I thought OP was talking about people who thirst after him lol.


As others said, he's popular because he's a villain who seems to have an actual motivation to do what he does more than just being evil, which is all that the Ascians seemed to be up to until him. Then after being defeated in a test of our right to exist that could have been completely avoided if he had instead decided to wait out WoL's demise watching from afar on the Moon or in a different Shard, he turns on the last Ascian left as well as the only hope for the revival of Zodiark and his friends by freeing us and letting us kill the last of the Unsundered. He has A LOT going on and is a complicated character in a game where most characters don't get much characterization and are mostly generic.

That all said, while he's one of my favorite characters I don't think you can compare him to WoL or even Venat when it comes to killing and genocide because unlike the other two his personality needed a lot of work back when he was just an Ancient and definitely so when he was an Ascian. I think that's something that a lot of people seem to gloss over. It could be argued that the whole plot wouldn't exist if Emet-Selch wasn't a jerk since his self-importance, abrasive personality, desire for justification, and lack of patience or empathy often dooms whatever side he's supposed to be on and in my eyes, that makes him more of a tragic figure than his being sad and tempered for thousands of years.

Possessing someone on the First and physically warping their body to the form you're comfortable with is kind of a hard thing to justify even accounting for moral relativism, had nothing to do with bringing his dead friends back, and just showed that he's become unnecessarily cruel and simply does not care. And before that, he laughed about setting up the first Garlean Civil War and how it ended up being worse than he imagined it would be, despite the fact that it would have delayed his plans and if it did fall, it would have greatly delayed any upcoming calamities.

Back in Elpis, he kept being pushy about the seat of Fandaniel to Hermes, who through the journey around the zone showed that he really had no business being on the Convocation or in a position of power. Even more than other Ancients, Emet-Selch seemed to really lack the ability to empathize with others, notice how others are feeling, or know how to de-escalate a situation. After Hermes has the worst couple of days of his life having to dwell on the death of his mentor, taking up a seat he doesn't feel like he wants or deserves, dealing with the death of some monsters, and then finally his secret pet project gets a report with bad news about the universe right after he's told he helps destroy the world and Emet-Selch just yells at him and tells him that he's taking him and what is essentially his daughter into custody. That didn't seem to do much good for Hermes' mental state and wasn't good for everyone else either considering he happened to be standing next to his memory obliterating machine.