#like you end up with nothing LEFT except the hollow archetype of whatever role the character exists to fill

[bestworstcase]

I disagree with the idea that ozpin has for the greater good ethos if anything he has put peoples happiness/individual over the greater good multiple times ( if anything he could have did what the god of light did and the moment pyrrha said yes he would put her through the machine but he explained to her the process and gave her time to think about it and basically even during the fall of beacon and the salems forces coming he still needed her to say yes

the man created a global institution to systematically train child soldiers to fight in the forever war he’s prosecuting expressly because he believes destroying salem is a necessary step on the road to summoning omnicidal gods back to the world to judge whether humankind deserve to be spared from execution at the hands of his gods. he asked a seventeen year old girl to assist in the murder of a young woman barely older than herself so that they could make her the receptacle for what was left of that woman’s power, and gave her ONE DAY to deliberate—“by the end of the vytal festival” meant “tomorrow, when the tournament is over.” (not to mention tacitly allowing the wildly manipulative “we can tell you more once we know you’re with us” approach.)

he explicitly believes that it’s shameful to commit to something and then change your mind after new information comes to light, which goes a long way to explaining why he hasn’t tried anything meaningfully new or reconsidered his beliefs in thousands of years but also suggests that at least on a subconscious level he tries to ‘trap’ people by withholding necessary information until they’ve already made an irrevocable commitment—which is, indeed, precisely the approach we see him and his loyalists take with pyrrha.

he’s nice, certainly, and he cares about people and is clearly aware of and troubled by his own moral decline. but none of those things prevent him from being a deceitful, manipulative control freak who believes he’s divinely ordained to save humanity from itself and by extension that humanity as it is now fundamentally doesn’t deserve to exist. lmao like i’ve set before he’s not the Good One to salem’s Evil One, he’s a zealot and she’s an apostate and both of them are completely awful in perpendicular ways with tiny inklings of the better people they used to be and could become again if they really tried; and that’s a good thing because it’s a much more layered and interesting and potentially dynamic setup than your standard at worst lightly-tarnished good mentor vs unspeakably evil foe situation. why do you want him to be boring