DS is such a fascinating protagonist to me because he is very much The Loveable Bastard (!!) in every way but in this terrible man we see such a genuine love for humanity, not just in the character himself but in what he represents.
DS is not a good person. The series jumps through hoops and is borderline a parody of itself just to show how much DS sucks and is a legitimately terrible person, but he is also not a character inherently made to be mean spirited. He is our protagonist, sure, but not a character that we root for: one who raves about his own ambitions of killing people to rule the world with evil, how every woman exists just to sleep with him, DS is by design not someone whose 'redeemable' or even half way decent by any definition, and the writing does reflect this by having DS, powerful as he is, constantly clowned on and beaten up by the rest of the cast even though he could nuke them pretty easily. He's not justified in anything, he's not someone you want to believe in, he's not good by any respects.
Yet, he is still the one who fights to save humanity from the threat of both Heaven and Hell. When faced with the prospects of God's condemnation and Hell's wrath, he is the one who says that humanity should endure.
This is important because fundamentally, DS does not understand love. He does not understand the love he holds for others, nor the idea that people can love him. He doesn't understand the love of the divine towards humanity, nor why humans willingly pray to any god for salvation. He has no value in faith, not only in the religious sense but even the belief that humans can have in one another. He doesn't believe in anything or anyone, not even himself. All that he exists as is raw power and instinct.
He is a human without a heart.
I think his relationship with his four generals is something to look at here, because while on the surface it may seem like just another example of him being terrible (which it is), an interesting caveat to it is that to him, it is entirely transactional: Gara and Abigail are no different from any of the other soldiers sworn into his service, they just happen to be the strongest ones. Any loveable rivalry that Gara had with DS is entirely one sided, something he himself comments on when seeing how DS acts following his revival. Furthermore, in his eyes Kall and Nel are his possessions before they are any form of family. He saved their lives, so now they owe him, they belong to him. For all that they are called his children, Kall is only a powerful soldier he raised whose life was sworn to him and Nel is no different from any other woman he sleeps with. He doesn't care for the labels other people place on any of his relationships because he does not understand them.
None of these dynamics, however, are inherently malicious on his end. In all of his exchanges with his generals, it always goes the similar dynamic of "Do what I say, and you are free to do whatever else you want". He has a genuine childlike mentality and reasoning for what he does, an overgrown manchild of course but DS despite being the physical embodiment of lust is not actually a mature human being. He's grown but he's not grown up. He plays at human relationships and human emotions because it's what everyone else around him does, not because he himself actually understands them.
And when we learn that he was originally an artificially created human, a weapon made by man to stave off their extinction, outside the domain of God, we realize that he was born without God's love. Humanity is the child of God, but he is an unwanted bastard child.
He was a human entirely lacking in humanity because he is half a person, without the other half of his soul. DS before his merging with Lucian is simply raw desire, ambition, and human evil, an animal howling at a world he does not understand and that does not understand him. Following his merge with Lucian, however, he's.... still roughly the same, actually. Kinder, for sure, as he does not indiscriminately kill people anymore, but many of the terrible aspects of pre-revival DS still do exist within him. Softer, maybe, but not any less damning.
But you can't deny that even he, born as a weapon, known as a tyrant, killed as a monster, and reborn as an effigy, is still a human being worthy of being loved.
Because that's what DS ultimately is after all the labels and evils: just another human being.
He is the raw human desire for survival, the unwanted bastard child of God, the stillborn infant who survived and grew outside of God's hold over humanity.
He is the Dragon Knight because he is both the monster and the hero, the dragon who terrorized humans but also the knightly hero who saves humans.
He is humanity's sins and humanity's salvation, the damnable creation made to destroy but still capable of love and still worthy of being loved.
DS is a mirror to the human spirit, to you the reader, but he's not a perfect image. Rather, he's a reflection of all our worst traits, not as the terrible monster to damn for all our evils, but rather in a comical package we can laugh about. He's the bastard of the world in how terrible he is, sure, but also a bastard that exists to laugh at, not because humanity is inherently evil or anything but because everyone just sucks sometimes and what we can do is just laugh about it.
It's ok if you make a mistake, because you'll never be as terrible as Dark Schneider is! Have a laugh about it, you'll do better next time!
Even the most cartoonishly evil man and literal bastard child of God is still a human worthy of love.
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