He is definitely not good but I dont see him as evil either. I just wanna know what people think. Let's vote and make a discussion about it.
I hope they dont make Xerath a totally bad guy in his new bio. I want bigger reasons.
Xerath is a person who had a just cause, a good reason to strike out against some bad people, and some really, really, shit luck combined with a willingness to go way too far.
Xerath did what he did because Shurima was an empire with slavery. They had kept him and countless others enslaved for years, and he knew the only way to fix that was with something drastic. So he sabotages the Ascension ritual of his master and gets ready to attain power, something he never had. I don't think it's fully clarified if he knew how big the blowback from his sabotage would be (He killed a TON of innocent people), but maybe he didn't really care. That's the taking it too far bit.
The real tragedy with Xerath's story is that he was convinced he was alone, ignored, and hated because he was a slave. He never realized how much Azir cared about him, that he really thought of him as a friend, and that he thought slavery was as barbaric as Xerath did. He never got a chance to say it, and he waited too long to do something about it.
If we're talking current Xerath, I think all that remorse is washed away in both of them from millenia of imprisonment on Xerath's part and...death on Azir's. It doesn't sound like there's any friendship left, just revenge.
That's why I think Azir/Xerath's dynamic is sorely underrated, probably because it's a retcon of his original story and still from around that time when Lore was super tumultuous. There's a whole lot of the classic "If someone had just said SOMETHING" in there.
In his original state, I wrote Xerath as someone seeking retribution for his sins and worked in the IoW in order to find it. Despite him reducing an empire to ash, there were other champions who hated themselves for their comparatively minute sins and I was planning on that being a major theme to the story.
Then Azir came along and fucked EVERYTHING up for me. First there was another entity that I had to deal with, and that would take some serious rewriting to work around. Then they turned Xerath into a joke of his possibly more human self. And I'm not letting that slide so easily even after 1.5 years of this shit.
For some reason i can't vote in the poll,however I'd say he is(and always was) neutral evil.
In both his old and new lore,he caused a lot of destruction with his ritual,that probably killed thousands,if not millions(the sheer size of destruction was left unclear,but it was said to cause destruction throughout the whole country).
He could be seen as a more neutral guy if he did it for some noble reason or if he didn't know that this would happen,but thats not the case. His old lore said that the mages feared his disregard for life,so he knew what his ritual would cause(this is also the case in the new one,where he says its too late for them all). And while his goal is unknown in the new lore(so it might turn out that he had good intentions in the new lore),it was simply power in the old lore,he didn't want to help anyone,he just wanted to fullfill his desire for more magical power,regardless if he had to sacrifice others for it.
Sure he did betray Azir in the new lore,but honestly that betrayal fades in comparison to the death and destruction that was caused by his ritual.(though in the old lore there was the point where he said that he had no regrets about what he has done,which included the death of his loved one)
He is surely angry at Shurima but he is chaotic neutral for sure.
