This isn't even my final form

Zenos's tragic flaw is his inability--and yes, perhaps, on some level, unwillingness--to connect with the world and the people around him. He finds no meaningful engagement with the world except to enact violence upon it. He has no personal investment in the Garlean Empire except as it allows him to enact violence, and by this disengagement he basically singlehandedly allows the entire empire to collapse because he doesn't care about it, only about fulfilling his own desires. The funny thing about Zenos as a foil for the protagonist is that he would make a terrible RPG protagonist. The archetypal RPG protagonist is so defined by their willingness to say yes to menial tasks that are only meaningful to some minor NPC that most modern RPGs end up lampshading that fact in some way, and it's endlessly memed upon. I struggle to imagine Zenos making it through the Company of Heroes fetch quests in ARR without getting bored and stabbing someone.

So all-encompassing is this worldview for him that even upon calling the WoL his only friend, he can find no meaningful engagement with them beyond "let us enact violence upon one another." Even the one person in the world he finds interesting enough to engage with, he is seemingly incapable of understanding on any other level. (And if you play a WoL with a desire to connect with Zenos on any other level, I think there's potential for a really interesting tragedy there! Because he either won't or can't.)

And we don't ever really get to challenge him on how narrow and stifling and miserable his engagement with the world truly is. Maybe there's a flicker of it at the very end, an acknowledgement that his life was fundamentally unfulfilling. Perhaps Zenos even sees, on some level, what the WoL has that he does not; maybe unconsciously in pursuing them, he seeks to figure out what that thing is. But then he dies, in his chosen manner, after getting the same one thing he's been pursuing as long as we've known him. That's what's sad about Zenos on a narrative level. Not that he dies, but that he dies unchanged and unchallenged.

If any character would do that, it'd be Gaius Baelsar, who is actually a True Believer in the civilizing and stabilizing power of the Empire, who actively tries to recruit the Warrior of Light to serve the Empire because he sees their interests as aligned, and who seems disappointed and even somewhat surprised that the Warrior of Light turns him down without engaging with his argument. Gaius is a deeply political character, whose violence is explicitly in service of an ideal--and because of this, Gaius is able to be persuaded, and to redirect his violent skillset when he sees his ideals as aligned elsewhere. I would argue that Gaius was in fact right about his interests being aligned with the Warrior of Light in specific ways, that Gaius is in fact rather like the Warrior of Light, for all the reasons listed above: highly skilled at violence, highly engaged with the world and what he sees as its ills, willing to employ that violence as a solution, and willing to redirect it when he sees a flaw in his previous thinking.

Zenos on the other hand doesn't care enough about either the empire he ostensibly serves or the actual things the Warrior of Light has done for any of those entirely obvious parallels to matter to him. The argument he presents to the Warrior of Light regarding their similarities has nothing to do with violence in service of structural power. Instead it is this:

Man should fight for the joy of it. To live, to eat, to breed─lesser beasts snap and howl at one another for this. Only man has the wisdom and the clarity to embrace violence for its own sake. For we who are born into this merciless, meaningless world, have but one candle of life to burn. I know you understand this. You and I are one and the same.

His claim in Stormblood is explicitly that he and the Warrior of Light employ violence not simply in service of empire but for its own sake. Which is a far more assailable argument, given everything else we know about the Warrior of Light! Of course for some characters this will resonate. I think it's hard to argue that the Warrior of Light as written doesn't find some enjoyment in combat! But I think it's worth considering that even the oft-cited Dark Knight questline ultimately concludes that it was all about love, really. That the violence, no matter how naturally it came to the Dark Knight, was never purely for its own sake, but in service of love... which makes it particularly ironic that Dark Knight seems to be the go-to storyline for defending Zenos's claims as true on their face. (Besides which, what other job stories say about the WoL aren't any less true that Dark Knight, but even Dark Knight I think doesn't quite say what people will sometimes suggest it does.)

The recent question "Was Zenos right about your WoL?" had me thinking, "Well, right about what exactly?" and drove me back to MSQ dialogue to look at the things Zenos actually says. I stand behind what I said about their fundamental difference being engagement with the world. And on further reflection I think that Zenos, in the end, does give a kind of acknowledgment of this. When we face him for the final time in Ultima Thule, Zenos has somewhat modified his argument. It still has nothing to do with violence in service of empire; he still doesn't care about that. What he does say is, "You value life. You do not burn yours save for reasons you deem worthy." In that, I think Zenos does strike on something about the Warrior of Light that he wasn't willing to see before, if only to acknowledge that he doesn't understand it.

I want to elaborate on what I said above on the real tragedy of Zenos being that by the time he meets the Warrior of Light, someone he wants to connect with, he has basically become incapable of doing so, and perhaps unwilling to do so. Regardless of how the Warrior of Light responds to Zenos' invitation of friendship in Stormblood, whether they accept or deny him, the outcome is ultimately the same. In fact, he actually seems more satisfied if he is rejected, thereby affirming the necessity of their conflict. Should the Warrior of Light accept him, Zenos almost rebukes them for it. He mocks them, even. "Do our deeds weigh so little that you would cast all aside? Come. 'Twas plain from the first how this would end."

This is a pretty crucial piece of characterization, I think! If the Warrior of Light accepts Zenos' offer of friendship, he subsequently rejects that acceptance. He mocks the very idea of their coming together in true companionship! Because he can't conceive of any connection between them besides violence. I think it is actually so meaningful that the Warrior of Light can't accept Zenos' offer of friendship in any way that matters. Even at the very end, in their final conflict in Endwalker, as Zenos ostensibly gets everything he wanted, he dies seemingly with a sense of dissatisfaction, still lamenting his detachment from those around him and the utterly fleeting nature of any satisfaction he did find.

And in this I see affirmed a truth about Zenos that I also saw in "The Hunt Begins." I don't believe that Zenos' lack of connection with others is an immutable condition he cannot change. Because his actions toward the Warrior of Light speak of a desire for connection, as well as a self-sabotaging rejection of it.

"The Hunt Begins" is, in my opinion, bad, in the way a lot of attempts to write Genius Kids are bad; it is a fundamentally contradictory narrative about a boy who is at once completely bored with life but also a voracious reader with basically unlimited access to books, utterly detached from his lessons but also constantly delivering brilliant insights to his instructors. Because of its inherent contradictions I mostly have to take an adversarial reading of it to get anything useful out of it, which means my conclusions are almost certainly not authorial intent, but I'm prepared to argue that they make more sense and harmonize better with the character we actually meet in the game. In writing about this story I have asked the question: Is Zenos' brilliance actually the source of his isolation, or does he just believe all other people are beneath him?

And now I'd like to add: is Zenos' inability to connect with other people an inherent trait, or is it the product of a child raised with no familial affection, surrounded by people he was explicitly taught to see as things: servants and subjects?

The latter interpretation certainly has a lot more to say about empire, doesn't it?

Even if it forces us to confront the possibility that Zenos' detachment is not innate, but learned, and therefore could be unlearned. Even if, combined with his seeming rejection of the Warrior of Light's acceptance, it could lead us to conclude that in an adult man this detachment is on some level a choice he is making and continues to make until the day he dies (for real this time).

In fact, in all these I think I'm willing to amend one of my previous conclusions about Zenos, that he ultimately gets what he wants in the final battle in Endwalker. I don't think he actually does, because there was never any way for us to give him what he actually lacks: a connection beyond violence, beyond conflict. Offered this, he would ultimately reject it, just as he did in Ala Mhigo. He desires a satisfaction he will never find, because he has ultimately denied it to himself.

Is Zenos right about the Warrior of Light? Of course the devil is in the details, and those details will differ for every character, and I'm certainly not here to contradict anyone's conclusions for their own OC. But even in the broad sense, when it comes to the Warrior of Light as Written, I think the answer is: no, and yes. There is a spark of understanding there that remains ultimately incomplete, because it never could be complete, because Zenos himself, who he is and has chosen to be, will not allow for a complete understanding of a person as adept with violence as he is yet deeply engaged with the world outside themselves in ways that go beyond violence.