An NPC you truly hate with passion

[Hasrat]

Much as I agree with the Alphinaud hate, I also recognize he is effectively the player's "voice." Being the silent protagonist, we're mostly just tagging along, mostly just standing there looking pretty while important matters are discussed, mostly just the muscle sent out while everyone gets stuff done.

[Kaldaka]

This dumb animal :/ As entertaining as it is watching him have his head kicked in by various quantities of stupidity... he doesn't learn, he remains stupid.

[Antonio_Xul]

This dumb animal :/ As entertaining as it is watching him have his head kicked in by various quantities of stupidity... he doesn't learn, he remains stupid.

You can't learn by having your head kicked in, you'd get stupider. It's an endless downward spiral.

[Kaldaka]

You can't learn by having your head kicked in, you'd get stupider. It's an endless downward spiral.

Yes, but survival instinct has to kick in at some point with the "oh, hang on, I shouldn't do that, I might die"
He seems to lack that, unless it involves his parents... I love his parents.

[Kazgrel]

Hate is a bit overkill, but Minfilia, mainly because 90% of the “return to the Waking Sands” quests could’ve been avoided with a simple message via linkpearl.

Too early to toss any of the SB cast under the bus, to me at least.

[silverlunarfox]

I can ignore some of the side quest npc's....

But I cannot stand Lyse.....

[Antonio_Xul]

@Third Child

To me there is no excuse of doing the things they did. It is still evil. It doesn't matter if you have a tough life. You do things to better your life and not at the cost of others.

I'll get a little personal here, but is was born and raised in the ghettoes of L. A. If you've seen video footage of the L. A. Riots, that's my neighborhood. I grew up there and still live there. My parents divorced, I didn't see my mom for 3 years, left on my own after a fight with my dad and then my dad is robbed and murdered in cold blood. These are horrible things I had to live with it and I have yet to commit a crime, go to jail or even a traffic ticket. I'm currently trying to save money to get out of the hood to raise my child in better conditions than when I grew up. I went to school, got a good job and doing well. I never resorted to doing bad things to make a quick buck. Having a tough life is no excuse for doing bad things.

[silverlunarfox]

@Third Child

To me there is no excuse of doing the things they did. It is still evil. It doesn't matter if you have a tough life. You do things to better your life and not at the cost of others.
snip

In the aspect of villians, some have lessons yet to learn. They aren't evil to be evil, but perhaps they just don't know any better. Sometimes it just takes one thing to make it all click.

[ThirdChild_ZKI]

On no I agree with you, there's no excuse for what they did, but there was reason. And at least when it comes to fiction, only the most hollow villains are "truly" evil.

Look at Garlemald: In their eyes, Primals (Eikons) are a major threat to the world, and Eorzea seems to produce them like rabbits. So they decided to get things under control (possibly with the mindset that "if we don't contain it there, it'll spread"). Their methods are cruel, and their condescending attitude toward "savages" is wrong, but even they care about the safety of life on Hydaelyn. No excuse for 20 years of Ala Mihgan occupation, but there weren't any primal threats then (to our knowledge). This might sound like I'm some kind of Garlean apologist, but I'm not. I disagree with what they do, but I see that the reason they do it isn't evil.

I understand and agree that a hard life doesn't excuse or justify evil actions or intent, but between those two, I'd say Fordola arguably had no evil intent. Ran face first into a moral event horizon, but she wasn't a Garlean conscript for the money or the "fun" of it. She was trying to embrace a better way for Garlean-occupied Ala Mihgo, and maybe be an example to others. She chose wrong. And now her story is largely learning to deal with living with that choice. Sure, death would be the easy punishment. Living with what she did, and how a free Ala Mihgo is proof that she was wrong is going to be tougher.

Yotsuyu's a different case. She let it twist her. Even to the "end". Whoever she is now as "Tsuyu" is a blank slate who's going to have to face the scorn and the hate, and won't know why. Again, from a writer's perspective, I'm interested to see what happens when she gets the answer to the "Who are you?" question from the trailer. Will she just go back to being a cruel bitch who gets off on hurting people, or will it somehow break her even worse?

To comment on the Lyse hate:
To be honest, I like her more as Lyse. I really didn't like her as the aloof space case she was as "Yda". I like the fact that she stammers and takes people too seriously. I like that she's naive and an idealist in pursuit of her goal. And I like that she's an imperfect leader. For the simple fact of character growth.

I would love to see her grow into something more confident. To "fill the shoes" of her sister and father, as it were. But she's not there yet. She's not even close. She literally just got handed a free homeland and thrust into a leadership role. The people she used to lean on either aren't alive, or won't be around to lean on anymore, and that's where the beauty of "what happens now" happens. Will she help create a better Ala Mihgo, or will she fail and let something worse happen?

[Enla]

To comment on the Lyse hate:
To be honest, I like her more as Lyse. I really didn't like her as the aloof space case she was as "Yda". I like the fact that she stammers and takes people too seriously. I like that she's naive and an idealist in pursuit of her goal. And I like that she's an imperfect leader. For the simple fact of character growth.

I would love to see her grow into something more confident. To "fill the shoes" of her sister and father, as it were. But she's not there yet. She's not even close. She literally just got handed a free homeland and thrust into a leadership role. The people she used to lean on either aren't alive, or won't be around to lean on anymore, and that's where the beauty of "what happens now" happens. Will she help create a better Ala Mihgo, or will she fail and let something worse happen?

To be entirely fair on the first point she wasn't so much a character as Yda as one part of a 'duo'. Both she and Papalymo suffered in terms of characterization for it and as a result had barely enough character between them for /one/ person let alone two. It's half the reason why I felt nothing with Papalymo's death. There was only the shell of a character to mourn there.

As for the rest I would agree with you if the narrative didn't make it abundantly clear that it doesn't acknowledge her flaws and will pick plot progression over character growth every single time. She had a really decent arc all the way through the Steppes and I looked forward to seeing how she would improve or potentially regress as the threat of reclamation loomed ever closer. Yet as soon as we went back to Ala Mhigo it was as if /none/ of that matter. She was reset back to the same character she had been on the outset and instead of SE exploring the pitfalls of suddenly being thrust into the role of a leader without any warning, they made it perfectly clear through their writing that nothing was wrong. The narrative /never/ acknowledged her subservience to the Eorzean Alliance, all that she had learned over in Doma about the nature of war and how people react, the fact that she has no right to judge those who stayed in Ala Mhigo and suffered when she lived comfortably in Eorzea since she was five, lack of participation in the invasion of the city beyond following the WoL and Thancred, and most of all it never acknowledged her regression.

That's my issue with Lyse. She's cognitively dissonant as a result of poor writing to the point where we are players can recognize her flaws quite readily but the narrative rarely if ever is willing to view her from the same lens. It's what I like to call the Bella Swan effect, where a character actually seems more interesting than the writer intended and the potential they had is never capitalized or their flaws truly acknowledged. Now do I hope this changes? Absolutely! I'm a sucker for flawed characters and have no issues with character regression if it suits their narrative journey. Sadly however given how things have been going of late and how things went previously with Minfillia who also suffered from the same issues, I don't think we're going to ever get Lyse's 'Alphinaud' moment where the writers suddenly go all in on her potential.

I do very much hope I'm wrong however.