Amalthus
Alright. We've talked about Lora and Gort, we've touched on Addam and Mythra, we've thought (perhaps impurely) about Jin and Malos, we've dusted off our kabbalah in contemplation of Jin and Elisha Ben Abuyah, and we've had Homestuck flavored thoughts about the third aegis.
We're out of characters! It's Amalthus time.
Massive spoilers for Xenoblade 2, as usual. If you haven't played the game, play it! Then read this.
You can interpret Amalthus as an extremely normal supervillain, in disguise as a benign pope. He awakens a dark power that at first he controls, then he doesn't. To defeat that dark power he recruits the services of a prince from the main nation that could challenge the power of his own. In the resulting battle, that prince's nation gets destroyed, with a little help from Amalthus himself. And meanwhile, with the help of a few assassinations, Amalthus becomes the ruler of a now fully uncontested world power, where he rules for 1000 years.
It's a pretty fun insight to realize that maybe this guy had more control over the dark power than it seemed like all along, and that everything played into his hands throughout. And indeed, the game is happy to oblige with many hints to this effect. There's no getting around it: Amalthus is one power hungry, sinister motherfucker.
But okay, wait a minute. Malos is evil, and we care why. It's actually really important that Malos's true name is Logos, and that his bad behavior comes from his synthesis with Amalthus's bitter nature. Jin is evil, and it's really important to understand why: among other reasons, that Malos was there for him when no one else was, and forged a bond that helped substitute for one that, when he lost it, unmoored him emotionally for half a millennium.
So why is Amalthus evil? Why does his evil manifest how and when it does? Why is he content to chill out for 500 years, not doing very much, and only go apocalyptically apeshit when a random kid defies his orders?
So here's my thesis. Why is Amalthus evil? It's not because his mom was killed by marauders. It's not because the architect didn't have time for him. Those contributed, but they aren't the main flavor.
Amalthus is evil because helping people didn't work.
Amalthus had a difficult childhood. His mom was killed when he was a child, leaving him an orphan. But he was resourceful, and managed to become a pretty respectable government official. He spent his time wandering the world, spreading peace and healing those who he could. To ease his own pain, he became a holy man. There was no way to accept what had happened to him, or the ugliness of the world. He didn't try. He just tried to fix it.
One day, he healed a soldier. Later, he found that soldier murdering a family in the process of robbing them, with only a baby still alive. He killed the soldier, undoing his past good deed: but not undoing its negative consequences.
He tried to do it right. He tried to help others. Not because his heart was in it, mind. But because his heart was in a losing battle, constantly besieged by darkness and doubt, because within him was a child calling helplessly out for love and care, and answered by even, placid silence. Addam helped people because the joy within him was infectious - it could not be contained. Amalthus helped people as a first resort, a defense against the observation, baked deeply into his intuition, that the world was bad, bad, bad.
And then he made it worse. Never mind that it was only the one time. It was only the one time that he happened to notice. But why trust the other times? Why trust that in a world disordered by war, any good deed wouldn't collapse like a house of cards from the second order effects that by helping people, you were helping exactly the sorts of entities that caused all the problems in the first place?
Does this turn him into a villain? No. Why would it? He hates the cruelty of humanity, but it wouldn't resolve his philosophical torture to become cruel himself. So he does something almost no one else would thing to do - he attempts to confront the problem at its source. He goes to ask the demiurge - who he thinks of as just basically God - what the fuck is up with all this evil.
Answering that question: 'what the fuck is up with all this evil?' takes a very long time. 500 years in universe time, and about 80 hours of play time for an enterprising Nintendo Switch owner. There are two answers. The demiurge does not offer them up - the demiurge, seeing a bit too much of himself in this philosophical and headstrong damaged boy - prefers to hide in his room. But the headstrong boy takes two answers anyway. Their names are Logos and Pneuma. But they'll go by Malos and Mythra for the time being.
The fact is, Amalthus has too much pain and rage buried in his heart. He's a thoughtful guy. He's principled. He's going to do this the right way, damnit. It wasn't enough to grieve his mother; he needed to make sure that sort of thing didn't happen again. It wasn't enough to have a personal crisis; he had to check his notes, personally, with the man upstairs. But meanwhile, while he's trying to be perfect, there's something very, very dark churning inside him, looking for release. Then he touches a powerful core crystal, and that part of him finally comes out to play.
Now Amalthus has had enough. He's terrible, garbage, far beyond saving, and deep currents within him will never be convinced otherwise (Malos inherits this belief and announces it just before the fight that claims his life). Malos coming out is enough to show him who he really is, and to spare him the effort of trying, as he has been trying so hard for so long, to really fight it.
But Malos coming out also does something else. Just as Socrates is the wisest because he knows he knows nothing, Amalthus is the purest because while he is fundamentally toxic garbage, he is the only one who even bothered to try. He is a profane wreck of a person, but you know what? You know who, according to Amalthus, is even worse? Everyone else. Self loathing and megalomania aren't really so incompatible. You can be the only zero in a world full of negative a millions.
So fuck it. Several continent-sized birds, one stone. Nobody can hurt you when you rule the world, and maybe you can be a halfway decent manager of the place. Keep the war shit to a minimum. It's not like anyone else could do a better job.
This is where Amalthus's ruthless climb to the top comes from. He's not delighting in the cruelty. He's just doing what he has to to put himself in his rightful position as the only person worth anything. And since he's so good (so bad so bad so bad why does it still feel so bad), so very good, it's no big deal if he has to break a few eggs along the way.
It's not like helping people or killing them is that different, right? You help them, they kill each other. You kill a few to gain the power to make the rest of them behave, and, well. Whatever. It'll do.
And meanwhile, that curious, anxious child within him keeps him at his awful research, trying at any cost to understand the true nature of things, hoping against hope to be bailed out, to gain that little nugget of understanding that might, for a moment, set him free.
But inner child notwithstanding, Amalthus does get old. He kind of drinks his own Kool Aid. He mostly forgets about the trail of bodies he's left behind. He does good deeds now and then, takes in some refugees. He genuinely does broker power and keep war to a minimum. He's content to be a Pope rather than a king: a loose role more powerful than any other individual, but not wielding direct sovereignty over emperors and queens. And he's happy to keep ruling indefinitely - once his power is secure he doesn't try to dredge up Pyra's ship himself. He doesn't bother blackmailing Genbu, doesn't try to return to the world tree, doesn't really do anything to stand against Addam's phantom, still keeping watch over the world. No, he just does his job. And in his outer layers, in his day to day experience of the world, he forgets about what's roiling beneath the surface, the part of him that once unleashed Malos, and, worse for him personally, unleashed Jin. He's a holy man! A gentle and benevolent intercessor for the divine. That's all.
But when he's confronted with his own evil, the darkness within himself, when he is not permitted to control and destroy it, he loses control of himself, too. He's always believed, deep down, that Malos was weaker than himself, that the weapon had no power over its wielder. That when push came to shove, when he decided to step up and take the reins, his darkness wouldn't really matter.
But he can't control it. He can't control himself. He can't control his pain. So he lashes out.
Like he did when he got revenge for the death of his mother. Like he did when Malos got away from him the first time, and started an embarrassing war.
But old men don't make good scared children. So he dies. And in the end, with Elysium barren overhead, he hardly even matters.
The true foe is far above.
