I hope the Writing doesn't remain like it did from Post 5.0 to Now (post 6.0)

[Cassar]

It's not a good feeling to constantly be dragged into everyone talking positively about a character you have nothing but negative feelings about. It especially sucks when both feelings are actually valid, but the sheer volume of strong talk about one drowns out the other; we're not wrong for not liking Emet or thinking he's a bad guy, he's a monster and thinking that about him is absolutely valid, but it sure doesn't feel like you're allowed to sometimes.

I can definitely see your point. I will add though, just because the character is written to be a monster, it doesn't necessarily mean- Actually, as I'm writing this, I feel I need to ask: do you (and everyone else who dislikes Emet) dislike him because you think he's a bad guy, or because you think he's just not well written? Because I feel I've had the wrong impression this whole time.

A character that always comes to mind in this context is Asahi. Asahi is written to be by far the most unlikeable and despicable person to ever exist, and yet I still love his character (in terms of how he's written) and the role he plays in the story.

[Cilia]

... [D]o you (and everyone else who dislikes Emet) dislike him because you think he's a bad guy, or because you think he's just not well written? Because I feel I've had the wrong impression this whole time.

I can't speak for anyone else, but...

Personally I don't like him because the story kind of forces you (or at least your character) to sympathize with him, while simultaneously glossing over the fact he's wrought the same death and destruction on the reflections and Source he condemns Hydaelyn for several times over. I think Y'shtola tells him off once in the Ocular, but other than that nobody ever brings up his raging hypocrisy even after the fact (since we only learn that in Amaurot and he dies shortly thereafter). The smarmy attitude I can deal with - affable or not, he's still an antagonist and it suits him - but the fact he's responsible for countless deaths and the destruction of who knows how many civilizations, whines about how unfair the end of his own was, and the story still assumes we were best buddies with him (to the point we summon his soul twice with the Azem stone, and our attitude when first arriving on Elpis immediately picks up when we hear his voice) really rubs me the wrong way.

The fact lots of people declared the Ascians to have done nothing wrong in the wake of the half-truths he provided really didn't help either.

Emet-Selch is pretty well-written and a good person on a personal level, but that doesn't change the fact his methods (if not quite his end goals) are nothing short of horrific.

I enjoy his character, in the sense that he's the smarmy antagonist plotting just behind your back but trying to force the "not bad just misunderstood" angle didn't quite work for me. Not a fan of the tsundere attitude either.

[Brightamethyst]

Personally I don't like him because the story kind of forces you (or at least your character) to sympathize with him, while simultaneously glossing over the fact he's wrought the same death and destruction on the reflections and Source he condemns Hydaelyn for several times over.

You don't have to agree with someone to sympathize with them. Understanding doesn't automatically mean acceptance. You can feel sorry that he has a tragic backstory while still agreeing that he's a villain and needs to be stopped.

[Cilia]

You don't have to agree with someone to sympathize with them. Understanding doesn't automatically mean acceptance. You can feel sorry that he has a tragic backstory while still agreeing that he's a villain and needs to be stopped.

Which would be a fair point - if the story let you get away with it.

When you finally meet Emet-Selch in phantom Amaurot you have the option of telling him you showed up to stop him or to save G'raha. Going with the former will have him go on a tirade about how unfair it is the Ascians are painted as villains for their actions, and he monologues so long nobody thinks to call him out on the hypocrisy of it all. (Alphinaud just reaffirms their resolve.)

By my measure he is a tragic and pitiable character, just not in the way the narrative presents him as being.

[Iscah]

do you (and everyone else who dislikes Emet) dislike him because you think he's a bad guy, or because you think he's just not well written?

I dislike him because he's presented inconsistently, and the way he's written in some parts is at odds with others.

First impressions matter, and his early interactions with Varis show him to be cruel and manipulative, basically abusive to Varis, with the implication that this how "Grandfather Solus" has treated him all his life. (It had the seeds of sending Varis off in a more sympathetic direction, together with what unknown secret plans we thought he might have had at the time of the parley and the old plot thread of the Warring Triad storyline suggesting we might become allies with him in future, but the writers tossed it all aside to make him a total villain who wants to use Black Rose for the sake of it.)

Then, as I outlined earlier, most of Shadowbringers gave you reasons to not trust him, hinted at his involvement in so many atrocities, then suddenly throwing the "actually you were friends once" thing at me – which felt so jarring exactly because I couldn't picture my character ever having been willing friends with someone who was so casually cruel and ruthless.

His sudden appearance at the Seat of Sacrifice should have been the last of him. It was a perfect send-off. If they wanted to tie up loose ends of what happened to the real Hythlodaeus, my guess/headcanon at the time was that G'raha has his soul, which I think would have rounded things off nicely.

Instead we got first the Tales From the Shadows, which delved into his mindset a bit more but also reframed the whole Convocation as a comedy, and then Endwalker itself was complicated. (Somewhere around here I had resigned myself to the mindset that I will need to at least attempt to like Emet if he gets mentioned again, because the writers are dead set on writing from the perspective that you like him.)

The first thing with Endwalker was that it made Emet inherently less "tragic" by reframing the whole situation. Where the language had previously pointed to people "giving up their life energies" to form Zodiark, and the Ascians obsessed with the impossible prospect of reviving what was already dead and gone and beyond reclaiming, they were now genuinely working to rescue people who could be rescued (with that little forever-glossed-over detail of whether the whole plan involved replacing willing souls with unwilling ones). Again it seems to be intended to make you think Emet is a good person, at least from the world as he experiences it, but the ambiguity – to say the least! – of how it affects people around him still makes it hard to accept that reframing.

And then we have Elpis, where we really have to put aside all his future misdeeds and like him there if he's likeable, but... meh. He's just non-stop prickly and unlikeable, even if he does get some funny remarks in sometimes, and I still can't picture him being friends with my character or even "Azem as an independent character" from what little we know of them. Hyth and Azem and maybe Venat as a group, sure, but it sounds like they're all bent on making Emet's life hell and it's not clear what they actually get out of each other as reciprocal friends.

And finally Ultima Thule where he's this messy tangle of behaving like his Elpis personality but also still insisting that all the things he did in his life were the right things to do, while also being in "we're back to being friends now" mode and he gets a happy ending that is... well, in isolation and in the context of "your old friend who has suffered for years doing what he thought was right", a very nice send-off and I liked that he and Hyth finally got what they always wanted: finish their life's purpose and depart the world together by choice. BUT, once again, that immediate niceness jars with the wider picture of what the game showed me of him, particularly the element of him never showing regret for what he did in his long time as an Ascian.

Showing is a key point, I think. We got told a lot that he is (or was) actually a good and noble soul in harsh circumstances, but we never really saw it.

You don't have to agree with someone to sympathize with them. Understanding doesn't automatically mean acceptance. You can feel sorry that he has a tragic backstory while still agreeing that he's a villain and needs to be stopped.

I still find it problematic that (particularly in Shadowbringers) the sympathy card was thrown in at the end, inbetween his story-long untrustworthiness and outright trying to kill you all. It just feels forced.

[Cleretic]

I can definitely see your point. I will add though, just because the character is written to be a monster, it doesn't necessarily mean- Actually, as I'm writing this, I feel I need to ask: do you (and everyone else who dislikes Emet) dislike him because you think he's a bad guy, or because you think he's just not well written? Because I feel I've had the wrong impression this whole time.

A character that always comes to mind in this context is Asahi. Asahi is written to be by far the most unlikeable and despicable person to ever exist, and yet I still love his character (in terms of how he's written) and the role he plays in the story.

The very first point I make in my video about why I don't like Emet (it's over here and I stand by all my points) is that I don't think that he's badly-written. Hell, I'd probably hate him less if he was, because I find it really easy to dismiss and forget about something I recognize as badly-written. I don't think he's a masterpiece of writing, and that video is largely built around the fact that Fandaniel is just a better-executed version of him from a structural perspective, but I don't think he's badly written.

I think he's a monster and don't find him sympathetic mostly because of that, but get really annoyed at both the game and its community assuming it's earned the sympathy from me that his story needs to function. And it really just hasn't, because I can't be sympathetic towards someone who's unapologetically responsible for the things Emet is.

Fortunately, the game doesn't actually need you to be sympathetic towards him in the long-term; the story still functions, it's just that a number of Emet scenes fall flat and hit wrong notes.