app revisions - Apoc

[unnecessaryflourishes]

Personality:
~Dramatic AF: The most immediately noticeable thing about Emet-Selch is that he pretty much tends to exist up near the higher ends of the 'dramatic on purpose' scale and does not seem in the least bit inclined to not do so. There are, admittedly, different shades of it - a fair bit of it does seem to be a conscious decision on his end and there has been more than one occasion where he has played it up to an absolutely over-the-top level, but even at his baseline there are still shades of the dramatic. Most of this tends to come out in his body language - not to the point of being overwrought, but enough to be noticeable - but even aside from that he is often prone to dramatic proclamations as well as more subtle moments of dramatic emphasis. (One of his favorite methods of casting spells is simply to raise a hand and snap. The weight of eternity has not changed this. If anything, it seems to have made him more inclined to lean on it, to the point that he spends a fairly extended period simply using his dramatic tendencies to troll the everliving heck out of his (mortal) grandson, and otherwise simply proving himself to be a very dedicated nuisance. And then there's the matter of his almost ever-present slouch through much of the game, as if he is announcing to all the world just how tired he is, and how much his duty has weighed on him.

~Patient: Emet-Selch is - or was before his death at the hands of the Warrior of Light - quite literally immortal, and with that comes a certain amount of patience (in his case at least. Even within his canon it's not universal across what few immortals we meet). Enough so that he directly admits at one point that even should his plans end up being foiled he can, quite simply, start over. There's an implication that it will be something of a nuisance to have to, mind, but other than that he shows no direct concern over the idea. This is further echoed by his preferred methods, when it comes to villainy. While we do see a number of antagonists who are more direct in their methods Emet-Selch... is not. His preferred method is a more subtle one, built up over gentle nudges and careful planning rather than any sort of more in-your-face villainy. Additionally, he himself admits to having been the architect of multiple "imperially-inclined nations" - in particular, Allag and Garlemald. No mean feat, given that Allag lasted for some several centuries, before its inevitable downfall.

~Driven: In addition to the above, Emet-Selch is also very much the sort of person who will see he duties and goals through to the end regardless of they are. Most recently, this has been his desire to see his own world reborn and his people reborn, but even before then he had been prone to treating matters of duty with utmost sincerity. He might certainly raise something of a complaint, at being asked to do so in some cases, but once he has begun something he will see it through to its end. Whether it be his duty as Emet-Selch - one which tasked him with overseeing the aetherial sea and the souls therein, and which ran more than a few millennia beyond what he might have expected - or the numerous duties of overseeing an empire. Similarly, once he has embarked on any specific task, he seems to not let his own protests and misgivings about the matter at hand get in the way of doing whatever he has been asked to. Enough so that when time travel shenanigans have the Warrior of Light encountering him far before he becomes the villain we first meet him as he doesn't let an explanation of his future actions - which he spends some time outright denying the plausibility of - get in the way of helping the Warrior of Light once it proves that their goals are momentarily aligned.

He does, later, end up having his memory partially wiped, which leads to him forgetting that he'd ever been told his future. But that brief glimpse is nonetheless enough to suggest that he treats his task with utmost sincerity. Even if he does get better at finding ways to avoid taking on too many tasks, as the millennia go on.


~Caring: Buried deep deep down under everything Emet-Selch is - and something that he will absolutely and utterly protest being - is someone who cares. Deeply and thoroughly, and most especially with those few people he considers friends. (Of which there are not too many, for reasons that will be discussed below.) It's this care that leads him to treat every request made of him - or at least every request that he doesn't manage to rebuff - with the seriousness he shows, and is what earned him the role of Emet-Selch, through the testimonies not only of his friends but also the many and various people he had helped besides, and with little thought that he might have been doing anything out of the ordinary. It is also at the core of what makes him such a tragic figure in the wake of the catastrophe that destroyed his world and split it into 14 different shards. His people - the people he loved and cared for - were all but wiped from the world and even the very world itself had changed into something no more than an echo of what it had been, populated by people whose lives were little more than blinks of an eye. And yet, despite his grief and loss, and his attempts to hold the people of the Sundered shards at arm's length, he cannot help but care. So much so that, while spending his time acting as the Emperor of his most recent Empire, the birth of his firstborn son was very nearly enough for him to feel hope again after all those millennia without. Hope that, perhaps, there was another path to take. Unfortunately, when said firstborn son died before his time, Emet-Selch's hopes were all but dashed to the point that his relationship with the rest of his mortal descendants never recovered.


~Callous: For all that Emet-Selch at least was a decent enough person once, even at his best, he has never been anything that could be considered nice. Quite the contrary, in fact! Even before the events that culminated in the destruction of his world, he was often prone to being grumpy and sharp-tongued by turns, even to those he considered his friends and rarely made any sort of attempt to be anything other than thoroughly blunt about his opinions. Additionally, for all that he cares enough to help (most of the time), even one of his best friends admits to the fact that repeated insistence is often required to convince him to actually be willing to do whatever it is that's being asked of him. Once he has been suitably worn down he's not usually any worse than superficially grumpy and is remarkably selfless about his actions, but there's a sense that he's using it almost as a sort of... limiting factor. To the point that he comes across - at best - as an extremely crotchety introvert who doesn't really have a lot of patience.

This flips into outright cruelty after the destruction of his world and his people, as unresolved grief and loss have him sliding into the worst version of himself. His sharp tongue swiftly becomes biting, and by the time we see him in Shadowbringers he has well and truly embraced the idea of words being both shield and weapon, to the point that he point-blank admits to not really seeing the Warrior of Light and his companions as people. Which may well have been partially a distancing tactic but even so, it's one hell of thing to directly admit to someone.

As of his current canon point he seems to have pulled back somewhat from the outright cruelty he displays periodically throughout Shadowbringers, likely as a result of no longer having to bear the burden of his long duty, but he almost certainly still retains the capacity for genuine cruelty, especially if pushed.



Suitability: Though Emet-Selch will almost certainly be feeding the entity to which he's aligned in some respect - if only to reclaim or partially reclaim abilities he rather takes for granted - he will be more than glad to assist ADI in their endeavors. He won't be exactly thrilled about hauled to another world, but that alone is hardly going to be enough to have him throwing all caution to the wind. Especially given the implication of there being an imminent apocalypse. Admittedly, he has spent far more time causing apocalypses of late than actually stopping them, but even those were carefully crafted events, built up over multiple decades and specifically tuned to his own world. Absent those specific circumstances, and in light of fairly recent developments within his own personal timeline, Emet-Selch is far more likely to offer his own advice on how to stop (or survive!) an apocalypse than seek to immediately cause one.

...Provided there is no direct evidence that causing one will see himself and those he cares about home faster than simple cooperation, anyway. But even that is an option he will only entertain after thorough consideration and if there is, genuinely, no better option. Or even one that might be better. He is a patient man, with the advantage of eternity (and a very distinct inclination to not bother with significant effort if he doesn't have to, and apocalypses are very much Effort). If the path of least resistance (ie: cooperation) works, then he will be more than content to go with that.


Entity Alignment: The Dark. Even before Emet-Selch ended up bound to the will of a darkness-aligned entity in his own canon, a not insignificant number of the abilities we see him use are elementally aligned to darkness, and he had - and still retains - a strong connection to what his canon refers to various as The Underworld/Aetherial Sea: the place all souls return to after death. Beyond this, he has also spent multiple millennia serving as both a major antagonist and one of the forces of darkness in his own canon, to the point that during the Reaper job questline he is directly described as having "Things That Lurk in the Dark" style terrorization well enough to not only send a would-be assassin packing but also caused the man's hair to go fully white besides.