Turalyon and Lothraxion literally questioned that rule, leading to them working with Alleria and appealing to Xe’ra for mercy when she intended to punish Alleria for defying her previous warning about “No Void”.
I think the ARMY of the Light counts as a military, so Xe’ra valuing obedience and adherence to a chain of command isn’t authoritarian.
For someone who claims to not hate Xe’ra, you’re pretty desperate to paint her in a negative light (pun intended).
The point I was originally trying to make was that the building blocks to make her into an antagonist existed from her introduction. It wasn’t even supposed to be a condemnation of her as a person, but a discussion about how a fictional character could have potentially be used differently by the writers.
Getting lost in the reeds about the specific nature of authoritarianism wasn’t really what I intended to do. I wasn’t trying to make The Case Against Xe’ra. If anything I was trying to extrapolate from the scant information we have about her to speculate on a role she could have had that was more compelling than just Illidan’s cheerleader.
I admit I got a bit lost in the reeds too. My bad. While I see where you’re coming from now, some of those building blocks were either non-existent or exaggerations, which undermines the premise.
They definitely portrayed her negatively in the end, but that seems like a sudden swerve and part of the taint of Afrasiabi (one of the directors of Legion, worst of the Cosby Suite crew and a guy prone to putting his personal issues into his work. You can’t separate the art from the artist when they’re putting their worst qualities into their art).
I honestly don’t know whether I think Xe’ra was always meant to be an antagonist or not. I’d be very interested in hearing the behind-the-scenes stories on that one.
Every other contact was agony because Xe’ra has no sensitivity for a light touch,
No… Illidan has always been a character who’s been on a swing between antihero and antivillain from the RTS through Legion.
He presented himself as Kosh after the original Kosh was killed. He was utterly contemptuous to mortal characters and we would find that his actually WAS the typical Vorlon attitude and that the original Kosh was the outrider.
The Vorlons proved as much of a threat as the Shadows and the resolution was to send them both packing at the end of the Shadow War.
The lame ending for the Humans pretty much echos the rushed phoned in nature of the piece.
Still doesn’t make it deliberate.
There’d have been no reason to give her the heroic set up before that cinematic.
So he was Ulkesh impersonating Kosh?
Humanity still used the Vorlon’s ideas on how to run a society, colonized the Vorlon homeworld, used Vorlon technology and became Vorlons 2.0. They didn’t do that with anything from the Shadows.
The Vorlons and Shadows only left because the First One they both revered returned and wanted to resolve their dispute.
The lame ending for that Champion of the Light arc echoes the rushed phoned in nature of Xe’ra’s writing.