Well, it's probably not Magus but I don't think you realize what Magus is. If finding Schala meant destroying Guardia, he wouldn't hesitate to decimate it. He doesn't give a damn about Crono, Marle or Lucca. Even tho he was a good little boy back then and that he's searching for someone he loves, he's still a cruel, pale-faced dark wizard.
Nah, he's not that bad. He's of true heroic temper. You demean him to speak so basely of him. Yes, at points he did act harshly, but so did most heroes of antiquity - take the famous aristeia of Achilles. He butchers his enemies, even they who fall and beg mercy at his knees. He challenges the river Scamander, and taunts Apollo. He is like a brilliant star, arrayed in golden armour, very much like his epithet dios - godlike - suggests. Yet he is also beastlike in that aforementioned brutality. Such is the nature of an ancient hero. And that is precisely what Janus is. However, his strength is such that he is not prey to dark and bestial action - he commands it. He is dark, maybe, but of his own choosing, and can lay it aside at will. He struggled against himself, and won. The guy is a bloody hero, and noble to boot. And, if the translation was right in that interview with Kato, that's how he himself refers to Janus: the
noble character of Janus. He is not a mere bloodthirsty anti-hero. Heck, he's not even an anti-hero at all! He's merely a hero our modern sensibilities might be a little uncomfortable with, but the sort of man Odysseus would have been in good company with, one who could also have gone by such epithets as 'far journeyed' and 'sacker of cities.' Those are names given to Odysseus, a man ruthless and powerful and cunning... but one of the truest heroes of antique Greece! If Janus has no company beside our 'heroes', he sure as hell is welcome beside those demigods of the Heroic Age, the speakers of words and the doers of deeds, in an age when the mighty ruled by force of voice and spear.
So let's not demean the poor man. Give him his dues, and place him on the same pedestal as Odysseus. Both are 'polytropos', being driven by fate - and their own wills - on long journeys. Both are the sackers of cities - only read what Odysseus' first action after the fall of Troy... like the pirate he is he destroys another city. Does this diminish his heroic stature? Not at all. Janus... he fought his wars, he destroyed cities, but his age was a harsher one. Let him be a hero for it. So consider it... Janus and Odysseus. They are not much different. One a man upon who the changes of the world balance, the doorway between ancient and modern, magic and strength, mind and spirit; the other, one whose name means 'to be wroth against'. But could that not fit the character of Janus, too, who is hated by no less potent a divinity than adverse Fortune... one, I might add, he beats back time and again?
