Xykon and Edelgard seem like completely different villains.
Xykon is a card-carrying villain, utterly uninterested in any pretense of justice or morality. Edelgard does not just use the rhetoric of justice, but has an actual real point to make, that the hierarchy of the Crest system is arbitrary and unjust.
Xykon is generally light-hearted, making whimsy and wisecracks, only showing his serious determination when the moment truly calls for it. Edelgard is bone-crunchingly serious, shaped by personal trauma, reserving any smidgen of vulnerability for rare episodes in the exclusive company of highly trusted people.
These seemingly opposite profiles go in the same despicable narrative direction, though. Twice the same direction.
They breed
familiarity, conditioning and encouraging the reader to underplay their villainy, and they warp the characters to seek absolute personal
power at any cost.
Familiarity first.
Xykon is funny and playful, and keeps it real over being pretentious, which gives him a legitimate likable and relatable element. Over the course of almost
1500 strips, you become more and more familiar with his presence, and the party is alive and well at the (thus far) end of it, and the world isn't destroyed. He's basically harmless, right?
A recurring theme is that, no matter how charismatic he is, he is irredeemably, unrepentantly, massively and pettily, both stone-cold evil and simply an asshole.
Xykon makes you come to grips with your own reaction as a reader. Is
this the kind of guy I find funny? What does that say about me, and what I find likable in people?
Because at the core, all Xykon
really cares about is Xykon's power. He wants pure childish tantrum freedom, for nobody to tell him what to do, for any reason, at any time, and he will viciously torture whoever it helps to torture to get there. The japes and wisecracks are an adequate distraction when he has nothing better to do for power, but they're games he drops as fast as a bear trap shuts.
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A big reason Edelgard breeds familiarity is the structure of the game. It has two major phases. The first half is the Monastery phase, where stakes are relatively lower in the fantasy nobles' high school, and everyone is seemingly on the same team. The second half is the War phase, where the world breaks out into war, and everyone has to choose what side they are on, fighting and even killing their friends and former classmates.
At the very start of the game, you decide which of three school houses you'll spend your time with.
Each house has their quirks, but there's little telling you that any house, or anyone in it, is outright villainous. That guy in the bottom right looks shady, I guess, but that's just one facial appearance of one guy. I picked Edelgard's house in my first playthrough because I liked magic, and this house had a lot of magic users, and some of their headshots seemed like interesting characters. Nothing complicated.
You'll spend the first half of the game better knowing the students in your house, going on missions with them, chatting with them, solving problems with them, all that stuff. If you get close with Edelgard, she'll share some vulnerability with you, but even if not, she mostly comes across as a stiff but fine leader.
Eventually, Edelgard has some business to take care of back home. She is going to be crowned as emperor of the Adrestian Empire, the largest country in the game. She invites you to come with it. The game makes clear there's something going on here.
When I got here, I saw no reason not to go with her. She was a part of my team and hadn't done anything to make me think otherwise.
Why wouldn't I support her? When the stakes escalated, and she attacked another major faction, the Church of Seiros, I assumed she had some good reason for it.
With the information I had, it seemed reasonable.
From here, Edelgard's villainy unfurls. She denounces the unfair hierarchy of the Crest system, where some people get increased societal standing and power because they are born with magic in their blood, which itself is fair. But she decides the solution to this problem is embroil the entire world
(or continent) in a vicious war with one goal.
She, personally can rule it all, implementing her desired policies. Conveniently, her solution to this societal problem is "Give Edelgard every scrap of power." All the individual atrocities and ills along the way - including collaborating with Those Who Slither in the Dark, wannabe Nazis who torture, experiment on, and slaughter children for power - get swept away as necessary for the grand plan. Edelgard will mildly regret the torture and then get right back on it. In practice, in terms of what she
actually does, she's little different from Xykon.
A grand plan where
one person, because of her birth to the emperor, gets to rule the world.
But it's harder to see this bigger picture when you start the game by aligning yourself with Edelgard's camp; when you spend all your time cooperating with Edelgard; when you listen to what Edelgard says has to be done; when Edelgard is a very powerful and helpful fighter, and competent and taking care of business and traditionally attractive. The pot gets hotter and hotter but you don't see a good reason to leave, and you don't
see good reasons in large part because of manipulation and favoritism in your arbitrary environment. By manipulating you like this, the game brilliantly asks you what you're willing to believe, how you're willing to sully yourself for what, and how independent your choices are.
