I honestly feel really bad about the soldiers/guards in the echoverse because most of them didn’t wish to be working as soldiers.
The Vinite guards were created in order to fight people, they don’t have any family and they don’t have anyone to go home to, fighting and being guards is the only home they have. Sure they make friends with the echo users around them, but that doesn’t mean they can form actual connections with people. And they know how many echo users don’t like seeing their faces as they look like the echo users that fell so many years ago. They know how their look affect others and this causes them to feel an emotion that they shouldn’t be able to feel: guilt.
And Voyal guards are only slightly better. They started out as guards who joined from their own free will and wanted to join in the first place but after the genocide of the saints and the uprising of the harrows, that was no longer something that happened. Kids as young as three years old were being taken from their family by force and trained up in the ways of the harrows. And because of that, the programming of Vinite guards also had to be changed so they no longer had a personality and were just empty shells of the original Voyal guards that they were based off of.
And that’s terrifying.
These soldiers began working for good, helping saints and becoming friends with them, joining them on missions. Voyal guards were treated like people with lives and not just workers doing their job while Vinite guards were treated like people instead of mindless killing machines but when the harrows attacked, that all changed. Only harrows were seen as the true people with power and able to control missions, no one else could.
The Vinite guards were never meant to be emotionless without their own mind while Voyal guards were never meant to be kept and worked like prisoners.
An uprising is coming, even if no one else can see it.
