Wow, Wuk Lamat is really single-handedly ruining the DT story...

[CuteBucket]

This time, however, she didn't have any flaws, which were the only thing that made her character in the first half interesting. Now she's the 110% embodiment of stereotypical "power of friendship and understanding" mary sue anime character. I felt like I was watching Naruto Talk no jutsu style storytelling, but without all the big ninja spectacle to compensate. She gave very bland "fence-sitter" vibes with the people from solution 9. Going on about how important it is to understand them, while also being fully devoted towards destroying their way of life. This culminated in the cringe inducing cutscene during the final trial. While I did enjoy the sort of "inevitable" conflict created from two completely incompatible ideas, it didn't have near the impact it could have because it felt like the wuk lamat and the story in general had to make super duper sure we knew how important friendship is and how wuk lamat definitely always gets along with everyone.

This is also why I found the last 3rd of the story the most insufferable of it all. Yeah, sure, the first Dawnservant competition bits didn't have the best worldbuilding and storytelling, but they were in that kind of... bland but inoffensive level to me. I thought it was building to something greater, so I was willing to overlook some of the weird dropped/easily solved plot lines, (though in retrospect they annoy me quite a lot).

But whatever good will I had for Wuk Lamat (which wasn't a lot, but I didn't hate her by any means) was dead and gone by the time we were in Heritage Found. Her obsession with befriending the World's Most Suspicious Kawaii Teenage Queen at the cost of all common sense and reason was just painful to witness, and not in a "good, angsty" way, in a "oh no, the writers have completely lost the plot," kind of way. It would be one thing if Sphene was at all cunning or intelligent about her plan, and actually set up an interesting trap for the party, but she didn't. She's obviously untrustworthy and unhelpful from the get-go, but the narrative tries to drill into us "Look, she's so cute and everyone loves her!" and WL turns into an insufferable idiot trying to befriend the leader of an enemy nation that actively slaughtered her own people. I hated both her and Sphene by the end and never want to see or hear them again. And it's such a shame, because the concept of what Sphene is quite interesting (a rogue AI that has warped its core directive to the point that wanting to "protect the people" is creating harm), but the execution of that idea fell so flat that it makes me want to pull my hair out.

[DonutSteel]

Her obsession with befriending the World's Most Suspicious Kawaii Teenage Queen at the cost of all common sense and reason was just painful to witness

Well obviously it's because she's the Vow of Resolve, not Reason.

/s