Aldaris did nothing wrong... except everything

The character Aldaris is more or less an idiot villain in the protoss campaigns whose sole purpose is to cause conflict to drive the missions. The frustrating part is that he is written horribly. He always has a good point, but the narrative either unfairly punishes him or gives him the idiot ball for it.

During the protoss civil war, he was suspicious of the nerazim and his reasons for being suspicious are completely reasonable considering that the nerazim caused the apocalypse the last time they were on the planet. You would only know this from reading the manual, as it is never brought up in the game script so Aldaris gets framed as an ignorant bigot standing in the way of victory. Then he just forgives the nerazim and says he was wrong, without providing any explanation for why he thinks so beyond "the narrative says I should admit I was wrong."

In the next campaign, he starts a terrorist uprising. His reasoning for this is that the nerazim matriarch has been compromised by Queen of Blades' mind control. (It makes no sense for the protoss to trust QoB in the first place, but I will get to that in another post.) The problems start immediately: QoB never had any opportunity in which to compromise the matriarch, there is no logical way for Aldaris to know this, and somehow the terrorists follow him even though he does not tell anyone why he started the uprising. Has everyone except the main characters suddenly turned into obedient zombies? None of this makes sense.

When he is confronted, then Aldaris tells the cast why he rebelled. He really should have told them earlier like a sane person would, but the design mandated protoss vs protoss missions so he got the idiot ball. However, right before he can finish something really stupid happens.

While protoss are in the middle of conversing, QoB shows up, plants some lurkers, and none of the protoss take notice of this. They just stand around like idiots. She then murders Aldaris mid-sentence by impaling him... right in front of the protoss leaders and their armies.

Then the protoss leaders just let her walk free.

I really cannot stress how utterly stupid this is. QoB just murdered a foreign head of state in front of countless witnesses in a cruel and unusual manner... and they just let her leave unmolested.

I have brought this up in the past as an example of bad writing, and people have told me that it makes perfect sense because Aldaris was already a traitor. Le sigh.

If you cannot understand why this is stupid, then imagine that the same thing happened with (deep breath) the January 6th insurgence. Imagine that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez walked up to Donald Trump and viciously stabbed him to death. Do you think that she would just be allowed to leave after that?

The protoss should immediately arrest QoB and put her on trial for murder. The only reason they do not do that is because it would break the plot. This is a badly written plot because it requires the cast to act like idiots in order for it to happen.

Aldaris is a fascinating and frustrating character. In the hands of a competent writer, he could have been very compelling as an antagonist with reasonable points. Unfortunately, Blizz turned him into a buffoon. He acted like an idiot even when he was right, died in an idiotic fashion, nobody mourned him, and he never got justice.