Quote Originally Posted by Thighland View Post
If you introduce a character to a story that is a scientist, driven by intelligence and logic, every time that character does something illogical, it's either a writing mistake, or a plothole that needs filling.
And I don't think that Calyx has done a single illogical thing in his scheme.

He kept Sphene because she worked perfectly fine for hundreds of years, and only failed at the exact last possible point. And then, he replaced her with a version that wouldn't do that. Seems perfectly logical to me. What wouldn't be logical is trashing a plan that has worked for hundreds of years, causing unnecessarily backfires in the process, just because Sphene might at some point fail him. That's not logic, that's textbook paranoia. An approach like Calyx's requires some level of trust in the people and tools around him to perform as expected (and Endless Sphene is debatably both); if you don't have that, then you end up with nothing but imperfect, aborted plans.

Calyx does not do that: aborted plans get nothing done. So instead, he produces imperfect products that still do the job, and if that imperfection causes a failure, he fixes it.

Now, I don't think Calyx is a perfectly logical machine, and nothing he's actually said or done has implied he is or even considers himself one. In fact, Real Sphene being alive may well be evidence of that; while I can produce reasons that he'd do that that are perfectly reasonable, they're all some level of emotionally-driven ('I promise I'll get around to it', 'it would be wrong to kill the Queen even if I've effectively replaced her'). I don't think this is against him, because again, nothing says that Calyx is a perfectly robotic machine of logic; he's simply a man who thinks about his solutions more than he feels them, which is unique among FFXIV's villains.

He's an engineer, even if he's styled more as a scientist; engineers aren't computers, but they do think really hard about their projects. And if something an engineer made doesn't do what it's supposed to, they revise, rebuild, and try again.

Quite simply, I think you're reading Calyx incorrectly, and calling anything that doesn't line up with your reading of him wrong, or 'bad writing', instead of admitting that you might be mistaken. I really recommend you try to stop yourself from doing this, because otherwise you're likely to get really mad at 7.3 for refuting what you've decided is canon.