Team Xen and Recruitment (Spoilers!)

[Mayflower896]

Spoiler

We’ve known for quite a while that Madame X does not take her underlings’ failures kindly, going as far as to terminating them. I’ve always thought that there something odd about this. Why would she kill perfectly loyal grunts?

 

Team Xen are terrorists, and it is much harder to recruit for a radical cause than to hire for a normal job. Of course, said recruits could already be fervent believers in the cause, but we don’t know Team Xen’s goals. If Madame X kept killing her soldiers, it would result in Xen’s numbers vastly decreasing, and recruiting replacements for a position with such a high death probability would become harder.

 

Furthermore, a Deathwing in one of V11’s sidequests mentions that he and fellow Deathwings can be killed for a single failure. Adding on to my question, why would she eliminate her elite troops so quickly? 

This all makes me wonder just what would make ordinary people join such a ruthless and unrewarding organisation, but we probably won’t find out so soon...

 

Edited January 6, 2019 by Mayflower896

[Ice Cream Sand Witch]

 

We don't know all the details of Team Xen's goal, but we know they're looking to gather a type of energy created from conflict. This is why they don't care if their Shadow Pokemon get snagged, or if Blacksteeple ended in a riot: either way, their goal is fulfilled because they don't need to win all the fights, they just need the fights to happen. Neved said that Madame X also planned to eliminate her own guards at the castle.

 

On why people join: it's possible they don't know the severe consequences of failure, or that once they join Team Xen they can't go back, until later on. But if they do, Madame X may recruit people in desperate situations who are willing to take the risk because they have nothing to lose. If they fail, they'd be no worse off than they would if they didn't join, and if they succeed, they get to turn their life around. For example Neved, who didn't make enough money from being a sailor to pay for his daughter's hospital bills. Kind of similar to how Spacea and Tiempa orchestrated a scenario where Melia wouldn't have the option to refuse even though they gave her one.

 

 

[Mayflower896]

4 hours ago, Ice Cream Sand Witch said:

  Reveal hidden contents

We don't know all the details of Team Xen's goal, but we know they're looking to gather a type of energy created from conflict. This is why they don't care if their Shadow Pokemon get snagged, or if Blacksteeple ended in a riot: either way, their goal is fulfilled because they don't need to win all the fights, they just need the fights to happen. Neved said that Madame X also planned to eliminate her own guards at the castle.

 

On why people join: it's possible they don't know the severe consequences of failure, or that once they join Team Xen they can't go back, until later on. But if they do, Madame X may recruit people in desperate situations who are willing to take the risk because they have nothing to lose. If they fail, they'd be no worse off than they would if they didn't join, and if they succeed, they get to turn their life around. For example Neved, who didn't make enough money from being a sailor to pay for his daughter's hospital bills. Kind of similar to how Spacea and Tiempa orchestrated a scenario where Melia wouldn't have the option to refuse even though they gave her one.

 

 

Spoiler

I should have remembered that part about Neved... But thanks for the answer. I loved how V11 gave glimpses of the Xen Executives’ past, and I can’t wait to see more of that.

 

[ParadoxPotentia]

On 1/6/2019 at 5:28 PM, Ice Cream Sand Witch said:

  Reveal hidden contents

We don't know all the details of Team Xen's goal, but we know they're looking to gather a type of energy created from conflict. This is why they don't care if their Shadow Pokemon get snagged, or if Blacksteeple ended in a riot: either way, their goal is fulfilled because they don't need to win all the fights, they just need the fights to happen. Neved said that Madame X also planned to eliminate her own guards at the castle.

 

On why people join: it's possible they don't know the severe consequences of failure, or that once they join Team Xen they can't go back, until later on. But if they do, Madame X may recruit people in desperate situations who are willing to take the risk because they have nothing to lose. If they fail, they'd be no worse off than they would if they didn't join, and if they succeed, they get to turn their life around. For example Neved, who didn't make enough money from being a sailor to pay for his daughter's hospital bills. Kind of similar to how Spacea and Tiempa orchestrated a scenario where Melia wouldn't have the option to refuse even though they gave her one.

 

 

Spoiler

Another possibility, given what we've seen of death wings and how many recruits they have- and how casually they dispose of them- is that the majority of team Xen grunts are "maids", as described by anju. Of course, if that's the case, they must be deliberately summoning them with both self-preservation and personality- except that the maid gardevoir sends has a self-preservation instinct as well. This is both a fridge horror, as our "good guys" in the past are comfortable with killing entities that actually are human or close enough- and a good explanation for how they have enough team xen members to die for a single failure. This seems likely to be either a variant of the maid spell that produces clones, or backed by actual recruits.

 

Conveniently, this also allows Team Xen to suddenly bounce from the harmless fools they are characterized as in early-game to an utter nightmare, just by sheer quantity of mooks produced.

 

I mean, it's not the only possibility, but it's the one I like best, at this point- and I think that regardless of what normal xen grunts are, death wings are "maids".

 

I might be horribly mistaken, but it seems like a plausible option.