Quote Originally Posted by Jaywalker View Post
Probably going to slip off the forums again for a bit soon, but want to present the possibility real quick that Emet-Selch had to believe/tell himself that because the alternative is that he's been committing genocide against billions of actual people, all of whom are on some level still pieces of the Amaurotines he loves.

He is doing whatever he believes necessary to bring them all back, but seriously. The alternative to the idea that it doesn't count as murder is that it does. There's no way he would have been able to avoid going insane under that reality.

There's room to debate of course, but the "unreliable narrator" possibility is one way to interpret things and puts an interesting spin on his characterization.
Honestly that's the interpretation I like. I personally don't think he genuinely believes that we "aren't alive" or whatever nonsense he threw at us. He made his point about moral relativism clear, but of course what other option does he have? Either he believes the ends justify the means, or he doesn't. Either he convinces himself his cause is just enough to justify the wholesale slaughter of worlds, or he doesn't.

Either he's a murderer, or he's not - because if the ones he kills aren't people by his definition, then is he really a killer?

What I love about Emet is that he's nuanced as a character. I don't think he thinks so little of us as to write us off as a being that isn't even alive. I think he wanted to be wrong, and he wanted us to be the ones to prove him wrong, and when we didn't, he had to convince himself that we were a lost cause, nothing but an empty husk to be destroyed and erased and forgotten. Because if he's wrong, and that "trick of the light" he saw in that last cutscene wasn't a trick after all, then he'd have to acknowledge us as people - and as fragments of an old friend.

I'm super tired and half asleep right now, so this might not be coming out wholly coherent. But basically I think that a lot of what Emet says shouldn't be taken at face value. He's an old, bitter, angry man who's lost everything and taken on an incredible burden, and he's been so dedicated to his cause, to ensuring that his and his people's pain and loss weren't for nothing, that he has no other path to choose. He has to be right, even if he'd rather be wrong about us, because he's well past the point of no return.

And I'm not convinced that he believes that it's not really murder at all.