I'm sure there's gonna be legions of people complaining about how Fandaniel isn't nearly as interesting as Emet or Elidibus 'cause he seemingly has no actual reason to destroy the world, how his reasoning is seemingly one dimensional and, therefore, boring.

Good.

I'm gonna fight to the death defending the hill of "villains do not need to be morally complex to be interesting."

I am so mentally exhausted emphasizing with the main villains this expansion, or sifting through their intimately complex reasons for being villains. Not that that's a bad thing, cause I loved them all. But a villain DOES NOT need to be a Thanos to be interesting. There was nothing morally grey about villains like Frieza, DIO, Sephiroth, or Kefka, but they remain effective baddies anyway.

Wanting to be an evil person for its own sake is often chided as "not realistic" or "not as humanizing as a villain that likes to pet puppies on Tuesdays". I disagree. Real life morality is complicated, of course, but sometimes, there really are scumbags out there that are irredeemable scum.

Plus, Square Enix has proved, within a single expansion, that they're capable of providing much depth to the Ascians, the faction that everyone thought as one dimensional Saturday morning cartoons for a long time. I'm confident that they'll be able to make seemingly less nuanced villains like Fandaniel interesting in their own right.

In short: I know everyone has their preferences. Some like their villains to be sympathetic more than those that don't, and that's totally fine. What I *will* throw down verbal fisticuffs over is the notion that lack of sympathy somehow equates to being bland.