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The thing that makes Nanook and the path of Destruction so intriguing to me is that the methods are generally bad, but the goal, and what leads up to that goal, are much more complex and understandable than one might think.
Because Nanook wasn‘t some mustache twirling villain since birth, they were a victim of catastrophes started by other people and only through experiencing so much suffering did they develop their ideology of „This universe is bad and it needs to be destroyed.“ Fact is that if the universe did not exist in the way that it does in Star Rail, there wouldn’t be a path of destruction. Continuing that thought, there was and is Destruction in Star Rail‘s history that’s completely disconnected to Nanook. Nanooks ascension was more of a response to the suffering created by Emperor Rubert, Tazzyronth, the IPC etc. than something that happened in a vacuum.
If you look at all the antagonists we got in Star Rail up until now, do you notice how only a few of them are fully associated with the Destruction? And if you look at their goals, how many of them align with the path of Destruction?
Nanook and the followers of the path of Destruction are in no way justified in their actions, but acknowledging that they are the product of a continuous cycle of violence created by paths other than theirs than them is important for understanding the entire Star Rail story.
To end this I wanna point out how similar Nanook‘s goal is to the message of the game to ultimately show how flawed the Destruction is.
The message of Star Rail is to embrace the future. This is similar to Nanook wanting to destroy the current universe for a new one. Ending things to start new things isn’t wrong, but Nanook‘s desire to destroy the past is born out of an inability to see the past clearly for what it is, resulting in their actions being harmful. They internalized the violence they experienced as a human and now see it as some universal law and can‘t see past it to find a way to break the cycle of violence which they are now just continuing.
This is what makes Nanook‘s goal ultimately only a twisted reflection of the core message of Star Rail, because the AE Crew is creating a better future by understanding people’s problems and helping them (e.g. Sunday), not just by fighting bad people and never fully addressing the problem.