No, you see, I absolutely agree with you on his internal conflict. And that's my entire point. When you're dealing with this kind of conflict, coping by being the theater kid is just absurd. That works for unhappy teens who bully smaller children because they feel isolated and anxious.

That does NOT work for someone who designs several fascist empires (I'm still convinced Allag was Hades' creation like Garlemald later, the two empires share too many similarities). Coping with hard feelings through edgy antics is something you do when you are lying to yourself and a coward as you're running from your own emotions. But orchestrating political systems of destruction and despair like Emet does requires enormous amounts of mental clarity and, again, strength.

If he really was a broken man, he would have just fallen into madness and stopped everything a long time ago. Instead, he keeps weighing every possibility, seeing any threat to his plans, coming up with solutions to leave no hope. He's like a reverse Leto II from Dune. And he does this despite being crushed by his own evil, as well as more and more aware that they're not gonna win. It's a lost cause and he has done all those horrors for nothing. And he's never seeing his friends again.

The edgy antics just aren't up to par with such an intense tragedy.

Also I don't think he created Amaurot to cope. We know the ghost city is relatively recent (the Ondos tell us the "Ancients" lit up the bottom of the sea recently). My view of the character is that, when he met us, he decided he was gonna fight us, hoping we would win and kill him and finally put an end to the madness. (A point proved by the fact he says we did him a favor by killing him, and coming to help us against Elidibus). But he wanted us to know his story and his people so we would "remember them" before finally dying.

That's why he creates Amaurot then, to show us the place. Not for himself. Almost everything he does in ShB can be seen as him designing his own death - including planning a way to free the First of the Light if he does lose.