[gashatfreak]

As poorly written as Bahato was, I have to agree with Touma here; Bahato wasn't doing himself any favors by stubbornly sticking to his nihilistic ideas that human nature can't change for 1000 years. Yes, his family died and all, but that's all he has going on for his character. There's really no further 'depth'. So his friend betrayed him. Okay, sure, tragic. But why make the stretch that ALL of humanity is twisted? I don't recall seeing any others betraying this guy. And considering how Bahato vowed to protect the world (according to Yuri), I just don't find it believable that he does a sudden face-heel turn from the death of his family. Surely he knew there was good and evil people in the world beforehand?

And even if we do accept that his mental breakdown pushed him over the despair event horizon, it sucks that he had absolutely NO character development. I mean, yes this was called out by Touma when he said that Bahato persistently held onto despair, but that's really not an excuse for a lack of character depth.

A tragic event is a good way to give character depth, but not when it is poorly explained and is literally a SINGLE tragic event. A tragic event is different from a tragic backstory, which fully fleshes out and build up a sequence of events that shows how someone got pushed to the edge. Bahato's role can be summed up as "opponent for Saber and friends to defeat." If it wasn't for his sacred sword (which was important for creating the Xross Saber), I swear the guy could be replaced by a generic mook.

And this is honestly my biggest gripe with Saber. The designs and action are great, but that does nothing to make up for characterisation. The show puts too much focus on some characters while leaving others with minimal or no development. Touma keeps telling Ren that he could get stronger, but the show doesn't DO anything with it! All we see is Ren brooding around instead of training with Desast like I hoped he would when he decided to go with Desast. At least Bahato's poor characterisation gets called out (even though it's not an excuse to justify poor characterisation), Ren's brooding habits aren't corrected at all! I really feel bad for Ren's actor for having to show up on set just to 'brood'.

And while I hope Desast becoming Falchion would push either him or Ren into SOME development, I'm not exactly counting on it either at this point.