About Dottore
When it came down to it, Dottore never cared about Celestia's injustices or freeing humanity from their rules. The only injustice for him is that he isn't special, above all the people he looks down on; that he is bound by the same rules as everyone else. That's why he wanted the Traveler, a descender, to recognize him, recognize that he's special. He just wanted to be the most special-est boy. In the end, he is an absolute narcissist to the point of making everyone he's ever met hate him.
He also evades all responsibility and consequences for his actions, going especially by Sandrone's anecdote about him. This is simply because those consequences never happen to the one person who matters to him, himself.
This makes him a good villain. I really enjoyed his talk with the Traveler. I found his whole aesthetic really cool. I love his boss theme. But make no mistake, going by all that has been revealed in the game and the stuff he says, he really does not have any sympathetic qualities like all the other major villains in this game. So, I wouldn't expect a heel-face turn in any way. Rather than making him good, the issue is that every character has a in-lore bond with the Traveler, reflected in their voicelines. Considering how much the Traveler rejected him as of the latest AQ, his playable status is questionable at the moment.
Regarding the weird glitched end, it's likely that it might be some last surprise he left for the Traveler and co.
Borrowing from one of my older comments:
'He can't become a false god again because he can't steal the power of the Trilune again. To become a threat again, he would have to go for more power. But that won't happen because it would take away from the focus on the Tsaritsa's plans. Maybe, if he's alive, he would be a minor obstacle to the Traveler or the Tsaritsa. So, yeah, he's pretty much done after getting all the screentime he can.'
I made this post after seeing weird Dottore fans defending him like crazy. Plus the whole deal with the fake AI message in the glitched ending. It's one thing to like the character but it's another thing to reach for excuses for the actions of a character who's so blatantly how he is.
He also evades all responsibility and consequences for his actions, going especially by Sandrone's anecdote about him. This is simply because those consequences never happen to the one person who matters to him, himself.
This makes him a good villain. I really enjoyed his talk with the Traveler. I found his whole aesthetic really cool. I love his boss theme. But make no mistake, going by all that has been revealed in the game and the stuff he says, he really does not have any sympathetic qualities like all the other major villains in this game. So, I wouldn't expect a heel-face turn in any way. Rather than making him good, the issue is that every character has a in-lore bond with the Traveler, reflected in their voicelines. Considering how much the Traveler rejected him as of the latest AQ, his playable status is questionable at the moment.
Regarding the weird glitched end, it's likely that it might be some last surprise he left for the Traveler and co.
Borrowing from one of my older comments:
'He can't become a false god again because he can't steal the power of the Trilune again. To become a threat again, he would have to go for more power. But that won't happen because it would take away from the focus on the Tsaritsa's plans. Maybe, if he's alive, he would be a minor obstacle to the Traveler or the Tsaritsa. So, yeah, he's pretty much done after getting all the screentime he can.'
I made this post after seeing weird Dottore fans defending him like crazy. Plus the whole deal with the fake AI message in the glitched ending. It's one thing to like the character but it's another thing to reach for excuses for the actions of a character who's so blatantly how he is.
Commentaires
Seriously, Mavuika in Natlan was called a bland character, a Mary Sue, and a one-dimensional and poorly written character, for much less. And so, I've taken writing classes in college, and while it's not always the case, most of the time, what makes a character well-written is that they aren't predictable and have multiple dimensions. Man, I watched every scene the doctor appeared in and I already knew exactly what the next 5 minutes of dialogue would be like. A fucking Power Rangers villain trying to bribe the hero and still letting it show how little he believed in anything he said. The doctor managed to be more one-dimensional and one-sided than a line on a blank sheet of paper. And I have to read/hear everywhere I go that he's the best villain Genshin has. Holy crap, Rerir is a better villain than Dottore, and they don't even talk about him anymore.
Genshin usually gives villains some sympathetic trait or a tragic backstory to avoid black-and-white morality, and to give us some insight into their character. So, it's telling that they didn't give Dottore that. They instead have him do heinous things again and again.
His first appearance in the fatui artifact set had him driven out from everywhere in Sumeru. He experimented on countless people, including Collei. His actions in the Summer AQ are, as we know, quite malicious. Zandik's notes had him strangle a fellow student. His actions in Scara's tragic backstory are awful. He received unwanted orphans from Crucabena to experiment on. I can go on. We even get numerous examples from this patch, 6.3.
In a previous patch, they even had the Ibis King pretty much face the camera and say "That guy was a malignant narcissist and I was worried he was going to kill his companion just to get himself out of a difficult situation."
When you think about it, Zandik was just a human who was more thinking than feeling, probably on the autism spectrum because of his impaired ability to understand others on a personal level rather than on an exclusively intellectual level. He only became evil when the world labelled him as inherently evil because of his different, "heretical" way of thinking. Closely mirroring the experience of a person on the spectrum. Oh, and don't go tell me he can't be autistic just because he's evil. THAT would be infantilizing him.
Going by the Complete Monster trope page on tv tropes, for example:
Truly heinous by the standards of the story, which makes no attempt to present the character in any positive way - The human experimentation in 6.3 alone would make the cut.
Terribleness is played seriously at all times, evoking fear, revulsion and hatred from the other characters in the story - No one defends him in-story, even his subordinates.
Completely devoid of altruistic qualities. They show no remorse. - He sneers at the concept as evidenced by all the times he said so.
Nahida suspects that the reason he completely destroyed Don Sombrero's life was due to jealousy. He related to Don Sombrero. Don Sombrero was, like him, an exceptional entity and a societal outcast. And yet people managed to acknowledge and accept Don Sombrero for what he was. This was likely both a great source of confusion and rage for Dottore. Despite what Dottore perceived as similarities between them, Don Sombrero was able to achieve something that Dottore could not. He could not accept that Don Sombrero had something that he lacked. Because he did. Don Sombrero had the one thing necessary to connect with others: empathy. The one thing completely out of Dottore's reach. Dottore appears to have a tendency to relate to those he views out outcasts and exceptional individuals. This is why he approached Sandrone and Columbina. But when both ultimately rejected him just as many have done before, he still didn't understand why. He simply accepted it because he was used to this treatment, but that doesn't mean he's any closer to figuring out the cause.
I believe that one of the reasons why Dottore is so utterly incapable of understanding the reason for his rejection is because in order to do so, he would need to accept that there's something wrong on his end. That ultimately, his lack of empathy is a flaw. This would utterly clash with his view of being an exceptional individual, and thus he must take the opposite view; that the reason he is so rejected is because everyone else is flawed. It's THEIR fault that they can't understand his greatness, not his. I think the reason that he kept trying to get the Traveler to see things his way is because, even now, he's desperate for some manner of acknowledgement. If he can get one of only FOUR Descenders, a true exception among exceptions, and what he sees as the ultimate outcast (being a literal alien and all) to acknowledge and accept him, then that would finally validate him and his views. I think that's why he gave the Traveler so many chances, because he craved this validation more than anything.
I think he does understand this but still rejects it anyway.
Also, it seems he does treat people who agree with his utilitarian worldview much better as evidenced by his long-standing relationship with some of his fellow Harbingers. But still, he ends up using them because they matter less to him than himself.
I expected the Traveler to notice this during their talk but I guess they were more occupied with their sibling and what Dottore said to them.
Even the murderers and child groomers had sympathetic qualities to render them morally grey, as evidenced by the Monoceros Caeli & Ignis Purgatorius story quests and more.
For example, he constantly implies that he craves to have a family. But somehow people condemn him for it just because his way of relating to people is imtellectual amd cognitive rather than emotional. He's not even condemned purely for his experiments and acts of harm towards the traveler's friends. His whole person is condemned, not his actions. He's treated as uniquely evil because he doesn't have a mainstream/value-based view of "family".
He is treated as evil because of his actions with regards to the people he meets.
Even his 'familial' relationship with Columbina is a mockery, looking at her with 'greedy eyes' in her words. The comment by clfr6515 above is quite elucidating
Well, I also suppose the nature of the post skewed the odds in a weird direction.
Edit: Welp, 'dottorespet' isn't budging. They could have limited themselves to just being horny for dottore. I better get to sleep.
And he was already chased out of his hometown as a literal child. A CHILD. You're claiming a CHILD can somehow deserve to be thrown out on the street.