I just put a page for Aleister on the wiki. While writing, I spent an hour or so reading the Toaru wiki, and honestly at the end of it I came out even more confused than before I started. Seriously, that wiki is very comprehensive; I think it has to be comprehensive so that the people writing it can figure out what the hell is going on in the anime/LNs.
So the motivation for the whole thing is that his infant daughter died... in the 1800s... while he was out mountain climbing.... because of maybe the pollution byproduct of some magical experiment gave her a bad fate? And because of this, rather than raise his future children, he has a vendetta against all of magic and wants to restructure the universe. And because it was bad his daughter died from magic, it was somehow okay to kill 10 kilomisakas for science? The IRL events make 10 kilotimes more sense here; after the daughter died of typhoid, the mother became an alcoholic to the point of alcohol dementia, and Aleister went on see the occult parts of a lot more women.
That's just main villain motivation, putting aside setting things like magic being mainly represented by the Roman Orthodox Church, while there are also magic gods, plural. I know I complained about Aria, where setting things on Mars leads to a lot of weird assumptions. But its core story is all real: gondoliers have apprenticeships. Venezia is pretty. Female gondoliers was a "ripped from the headlines" thing at the time of writing the manga.
This is why I like Salem as a villain so much. Her backstory: unlucky in life, then finally gets free, then becomes unlucky again. Gods play with her, expect her to accept fate, she says: NO U. And while she remains cursed, partially of her own choosing, she still managed to Sheridan the Brother Gods out of her galaxy.
I'm now not sure what I want more: the original plan of kill Aleister fast so we don't have to deal with that particular tangle of story, or to actually try to fix it and make a solid recurring villain. IRL people saw him as a villain; William Butler Yeats certainly thought so. There are some theories out there that the "rough beast" "slouching toward Jerusalem" referred to Crowley.
So the motivation for the whole thing is that his infant daughter died... in the 1800s... while he was out mountain climbing.... because of maybe the pollution byproduct of some magical experiment gave her a bad fate? And because of this, rather than raise his future children, he has a vendetta against all of magic and wants to restructure the universe. And because it was bad his daughter died from magic, it was somehow okay to kill 10 kilomisakas for science? The IRL events make 10 kilotimes more sense here; after the daughter died of typhoid, the mother became an alcoholic to the point of alcohol dementia, and Aleister went on see the occult parts of a lot more women.
That's just main villain motivation, putting aside setting things like magic being mainly represented by the Roman Orthodox Church, while there are also magic gods, plural. I know I complained about Aria, where setting things on Mars leads to a lot of weird assumptions. But its core story is all real: gondoliers have apprenticeships. Venezia is pretty. Female gondoliers was a "ripped from the headlines" thing at the time of writing the manga.
This is why I like Salem as a villain so much. Her backstory: unlucky in life, then finally gets free, then becomes unlucky again. Gods play with her, expect her to accept fate, she says: NO U. And while she remains cursed, partially of her own choosing, she still managed to Sheridan the Brother Gods out of her galaxy.
I'm now not sure what I want more: the original plan of kill Aleister fast so we don't have to deal with that particular tangle of story, or to actually try to fix it and make a solid recurring villain. IRL people saw him as a villain; William Butler Yeats certainly thought so. There are some theories out there that the "rough beast" "slouching toward Jerusalem" referred to Crowley.
"Kitto daijoubu da yo." - Sakura Kinomoto