#i think ive referred to his plan as an elaborate suicide pact before but i don't remember where

[nemesis-is-my-middle-name]

With how all over the place and messy his motivations seem to be, it almost would have made more sense to me for the primary motivation of his turn to be the simple fact that he's working in retail lol. Lord knows there were plenty of bad days where I was like "people are a mistake" and might have been willing to end the known universe if just one more thing went wrong or I had to deal with one more horrible, unreasonable customer. At least Hisui is largely empty, so there are way, way less people to deal with, but on the downside he doesn't get any fun battles like a modern trainer would, just a lot of commute time featuring deadly encounters. He's young too, like older teenager-early twenties and seems to have cooked up this whole mess quite a few years ago, which aren't anyone's most stable. HC from you of echo chamber of discontent with his evil togekiss + job he hates and no end in sight + the recklessness of youth = ripping holes in space and time to yell at god and demand they fix the world, makes sense to me.

But to your point, him having an actual, regular ass job is a nice change of pace! I can't think of any other big bad who has one... except maybe whatshisname from Kalos? Forget what he does but maybe ceo? Even Giovanni is a gym leader, which is like a special job. Not comparable to some dead-end retail job. Though I guess Volo and Giovanni do have a handshake meme of shirking their duties to do their real passion, so there is that.

wwkjhwjkh yeah honestly, lysander and (i think) lusamine and rose technically have Jobs, but even ceo is kind of a Special Job in the same way a gym leader is imo. there really are kind of no other villains who are just some guy normally i don't think. volo's entire Thing really is justifiable purely on the basis that he is like twenty (hell years) working retail (hell job) with an apocalypse plan he's been sitting on since he was fifteen (you are your absolute least rational at fifteen.) and sadly he somehow found out a real workable way to end and remake reality. when you think about it from that angle he really makes so much more sense as a character and person.

srsly though i know i've said this before but i think volo makes waaaay more sense as a character if you ignore the tangle that is his canon ranting and look at him as a very young and DEEPLY miserable person who is on so many levels not making stable decisions. he hates his job, hates his life, has a miserable life history, plus with the added confirmation that there's sort of a general air of gloom & doom around hisui atm that's like, the cultural/social situation he's been steeped in (even if he goes elsewhere as a guild member, he pretty clearly considers hisui His considering the whole fixation on arceus.) dude was Not set up for success. modern au where volo goes to therapy and gets a couple prescriptions and gets to live out his true purpose of being some fucking guy