#ns11

60 years holding the staff you start seeing the hatman

(How fucked up would it be if the staff talked but only to Zane lol)

This is not to say the Ice Emperor is without cruelty or brutality. He is still a very menacing presence in his own right, and he absolutely has gallons of blood on his hands. That cannot be understated. But on his own, without a wormtongue whispering in his ear, I personally think the Ice Emperor would have been...well, not necessarily a kind person, but significantly less ruthless. He's a passive and dare I say tired person who prefers to sit on his throne and wait for orders rather than taking any form of initiative on his own. He's barely even a leader or a tyrant in any true sense of the term, really -- he's just a glorified weapon Vex keeps stored on a shelf until he's needed.

This actually makes sense when you consider Zane's element. Ice is in its very nature a slow and sedate thing. Temperature is shaped by the speed and movement of particulates -- the faster molecules move, the hotter things are. Whereas when things get colder, molecules move much more slowly. (That's perhaps a bit of an oversimplification, but I'm not going to give a lecture on thermodynamics in a post about silly lego people). And the Ice Emperor...well, he's very much encased in ice. He has to physically pry himself off his throne, and the staff has long been frozen to his hand. The whole world is in a similar state as well. Entire swathes of the population have been cryogenically frozen, and the world is so cold that it's exceedingly difficult for fire to thrive. And many other fans have speculated that the reason Akita is able to look the same age despite decades passing is because Zane's corrupted ice has overwhelmed the land so profoundly that everyone is more or less frozen in time.

Ice is a slow, sedate, passive thing. It does not demand anything of you except that you cease movement. Likewise, the Ice Emperor in his truest state is a sedate, passive character, only stirred out of his meditations when Vex compels him into action.

True, he's often depicted as a generically ruthless tyrant in most iterations after s11, but those can usually be chalked up to Zane's unreliable self-perception. This is how Zane interprets his behavior as the Ice Emperor, rather than the actual reality of how he truly behaved. Zane resents that part of himself, and that resentment has warped his understanding of who the Ice Emperor truly was. Which in itself is rather tragic considering Zane's identity issues. That is to say, Zane is so terribly blinded by his trauma and self-loathing that not even he can see himself for who he truly is.

(Cough cough that one quote in Dragons Rising: "Zane had such impressive shoes to fill. No one could ever live up to him, perhaps not even Zane himself.")

Anyway, even if people disagree with this interpretation of the Ice Emperor's character, I personally find it much more compelling to view him not as a generic murderous tyrant...but as an old, tired machine who cannot conceive of his personhood outside of his own weaponization.

By extension, this actually makes Zane's post-s11 coping process a lot more complex as well. The popular narrative is that Zane needs to learn to accept that what happens wasn't his fault, that he had a whole chorus of extenuating circumstances working against him, and that it's actually quite impressive just how many things had to go wrong all at once for him to become evil. And that's fair, but I also think the truth of the matter is more complicated than that.

Zane knows, deep down, that the Ice Emperor's actions weren't his fault -- and that's exactly what terrifies him. Because if he accepts that he was little more than Vex's mindless weapon, then he has to admit that his greatest fear has come true. He spent decades as a mindless, soulless machine, only ever acting on the will of another person, all while being endlessly manipulated by a cursed artifact, rather than having any true agency of his own. When his friends tell him it wasn't his fault, it's not a comfort but rather a painful reminder of how long he spent as someone else's drone. When the people of the Never Realm forgive him and let him return home unobstructed, a part of Zane resents it because it means they, too, acknowledge his absence of free will.

In my eyes, Zane post-s11 is someone who feels that he needs to be blamed, needs to be hated and despised and shunned -- because if people hate him for what he did, then that means it really was his fault. And if it was his fault, then that means he didn't lose his free will after all. It means he didn't spend 50 years as someone else's empty plaything. It means he didn't spend more of his life as a mindless weapon than as a true person.

ice emperor but make him Beast

That or the ice emperor just saw them as a threat to himself, possibly being a parallel to the fact that instead of protecting others he would only protect himself. Loosing not only his memory during the ice chapter but reversing his purpose.