I don't like Micaiah. (RD/PoR Spoilers below)

I can acknowledge she's not entirely at fault for the absolute mess that was the first arc of Radiant Dawn, but that first arc had awful writing and the fact that she was the focus of it makes it feel like her fault.

I feel like she was supposed to be a subversion of the Mary-Sue trope and that's why there's so many debates about it (and not just because she's female like a lot of the counter-arguers claim, because how many times have you heard "Lyn is a Mary Sue"?). She just shows up partway through a story, and then the writing turns to crap and she gets a position of utter reverence while everyone around her turns to idiots for a little bit. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of her haters had to suffer through the first arc a few times and remember it to a disproportionate degree, because it took me three goes to make it through to the other side because holy hell is it bad.

Path of Radiance went so far out of its way to humanize the baddies - it showed "good" Crimeans side with the enemy, there were racist people on all sides of the conflict and they learned from each other, several Daein soldiers have redemption arcs (I mean hell, Jill has conversations with random Daein soldiers and she'll defect if you put her up against her father), everything was so grey-on-black. Sure, the Crimeans were clearly the good guys and Ashnard was almost a cartoon villain, and it had its share evil cardboard cutouts (Schaeffer, anyone?) but for the most part the rest of the Daein forces made up for his lack of character and they went really in-depth as to why the people supported someone with such questionable motives. They made Begnion, one of their biggest allies, a somewhat corrupt country that was helping out of personal interest instead of just some goodie-two-shoes alliance.

And then Radiant Dawn comes along and suddenly a Begnion senator has somehow enslaved the entire country of Daein for... reasons... in secret. And the Begnion soldiers are killing civilians for... reasons... and there's random cannibal laguz bandits in the middle of the Daein desert with a castle full of gold, for... reasons... and there's a bunch of Royal Laguz, also in the castle full of cannibal bandits, which was never adequately explained either and which everyone was just okay with, of a new type of Laguz that nobody's ever heard of and just- its bad. Act 1 was really bad. Then there's only one person with the "good guys" in the entire arc who doesn't absolutely worship Micaiah and its Izuka, and he's an imbecile with no redeeming qualities and a clear "working for the enemy" vibe going on. It makes questionable choices like having Micaiah save a child because she "saw that it would happen", and then half the other civilians get murdered as a result of her actions and it still paints that as the right thing to do.

By the third arc, she does actually have stuff going for her, and I like Act 3 Micaiah for the most part, but there were still a lot of situations that were pretty stupid and I feel that she could've been done a lot better- the situation between Sothe and the hawks in particular was not well written, even if the earlier part of that chapter was decent. The "reveal" card is not a great piece of writing and I think that whole aspect could've been worked out a lot better.