I think the point of the character of Hermes is that even the most empathetic and good-hearted person can deal a lot of damage, when left alone and without support in the face of traumatic events. Their trauma becomes so big that they just can't function anymore. We saw this with Nidhogg, Fordola and Yotsuyu, even Emet-selch. It's the reason why the Final Days happened. The main moral teaching that FF14 offers is that anyone can become a villain, in the worst situation. Being good requires effort, energy and the humilty necessary to stop and change, when becoming aware of their situation. Most of people out there simply refuse to get help out of habit, pride of whatever. I had people like this in my life, dealing with crippling clinical depression and disability, so yeah. Endwalker was personally very impactful for me.
It is a good point that Hermes' expected role is clear, and in principle it's a unique, interesting and strong message to convey ("that even the most empathetic and good-hearted person can deal a lot of damage"). Personally, I felt like there were some missing steps (which I have associated more with Meteion), because I never felt that convinced that Hermes' honest curiosity would lead to Meteion down a path where she concludes that she must extinguish all life. All because she had been posed a question to which there was no obvious answer. Why could she not have returned saying "I don't know"? Why instead did she conclude that she must *personally* end all life? I think Meteion's *expected* role was also clear. She was *somehow* meant to conclude that life is meaningless because it is transient. There is no clear destination to life, no clear state where one achieves maximal or stable happiness. She was then somehow *also* meant to conclude that death is the best state for all life. But I don't think Hermes' question about what the meaning of life is takes her all the way to this conclusion. It is a bit like saying that every Nihilist must inevitably conclude that life is pointless and the solution is death. That's not true. For example, one can interpret that the lack of an obvious *intrinsic* value to life does not prevent one from *creating* their own, personal value. This value may not be shared by everyone, and so it is not universal, but that doesn't make it any less important. Indeed, this view is precisely how the Scions, and we the player character, respond to the Endsinger. One can even go further to say that a Nihilist position actually suggests an incredible freedom - we are free to make of life in whatever way we choose, and this is how you get Existentialism. TL;DR - I understand where the writers were going with Hermes and Meteion, but personally felt some steps were missing to really make the characters watertight.
@@paradoxicaldragon The issue is Hermes, when programming them, didn't program "I don't know" as a valid conclusion, which returns to the point of him skipping the peer review part where someone WOULD have told him, "Hey, this line of code/reasoning you've written is going to end badly" especially since he is designing a being to try and answer a question most all humans still struggle to form an answer to...so without "I don't know" as a valid failsafe in its mind, it jumped to the rogue AI conclusion of all life is meaningless. It's similar to Skynet or Ultron but perhaps closer to Clu from Tron: Legacy. It can even include the MCP from the original. Both are doing exactly what they were programmed to do. The MCP just saw the government as another corporation cause it hadn't been programmed to know the difference, and Clu was perhaps the closest to Meteion because he was given an impossible goal because, by Flynn's own admission, he didn't know better at the time when he created Clu.
EXACTLY THANK YOU You are supposed to hate and despise him. The front of him being a sadboy pity party is not supposed to last past the first fleeting moments of meeting him.
Hermes sin is very fitting of his name, his obsession with the message "what is the meaning of life?" was his downfall. His lack of understanding and his need to answer it was obsessive and thus shut out everything else, including help from others. It didn't help that most people that got the forum seats were very emotionally unavailable people: look at how long it took Emet to come around or Lahabrea. So the greatest flaw of their society was doing everything so by the book and only caring about the star's wellbeing and not their own. This shows in the final days how suddenly they cared little for the star and only to return to life before the calamity. This resulted in them pretending to care about the star's interest of solving the final days and instead hiding from the problem. Meteion was an AMAZING character. She showed the possible flaw of creating intelligent life and failing to guide it properly. This resulted into her falling into despair due to finding life dead, causing death, or misunderstandings that led to all her sisters combining into this dynamis beast. Hermes then came to the conclusion that the heartless nature of all of these civilizations deserved to pay penance which would be an eternal death, life never springing forth again, a kind of super hell or void. Meteion knew this info who break his fragile mind which is why the one we were with ran away with the info to hide it from Hermes and not break him. Due to Hermes obsession with the answer, he believed that Ethyris and all the other planets deserved their fate for how cruel we were, passing judgement from essentially insanity. Thusly he breaks down and tries to help the last meteion escape. This obsession shows as his time as Fandaniel when he tries downright evil experiments under Allag's time. Ultimately his obsession and his answer loses to ours and thusly he realizes that he fucked up all those years ago. So the idea that maybe, with some therapy and some help, he could have been someone better is possible, but I do agree having him in the end screenshot was kinda weak... Meteion deserves our love, after being driven to madness, escaping the rule of her sisters and being the spark of hope for them because of us, she ends up showing the importance of showing hope when things look most bleak. She is someone, that was abused, and yet came out clean on the other side, shining brightly despite what she had been through. A redemption of sorts. Thanks to her area, we being to bring some species back to life via Dynamis and help bring hope to hopeless creatures. Hermes was more a mirror to Meteion, while he gave into despair, she gave way to hope, which is why she ended up the victor, she found the answer and he didn't. Do I think it could have been done better? Maybe, but we already knew that something bigger was out there from previous expansions, we just didn't know what it was that was the villain. Can't wait to see where they go from here. I still thought this was a great expansion, definitely loved the story 9/10.
A counter: If you do the side quests in Elpis, you find that they're *all* unsure, they're *all* anxious - that's why the blooms are white, which Hermes mistakes for contentment. But the blooms are the same color when the gleaners are anxiously working around Labyrinthos. No, Hermes isn't the only one asking those questions. But he, like everyone else, is not *asking them of anyone else*. But his position as head of Elpis, and the ability to go around the peer review process, made all the difference.
Reminds me of the side quest where you explain memorial services to the Elpis workers. The Ancients had a very different understanding of death since they were not affected often by it.
Exactly, going around doing the side quests shows that a ton of his coworkers share his stance and concerns towards their creations, but he crowns himself to the pedestal of "only I feel this way, woe is me" to stand on and then completely falls apart as a result Wonder how he'd turn out if he actually spoke with someone, anyone, instead of what we got
This really comes through int he short story as well. People did want to help him, but he very much isolated himself. The side quests really highlights that they are all human, too, and all have worries and questions. I also feel a sense that he doesn't like be disagreed with? Since he basically skipped peer review because he wanted to do things his way and that his way is better, when like any societal issues, it's a lot more complicated that deeper than meets the eyes.
@@kuronaialtani I don't think that necessarily presents much of an indictment of Hermes and more of Ancient society and how people felt reluctant to even air their worries in a meaningful way. "I don't think it's right, but I'll just keep quiet about it because I don't want to rock the boat." You're right though that he should've sought out people who felt similarly so that he at least didn't feel so isolated, but it doesn't resolve the issue of how society itself felt constricting to the point that people would rather just ignore their own concerns altogether. At best, they'd just become a congregation of "disgruntled Amaurotines." And we kind of saw how that went with Venat and her cohorts. A small selection of individuals who also didn't want to comply with the state of things (albeit that was more driven by the Final Days and Zodiark) and whose discomfort with the situation fell on deaf ears until they seemingly felt forced towards drastic measures. But yes, it's good that this nuance exists, rather than this pretend-wonderland that only Hermes and Venat detested. Alas, those pesky facts often elude Amaurot enthusiasts.
As much as I agree with your thoughts on Hermes, I do believe that we have opposite opinions on Meteion... for one specific reason: Meteion actually tried to stop the tragedy that her sisters were going to create. She failed, because what is one voice in a thousand going to do, but she put forth an effort that Hermes never did. One thing that makes it worse is that the Meteion collective were effectively a group of AI sent into space to find out a meaning of life given flawed instructions by an idiot that should have known better but either didn't or chose to ignore good sense. Furthermore, where Hermes doubled down in both his life and his future incarnation, Meteion at least seems like she's trying to rebuild as a form of penance. I hope Hermes stays dead - it's the best thing that could happen for his character. I hope we see Meteion's efforts to rebuild the universe that she wrecked.
Yeah, people always seem to miss how whenever "our" Meteion is herself she tries to stop the bad stuff. In Elpis she runs away and tries to hide because she knows how hearing the report will break Hermes. After that she gets subsumed by the hivemind, then the moment we break her out of it she's back to trying to convince the rest to stop.
@@Enixon869 I believe she actually shows up again at the end of the Dead Ends dungeon as the little blue Starbird who's trying to stop the Endsinger and make her listen.
I also disagree with his assessment on Meteion. Also let's not forget that Meteion(as a species) was created to be the physical embodiment of empathy. Meaning they feel the exact feelings that others do. Not only that they are a collective consciousness. Basically "our Meteion had to break free from the hivemind to even try to stop these things. I think characters like Meteion are very interesting. The glory of the FFXIV story is everything can be interpreted different ways
It's funny that the very thing Amon and Fandaniel/Asahi wanted most--oblivion--was the one thing Hermes could have had right away. He would have been the first "not born anymore" soul she stuffed into her nest, but like a coward, he not only refused her "gift" but made himself and the witnesses forget that his experiment exploded so spectacularly in his face. Or that it, in its extremely broken state, is coming back around to judge not only us, but the entire universe and find us lacking based on a foregone conclusion that we are not worthy. Hermes can come back, but like, only as a chocobo or something. Let him spend a couple thousand lifetimes eating lettuce until he gets his head on straight.
And I'll be honest, Hermes all but FORCED her to continue the download of her sisters' reports which was... sick. Like she is legit crying for him to press the abort button and he's like "No no I want to hear MORE!" while she is in agony, it was when he went off the deep end at that moment that he lost ALL sympathy...yes he had problems, but your creation that you swore up and down you cared about (to the degree that exceeded the norm for your society) is in mental pain because of what she is getting back from her sisters...and you're being a selfish p-k cause you want "answers".
Emet literally says as much. Hermes did not take the worst possible edge cases into account, which is why he failed. To have an answer to "what meaning do you find in life," the people have to actually want to live and enjoy it. I do hope in the future Meteion finds worlds that are still going strong.
@@ApexGale I doubt Meteion will find any world besides our own that still thrives with life. Midgardsrmr tried looking for other places to settle down and found nothing, literally calling our star "the last bastion of hope". Maybe he didn't search as far and wide as Meteion, but Meteion was responsible for snuffing out life wherever she could find it, once her report was concluded. And she had 10 millenia to do it.
@@GhalanSmokeScale Midgardsormr was focused on finding a safe place for his clutch of eggs, he didn't have nearly as much time to search. The entire theme of Endwalker is "hope." That's literally what Elpis is (the greek word for hope). Meteion restored represents that hope that all is not lost. "After all, miracles happen every day, do they not?" Maybe she won't find sentient life, but that's not to say she can't find a planet lush with plantlife or with animals. That is still life.
@@ApexGalenot only that, but she also pretty clearly states that while she was still capable of it her song of hope was meant to revitalize the universe that her and her sister nearly snuffed out. Recognizing that they can’t make up for the lives they have stolen, but can at least foster a seed for new life to spring forth
Add on the fact that since Hermes refused peer review most of the behavior the Meteions modeled and learned was from a guy who was a closet nihilist...of course when faced with a dead end with no off-ramp in her thought process to account for failure she came to the conclusion her creator would.
I disagree about Hermes' characterization and that he was rushed. While I also don't like that one person could cause so much strife in FFXIV (see also: Hydaelyn) I think the whole point of Endwalker is that people need community and connections to not give into despair and my perspective is that Hermes didn't feel that he could open up to people and discuss what he felt was wrong. This caused him to isolate himself, which then resulted in him creating another being that could empathize with him because he couldn't find that in other people. Not sure if I missed a key point of the plot but I don't remember the creatures in Elpis being akin to bots, as you said? To me, the scene where he mourns that creature demonstrated that he basically shouldn't be working in Elpis since he's a doctor who's very uncomfortable with the idea of euthanasia. Either way, he viewed them as living creatures deserving of their own inherent right to live but this line of thinking made him eccentric to others and so he closed himself off when he didn't find understanding in others. Imo, the story wants you to consider how that type of isolation can fester into something like hatred or anger (especially at what you could perceive as injustice) and then eventually the nihilism we see in Fandaniel. Personally, I read Hermes as an examination of a person living in a society with no mental health care or friends. I think Hermes could've chosen differently had he been able to open up to someone and basically get therapy. I don't think he would've chosen to doom the world if he had people that he actually loved living in it.
You articulated what I had trouble doing. This is how I felt. I've been low before. And when that wears on you it can actually manifest even in kind people in terrible ways.
Yeah, calling the creatures of Elphis no better than just... strings of code just sets off alarum bells of a different sort. We know these are proper creatures, hell we've seen their spawn in the 8th Astral Era after they were sundered just like the rest of us. I do agree with the idea that Hermes was feeling too much sympathy in the situation (the beasts were basically rabid if I understand it correctly) but it's still a living animal, it's almost literally the same sorta situation with the Hecatonkerie in Copperbell for heck's sake just with a slightly less sentient entity.
@@gratuitouslurking8610 I'm 100% on board with you on this. I'm honestly surprised to hear that anyone has this take, since the whole conflict with Emet-Selch in ShB was us proving our right to exist to someone who didn't even see us as real people. What we are now in the sundered world is the exact same thing that Hermes felt guilty over destroying out of hand. He was definitely in the wrong job, but like... Did we learn nothing from Hades?
You wrote my exact thoughts in a manner far better than I would of stood any chance at doing. The part when he spoke about the beast as a bot, kinda made me feel like he might of missed the plot or perhaps he had already formed an opinion of the character in his head that wouldn't allow him to see any other way. BUT that's Synodic's right to do so. And to me, yes Herm-dizzle isn't the best character but he certainly not the worst. (Mind you I'm sort of partial to post-stormblood Zenos, so I may have some screws loose myself).
@Boxkar24 I think everyone is. There's a great video on Zenos, and it also cottoned on to an important point. Zenos is like if you set up Game of Thrones and put Michael Myers on the throne. He actually doesn't fit or express the themes of Stomblood quite well enough. Also, the game did little to build him up as a threat that could rival us ahead of time. He didn't fit in Stormblood. He does in endwalker
I have to disagree with the perception that the Elpis creations are akin to AI bots or “not real”. Even if that is an accepted norm in the ancient society. This way of thinking is what led Emet to attempt the rejoining - the fact the lesser imperfect beings (including the sundered souls) are not “alive”. By your logic, Emet should have gone ahead with the rejoining without being stopped. What Hermes saw in the creations was their potential. They did not ask to be created, yet by the hands of their creators they were handed judgement with no control over their own fate. I think Hermes despised that they get to control life at a whim without considering the harsh reality faced by their creations. This resonated with the story of SHB where the wol proved their resolve to Emet that even as a sundered, incomplete, and “lesser” being, we can still be worthy enough to be entrusted with the burden of taking care of our star and our future. I think this was what Hermes wanted for all the creations in Elpis too.
I also feel that you misunderstood the MSQ. I didn't feel that it was trying to make us forgive him. I felt that it was trying to make us understand him. How a person could find despair in what is supposedly a paradise and how that could spiral into something that exposed the flaws in the Ancients society. Because it was flawed, deeply. It's why Venat split the world into its shards. It's why we saw the dead ends and a society like the Ancients choosing to commit mass suicide due to essentially feeling listless and disconnected from life. Hermes answer was to give up. Venat's answer was to plunge people and it's existence into one that has strife and despair nipping at its heels constantly. So that we may learn to overcome that despair. Athena's answer was to hit the reset button and remake life to improve it. Athena essentially was the most extreme form of the Ancient's perspective on Elpis. She just happened to include the Ancients themselves in the process of experimentation and improvement.
Framing beats narrative. Sure, maybe that is what the story is trying to tell us. But the fact that they gave Hermes two very long death speeches? That he appears in the endcard with all of the Scions and the most important Ancient characters? Clearly the game wants you to associate Hermes with all of these characters you have grown to love and care for. I definitely felt that the game was trying to make us like him. I would have loved it if there was an option to not be kind to Amon as he faded away and in the final end card, Hermes did not appear on it.
@@Scerttle Similar to how the Japanese handled their atrocities in WW2. Japan's indifferent attitude towards their actions during WW2 stems from their belief that they can be forgiven under the notion that 'anyone can be forgiven'.
I don't share a lot of your thoughts and feelings on Hermes. But I really like your analysis of him! In the end he did in fact make a lot of selfish and horrific decisions born of his own disillusion with life. I feel for him, but in the same way I feel for a rabid animal. His circumstances may be tragic and he may be a broken person that simply couldn't handle the knowledge he received, but that shouldn't stop any of us from seeing he needs to be put down for the safety of others.
One thing I wanted to address first. Hermes wasn't mourning a soulless being. When the ancients create something that follows the rules of nature it gets a soul. You can tell from the way he's talking to it when he tells it to hate them if it wants to and live again if it wants to, that it will have a continued existence after death. The ancients have no problem killing beings with souls if they believe that's what in the best interest of the star. I didn't feel Hermes was rushed at all and we learned everything we needed to know about him for him to be the antagonist of Endwalker. Shadowbringers sets up the question of who deserves to inherit Etheirys, the ancients or us. Emet-Selch argues the ancients were superior and therefore they are the ones who deserve to live. Hydaelyn argues that we are superior and therefore deserve to inherit the star. Hermes is the administrator of the test to settle the matter once and for all. He is playing by the exact same rules as the rest of his people, so if you hate him, you have to hate Emet-Selch and Venat too. They are all gods playing with lives as they see fit. Also, when it becomes clear that Meteion is responsible for the final days, Hermes has to choose between protecting his daughters and letting his people slaughter them for the good of the star. It's already very clear he takes issue with murdering beings for the good of the star, so obviously the child he created with his own two hands he would not easily turn over to die. I think for a lot of parents if their kid suddenly turned evil and the state wanted to put them down they'd be like "fuck morality" and protect their kid. Human beings are just selfish that way. We tend to protect our own over the greater good. Meteion isn't simply an AI program. She has thoughts, dreams, desires, hopes. She's a person by every metric we have to measure personhood. Hermes wanted a fair contest rather than the ancients using their overwhelming power to put down his kids like some failed experiment. What was more important to understand during the Elpis part was the ancient way of thinking. About the way they viewed life, purpose and their entitlements. It explains why out of the ancients we meet, only one of them (Hythlodaeus), hasn't committed genocide. They come from a society where death is no big deal so killing millions of people to reach the desired outcome isn't as horrendous to them as it is to us. When Emet-Selch is giving the speech about how ancients are better because half their number were willing to sacrifice themselves for the other half I couldn't help but think, "we would have come up with a better plan." Necessity is the mother of invention. Because these were gods who had only known paradise, they were incapable of coming up with a plan better than making themselves a big strong daddy that ran off of human sacrifice. Endwalker wasn't about Hermes, it was about human nature. It gave us a glimpse of what we might become if suffering wasn't part of the human experience -- weak and blind to the suffering of others.
THANK YOU. At least in certain parts of the fandom, there is very much an uncritical, "take everything at face value" view of the ancients, which is a bit of a problem because, YES, their society does look like a paradise at first glance. But one of the biggest points of the Hermes arc, as well as other glimpses we've seen of it from, say, Emet, show that they had a Serious case of noblesse oblige towards both the star and anything they created. And perhaps some of that was deserved, but at the same time, they were going around and killing creatures with souls just because they didn't fit some grand purpose that they were supposed to. Switch it from animals to people (which is not a leap, considering how willing the ascians are to commit murder on a massive scale), and it gets very ugly, very quickly. Hermes' curiosity is what caused his downfall and that of the ancients, yes, but if the society that he had lived in had been better and more empathetic, would he have been driven to create Meteion? Probably not. The end days, and especially the way that they were handled, are an indictment against the ancients as a whole, not just Hermes.
You cannot compare a parent protecting their child to Hermes protecting Meteion. A parent does not control many aspects about their child. A parent doesn't control their personality, their interests, any illnesses they may have inherited. Hermes literally created everything about Meteion. And rather than realizing that there mistakes in how she was made and the kind thing to do was to unmake the poor thing, Hermes doubles down. Also, if Endwalker wasn't about Hermes, why do we fight him three times? Why did he get two extremely drawn out death scenes? Hermes was intended to be one of the main figures of Endwalker.
@@invaderzamParents create children, both in the biological sense and in how the child is raised, and I don't see how Hermes shouldn't love Meteion as a child simply because he had access to her character creation screen as well. Soul or not, she is his life's work and wouldn't think rationally to the call to have her destroyed. Many stories have been told on that trope. Furthermore, his selfishness proves the point that some people feel that the story is trying to tell: humans, even ancients, are imperfect beings and probably shouldn't have access to this level of creation magiks to begin with. "He tampered in God's domain," etc.
My summation of Hermes to a friend is that he tried to have Meteion to answer the Fermi Paradox, but all she found were the collected works of Friedrich Nietzsche. As a result, he got so embarrassed he committed ALL the atrocities.
I think you are missing the key part in his philosophy. ''To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering'' ''To live is to suffer'' : This is suppose to refer to the negative aspect of life. ''to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering'' : This is suppose to refer to the positive aspect of life. A lot of people cannot move past the initial claim his philosophy that life isn't pretty. Friedrich Nietzsche didn't like nihilism. He wanted people to move past it and become strong and know meaning Let me rephrase that... A lot of people cannot move past the initial claim her philosophy that life isn't pretty. Venat didn't like nihilism. She wanted people to move past it and become strong and know meaning/happiness.
@@fpqcgaming4770 Oh, I agree. I think the people who’ve actually read and understood Nietzsche can be characterized like a father happily sharing a beer with his son - calmly remarking that sometimes life has no meaning. Or hey, Zenos is probably a better embodiment of actually understanding what nihilism is about - just not in a particularly healthy manner.
I was initially going to put this out as a reply to someone talking about the identities the various people modern Fandaniel has been has held but it's become its own thing and now i have a wall of text that's veered of topic enough to become its own point, i think. I think if there is any validity in the statement that Hermes is a rush job of a character its because we only got a single zone to get to know him and i think a factor behind this is because Hermes' purpose in the story isn't to be his own character but to be dressing for Amon/modern Fandaniel. We see enough of him to get a little taste of who he is. Why he's unhappy so that we can both see what the ultimate cause of the final days were but also to see a fraction of what caused modern Fandaniel to become who he was.
Hermes had his own issues and Amon had the joyous experience of reliving splinters of them through dreams right up until the point where he joined up with the ascians and was given even more of those memories to chew on. Regardless of having those memories Amon lived a life of his own before accepting those memories, making his own lens by living through his own trials, victories and losses and he interpreted Hermes' memories with that lens. Amon was his own person and probably his own kind of messed up though. I say probably but an interesting distinction that current era Fandaniel makes is that Amon, or at least the Amon who lived during the reign of the Allagan empire is the "old" him and that he had abandoned this old him a long time ago. He's obviously been doing a fair bit of changing over the thousands of years since the fall of the Allagan empire and it makes me wonder if the line Fandaniel says as he dies, something along the lines of the man i was would weep if they could see the man i've become actually meant Hermes or old Amon. I had initially taken it as being Hermes given the next new zone we go to is elpis and the amount of emphasis that is put on the memories Fandaniel inherited but i don't think it fits his character to dwell on the opinion someone who he inherited his soul from so why would he mourn for Hermes' opinion of him? I think it makes more sense that he was reflecting on his journey, Amon's. It's interesting to see Amon as a bad guy, by the standards of an outsider many thousands of years into his future but also as someone who was trying their best with what they had. its similar to Hermes, i'd say. It's interesting to see him as someone who clearly cared about SOMETHING at some point, as someone who saw the stagnation and rot that was spreading across his civilisation and was disturbed enough by it to do something about it all while being a product of his time and dealing with other people who were themselves products of their time. People who grew purpose built abominations and were utterly callous towards those they didn't view as worthy of empathy. They laughed at the fate of a person they'd subjected to some kind of transformation. I think in that sense Allag is a mirror to Ancient society or at lease Elpis. A difference is that despite being so technologically advanced by modern standards Allag didn't have the capacity or perhaps the inclination to construct a façade that appeared as clean or as beautiful as the ancient world had. To think of modern Fandaniel as falling by the standards of both Hermes who has never belonged to the identity modern Fandaniel built through his lifetime despite them having some impact on that identity simply by being a previous owner of his soul but also by the standards of the literal man he once was as well. I'd also like to add that despite Modern Fandaniel's attempt to put forward the idea that he is is own person it's clear he has been dwelling on the things Hermes went through For example the line when we engage Zodiark, the end has come and it will be beautiful comes across as something someone who has been thinking a lot about the problems Hermes had been going through and putting their own spin on it. In a sense modern Fandaniel has turned the thing that haunted Hermes into a kind of punchline. He very clearly enjoys the irony of it and of using Zodiark - the beacon of hope for the ancients as a tool to bring an end to the world. I also wonder if his choice of creating those terrible dark towers as a means of collecting aether has something to do with the irony of turning the crystal tower - a sort of symbol of hope for the survivors after the fall of allag despite the tower's disappearance and something we as viewers of the story understand has been a symbol of hope for the people of the first, though I doubt even as an ascian Fandaniel would be aware of the towers status on other reflections. bit of a tangent hopefully it makes sense.
I've played through Endwalker twice now (once on my own, once with a girl friend) and my read on Hermes is he absolutely hated the other Ancients. He fundamentally despised his own people. When Meteion's sisters brought back the reality that, per their findings, not a single other planet was thriving or even simply surviving, Hermes was sharply cut off from what he wanted most: Proof that the way the Ancients were doing things was wrong. Any evidence that the paradise of pre-Final Days Etheryis wasn't as perfect and flawless as the other Ancients would have you believe. Lacking the validation that he so desperately craved, he broke and fell sharply into the "burn it all down" mentality. I feel like we've all been there, albeit not to Hermes' extreme. That bitterness when you're truly at rock bottom that you just either want someone else to hurt like you do, or the "proof" that whatever it is you've focused your negativity on is really as bad as your emotional state has convinced you it is. That was Hermes to a T. He disagreed with how the Ancients did things - and whether he was right or wrong is wholly irrelevant in this argument - and because of that he wanted to prove that they weren't doing things right. But when Meteion was like "yup, every other planet is dead, Etheryis is it" he realized that validation was impossible so when Meteion presented him with the option to destroy the source of his woes, he did. This is made more frustrating because Etheryis was not some flawless bastion of pure bliss. It was a world that knew peace and plenty, but still had plenty of hardship, anxiety and stress to keep it from being a mythical paradise entirely. He just hated everyone around him so much that he couldn't reach out to learn that the validation he needed was literally right next door.
I don't think looking for external validation is wrong in itself. There's no shame into being praised. But, being completely addicted to it and/or excessively relying on it is the wrong thing. There's shame into asking to be praised.
I would argue something slightly different. To an extent, you are correct. However, you should have highlighted the difference of defining yourself on external validation, (which is textbook narcissism), and just doing a good job at something. Validation as a whole is not bad, as long as you don’t use it to define yourself.
@@siobahnhurley85 Agreed. And I do not feel like I generalized my statement; I did say "looking" for {external} validation. If you get praise, cool! But if you don't get any that's fine too, because the only measure of worth that truly sticks is your own. Medicine and compliments won't cure depression, but lifestyle and mindset can treat it.
I agree with your observation- to me, Hermes' biggest sin is that he tried to find the answer only by *himself*. I can sympathize with him falling into despair and sorrow, but that he came to such a conclusion and then deciding that it must apply to *everyone* else is a catastrophic mistake on his part as a person and a researcher. (I mean hello? Peer reviews are a thing!) But in that sense I get why he was needed in the story thematically, and I liked how our time in Elpis really highlighted *why* the Ancients were doomed to fail. Each of them displayed unchecked levels of hubris to varying degrees whether it's as innocuous as believing that paradise would last forever, to full-blown god-complexes like with Athena. If not Hermes, some other random Ancient was bound to damn the world sooner or later with all the crazy things they were doing. I think Yoshi-P talked about it in a PLL, but even with someone as benevolent as Venat, she was bold enough to proclaim for all of humanity that they would "walk" henceforth. That kind of decision isn't one a mortal would even think to make. Which, again back to Hermes, IMO puts him as the perfect foil for us with the themes they were trying to tell in Endwalker. It's the mortal races of Etheirys, and by extension us, who laughed, suffered, and were there for each other's sorrows that saved the planet. The best response to the question had always been to "answer together" all along.
I don't understand this point about ''peer review''. What on earth does that have to do with anything? As if peer review will somehow convince someone that their thoughts and feelings are misguided in some way?
I meant with his findings and the conclusion he took from Meteon's report specifically, but maybe I wasn't clear on that. His thoughts and feelings are another matter completely, but him taking Meteon's report and concluding that "yeah, civilizations are doomed to fail and nothing has meaning" is empirically true without discussing his findings with fellow researchers seems like a failure on his part. Especially considering how he didn't even stop to consider that his actions might just doom everyone.
@@Al-ji4gd peer review is relevant, because it would have pointed out all the DEEP, FUNDAMENTAL FLAWS in Meteion's design, mission and the question she was given. Hades, within seconds of learning the question posed to Meteion, was able to point out a crippling error in it.
Ngl, I feel more pity for Meteion than Hermes. Meteion was used as a tool to ask a question that never had an answer to begin with as the meaning of life is subjective and is always different to everyone.
I don't know if I'd say the creations of the Ancients aren't alive; we see far too many non-standard lifeforms in XIV to just write them off entirely, and I would say Meteion is most definitely a living creature. More to the point, though, I would say the red flag of the scene with Hermes and the lykaon (or whatever it was called) for me was the fact that he spends so much time mourning the beast, but not the various creatures that it killed in the process! And then there's the fact that not only does he choose himself over the universe, as you put it, but he tells Meteion to nest at the edge of the universe and tells her point blank that he intends to *fight against her.* Hermes knows better than anyone how Meteion works and how her mental state defines who she is. And he chooses to abandon her in a period where she needs consolation as much as he does, with the knowledge that he intends to raise forces to fight against her if he ever re-learns of her existence. And people in-game (or Omega at least) try to suggest that maybe he was right to do what he did!?
At the very least, before swearing him into the Convocation, whether they remembered him or not, Emet-Selch and Hythlodaeus should have at least presented him with the Trolley Problem...
There's something out of the Hermes debacle that definitely hit a chord with me, and that's part of the flaws of the ancients the story was trying to tell. The problem begins when the hubris and self importance of the ancients giving rise to cataclysmic consequence is a plot point carried exclusively by a single character. I think it would carry more weight and make more sense if Hermes was, perhaps, part of a group that was collectively dissatisfied with the ancients' self righteousness and playing god, and made Meteion and her sisters together as a symptom of that society's hidden flaws. The glimpse into the flaws of a society that believes it should decide what creatures should live and die across the entire world, as though their lives were leaves to be pruned on a bonsai, should never have been carried solely by a single character and their own sins, as it greatly diminishes the point by making it only *their* problem, and not a truely widely acknowledged one.
Except I don't see it as being carried by a single character, afterall he makes valid arguments with Emet about his discomfort with how their society is run and despite what Emet said in Shadowbringers about them being a society built on reasonable debate and listening to their fellow Ancients he is quick to shoot down any of Hermes legitimate complaints and concerns without a care because Hermes is an outlier that that society wasn't built for nor cared to consider
I think it's the main point that was missed in the video. why would hermes put his own desires ahead of society and the whole universe? Well it's because he's an outlier, the oddball. Perfect societies, like the ancient's, aren't very kind to the imperfect. if the universe doesn't care for him then why should he care for the universe. i can't help think of that saying...if a child doesn't feel the warmth of the village then he'll warm himself by burning the village down
But his goal wasn't to destroy the universe or the world. He had the understanding of a child when it came to danger. The big bad thing he did was "talking to strangers without permission" and since his species had never experienced a kind of hardship they couldn't easily handle it would have never occurred to them how bad such a thing could go. Once he was aware of exactly how bad things would go, he was faced with a choice between letting the state execute his children or protecting his children regardless of what might happen. That is a very personal decision. I don't see how turning Hermes into a group better justifies what he did.
@@insertcognomen Which is exactly why Emet and friends had several discussions with him on the matter, aided in his breaking of Elpis protocol to protect at least 2 concepts which were supposed to be terminated, and - in the memory modified sequence of events, still gave him the job, even after the heavy grief of Meteion's (supposed) death on top of everything else. They just simply didn't care. It is so strange that the story is trying to make a point about how uncaring the Ancients supposedly were, and then try to convey it using a cast of some of the most empathetic, or at the very least caring, characters they had available. Heck, Emet and Hythlodaeus are both very scrutinous, and can see souls, so making them the interviewers on this matter actually makes the argument way worse. But I digress. I think the ultimate point of the video hinged on one major point about the writing, that it wanted you to sympathize with Hermes plight - at the very least because that is how the writing seems to frame it. The problem is that comes off as a bit of a narrow-minded prick and a daydreamer, and doesn't do much to endear himself in any particular way. But even that aside, the ancient world was one where debates could be considered an Olympic sport, and you're telling me he couldn't find a single pen pal to chat with over this? More importantly, he might be an "oddball," but his "oddity" saw him single-handedly sentence reality itself to a collapse in a spiral of its own agony and despair, just so he could prove his nihilistic viewpoint correct... and he was wrong anyways. I think this time I can accept that society was probably better off without that one :\
to the point, I definitely agree that a society that runs on debates and reason whole heartedly should have a flourish of minds that think alike and hopefully a just and fair society. But if we take historical contexts, a lot of these societies still discriminated and disenfranchised a mass group of people. I think that’s why it was such a nuanced look in SHB when emet compared his civilization as essentially a utopia. But even then, even when they could sacrifice themselves willingly for the greater good, there was still pushback. A very conformist society would no doubt shun and disenfranchise those that don’t conform. Hermes did his best to try, and I see him as a person with severe and chronic depression in a society that doesn’t address or is grossly ill equipped to deal with it. And the tragedy was because his thoughts and feelings were silenced he made a very neglectful decision which unintentionally caused the destruction of his whole civilization. Big L. But yeah you can have a society polite people who still turn a deaf ear to your issues. I think in the msq we see a lot people who act like that towards Hermes. “Oh he’s great man, but he’s so quiet and sometimes distant, oh well.” “Oh Hermes you’re so silly for thinking those things.” Like it’s clear that his feelings on creation were foreign and his colleagues didn’t much care to understand his thoughts, which caused a troubled man to spiral.
Weirdly enough I liked that Hermes wasn't important until endwalker. He's a just a man. There's no way for us to have known about him before endwalker and we (hopefully) won't hear from him again after. He's just a guy who made some bad decisions (understatement I know). I know this is just my preference but There are other reasons that I like Hermes. I disagree that he is not empathetic. If you have seen the movie Ex Machina, people can absolutely feel empathy for non-living things. Hermes has had to live through the turing test every day since he started working in Elpis. Over time that is gonna start to mess with someone's mind. Is it any wonder that he was unstable? Over and over again he had to destroy these creatures that he thought could be alive until he learned from Meteion that there was essentially no future. Imagine playing a game that has no good ending. You are told from the beginning that you will not win, it is impossible. What is your response then? Do you play the game and lose, or turn off the game? Either way there's no good outcome. Hermes is an unstable man who got caught up in the mother of all existential crisis. Although his actions lead to every other bad thing to happen, that doesn't mean they are his fault. Emet-Selch doing basically all of shadowbringers? Those were still his decisions. Lahabrea tricking Gaius with the ultima weapon? Lahabrea's fault. The Garleans doing pretty much anything they do? The Ascians fault. Hermes had no hand in anything else that happened until he was Fandaniel in endwalker. So while he was technically responsible for the whole plot, only the final days were directly his fault.
I listened to this one the way back home and I spent the entire drive thinking about how to react to this because I have some HARD disagrees. I settled for a simple comment. 1) The aspect of presence What I agree on is that Hermes' limited presence in the MSQ and other related content is a bit of a waste of the format. The format being a story-driven MMO with then 9 years under its belt. It could've been much more. However, Hermes exists in a contained space that is believably explained: Noone knew he was the root cause of anything and he would only be known as Fandaniel, who was one of the shattered Ascians and thus never truiy at the peak of his power, let alone knowledge... since he forgot everything thanks to Kairos. It's a bit of a cop-out, as I agreed, but I don't think it cheapens his part in the story. Sometimes great impact can be made by small roles. 2) The aspect of empathy Your entire argument hinges on omitting context. You describe the beasts Hermes empathizes with metaphorically as "Artificial Intelligence" devoid of a right to exist independent from the whims of the Ancients. That is exactly the thinking the Ancients have. In all of Elpis, in the bits the MSQ shines light on as well as side quests and NPC conversations you get confronted again and again and again with the fact that the Ancients think absolutely nothing of their creations. They're like LEGO toys to them, to be created, changed and destroyed on a whim. Their merit comes from the prestige they bring their creator, which in turn hinges on their subjective "coolness/beauty" and their objective role in the ecosystem. The creatures have no agency. They even do this to YOU, the Warrior of Light. Since you run around under the guise of being a familiar, something they created, several Ancients comment on various aspects of how you, as a mere tool, are surprisingly sophisticated and strong. I vaguely remember one even talking about taking you apart to study you. A clearly sentient, thinking being and you're still just a tool/toy. Hermes questions this entire system, this way of thinking. He knows the creatures they create have thoughts and feelings, even though they technically lack a soul (as we know, a soul isn't necessary to create something that is technically alive, albeit less so than a "besouled" being (the whole Athena shtick)) and mourns for their pitiless role in the society of the Ancients. He has valid reason to think and feel this way. He think about it on a philosophical level. His role in Elpis is so high up, so abstract that he witnesses this cruel system from a bird's eye view (pun intended) and just can't stomach it anymore. Some of those beings are exceedingly strong and can even kill Ancients (looking at you, Pandaemonium, and your various inmates), which, following the logic of "survival of the fittest" calls the entire dominant position of the Ancients into question. Especially since most Ancients are seemingly entirely incapable of defending themselves when in combat, much like how a real world civilian would be faced with possible (or certain) death when confronted with a lion or even just a decently sized dog. 3) The aspect of Meteion Meteion was supposed to answer a question that Hermes couldn't discuss with anyone else because noone else felt the way he did. He even commented on it IIRC, saying that his thoughts fell on deaf ears multiple times. So, naive and hopeful that he was, he looked for an answer far far away from Aetherys. Perhaps some other people would know what to do, what "life" really was and where its supposed purpose would lie. A society like the Ancients can't come up with a solution to that. That's the entire point of the story. He would never find an answer with his people. They'd steer towards certain doom like all others. Though I do agree that he shouldn't have made the decision to make and send the Meteii all on his own. 4) The aspect of interpretation By the point that it came to acting on the knowledge that Meteion brought, Hermes was already full of despair and anger. He saw himself faced with a hopeless situation: If all other civilizations had failed, his own would hardly make the cut, statistically speaking. Worse still, there was no way he could use Meteion to convince his fellow Ancients that their actions were morally and ethically dubious because there was no precedence and obviously no judge nor jury. He was back to square one. Although Meteion suddenly did become a solution: If all others failed and fell, then it would make perfect sense to submit to the Great Filter and see if his people could pull through... or not. Hythlodaeus said it himself. "One could hardly make it fairer." By erasing everyone's memories and letting Meteion go, Hermes set the stage for a fair judgement. Just how all the creatures they made and killed were subject to the system they were created in, his people would be judged by the universe. Meteion was just a catalyst that would accelerate that process. 5) The aspect of choosing himself over the universe Just legit don't see that. He literally subjects himself to the same judgement that his entire people would face. In no shape or form is he trying to weasel his way out of anything. All he ever does is try to gain the knowledge to understand the situation and then he does provide for a "fair" trial. That's it. After that his memory is erased and he eventually gets shattered by Hydaelin following the Final Days. 6) The aspect of the MSQ trying to make you empathize with a maniac Hermes was misguided in his attempt to do the right thing. Nothing he does is ever motivated by evil and the selfishness you propose is something I don't see. I do see his selfishness manifested in impatience, mistrust and perhaps even arrogance (thinking he can solve his predicament on his own) but otherwise I see him as someone selfless, trying to make the lives of others better, namely the creatures the Ancients are creating. So while he is eventually and undoubtedly responsible for immense suffering... he never intended any of it. You also make the claim that he is responsible for the death of world by means of Meteion but you forget that she was witnessing dead and dying civilizations all over the place before she went rogue and caused the death of more, which arguably would have died anyway because that is the point Endwalker is trying to make. The universe in FFXIV is generious in providing its inhabitants with so much plenty that they eventually grow bored of it and would rather kill themselves than live on (one of the more common topics (e.g.the Ea (difficult case but they DID eventually succumb to despair because they had so few problems left that the death of the damn universe was the most pressing matter) and the mask-guys whose name I forgot (who summoned Raya(?))), so it's hard to quantify how many could or would have made it. Going by the narrative, I'd say none. So while he is to blame and guilty of many crimes, it's hard not to empathize. He just wanted to what he felt was right and his goal was inarguably noble. His means just didn't justify the ends.
that's the thing, his last act was to create suffering, knowingly. he erased the memories of everyone involved so that his people couldnt come up with a plan to survive. if all he wanted was a true 'fair judgement' situation he would have continued his work and let the higher ups start working on how to avoid doomsday: intelligence is often belittled as 'unnatural' because we're the only ones who have it (in our current understanding of its meaning) and see ourselves non-animals. but intelligence is natural and it is the most powerful tool in nature bar none. by erasing memories Hermes artificially culled the knowledge of what was going to happen, he erased the intel created by investigation and curiosity. thus making the fight inherently unfair, tipping the scales against the ancients in a grossly malicious way. Hermes wasnt just sad or misunderstood. he was a maniac who killed billions on purpose jsut because he was too dumb and too emotional. how can the great filter be fair if our greatest tool, intelligence in the form of foresight, information gathering and preparedness, is artificially destroyed by some ancient vegan who thinks the life of his literally soul-less dog is as important as the lives of every living being in the universe combined? feeling alone and misunderstood is no excuse. he had the intel of what was happening out there and buried it at the same time he freed the worst weapon in the universe and sicced it towards...everyone.
@@oldmanharley4018 i feel as if they wouldn't have survived regardless. it was noble at first that they sacrificed half of themselves to save the star, but then... they didn't want to survive through any of their destroyed world. they instead resort to sacrificing again to restore it, and then they even changed their minds on that to restore who they lost after that instead of move forward. it seems pretty apparent to me that they would have not survived - it was either paradise or it wasn't worth it. conflict on any large scale would rip that society apart either way. he did absolutely damn them under the, idk, hypocritical guise of a fair trial, but if the idea is the ancients would have had a better shot at survival if he didn't do this, i disagree.
I remember that, because I ran around trying to get those dialogues but they're optional and this missable... I feel those creatures had soul but to the ancients they have such knowledge and curiosity and power that yes even if I've considered you alive and sentient, might actually take you apart to study you. Study your aether, soul, self and body. You seemed to get away with a lot of things because you seemed to be azems creation. It's not far off from what the ancients did however. "This isn't flying, destroy them and try again" "this one is acting in it's predator instincts, kill it" Even to THEMSELVES death is little more than an inconvenience. They know and most accept the cycle of rebirth.
@@seacchi17the other thing I heard looking around is the idea they'd learn an there was to learn and then perish of the boredom. Every other Star that went on that route of knowledge simply gave up once they felt all was done. All was accomplished and thus life and creativity and knowledge lacked meaning
I feel like a lot of the problems you point out here are really misguided. Hermes is not just some random jobber, it is well known by his peers that he’s an incredible scientist and researcher, he got his role for being a highly acclaimed individual, and he was being offered the position of Fandaniel by Emet, cause the current Fandaniel (at the time) had recommended Hermes recognizing his talents. He wasn’t just some random bumbling idiot thrust upon to the role, he is a researcher through and through. He is also not just obsessively selfish in every regard, he only acts selfish when it concerns his ideals, that being his aversion to the ancients lack of care for death. This oblivion is an idea that deeply scares Hermes, this concept of nothingness is something he’s adverse to and something which he seeks to find an alternative route around. It’s why he creates Meteion, and it’s why he selfishly pursues this answer, to redirect the ancients away from a path he is afraid they may stray into if left alone. He otherwise acts in accordance with his society, he wears the platitudes and fits in as best he can, despite just how different he knows it is. And it’s that difference that eats away at him and slowly grinds his insides, and we can finally see him let out all that frustration on Ktsis. Also he doesn’t just end everything simply because he thinks the world is dumb and it should end. The Hermes we know is someone who deeply fears the end of the world, and while yes an element of his action is definitely to bite back at the society which he felt discarded him, the forward motive is still largely his desire to find an alternate path for society, and he felt there was no other way to do so unless said society was forced to face the inevitable truth he fears. I tbh don’t even really think Hermes was meant to be sympathetic like that, Amon though is definitely meant to be pitiable, but a lot of Hermes’ beliefs ended up ringing true. Even Venat see’s, that the ancients would do anything just to maintain this paradisiacal vision of the world no matter the absurd costs. A lot of the lines later in the narrative which may seem to portray Hermes as “sympathetic” end up coming from people who have very deep relationships with him, which definitely make the context of each line very interpretive. Amon’s line about “Hermes the man who knew so much, but understood so little” comes from someone who couldn’t despise Hermes more, and blames them for the despair filled life they were born with. Meteion who says “we couldn’t find the answers Hermes yearned for, the answers he deserved” also comes from someone who’s literal directive as a creation was to do said things, and by nature of their construction was motivated to find said things to comfort the individual who is basically her father. I feel like they come across as pretty neutral sentiments in the grand scheme of the thematics. The main way Ishikawa addresses Hermes’ actions in Omega Beyond the Rift is as being a “necessary step in evolution”, which is less about the sympathy angle as well, compared to Emet who is 100000% meant to be someone you can empathize with. They just want you to understand the choices that Hermes felt like he needed to make, and I personally think they did an amazing job at using him to portray the pitfalls in ancient society, and give a valid reason as to the origin of the doom that would eventually create the Hydaleyn vs Zodiark saga. A reason that couldn’t be more thematically appropriate for FF14’s narrative.
Hermes was IMO someone who I could empathise with deeply, but not agree with morally. His actions are 100% relatable to someone who has gone through depressive episodes. but that doesn't make what he did right.
@@1011skarn Hermes never tried to end anyone. Let's not confuse the Hermes in present day helping Zenos with Hermes in Elpis. The incarnation of him in present day is Amon, a shard that was infused with the original's memories that was previously an Allagan scientist.. except he actively rejected them and the role given to him by Emet and co. and waited until they were gone to make his move. They are completely different people. Amon is a Xande simp. Everything he did in EW was for Xande. Heck, even when you kill him as Zodiark he has a flashback of a conversation he had with Xande in his last moments. Hermes never knew that the Meteia would be the cause of the final days. No one knew, not even after telling them what would happen in the future. Hermes just wanted to know the answer to his question but the Meteia went completely off the rails like an AI given a task it was not trained for. All this to say: The shards are no the same person as their unsundered counterpart.
It's interesting how the MSQ portrays him as more sympathetic while at the same time putting Venat's Action into question quite a bit. The Ancients really were a scary bunch. Hermes almost doomed the whole Universe, Athena planned to remake Creation at the least on Etheirys and Venat literally split the world and everyone's Souls apart. You only need one Ancient with too much power to cause so much damage and we had at least three of them already
I honestly wouldn't be too worried about what the Ancients were able to do... I would be more focused on what can Ultima do? I really do wonder if she is the same Ultima we faced in Ivalice or not?
I get why Venat did what she did, though. The Ancients had been bloodied by the Final Days as their Utopia was brought to ruin. They were already showing symptoms of a society like to meet its end (looking at Dead Ends and all that). More to the point though, I think the Sundering is why modern humanity was able to deal with the Final Days better than Ancient man. By then, war, loss, discord, and even the end of the world had become commonplace. Emet Selch may have believed that the rejoinings were different from the Final Days in terms of world ending calamities, and they were in a cosmic sense, but for your average person they were virtually indistinguishable--it hardened them against the true doom that those remaining Ancients wanted to stop.
See I got the opposite from my MSQ run, to me Hermes was sympathetic the way a rabid dog is sympathetic, it's sad the ancients apparently didn't have psychiatrists but he was long past "saving" and needed to be put down, while at same time the stuff he did absolved Venat's actions of any questionably by showing that yes they were necessary to stop the doomsday Hermes set into motion.
Way more than three. Each and every one of them was a galaxy destroying nuke. It took one chick and her twelve homies to sunder the star. That's it. One depressed zoo keeper and his pet bird to end all life in the universe. The ancients had to be nerfed.
This is why I hate time travel narratives. It is so easy to get it wrong. Why did Venat choose the burgeoning life on Eitherys over her own people? Did she have great love for them? Did she believe that they had a right to life and do not deserve to be sacrificed? Nope, turns out she didnt have a choice in the matter. She had to do these things to create the future where the WoL would be in a position to save Eitherys. Sure, she may have believed these things, but that is only one part of her calculations. The fact that the choice was made for her kinda clouds her motivations a bit.
I guess I'm unsure of what exactly made the wolf creature "not alive". If it feels fear and pain and it it's heaving its last breaths on the ground as it dies I think it's a bit different than a computer program. The Omicron gathering quests are largely about exploring this. Even though they are recreated beings they still have thoughts and feelings. What is materially different about killing them as compared to killing their original form? Emet-Selch says the same about the WoL in the MSQ: that we're an aberration and unwhole and killing us would not count as "murder" because we are not "truly alive". Do we agree? Does the circumstance of their creation alone make them undeserving of our empathy? It's a bit of a classic SciFi idea to play with. I actually do take issue with the writing but more so that Hermes is the only one we see making these connections. This is not a society devoid of love and empathy so why isn't anyone else questioning why the Ancients feel that they have free reign to create and destroy life at a whim? I feel like surely someone else must have considered this as they watched someone unmake a dog for being 2% less fluffy than expected. Why is he so alone in this?
It's because these creations don't have souls. The only way for something to have a soul is granted by the planet after being born. Naturally, that's why they are on elpis Is to see if the creations are stable enough to be Let loose to give birth naturally to a living being with a soul.
Y'know, Hades' line about his world not needing heroes popped into my head, when I started hearing the obvious "this man needs therapy" lines coming from Hermes. Hades' world could've used some psychiatrists, at the very least. Like, the Ascians old society was in this weird state of manufactured "perfection" that its not surprising it produced the kinda sociopaths that would take the whole we like "creating life and messing with things beyond what we should be able to" to their furthest extent. If anything; I'm surprised it didn't happen sooner! As for the odd Meteion take; her being literally not a single being really does make putting blame at her bird feet hard. Hell; Hermes creating a super empath creature with childlike understanding was bound to have some issues, and that's not even getting into the fact that the Meteion we meet isn't even the one that was sent out to become the Endsinger. Getting to the finale; and that blue bird finally breaking free of her sisters kinda puts in to perspective how hard it must've been to even break out of that collective hive mind. As for her appearance being cute. . . I mean, they could do the opposite and made Meteion another Vauthry; would that have helped the story any? lol
I don't agree with your view of the creatures of Elpis; they are alive, they're just in beta testing to see if they can be worked into an ecosystem without horrifically disrupting it. Beyond that though, what really tipped me over the edge, before it became obvious what he did was a series of very deliberate and horrific choices, was also Hermes mourning the beast we put down. Hermes cares very selectively about life; the creature was killing not just it's Ancient handlers _it was wantonly slaughtering other Elpis creations for the fun of it._ So what, those other life forms under his care matter less than the uncontrollable rage-creature he got emotionally invested in? What was the alternative to killing it, locking it away for the rest of its natural life? How is that a kinder choice, exactly? He's a character who is, imo, very interesting in large part because he's a terrible person.
Meteion is a flawed creation and I firmly believe, that she is not at fault for her crimes. The only reason she did what she did is because Hermes made her that way. It's like blaming a machine for a work accident. If the robot was designed flawed and without a failsafe and someone got in an accident with it, we don't fault the machine, we fault the designer. If the machine was operated dangerously and without proper care, we fault the operator and not the machine. I think Meteion is much the same, but she actually has emotions on top, which makes blaming her feel even more unfair to me.
if i remember an anectdote from a worldbuilding course for literature, every story in life will have thousands of the minute, relatively unimportant players. due to kairos and largely speaking the greater players of hydalen v zodiark, the background character of fandaniel/hermes had been forgotten as a narrative player, but he always there. actually think back to when G'raha asks us about if he'd be in our story, and you have three answers to give him. one of the options is most likely the answer that will be told come the aeons aheads, that he'd be a footnote in the margin or lost in name. he had more gravity in the story of shadowbringers as the Crystal Exarch, which might subsume his real name even in later tales. history told is often not the true events that transpired.
I wanted that one but it felt... Rude Simply that not every story is told, not ever recollection accurate. No one knows the wol struggles UNLESS they've been there to witness it all, least for one adventure... Every road block, every set back, every helping hand that came with no strings attached... Hell there's so much that happens that I too forget what I was doing it what I did.
When you questioned why Hermes, this innately selfish individual, was still selected for the seat of Fandaniel, I had to wonder if that was actually part of the reason why. We know that the individuals who take up the mantle of one of the seats have some kind of similarity to those who came before them. With the seat of Azem, we know that everyone had this desire to see the world and go adventuring. What if those traits we see in Hermes is something that is present in everyone who helmed the seat of Fandaniel? The only other person who we see takes over the seat of Fandaniel is Amon, who was only interested in their experiments and bringing back the golden age of the Allagan Empire. Everything he did as Amon was conducted out of a sense of selfishness. He brought back the original ruler of the empire, only for them to question their existance and hope to be put to rest again. Both Amon and Hermes put their experiments and ideals over the betterment of society. I know it could partly be explained by the memories being passed through the seat of Fandaniel. It just makes me wonder if these traits were apparent in everyone even before they took the seat.
The biggest problem I had with Hermes' character was that we were supposed to (I guess) feel sympathetic to his empathy for the creations, and the sadness he felt when he had to oversee their unmaking due to not being as their intended 'design'. I found it entirely hypocritical and contradictory because he literally ran the facility that created predatory animals designed to hunt and prey on other creations in order to keep their populations in check and various other reasons. He had no problem creating aggressive predatory animals to hunt other animals in the wild forever so they would live in fear and be eaten, but when he himself had to 'humanely' unmake them he acted like it was unthinkable. I didn't vibe with that, and he just seemed ignorant, selfish and shallow.
It is very weird... The ancients however approved all kinds of creations for testing. Even themselves eat, and what is eating? Taking the resources you can from another source, often a living or once living thing. From meat to dehydrated tea leaves. Still the creature made was supposed to be that way... Made to be an apex predator, made to be aggressive
"Shallow"? He's an antagonist that comes full circle TWICE in the same expansion through both his ancient persona and his Allagan persona. They didn't build up to him as well as they could have, but his existence as a character is NOT without depth.
I personally do not mind Hermes like you do and I think one of the key reasons why he worked for me and not for you was because I didn't FEEL like I was ever meant to forgive him or anything. I'm going to preface this by saying I am not trying to change your mind or anyone reading this. Just sharing my thoughts. Like you, I saw a broken man spiraling out of control with nonsensical reasons for doing the things he did. But he is a villain. He is not a good person just because he feels sad. He is objectively wrong, and while I do feel for him seeing as he is a man lost to despair, I never felt like I was intended to forgive him. His final fate, being sunken down to the pits of the aetherial sea with Asahi reinforces this for me. I can understand what could lead a broken, mentally unwell man to do the things he did. Being an ancient obviously doesn't incline you to the side of moral goodness. They too are very flawed beings just like the races of Etheirys. Ancients were INCREDIBLY powerful beings as individuals and seemingly, had very little restriction on their power, another comment pointed out Athena and Venat as examples. I could have missed or forgotten the lore bits about restrictions on their powers though. Even if there were restrictions... These are villains (with the exception of Venat, though I doubt the ancients would look on her very kindly in hindsight). Bad people who do not care about the restrictions or laws or whatever else, only about getting their desired result. Emet Selch is a man who was willing to sacrifice millions, possibly billions of people to get his friends back. He is a bad person. But it's easy to understand WHY he'd do it. He's lonely. He's one of the last of his kind. He misses his friends and the lives they once had. It does not make him right though. I do not find Emet Selch forgiveable. Hermes was so cracked and broken he was willing to let the universe die just to see if there was a point to it all. He was lost to despair. And he made the Meteia also suffer the same fate and become the harbingers of the final days by forcing his needs onto them. But I still feel sad for both Meteion and Hermes seeing them embrace despair and sadness and pain and sorrow. Meteion too did unforgivable things like you mentioned. I don't forgive Meteion either. While yes, she is essentially a little girl who didn't know any better and was carrying out the will of her creator, she still committed unforgivable atrocities. But I can't help but get choked up and sad after you defeat Endsinger when she rediscovers joy and hope. Meteion, before the fight with Zenos, was ready to die. She thought you were going to kill her. She calls you her final encounter. She asks you to let her sing a song of hope, and I quote, "Before I fall forever silent." While I can't forgive the actions of her or her creator, or various other characters in the story, I refuse to close my heart off to them completely and not feel something when I see them sad, or lonely, or happy. Zenos is another example of a truly awful person. He would murder people on a whim and cared for nothing more in this world than to fight strong foes so he could feel the rush and excitement. I ABSOLUTELY do not forgive Zenos for the things he did. I do, however, understand that he wanted to FEEL something, he wanted to feel the rush and joy life could offer. Again, this doesn't make him right or forgivable, but from these people's warped perspectives, I could see what they were getting at. I never felt like I was supposed to forgive these people. Only to understand them.
Y’know I would think that Amon would probably agree with every critique you have over his original persona of Hermes. I honestly tie Hermes and Amon / Fandaniel as one continuous character arc rather than Hermes in isolation. Seems how we feel about Hermes depends on whether you have him stand as just the EW character, or the character we’ve seen hints about ever since Syrcus tower under another guise / iteration. Also I feel the analogy between chatAI and the creature creations is a bit disingenuous given the latter is tied to the ancients’ duty to the world and the potential intrinsic impact the creature they make have on the life of planet. So I do feel he had every right to feel the way he did about the ancients dispersing their creatures if albeit prematurely at times. Was something definitely eating at his mental health for a long time.
@5:20 See, my view on this scean is that even though the concepts aren't fully alive, they have a degree of awareness/feelings so this creature did die in sorts. Plus, Hermes and his bitterness to how the ancients would throwaway concepts is analogues to how Humans treat other species in our world.
Problem with Hermes is about scope. Is not about not understanding how one can do bad decisions or rushed decisions in a state of panic, depression or anxiety. But, is about the scope of this decisions. Whoever you can understand his thought process or not, he still dammed THE WHOLE WORLD because of that. Again: Scope. He never paused to think about that. About the magnitude of his actions. Its like trying to justify someone that commited genocide because he was Sad or had a sad anime back story. Can I understand Hermes feelings? Yes. It justifies what he did? Fuck no.
First of all, yes, EW msq was rushed. But I think Hermes fits well with the overall theme of "despair" and fighting against despair. You don't have to like or forgive him. His irrational and hypocritical decision IS the point, not his justifications, which are irrelevant. He's not Emet, but compared to some of the cartoon villains we sometimes get, Hermes felt human, and very real ... living as I do in a world full of mass murderers and terr0rists who think their nihilism and grievance justify inflicting horror pain and death on people they've never even met. The viral contagion of despair we witness in Thavnair, and the counterpoint in lyrics of With Hearts Aligned. ... Well, now I've lost my train of thought. But basically, I think Hermes works precisely because he isn't a great villain - he isn't meant to be, he's meant to fade into the background. If we had a big bad villain to focus on, we'd focus on that to the detriment of the theme we were actually supposed to be focusing on.
So after final sitting with the idea for awhile i want to share a thought/observation We (The races of man, and playable races) are the sundered reflections of the ancients, correct? What we call or used to call the Beast Tribes, and many of the non humanoid spoken races, are unlilely to share that aspect. So considering Meteion, or Hermes' favorite sky fenrir. They could be considered to have more in common with some of the spoken that exist in our shard now like the Ixal and Lamiae, who are intelligent and sentient given life through presumably the lifestream. And in that sense a much more poignant point could have been made, especally as it relates to the other intelligent life found apart from etherys like the Dragons or Omicron. Who are entirely foreign to our star but share the same "humanity" that we have. I also believe its interesting that the target of a lot of ascian animosity were the Beastmen. The Allagans, The Garleans, even in Ishgard. The Allagans conquered and subjugated the entirety of Eorzea and werent exactly averse to anything even experimentation and augmentation of themselves. But the list notable enemies for them is almost entirely non humanoid. Sephirot was summoned by treelikes, Zurvan by Centaur, Sophia is said to be by a multitude if races and beliefs, and the Dragons themselves. The Garleans were beyond willing to purge all beastmen from Eorzea and asked for their cooperation And despite Ishgards war starting with the betrayal of Thordan it makes me question, how exactly did he come to find out about a Dragons Eyes? Maybe thats a moment that i myself had missed. But i would not in the slightest be suprised to learn that he was tipped off by Ascians. There just seems to always be this innate and consistent enmity and lack of compassion between Ancients/Ascians and- anything that wasnt not another Ancient or a direct derivative of them. Everything else seems like "sorry this is just business" but if you were not a native at some point? "Fuck you in particular, we will remove you from existence"
As much as I understand the point of FFXIV, practically the lesson is “if you are not the split person of a powerful being who is a friend of the most approachable of the bad people, nothing will change”. Being the 7/14 rejoined of Azem brings the Warrior of Light to Stormblood; being the friend of Emet-Selch actually solves the problem the Ascians made. In the end, it very literally is who you know. And while admittedly the Scions themselves, Haurchefant and Aymeric, and those putting the fight in Gyr Abania and Doma were still going to do whatever they were doing, nothing would have been solved if the Warrior of Light was not who he is. It is, ironically, the most cynical take on the power of friendship ever. That change is pretty dependent on the person who can be the hero’s friends. To be fair, most of the time this is positive; when applied to what actually happened, it implies that salvation is beyond reach save a literal god empowered by another literal god who were friends of some of the evil gods who (except for the Dragonsong War and even then) were the friends of something. That is so impossible even by FFXIV standards that it ironically paints the bleakest picture. Emet-Selch would have kept going if the Warrior of Light was not 7/14ths (and later 8/14ths) of Azem.
idk what to think, i thought he was a character that was made to not be liked, i think he was in a good state of mind when he assumed the position of leader of Elpis, i really thinks that he was a good guy before we meet with him, but i can't ignore all mistakes, he's clearlly ill, but no one seems to care, that's kinda what fucked up too.
I liked Hermes personally. After everything we've gone through and all we learn about those initially presented as pure evil or good it strikes me as an appropriate thematic capstone that all this comes from one rando questioning but with no answers.
The entire time watching Hermes turn into our “Fandaniel” I was like, man I get it, but what the fuck Something something watching a train wreck in slow motion
One of my favorite lines in a movie is from Enemy of the State where Gene Hackman's character is kind of laying out or unraveling the plot to an agent. It's a simple line, not impactful and most people would think nothing of it, but to me it's a great line. It goes something along these lines: "She found out too much, so you killed the girl. I wouldn't have, but I understand the argument." They're dealing with issues of national security, global consequences, and here's this guy who can simply read the situation and disagree with the action, but can understand why another would have taken it. That was the Hermes situation for me drummed up to the highest level.... "I disagree with the approach, but I understand the argument."
I feel as though I'm more willing to forgive the execution because I understand the concept. Hermes for me is a statement about the flaws of the Ancients. And yes, his mindframe shift seems really out of left field, but I get what they were going for so I cant fault it too much. I definitely do see what some people mean by the flaws of endwalker, but I still adore it.
Honestly, I think the biggest issue with Hermes is that bit at the end of Ktisis Hyperboreia. Before that, he wasn't my favorite character, but I can see what they were doing. The whole chuuni turnabout "he he he I'm going to help Meteion bring about the apocalypse" shit is... probably a realistic representation of someone snapping after a situation like his, but it just doesn't really engender a lot of goodwill for a character. Like, yeah... We understand that Hermes was a tortured guy who slipped through the cracks and felt marginalized by the heavy boot of "the status quo" that everyone else seemed to him to agree with and revere. But the step towards "Okay, now I'm going to cause an omnicide" is far too great. And again, the chūnibyō "we live in a society i'm going to embrace my villainhood evil smirk who can tell me i'm wrong maybe you're all wrong im such a freak" demeanor made it difficult to sympathize. I think the only time I truly warmed to him as a character (or well, Amon) was in the Aitiascope. That moment of introspection, that despair, that voice acting. It felt so raw, so genuine. It didn't redeem him as a character for me, but it did strike me, and I still think about it on occasion.
On the one hand while I agree that Hermes is hypocritical in the sense that he acts like life is sacred then willfully condemns all life, as a personal with a slew of mental illnesses and a past of abuse this leaves a bit of a sour taste in my mouth. The tragedy of Hermes isn't how empathetic he was, to me, as an abuse survivor its how willing everyone is to dismiss his problems. Noteworthy though, under this lens one can argue he perpetuates the cycle of abuse by bringing Meteion, who is characterized as a young girl with autistic tendencies (Do not flame me, I'm autistic myself) and like you said, forces his ideals, his problems unto her. And then Meteion, a being of pure emotion is overtaken by the despair of entire populations, all because of what her narcissistic parent brought her into and made her into. Hermes is deeply flawed and wrong, but its because of the outright lack of help he received, However, as someone undergoing therapy, one must want help to receive it, which Hermes, despite wanting others to gear his plight, didn't seem to want their help in solving his problems, which, like a parent who should not have children, he forced upon his daughter figure. A figure he was just as willing to condemn as everything else when she proved "a failure." Not trying to incite an argument or debate, but I wished to share my feelings, and let my thoughts be known.
Yeah I am not convinced. I recently had some existential shit to work through and still kind of working through it. Through the course I went from seeing life as something to be preserved, to seeing a valid argument that it's more merciful to end life itself. If I had the power to do so, that conflicts too much with my other ideals that deciding the fate for others is wrong so I wouldn't, but I would be lying if I were to deny that the thought of destroying all life on the planet would be considered as compassionate. Hermes is an example of another someone who struggled with this shit, I believe, and fell mad from it when it all blew up in his face late in the Elpis story. I slightly empathize with him, in realizing what likely made him who he became, but mostly, I pity him for falling to it. In summation, I don't see him as a bad character. I would have liked more explorations of him, I'll agree on that front, but he's a really good example of staring into the abyss, and the abyss staring back being the thing that drives him mad. He wanted answers, and like some poor fool in a lovecraftian story, he got his answers, but it was not what he expected; it drove him mad when the answers (the abyss, in this metaphor) stared back at him, as unflinching as reality's callousness. A side note: I also think it's rather genius that the thing that caused all these problems was a mistake. A poor directive given to an untested empathic being. It lends credibility to the things Meteion herself encountered; that life can be snuffed out so easily.
I disagree with a few of the details of your argument against Hermes, but I definitely agree overall. I've hated him all this time for mostly the same reasons. One key difference would be the part you talk about around 4:40. While yes, I did find that cutscene to be a red flag also, I don't agree that this creature (or others in Elpis that similarly get put down) is not truly alive. They ARE living creatures, and in most cases, Hermes was RIGHT to mourn them and to be upset that no one else seemed to care. The Ancients basically see anything that is not mankind as simply aether to be repurposed into anything else at a moment's notice, and it's a big part of what was wrong with their society. For example, the Charybdis who was merely scared to fly, but the Ancients just assumed "Eh, prolly just a birth defect. Let's just wipe out the entire species and try remaking them better next time." That is horrifying, and Hermes damn well SHOULD be upset that he's the only one who thinks so. But it was made very clear that this creature (Lykaon or something?) in particular was just irredeemably horrible in every way. It was incredibly violent even when given absolutely no reason to be so. They were very thorough in making sure it wasn't being territorial, it wasn't hungry, it didn't feel threatened... it just killed for the sake of killing. For fun, perhaps. It would devestate any ecosystem it was placed into and then go extinct itself. It was all flaws and no positive aspects to balance said flaws. Yet he mourns it the same as he would have the Charybdis. THAT is why it is a red flag. He shows this so-called "empathy" even to things that don't deserve any. Also, as far as Meteion goes, I (like many people) do not blame her for anything she did. Anything bad that came from her actions were on the shoulders of Hermes, not her. She tried to prevent it all once she realized what was going to happen, but due to the way Hermes made her, she was only one voice among who knows how many, and was designed without a way to shut out the feelings of others, so of course she was overwhelmed in the end. In the end, everything she did is just more reason to hate Hermes, not her. Especially since, in the end, once you've freed her from all this overwhelmingly negative dynamis or whatever, she immediately wants to go off and try and make things better again. To rebuild and make right what her creator made her destroy.
I agree with everything you said up til the last couple lines. Hermes didn't "make" her destroy anything. He sent her out into a universe he couldn't imagine given he was born in paradise and she came to the conclusion that the secret to happiness was not to exist. The ancients would have exterminated her and her sisters to save themselves. All Hermes did was set up a fair contest to see who is right rather than helping his people murder his daughters.
@@MissKashira By "making her" destroy everything, I didn't mean directly. I just mean that when he created her, he did not give her the ability to shut out all the feelings around her (which was a completely stupid oversight on his part, tbh), and so it's no wonder that she would get totally overwhelmed and taken over by the feelings of far too many beings she'd be encountering all at once (through her hivemind connection). It's not really "her" conclusion that life shouldn't exist - it's the conclusion of an amalgamation of all those suffering/dead people. Whatever will she may have had of her own is completely drowned out by the time that conclusion is drawn. And that's because of the way Hermes made her.
>They are not truly alive they are closer to AI constructs But they aren't? Creating creatures out of thin air was just a more efficient method of iterating on their features. Meanwhile there is a building in Elpis where a couple ancients bred new species the regular way and were laughed at because of the "inefficiency" of such method. By the same logic Ixal are not alive since they were artificially created by Allag. >Hermies is an extremely selfish person As opposed to Emet? Elidibus? Lahabrea? The mommy HERSELF? Hell, Lahabrea built a whole ass prison to contain his wife who consorted with INTERDIMENSIONAL GOD and if given a chance would've reshaped whole world, or possibly whole universe to her liking. Also, add Athena to the list of extremely selfish Ancients who would do anything in the name of research. Huh... It's like there is a trend... Or a flaw with their society... HMMMM... >trying to make me empathize with Hermies FFXIV makes you empathize with majority of it's villains. Hell, it's easier to point out villains like Valens, who are just dirtbags with no redeeming qualities, than to list every mass murderer who had understandable motivations for their actions. You could level the same critique against Venat. She went with her selfish reasoning without consulting others, she successfully genocided her own race, created untold amounts of suffering for sundered creatures and inadvertently caused 7 worlds with all living creatures on them to be completely destroyed. And after all that you're supposed to smile and call her Venat before she dies. Or maybe story doesn't make you empathize with anyone at all, and leaves that choice to you. And you're the one who should decide for yourself why you might think Emet was not that bad of a guy after all, and Venat was cool too, and maybe you don't like Hermies that much, and Yotsuyu's sadism was really fucked up despite her broken life... At the end of the Omega questline, you are asked "Who was justified in their actions?" and game lets you pick an answer that best aligns with what you think is right. You are absolutely valid in your hate for Hermies, but I think most of your arguments don't hold up.
I think one of the main points of the Elpis arc was to show us that the "perfect paradise" the ascians wished to bring back never existed. It wasn't perfect, and most certainly it wasn't a paradise. Everybody was equally happy, and everybody was happily working for the star. But when you look at it closer, the cracks show. Gross disregard to the lives they themselves created, the complete neglect of community and communication, the fact that they throw away their lives once "they finish their work", these all gather over time and create people like Hermes or Athena. Both maniacs, but Hermes fought with his depression and Athena got a god complex. And the majority of ancients never caught on to it, in their minds, everything is as it should be. Hermes was a brilliant researcher, nobody cared that he didn't submit his creation to inspection, even Hythlo drops the topic after Hermes tells him that she is still just an experiment for now. Which she was. And even when Hermes first rebelled, they never thought to actually fight him seriously (nobody in the party assumed their "battle form"). It was inconceivable to them that one of their own could be that far gone. Meteion didn't want to tell Hermes what her sisters found because she knew that it will break him. And it did. His actions are unforgivable. But it doesn't mean that we can't understand it or sympathize with its tragedy. All of this could have been avoided if the ancient society was actually the perfect paradise.
disagree hard, i dont think the game portrays hermes as sympathetic at all, i feel like he simply was given motive for his actions and is unfaltering in swaying from his own beliefs no matter how horrid his actions which makes him a better and more intriguing character for that. ‘his motives paint him as a massive sociopath that no one in their right mind would ever forgive’ i feel like that is the point of his character as well, he is a bad person and i feel like you reading the story as trying to shine a sympathetic light on him is your own bias
I'll tell you what an English teacher told me once when I was equating characters that I don't like with bad characters. "Some characters aren't meant to be liked."
Oh, I think he's very much a Shining Example that the Ancients' society was incredibly messed-up and they brought about their own end. The Paragons were biased AF and their memories of their great society have more holes than the Rift.
Emet-Selch’s speech of whatever the virtues of Amaurotine society were were ripe for deconstruction; they reeked of a person who saw nothing but the best of his world. Elpis really was necessary.
The telling of Hermes story was flawed, but I think the intention is clear. They wanted to show a character who didn't think like the other ancients. His view about the creatures being unmade was less about the actual creature and much more about the casual view of death by the ancients. It's to show how few degrees away they were from seeing lesser races as not worth life and more clearly draw a line of how the Paragons got to their mentality. He also is meant to tell a story of their hubris, and how the Ancients' policing of each other was lackluster to nonexistent. We see this repeated in Pandaemonium with Athena, or even just Lahabrea splitting his soul in half. Surely that act should have drawn more attention.
5:31 hold up I thought it was established that those creatures had souls. Doesn't the first Anabaseios raid boss kinda confirm it when he was eating the Behemoth soul for power?
The creatures of Elpis were concepts without souls. I.E. A safe and controlled enviroment to simulate life without harming the world. This is explained as soon as you enter Elpis by Hades and Hythlodaeus!
Different concepts. The first two bosses of the new tier is Athena experimenting with creating sentient life with souls. Kokytos and its' forms taking on forms we've encountered in old content is interesting, that it ate the aether that gave it those memories/abilities whatever you want to justify it as.
@@SynodicScribe That's simply wrong. The point of that part of the msq, even the point of pandamonium, is that the ancients, despite their ability to create beings, can't control what is life. They can't control if a being they created will end up with a soul or not. And despite that fact, they kill them with little thoughts. To think of them as no more than souless AI is to do the same mistake as the ancients and to miss why Hermes is the way he is. He is born in a society of people with immense powers but people who are blind to the consequences of said powers. They create being without realizing that those being have feeling and thoughts, with value, not just mere experiment you can discard. The fact that they can have a soul sometime is a mere curiosity for them. They create beings as a a hobby and send them to Elpis without much thoughts. That fact is evident when Hyathlodeus is talking about the number of shark concepts that people like to create. They create beings without seeing the consequences, without seeing them live and die. If you talk to the researchers in Elpis, you realize the a number of them share some of Hermes anxiety about all of that, share the empathy for those beings. But much like Hermes, they can't express it in the ancient's society because this is a society where you're supposed to "sacrifice yourself to the star". People are expected to commit suicide, to want to commit suicide when they did what they could for the star. What's Emet reaction when Hermes have a little rant about those contradictions in the ancient's world ? It's that Hermes is unfit to work on his charge and that he should give up his very name to work for the star. The reason why Hermes is like this is because he evolve in a society who has little regards for individuals but as a researcher on elpis, he directly see that this society is at odd with reality, that life is not just something that advance the star but feelings and thoughts and, yes, suffering. The contradiction between that fact and the society he's supposed to partake in is draining him and just like anyone, he has his limits. Hermes was at odds with how his society worked and the stars was the straw he was clinging on. When that hope was made fruitless by Meteion's discovery, he broke and applied mankind hypocrisy about other beings on itself.
@@18ShedinnThis. So much of this! I couldn’t have worded it better! But I doubt he’s going to care. As much as I like the Scribes videos, he’s very “I’m not going to care about this point because it disagreed with my opinion.” It’s very evident by the fact he only likes and acknowledges comments that back him up and agree with him, or are “wrong” so he needs to chime in. The latter of the two got us here with this comment in particular.
there are parts of the video I agree with. But the idea that the MSQ is trying to force us to forgive Hermes I don't agree with. I feel like the MSQ wanted us to forgive our Meteion, the one we met, that tried to stop her sisters, who was taken over and drowned out before we ended their song and set them free. Hermes/Amon/Fandaniel are unforgiveable but Meteion and her sisters were just his puppets sent out by a very flawed and stupid person. I have also been questioning the Ancients for a while as well XD
It’s always funny when someone plays their first final fantasy game and is surprised that the final boss motivating the story’s conflict is some one we have no clue existed until the last chapter
First off there's something you said about Elpis that is flat out wrong. All the creatures on Elpis are fully living breathing creatures. It is a testing ground to see if a new creation is a latent ecological disaster, not a simulation, not the Matrix. Being deconstructed from a living creature to loose aether is still death. The image he references of a creature fearing its end is something children hunting for the first time will comment on. As for Hermes, I think he always hated the world for the way the Ancients accept death. He sees it as the Ancients imposing their view of it onto living creatures that only act to have another day. I'm willing to bet he joined Elpis for the sake of being a bringer of life, only to also have the responsibility of destroying failures. A whole part of the questline is him trying to get around that part of his duties with those flying snake things. He had become the very thing he hated and he knew it. Someone else in the comments described it as a doctor, someone who dedicated themselves to preserving life, being forced to prescribe euthanasia. By the time we meet him at Elpis he had been stuck in that role for who know how long. All taht time with hatred of the Ancient's way of life festering, hatred for the callousness of Elpis festering, and most importantly, hatred for himself taking part of it all festering. With an ancient's lifespan, who knows how many times he considered a "premature return to the star." The Meteon Project probably was his last gasp, her results to going to decide for him whether or not to make his return early. Her results didn't just confirm that decision for him, but shattered him to the point his hatred for the Ancient's methods overflowed for him to make a game for the fate of all life. Selfish, yes but well beyond the point the question of selfishness and selflessness being out the window.
My personal take is this. Hermes is mad with grief of his soon to be late mentor. I feel personally that his actions are the result of ancient society refusing to acknowledge their own suffering and oppressive nature. You are not permitted an identity beyond what is necessary to make society function. Mask on, individuality snuffed, deviation from the norm is met with almost systemic disapproval. Not even your cloths can be different, black robes or shame. Remember the side quest with the robes? She thought we were children and we were still forced to try to make robes to blend in. Then when that norm involves not grieving the "life completion suicide" of your mentor. Well you might not be punished physically but socially you will be a pariah. That or you will mask your emotions and hide your pain until it makes you want to destroy everything in your path. "Is this society so great? Prove it, survive the collective despair of the universe" Simply put, the ancients were a candy coated dystopia IMO. Like, dose that SOUND sane to you? "I completed my life's work, time to off my self!". The response to that is normally "Well they are just so different from us, we can't understand them or their values" but that would swing both ways? Wouldn't it? They understand us and our values, and beyond that they don't really ACT significantly different from us either. It's really kinda screwed up.
The suicide finale is actually entirely understandable once you remember the sheer timescale of an Ancient's life. Once you run out of things to do, what's left except being incredibly bored for uncountable years? You already debated that guy hundreds of times! You already played two hundred times as much chess as any human grandmaster! There's nothing but repetition and a slow slide into apathy in that long of a future.
I'M so glad you brought their attire up! A society that forces you hide parts of yourself, don't express yourself, to perfectly blend in with uniform is not perfect. It resembles a working environment a lot more than a society, which is fitting ig. Their sole goal is "perfecting the star". Their culture is just working on something that I don't think even they know the end of. He seemed to be the only one to question it. What if they perfected the star? We know the answer of course. They would've ended up like the people of the Plenty in the Dead Ends dungeon.
@@weaselprime8654 Nah. They would just find longer tasks to do. Make new games and debate different topics. Experiment in different ways. We humans reach a similar point all the time. Not to mention they literally have an ENTIRE UNIVERSE to explore. You heavily underestimate a persons ability to create and find novelty in the things around them.
@@GaleGrim It's possible that's what they were trying to point out; they were on the path of reaching a certain point that they 'believed' was their final goal, and not having the imagination to see what was after. If we treat Elpis as a microcosm of Ancient thinking, then while we had a few researchers there that were all about 'discovery!', the majority held to the party line of 'I have decided I have reached my perfection, there is nothing left to go from here so time to start over!'. Another thing to keep in mind: a lot of us are analyzing from a western perspective; you can easily see an exaggeration in the Ancients of a lot of current Japanese societal issues and behaviors (shutting down individualism to blend in, and keeping quiet about mental illness to keep from disturbing others, etc) so it helps to keep in mind this may also be a way for the Japanese developers to offer commentary in an 'acceptable space' for those issues, and provoke discussion.
You have a very flawed understanding of how empathy works. Empathy is not the ability to understand or relate to the emotions of others -- that is sympathy. Empathy is the ability to feel other's emotions as one's own. The easiest way to explain empathy to most people is to have them recall a moment when something so embarrassing was happening in front of them that they were frozen with shame (as though it was their shame). For an empathic person it is not about "understanding" or "feeling bad" that someone else has been shamed (again, that is sympathy). For an empathic person there is no separation from the other person or their emotional experience in that moment. Now let us imagine than rather than shame the experience is pain, the helplessness of knowing yourself subjected to the will of a higher being that wishes to erase your existence because you do not fit its concept of perfection. An highly empathic person would experience that fear of being erased, that void of not mattering and having no choice, and the injustice of being judged unfit to exist by creatures who are just as flawed, every time they were forced to destroy a concept. Over time, they would internalize that struggle as their own feeling themselves invalidated, doomed to be erased and ultimately laboring for nothing -- which would lead them to question the fairness and purpose of life. When you frame it as "good people do not feel like that" you underestimate (and rightly so, as you have likely never felt it) the level of severity and persistence of that experience. It has nothing to do with being good. Anyone in severe enough chronic pain would seek their own end. Anyone convinced that this is a universal experience, would seek to end it for all and see it a fair endeavor -- though just to be clear that is NOT what Hermes did. Rather than being consumed by that pain, Hermes sought to understand it and to every extent possible he sought to prove it wrong. He created the Metea and sought to use their empathy to understand the meaning of life, not as force-fed to him by the beliefs of his people, but as experienced by all manner of different civilizations across the universe. The experiment was flawed, as Emmet pointed out, both because it did not do enough to ensure the survey included a fair sampling of people willing and unwilling to continue living, and also because it did not consider that at some point the hyper-sensitive empathetic Metea would also internalize whatever the sisters found (like Hermes did before them). The Metea went on to experience the suffering, despair, resentment and loss of entire civilizations and planets as their own (empathy) not as something they were saddened by because it was happening to someone else (sympathy). And having experienced enough pain and convinced the whole universe was experiencing the same they south to end it. But even when confronted with the Metea's results, Hermes did not side with them. He merely did what was natural to him as chief of Elpis. He carried out a fitness experiment, no different than the experiments he conducted every day to evaluate the fitness to exist of other creatures. The only difference is that this test would be applied to his own people and to himself as he chose to remain, oppose the Metea and fought on the side of life until his sundering. It would not be until several reincarnations later, during the age of the Allagan Empire that Hermes, now Amon, would come to the conclusion that life was simply not worth it. And he arrived at this conclusion only after granting eternal life to Xande and watching him crumble into misery and after experiencing for himself the decadence that emerged in the Allagan court -- the members of which were largely devoid of suffering but still sought to inflict suffering onto others ("test subjects") for pleasure - an exercise that brought them temporary joy but that eventually left them empty as well. When Ammon received his memories as Hermes it was those memories plus his current experience that led him to the conclusion that life suffering because even in a perfect eternal society (he had now been a part of 2 iterations), humans could not help but to inflict suffering on their "lessers" and to fail to find happiness for themselves. However, prior to this Hermes, as his original ancient self, stood on the side of life and Aetherys and he used all his know-how to forestall the end of his world. His work and experiments with etherical currents are the basis for the creation of Zodiark as a shield for the planet. He fought to preserve life, even when his own suffering, the suffering of the creatures under his care and the experiments conducted by the Metea told him not to. Even as he dies, now sure that life is not the answer, he laments that this was not the answer he wanted at all. And all his actions as Hermes suggest this is true. He wanted to be proved wrong - he fought to that end. And he was proved wrong in the end too, even if he was too twisted to see it by 1000s of years of living and suffering. Hermes, in this sense, represents our curiosity. The existential need to know, the fear that our existence is pointless and the tragedy that we never truly get an answer in this life. He equally embodies a warning of how our inability to come to terms with the necessary uncertainty of our existence can twist us and consume us to the extent that we miss the point of life entirely and end up embracing its antithesis. So yes, he makes sense as a character and fits perfectly into the greater argument that the expansion was trying to make. Even more so when you compare him to figures like Athena, who acts as a mirror image of Hermes in her uncomplicated, unempathetic search for godhood at the expense of everything and everyone - all of whom she considers lesser beings. And then somewhere in the middle fits Hydelyn who accepted that the complexity of creation far exceeded her grasp, but did not allow this to overwhelm or challenge her desire to protect her world and her people. She knew that suffering was a part of the deal, that if we are to preserve life, we must have it in equal measure with joy and so she sought to make a world that would perpetually exist in the twilight. She understood this was unkind, but accepted that unkindness to be the price of life as an experience. And in the end she made the ultimate sacrifice, ceasing to exist entirely herself (her soul spent and gone forever), so that we could live again and again.
I want to pose a point-of-view that I saw Hermes at. He's the embodiment of failure and personal weakness. Not innately, not like he was born or fated to be a failure, but that he actively chooses failure for himself and everyone he ever encounters. Even as an Ancient. he is incredibly pathetic and weak-minded through his own choosing - near entirely. He lets himself be outwitted and out-maneuvered by everyone around him, he condemns everyone to suffer because his own personal and morale failing that he chooses to imprint on himself and everyone else. He is the epitome of all chosen weakness - personified in the game's entire narrative about him. It even corrupts his various incarnations. Now, I'm not a massive lore buff. but to me it's always seemed that whenever he learns of his own past that he falls back into that pattern of self-inflicted and all-condemning failure and weakness. Seemingly every single iteration of him seems to be like that, particularly once he is made aware of himself as an Ascian. In that sense, it really makes sense that his first chronological version of himself is the most absolute distillation of self-loathing and self-inflicted failure and self-chosen weakness. He is the truest antithesis of the WoL, who chooses to do the right and just thing who aims and usually succeeds in making everything and everyone they encounter better and happy in some such hard-fought manner. Overcoming the odds. In almost any situation you can easily parallel the canonical WoL to the opposite mindset and likely action of Hermes based on his own personal ideologies and views on everything. From that perspective, he's more opposite to the WoL than even a character like Zenos is. He's not even worthy of being known as a friend to the WoL, but it's likely the WoL would consider him such despite how utterly awful and completely terrible of a person Hermes is. Because that is what makes them different. Polar opposites even. Where as Hermes would condemn anyone for a weakness he himself possesses, the WoL wouldn't unless they were entirely forced to. They are two sides of *"choosing how to see everything and everyone else."* The WoL will do everything they can to see the best of the worst people in all existence and Hermes will do his best to find the worst in a perfect world where most would consider it a paradise... Enough to condemn literally everyone in all of existence over a self-imposed flaw that only he considers a flaw. We pity him because he is terrible by his own choice - personified, not because he deserves redemption. He's not even worth the pity, but the WoL would even still. I agree, I threw up a bit too seeing Hermes there in that final cut artwork to the EW story... But I also knew that the canonical WoL would include him there... where if Hermes had a choice, he would include no one, not even himself. He hates and loathes everything but is too pathetic to do anything outside of forcing a literal created imitation of childlike innocence to force his paradoxical horror on... and then get her to destroy everything in all existence... while he pathetically chooses to do literally a *"both sides"* argument over it. Literally the most pathetic choice possible, not even able to stand up for or against the ideology that makes him - him. Again, *by his own choice.* He is one of the most gifted people in the entire story: powerful, recognized and living in paradise, the epitome of privileged. And he chooses failure and harm to everyone, including himself, every time.
I can get why you would hate Hermes but I always saw him as a product of his society. The Ancients toyed with life and did whatever they wanted, and sure to some degree some of that life may not of been as developed as others but these were still living beings to some degree. I liked that Hermes is there to question all of this and ask if playing god like this IS a good thing or not. From there we watch him as he grow tired of it and then out of spite use the ideals of his society against them. After all, if people die then just like all of the other creatures the ancients erased it was deserved. Hermes asking things that only he is thinks of I would not call that a flaw. I think its normal to at least have 1 person think differently about the society they live it, it happens all the time in reality at least. He might be a bit weaker than some of the other FFXIV villains but I don't think he was that bad. Unrelated sidenote: The Meteion scene where she is points out all of the reasons why its "pointless" to live always scares me and fucked me up. Might be one of my more favorite scenes in any piece of fiction. I think the scariest part about it is that you see that it's all true, and she FORCES you to see that its all true.
3:41 you talk about hermes being the 'entire crux' of the story but that's just a blatant misreading, The point of the Final Days is you would've gotten to them eventually. FFXIV tells it that every immortal race was doomed to this reality., whether Hermes was the one to fall into depression or eventually Hades, who DOES fall into it, just alone. Comparing the creatures of Elips to an AI chatbot is just wrong too... Like these are the creatures we see in our world, they've very much real. They've very clear that they have CREATED life. There's no artificiality about it, these creatures LIVE. Whether they live to their purpose is the question to the ancients, but Hermes asks (wrongly, but not for any reason you've brought up) if the ancients themselves have lived to their purpose. Which is why people like Meteion. She's a victim of circumstance. She is given a mission, and HAS emotions and capacity for growth and satisfies everything that makes a living thing living. But Hermes robs her. Whether its discussed anywhere, hermes robs her of taste. He robs her of understanding (emotional intelligence). She feels emotions and responds to it but is never taught to handle it. The Warrior of Light eventually gives her some of this as she comes to realize how to cope with emotions. She cannot claim full responsibility for her atrocities because she was never able to understand what she was doing. Higher beings kept giving her incomprehensible answers. And all she can do is feel their emotions as they give those answers and despair over it. Hermes is wrong, but he isn't just wrong as a character. he represents the eventual rot all of the ancients would face. As Venat made clear, they were but spared despair for a time.
there is a big aspect to this video with which I disagree, to say that the creations on Elpis are not /alive/ and akin to AI is major mischaracterization and undersells the true power of creation magicks. The things they make and unmake at will /are/ alive, they are as ensouled as any of the other life forms. I say this because 90% of the sidequests are about witnessing the creation of things like the Behemoth and other creatures with the implication that every notable creature in modern Etherys came from places like that. Hermes existed in a /culture/ that /considered/ those things not alive or of no importance, that self same callousness that makes Emet Selch believe what he does forever doesn't count because it isn't murder. Imagine feeling so isolated that you care that much about things that are not supposed to be alive but every fiber of your being is saying otherwise and by merit of Shadowbringers and Endwalker, are supposed to know quite well that those "lesser things" are alive and do matter. If you fundamentally disagree that the creations are valid living creatures, you miss the point of the quest where you destroy the moths for robes, your character is upset by that and are told that is just the way things are in ancient society and how they view it. Also within the context of the world at large post sundering, if you believe that these creations are not alive, you should not weep for the injured chocobos or griffins or pets or any sort of animal companionship post sundering because it is highly likely there were a construct at one point, same goes for the Ixal, artificial creations or the Loporrits, who are just creation magicked bunny wards. Sure to the ancients it seems like created species are like ai chatbots but we as players are supposed to know that their viewpoint is /fucked/ and Hermes thinks the same way and believes he is /broken/ or something is wrong with him for it. Should he be in charge of Elpis? No, just as much as someone who gets sad about giving lab rats cancer shouldn't be in charge of a bio-med lab but that doesn't make him mentally ill as you posit.
"you are entirely free to disagree with me." Done. I've never disagreed with you on anything before really, but I could not possibly disagree more here. This honestly seems like a hot take just for the sake of a hot take. The hatred is completely irrational. It almost feels like those first criticism videos of the story I started seeing right after the expansion released. Where certain TH-camers were making insincere criticism and analysis videos of the story, trying to preemptively get a negative viewpoint out there because they thought it would make them look smarter than everyone else who had a positive viewpoint, as if the community are all a bunch of sheep, and only they were smart enough to appreciate the more subtle nuances of the story. Bear in mind I don't actually think that's what this video is. It just has a similar feeling. No he's not the greatest character in the game, or even top 10, but come on. Really? I really think you're looking for connections and motivations that aren't actually there. Over complicating things to create the illusion of affirmation. I think you made a genuine attempt here, and you do have some valid points. for example, I definitely think he could have been fleshed out better and they could have done more to make him earn how important they made him, but this was a terrible analysis overall, in my opinion.
Who are you to decide that those creatures are chat AIs just because they can be created easily? That doesn't mean their emotions or suffering aren't real in the setting. "No empathetic/good person thinks this way" he broke. people break. it's human. and the story needed a villain. he's not meant as the villain of the entirety of 14, just one of them for endwalker.
While I agree that they hastily tried to make Hermes become the MSQ's sacrifical lamb, I think, on a whole, they did a good job in making Hermes a manifestation of all the contradictions of the Ancient's whole society. Shadowbringers wanted us to empathize with Emet-Selch because he wanted to bring back this perfect world at any cost, and ultimately Hermes (and the Pandaemonium story) is an illustration that even a utopian society is built on a foundation of darkness, in feeble opposition of the harsh realities of the universe. This is why Emet-Selch HAD to lose his quest to rejoin the shards to recreate this false utopia, and why Hydaelyn HAD to sunder humanity in order to save it and salvage some of their world's goodness. Hermes made Hydaelyn, the concept of Zodiark, and Emet-Selch better than they were before the start of the expansion. Ultimately I don't like Hermes either, but remember that Emet-Selch has caused an untold amount of suffering too. Whether either one are redeemable is up to the judgement of the player.
I can't wait for you to cover Lahabrea next. I feel so mixed about him with how things have wrapped up since his introduction in ARR as this cackling madman. Insightful video!
Oh thank god someone actually pointing out faults instead of vigorously twisting themselves into knots to justify heaping endless praise onto an extremely flawed narrative. You had me at the title. The video was just dessert.
Considering that these Ancients were so invested in traditions like sacrificing yourself after your tenure as part of the Convecation and weigh this on Venat but also let it slide, AND was willing to PLAN the full sacrifice of their people to bring in Zodiark to stop the End Days AND reverse them PRIOR to the summoning that thusly indoctrinated most, I greatly question their leadership, wisdom and society. After all, Elpis and Pandemonium show us how messed up things kinda were before the Final Days ever began, and the Aumorot we see is a fiction by a man indoctrinated by Zodiark, lost everyone he knew, and lived so long in such turmoils he had to force himself to believe his society was as perfect as he said to get any willpower to DO SOMETHING, ANYTHING AT ALL. As you showed, Emet-Selch by Shadowbringers is not reliable, lying to himself constantly, and he is the one who showed us the Ancients being so good, while our time-travel shows two major arcs totally opposed, both kept hush-hush due to LEADERS' actions, and so many side quests proving Eithyrus was no better than the 14 Reflections of Hydaelyn, and the Ancients were just as human as us players and our friends and enemies alike.
I feel that your comparison to the living creatures in Elpis to a "Chat AI Bot" is a totally inaccurate comparison. The creatures of Elpis, while prototypes, are still living creatures that can experience suffering, have children, and live full life cycles. It's like imagining a puppy into existence with bright blue fur with white stripes. And that puppy can grow up, having children with its own kind or other similar dogs, and grow old/die. It can suffer, eat, sleep, etc. So how is that not a living creature worthy of respect, emotional attachment, and sympathy? The better analogy is to compare the life forms in Elpis like lab rats, or multi-cellular creatures in research work. At least with the way the Ancients viewed life forms besides themselves. Him being so distraught at having to put one down that was actively a danger does seem a little unusual, or even silly, in that context. But the point is that it also is a reflection of himself. Hermes is not a typical Ancient. He doesn't feel apart of their society the way most do. He has depression, he struggles with finding a reason to live, and wonders if anyone else sees despair in existence where if you're ostracized and not the right kind of creature... This is proven by the part of the MSQ when he asks if you ever feel moments of weakness and fear and that life and hope seem fleeting. And you can sympathize or empathize with him. To which he feels honest commiseration with you. That there is someone else, even if you're not a "real person" to the Ancients way of viewing things. Remember, for the entirety of the Elpis arc, all the characters around you think you're a Familiar of Azem. You're just some pet creation that someone sent there to do something for them. And the fact that Hermes treats you with respect rather than just the tolerance many seem to afford you instead... It speaks to his viewpoint of valuing life forms many Ancients consider beneath them. I agree that the writing of Hermes is flawed. But I feel like there is such a fundamentally wrong basis you have that it makes many of the arguments you're basing it on just not work from the start because of it.
I absolutely agree with you about Hermes. He is a villain that should not of been empathized with. Even after being told about the final days, how it will bring the world to destruction, and realizing his own creation ended up being the cause, and his protecting her after it becomes obvious Meteon was the cause, made him the ultimate villain of the story
I view Hermes less as a character and more as a warning against the pre sundered society, that it wasn't perfect and let someone such as Hermes slip through the cracks. He feels like an allegory for Mental Health in our modern day when left untreated and scorned it can fester and become an epidemic within the populace.
I argue the entire civization could be a sublte criticism of Japanese society. Individuality is shunned to the point people refer and become their title instead of themselves. When all breaks down there is heavy sharlyan isolationist arguments (Isolation from the lower beings). Heavy conformitionism (example: dress code but also their complete obediance to the 14) Venats acts was the more or less the very first act of rebellion against their government/superiors. And in the end everyone keeps their problems to themselves because you don't want to be bothersome for others and this causes a decline in mental health. Sounds very japanese...
@@leiferikson850 It does definitely seem like a take on Japanese society and collectivism as a whole. When everyone is just treated as a cog in the greater machine and expected to do their part for the greater good. People will feel like odd ones out, marginalized, weird, ill-fitting and fall through the cracks. They'll get depressed, they'll snap, they'll do something drastic because they just feel like there's nothing else they can do.
An interesting analysis of Hermes, some of which echoes what I had thought (somewhat suprisingly; I hadn't sat down to think about it in the way you did). I also had misgivings with Endwalker's latter narrative half. I had the same feeling that the origin of the Final Days and the root cause of everything we face in the Hydaelyn-Zodiark saga was rather rushed. But rather than associating these issues with Hermes, at least to the extent you do, I ended up focusing more on Meteion. But I think at the end of the day, it's really the Hermes-Meteion pair that felt under-developed. Since completing Endwalker and even until now, I have thought consistently that I felt unconvinced by Meteion's conclusion after her journey across distant stars, in search for the answers to the meaning of life. Why did she conclude that life is meaningless, and *therefore* it makes sense to extinguish all life in the universe? I never thought there was anything in Hermes' question that would have biased Meteion's search to reach *that* specific conclusion. In contrast, if Hermes had instead tasked her to find out if there is a way for a civilisation to, say, *be free from doubt and despair*, then I could see her reaching the conclusion she did. That is, the only definitive answer appears to be in death, because life is otherwise too unpredictable for there to be everlasting happiness (*or* everlasting despair). I say this because I would expect that as Meteion travelled, she saw stars in all kinds of states, some of which she describes to us. In war. Lost to time. Advanced. Rudimentary, etc. Should we have expected that the civilisations of every star necessarily met their *definitive* end, with Meteion as witness? *Nothing* new emerged from the ashes? Did Meteion never come across any civilisation, any community, that was persisting, without any obvious looming extinction? If the answer to this expectation is yes, then this would imply Etheirys is unusually special. It suggests that Etheirys is the only star in the universe that trots along the path of life where so many others have failed. I have never thought that this was suggested by the lore of XIV, and in general I find it strange to invoke a uniqueness about a character or a community unless there is cause to. In short, I think the conclusion Meteion reaches is strangely biased considering how open Hermes' question was to her. I would have expected that Meteion would have failed to reach a conclusion. She was not asked to find a way to guarantee happiness. She was not asked to help understand how to guarantee a civilisation's future. She was not asked to *act* on what she discovered. And so I never felt very convinced that Meteion would turn into the melancholic Endsinger, who insists on *imposing* death on all life. Another thing that irked me quite a lot was the musical choice for The Final Day, the level 90 trial where we face the Endsinger. The first phase's track is an arrangement including the motifs of boss battle themes from all preceding expansions. Ultima, Thordan, Shinryu, Hades. But I remember feeling that it was "undeserved", i.e. it did not make sense to associate that with the Endsinger. She did not have a strong link to these story events, and so it felt strange that, musically, it was being suggested that the Endsinger was the culmination of all of these significant events in the player character's story. Narratively, it was not justified. As far as I am concerned, the agency of the various villains we faced felt very much their own. Yes, the Ascians often had some role to play, but it did not feel like this connecting thread extended all the way until the Endsinger. At best, the Endsinger's relation to these events was circumstantial. In contrast, the Ascians' involvement was more direct, and so it would feel justified for Ascian characters to associate themselves with these fights. It also did not feel like the Endsinger was a thematic extreme of any of these villains, as each villain had their own motivations that were more developed, and distinct from the Endsinger's reasons for extinguishing life. The only way the track makes sense is to instead associate the motifs with the player character. It represents all the trials and tribulations we have faced until this point; and it acts as a testament to our strength to overcome the many arduous obstacles that have been placed before us. In phase 2 of the trial, after the prayers of the Scions, we have the motif from Footfalls. Which is a very triumphant and cool moment which I really enjoyed. But perhaps you may see like I do, that this means that the music of The Final Day has everything to do with us, and next to nothing to do with the Endsinger. I thought that was a missed opportunity. I had thought that maybe a rearrangement of "What Comes of Despair" would be used as a musical representation of the Endsinger. Or, if they wanted to be more experimental: perhaps give us silence in the fight. To show how starkly different the Endsinger is, both as a being of Dynamis, and as a character who does not believe in the value of life. In short, it felt like there were some missing steps. Something that could narratively justify *why* Meteion decides to bring all life to an end. It is not clear how simply observing countless civilisations leads to such a conclusion. Nihilist subjects can be taken in several directions, and I think the Hermes-Meteion treatment of it in XIV came across as somewhat shallow, forced towards a direction, without adequate discussion. Just so that we had an enemy fight at level 90. I could understand the destination. The writers wanted to pit two beliefs against each other: that life is meaningless because its value appears transient (Endsinger), and that life is meaningful because those transient moments of happiness can be what one lives *for* (player character/Scions). I also felt that Meteion's shallow nature was further exemplified by the trial itself, and I gave the music as one of my examples. One only needs to look at a character like Emet-Selch to find the complete opposite in XIV: plenty of depth, plenty of difficulties that the player is encouraged to ponder on, all with great narrative justification. In fact, Emet-Selch goes further, as he *adds* some much needed dimensionality to the otherwise plain role that the Ascians played in previous expansions. If you made it this far, thanks for reading! I'd welcome people's thoughts on what I've written, whether in agreement or disagreement!
I would disagree. From what I payed attention to not just "plot specific" dialogue but what the characters themselves have to say about the situations they are in. Endwalker is filled with a lot of key phrases that have deep meaning behind them but let the players themselves try to figure out the meaning of it themselves. One key phrase I payed attention to that is always missed by the community is the phrase about the elpis flower when speaking to Hermes, "It's always white". So this has lots of threads behind it. The ancients are near immortal, we all know this. So Hermes spent hundreds of years as the apprentice of the former head of Elphis, then took over the lead of Elphis once his friend was promoted to a Seat of 14. Then when his friend retired, hermes was recommended as a Seat of 14. So during this time, how many years do you think passed by? It's not 1 or 2 years. Hundreds of years, potentially reaching near 1000 years. At bare minimum, maybe like 500 years of Hermes seeing what Ancients do to their creation with the Elpis Flower always being white. Meaning that Hermes has seen who knows how many creatures being deleted with not a spec of remorse of the deletion for, at minimun, 500 years. You don't use the phrase of "Near immortal" and not think about what that means in years. Viera live for potentially 300 years and are not called "near immortal". The community makes the mistake of their own impression of the situation versus what is factually written in the game. This made it clear to me once patch 6.4 dropped, with the Tower of Zod citizen arc, the community misses the deeper meaning behind that quest line. I can explain this if someone asks, but that is a separate topic to this. As for the animals in Elpis being AI? I'm not sure how the conclusion came to be. We already saw earlier with the flying snakes that they can reproduce and create offspring different from the parents. That also led to a potential deletion when it didn't fly right away. It doesn't require much for an ancient to decide whether or not a creature lives or dies. A creature doesn't need to be violent at all to just be deleted.
@@daulpaul Sure. This isn't a super deep, change your life kind of meaning but one that does tap into the society of Japan itself. The tower of Zod is practically an allegory for Godzilla, or Gojira, when it was made. I have a friend who is a big fan of Godzilla and a simple wiki search tells you that the people of Japan did not like the announcement of Gojira being made. It was viewed, before release, as an insult to those that suffered from the atomic bomb in ww2. It took decades for Godzilla to turn from an insult to japanese society to their beloved mascot. The tower of zod arc of 6.4 is easily how japanese would of reacted to such a thing being activated again. With western people just telling the japanese, "to just get over it, you lost." from forums and reddit is very fascinating. The atomic bomb dropped in 1945, Gojira was released in 1954. 10 years passed and Japanese people were still very sensitive to the topic of an atomic weapon in movies, how do you think they would react if an atomic weapon was needed to save their lives?
It'd have been rough to not have enjoyed Hermes, you have my sympathy. :( They got a lot of mileage out of his actor appearing as all of his reflections and points in time. I'll try explain why he worked for me personally. I will say this much about his empathy and narcissism, which doesn't make him a good person, or maybe even a great character. But I'll explain why he worked for me, especially relative to Meteion. It's hard to not see Hermes and Meteion's relationship as Geppetto and Pinnochio - she wants to be a real girl, he wants answers for why life should matter. Moreover, the Ancients are hugely flawed in allowing him on the Convocation, but i do think, opposite the overtly sardonic attitude of Emet-Selch, Fandaniel's post may attract a more heightened empathy, as one governs death and the other governs life. From there it's like that bit in Community, where Jeff says "Same way I can take this pencil, say his name is Steve, and go like this *breaks the pencil* and part of you dies." And I mean, yeah, people can separate simulated related and half-people, but then that's also how the Ascians observed the reflected, they're fractured imperfect people, no better than AI, not even real boys and real girls. A bunch of Meteions. Meddlers and parasites. The reason Zodiark was a necessity. The challenge I think for Hermes was that even Hythlodaeus, who was the kindest Ancient even after the Sundering, still struggled to understand why Hermes could have difficult emotions. Especially with all the Utopia analogies from Thomas More's book, a formula for a world of peace and harmony was far more important than individuality, hence the masks. So that very culture may have spurred him to be so reckless and anarchist. Which is not... good. He's not a good person for letting Meteion go, but for him, his little ChatGPT daughter did more for him than even the kindest people in his society - and that fixation and empathy is likely how he got his post as Overseer. When I was younger, I would rage into a violent fit if someone took this stuffed animal and threw it or pretended to hurt it. It was stupid and childish and I needed to grow up a lot sooner than I did, got there, but somehow that stuffed animal could reflect my insecurities and be there in a way that people outside my own head could. I think Hermes is the logical extreme of that, where he lost sympathy and empathy altogether in a culture that only saw value in things if they were 'real'. And trust me, more recently, I was 1000% in your boat, in Detroid Become Human, I never treated as the androids as more than androids and the plot reflected that, but they weren't 'real,' it's just an exercise in empathy. Hermes' ego became such that he felt like he's the only one who ever had any, and he gets the final say, especially with no Emissary to keep the Convocation together. We also don't know a lot about other Convocation members who weren't Paragons, but it is clear that even no two Ascians fully agreed with each other completely after 10k+ years. Igeyorhm and Lahabrea acted out of the initial plan, forcing Elidibus to pull Emet out of 'retirement', Nabriales hated Lahabrea too, and who no one felt bad for when Nabriales died. The only one Mitron semed to care about was Loghrif and vice versa. And I broke the law of the Convocation by creating a crystal of Azem. So Fandaniel being elected despite his unhinged decisions is definitely an afterthought by the convocation, maybe not the Ancients as a whole. Fandaniel didn't want the post, but he needed to protect humanity from Meteion (and maybe he felt like he was the only one who could because he felt he was the only one who understood Meteion - again, more poor assessments from him), so he accepted the post. And the more time went on, the more he just felt like he 'got' Meteion, thus your classic final fantasy final boss nihilist arc. Also, quickly, the previous Fandaniel may have been more sentimental and decisive that it should be Hermes, maybe much like how Venat vouched for the new Azem before he/she was elected. For me, most of all rushing Zodiark and Garlemald was a bit peevish to me, and it didn't even hit me until recently that we already fulfilled the prophecy of might and light from Louisoix's journal during our fight with Zenos... All to make way for Hermes' story, because it's ultimately a fight of light and dark - but we're in the middle as soon as we take up the crystal of Azem and oppose Elidibus in 5.3. And after Kairos activated, only WoL and Venat remembered the events of the Hyperborea - and by then she's not thinking about governance. She's ready to live, die and know - not save the world as it is, but create her reflections and rely on mankind's potential. And as for stretches, and forcing things... Omicron Questline. A lot to reach the theme of final despair and hope at the bottom of Pandora's Box. But do I feel bad for him? ...After this much time, I don't think he ever stopped being idealistic and playing with dolls. Xande is kind of just another Meteion - this perfect idealization of a good person, so much so he cloned him, whether there's a soul attached or no. And Asahi was a doll as well - so yeah, dude needs to stop playing with dolls, especially when lives are the price. WoL by default empathizes with villains, and it's not always how I'd feel, but that's who we are, we're more agents of catharsis than dealers of judgement. Elidibus, Meteion, Zenos - whoever we fight, they leave the world with eyes unclouded, and that's the sad beauty of the writing. But yeah saying 'the devs' made Meteion cute is very reductive. Hermes did. The tragedy of Hermes is (again like a large number of final bosses in FF - heck, even in Endwalker if you want to include Zenos) - is that they became monsters before they could become adults, and they ignore the light at the end of the tunnel we don't see until we mature enough to search for it. Sephiroth, Kuja, Seymour, Kefka - even Garland in FF I, for all his idealizing of his romance with Sarah. Children wield power to judge the uncaring, when they don't realize that everyone cares - but it takes a LOT of pain to get there. That's what I got out of Hermes, anyways. Hope that helps expand your appreciation for it, because I'm positive what I read was what they were going for. But edit/final note, the big thing is we arent' sad that he's a genocidal maniac and that's just misunderstood. We understand what he could have been, and he chose nihilism over understanding - over living, dying, and knowing.
“It’s not alive anymore than a ChatGPT bot”. Woah slow down there Emet Junior. Incoming long form response. I don’t think we’re supposed to love or like Hermes. I think him being part of the art work isn’t a fair measure of “This guy was part of the crew” This is the same team that forgot to put Kryle in the Scion portrait. So not exactly batting a thousand on Art think pieces. Real talk though, Hermes is the greatest signifier of the dangers of depression. He didn’t empathize with the monster we slew. He sympathized. His longing for answers over purpose and refusal to accept ends of any form were marks of the potential flaws in the ancients. Their society was far from the perfect picture painted to us, but don’t let me get on about that til later. As a person who lives with (sometimes even succeeds despite) depression, Hermes represents that tendency for my brain to cause damage to myself and everyone I care about. You spiral, nosediving into actions or thoughts that bring agony and bitterness all around you; all while your brain tricks you into thinking: this will help us somehow. For me and my smooth brain, depression spikes drive me to stop talking to anyone I care about. I don’t want them to see me like this. They wouldn’t like me if they knew. It would only hurt them if I’m around. All of these thoughts are wrong, and on good days my logic can do the Emet check of ‘and you didn’t think to ask anyone before acting on this?’ It’s not all good days though. Having depression doesn’t get you labeled as someone who should not be in charge. Unless you wave a giant flag screaming “I would prefer to not be responsible for even myself,” people will look toward the good in you. I’ve been praised, promoted, and even celebrated all while thinking to myself “Why the #%$& do they want me here?” At least at one point in life I was not okay at all, but still trusted to lead a team of people because of ‘my dedication and knowledge.’ It brought harm when I reluctantly accepted it. Am I going to break down and make an emotional delete the universe button? Nah, thankfully another chunk is laziness. Can I see what led Hermes to do it? Oh absolutely. Finally, I’ll just say it: this is the same dumbass council that had Laha-freaking-Breha on it. Powerful? Oh gods yes. The best representations of leaders? Hard pass. The very themes of Endwalker explore finding purpose; and defining the difference between selfless and selfish purposes. The difference between Hermes and Zenos is that Hermes could not put aside his passion even at the cost of his purpose. Zenos, on the other hand, grew to choose delayed gratification in order to achieve his end goals. Thank the twelve we killed him or he might have become a whole ass person by 8.0 In conclusion, I don’t blame you for your perspective and respect your opinion. Perhaps though, perhaps you can understand why I don’t ‘nothing’ hermes. I see what unchecked selfish depression can cause. It makes me feel a stoic pity for him. Perhaps if Ancient Society was better they would have listened to him saying he was not ready for the seat. Perhaps if someone close to him had noticed he could not connect with people, they would have withdrawn him from Elips. They didn’t; he didn’t step back, and the world was shattered for it.
Here's my take: Hermes cared too much about life. He wanted to know what has meaning to it, what is the ultimate reason for existence and he had good intentions. Intentions however are always flawed. No matter who you are, intentions are always flawed - be they good or bad. By sending Meteion off to search for the answer without even once telling her, explaining her what that even is or even worse, not providing her any means of understanding the life has many answers instead of a defined single one, he basically gave Metion an impossible task that was doomed to fail from the start. And as such, came all the atrocities of thinking that the sole answer he wanted was to end it all. Here's the truth of the matter though: Life does come to an end. That is a fate we all share - we die. To put it painly as one aspect of Death once said: "Beyond the beaten path lies the absolute end. It matters not who you are... Death awaits you." But I believe Hermes was so sure that there had to be more to life than just that. He blinded himself and flew so close to the sun he didn't just melt his wings, he set himself on fire and dove right back to the planet at top speed to commence his own version of Meteorfall. In the end, it's not that Hermes cared too much about life or he was empathetic. I think the real issue that lies with him is that, he was so sure, so convinced by his own ideals that there was a single perfect answer to why we all live, he deluded himself into thinking once he found it, it would inspire true change to him and all of Ethyris. Alas... That's never the case.
Hermes, to me, was a much better villain than Emet-Selch. Hot take, I know. I found him to be a perfect juxtaposition of the Ancients and their culture. Of course, my opinion doesn't come out without bias, since Shadowbringer I always argued the same points which Endwalker pointed towards the Ancients and I absolutely LOATHED how the narrative was forcing me to sympathize and care about Emet-Selch. So it felt good to feel justified with an actual character in-game that approached those topics. And funny enough, the sympathetic approach from his writing is not really as him as a character, but to bring a counter to the 'perfection' which was the Ancient society. At the very least I felt this was the whole reason for it. The very own commentary over "this beast wasn't alive" perfectly summarizes why many people don't like him. Anyone who really holds to that viewpoint, will not be able to connect with Hermes and instead, connect with the Ancients. This is funny, to me, Elpis was a massive red flag for the Ancient society instead. Erasing and creating creatures at will is an act of natural dubious morale, their entire society was maniacal and absolutely terrifying because there's no logical justification for where one can act as they did, and once they came to be Ascian, did even more and more atrocities. The very own fact that Hytholadeus makes you a robe out of butterflies, disgusted me. I think it's interesting how both viewpoints can be approached in the storyline in that regard and how this conflict, even in the community, can bring very fun debates.
They don't see things as living beings they just see aether that can me molded at a whim, but can you blame them really they were supreme beings almost god like with their abilities
I was going to write something out, but you more or less summed it up. I feel like Hermes should be pretty easy to "get" but the most people pull from it is "RRR HUMAN BAD THEY DIE NOW" In the end Emet was more palatable I guess despite him follow a similar trend.
@@SpaceElvisInc Then it falls on the realm of ethics if what they do is moral or not and if by being a "god" they still have the right to shape life by their own whims. We have Athena as the extremism point of what the Ancient culture could lead to, which is enough to point out that they are flawed as creations and their perceptive is equally flawed. To the point Emet asked Hermes: "Who are you to decide if we live or die?" displayed the vast hypocrisy that the Ancient culture has, for to do it with any other creation is OK. But when they are on the receivers end, it's not OK. It's an interesting debate, won't deny it.
5:19 uhhhhhh they ARE alive. As much we are. The constructs made with creation magic are not just familiars bound to their creators wills. That is the whole point of Elpis as a facility. To evaluate creatures made by others for release into the wild so they can procreate and live on Etheirys. How did you miss that? They actually have commentary about how some of the subjects "Would be too devastating to the environ if they were released". They even call them life forms multiple times. These are fully sentient beings made by creation magic.
I noticed you didnt seem to talk about Fandaniel at all. Seeing as he's basically an extension of Hermes (no matter how much Amon may try to deny it) in the end he realises how much Fandaniel had influenced his development. I think the element of Fandaniel being introduced in 5.3-5.55 and early EW adds a lot to Hermes' character. I also think that Hermes' didn't account for Meteion's temperamental change and he wasn't doing it out of pure malice as you may paint him to be. As Emet said, the question he gave Meteion was inherently flawed. But Meteion took this and scaled it up to 100. By that point, she was her own being. I doubt anything Hermes' could've said or done would've changed her from her course at that point. So no, I don't think Hermes' is the inherent cause for every conflict leading up to EW. Meteion took the other half and ran with it where Hermes' was second guessing himself.
If you think the MSQ was trying to make you forgive Hermes, you weren't paying attention. They wanted you to know how he came to the decision he came to. Nothing more. Some of your points were spot on, but you missed ther mark on some.
So I am in a weird spot, your points are all good and I agree with them but something about it does not sit right with me. For example when it comes to the creature we put down. I see the point about it being an ai. However, at the same time we have to look at the fact that this is a creature set to be wiped away completely from existence. There will be no back up made. There is no second chance or remaking it. In addition who is to say they are not actually alive? They hunt and travel around, they can learn and they can pass away. All of these points are shown in elpis. Second this is the big point that often gives me pause when it comes to him. His biggest question was "are we alone in the universe." and "Is it worth living." Something I will point out is that most races he comes in contact with are races that have some function of immortality. Be it through science or evolution they have prolonged their life to the point of forever. Therefor I think the answer he got back was there is no point in living forever. Not that life has no purpose. I would love to hear counter points and observations.
My points on the thing being "alive" seems to be a point of contention for a some people. As explained upon arrival, the reason the concepts of Elpis aren't considered alive is because they lack a soul. The world/reality doesn't gain or lose anything from a concept being made or destroyed. This is why places like Elpis were considered important, they were contained simulation grounds. The Ancients saw this as the most ethical way to simulate life without actually harming a true ecosystem. If you destroy a concept, nothing happens. But if you kill a soul baring creature, that misery can be carried back to the aetherial realm. Also, I find it oddly hypocritical for people to say a soulless concept is an important living thing in Endwalker while ignoring the countless soul baring people/creatures we've happily killed up to that expansion. lol Secondly, Hermes was ultimately acting in self interest. Oh sure, people act things like "Is life worth living?" all the time. But Hermes wasn't searching for an answer that would benefit his peers, the world or the universe. He was only doing it for his own sake. And when he didn't get the response he wanted, he decided that the "imperfect" slate might as well be cleaned. I can't imagine any good or sane person coming to the same conclusion. Hope that helps!
I like you Synodic, I always will but I think you have completely swept a lot about Hermes under the rug here including his depression and the crisis of identity. You are not as wise with some of this game's lore as you think you are. Stout Helm and Zurichn should educate on you on Hermes.
While I don't think he drags down Endwalker, I do agree that people really shouldn't be thinking of him as empathetic. There's a line in the dungeon that really tips his hand. Paraphrased from memory: "I won't let you kill her, not before I hear my answer." This instance of Meteion is the one creation he spent the most time with. He shared his emotions and burdens, shared his favorite food, had been around him at nearly all times. There should be no creation in all of Elpis that Hermes cares for more. And yet with his goal so close in front of him, the truth is he doesn't give a shit about her beyond what value he can gain from her. As much as he made a big production about caring for the creatures, he was using them as an external vessel for his feelings about how ancient society as a whole handles death, and the creatures themselves never mattered. As an aside about the selection of Hermes as Fandaniel, I will remind you though, that while no one catches the warning signs, once Hermes lays it all out in the open, Emet's immediate response is "You should never have been put in charge of Elpis with that mental state." ('Because that job is destroying you' is implied by my recollection.)
This. Thank you. People really latch onto the idea that his empathy for other creatures is totally real and not just a projection of his self-pity for himself. Truly empathetic people totally condemn all life in the universe to certain death without a second thought, certainly. The targets of Hermes' projected empathy are primarily creatures he knows to be lesser than himself. They're either animal creations, who can't talk back to him, or his own creation Meteion, who he literally created to make himself feel better by acting as his emotional sponge and getting him his "answers". He has power over these lesser creatures, so he can freely project his feelings onto them and feel sorry for them as a proxy for feeling sorry for himself. He has no empathy for or connection to his actual peers - he "claws at them", to quote his short story; he feels stifled by them, because they are his equals in that they could actually talk back and challenge him. He has to isolate himself and put up an act because if he were to actually open his mouth and air out what he truly feels, his peers might lead him to doubt his preconceptions - especially those he has about himself, i.e. "I am the only one with feelings here". And then again, in Elpis he is not among equals. He is Chief in Elpis and everyone gives him a wide berth because a) he keeps to himself and b) he has power over them. The second he has to engage with an actual peer, an actual equal, someone he has no actual power over - Hermes gets criticized. It takes Emet-Selch seconds to see the flaws with his work and Hermes *explodes*. Emet's criticism is valid, it comes from a place of power, and he knows he can't actually address it; his lifeline is cut off and he's made to suddenly come to the realization that he's been wrong all this time? Welp!! He goes hostile and tries to kill them all. Which ultimately culminates in him knowingly condemning all life in the universe - human, animal, everything - to certain death. It's not empathy what he felt, never was. It was his vanity and pride, projected into small mirrors of himself. The second *he* felt threatened, he was ready to end it all. PS. Hermes witnesses a Meteion being "unmade" in his short story, with the little girl dying in his arms, and his immediate thought is that he's not gonna get his "answers". lmao.
Man sends a biological, emotionally-stunted Skynet into deep space with zero peer review or oversight, then when Skynet decides to end all life, he doesn't even ATTEMPT to console his creation or reason with it, choosing to force his "experiment" regarding the right to exist on the entire UNIVERSE. Hermes' kill count makes Emet-Selch look like a damn Care Bear.
Woahhhh your assertion that the creature is not alive is incorrect. It is explained to us in 6.0 that Man can create anything, but they have no control over whether what they create has a soul, or if it is an arcane entity. I remember this because I contemplated it for a long while when I read it; asking myself "If Man is not responsible, then who dictates what can and cannot exist with a soul?" With this in mind, I do not think you can safely say that the creature is not a living thing possessed of a soul. It is a beast, it can eat to replenish aether, it can feel pain, and it could breed. I would assume it would have a soul, and would not be considered an arcane entity. Next, you say Hermes is selfish for circumventing his society and for making an ultimatum for his people. The entire point of Hermes is that his society is unjust, and indulges in casual genocide because it suits the society. He, as leader of Elpis, is in a unique position to come to the conclusion that what they are doing is wrong. The line about humanity not having power over what has a soul is evidence of this. Man does what he wants, but not out of some divine authority, but out of convenience. We see this first hand in Shadowbringers. We are living, we have souls, we have populations, but to the Ascians we are a simple mistake that can be rectified by genocide so they can start over. Yes, if Hermes went through the proper channels, the great flaw in Meteion's question could have been avoided under the watchful eye of Emet Selch, and yet Emet Selch is also the chief example of how diluted and hubristic the ancients were. He is the example of the reason Hermes felt like he needed to act outside of the law. But it was not selfishness which motivated his actions, it was the desire to bring a new perspective to his people, so that they could grow. And he's also deeply conflicted about this. He wants to ask the stars for answers because he is not confident that his individual perspective is valid compared to his society. When Hermes learns that the stars hold only despair, not knowing at the time that Meteion has unintentionally caused much of it, he is not willing to fully accept this. The fact that the stars told him they feel the same as him was not enough for him to fully throw his lot in with Despair, instead, he elects to allow mankind to be judged in the exact same way that Man has judged all the creatures possessed of souls that they have discarded. If anything, despite the fact that Hermes is the one allowing this to happen, everything about Hermes is quite selfless. I'd say he's significantly more selfless than Hades or Venat, in that he's not forcing his will, he's allowing things to take their natural course. As for Meteion, She is what she feels. This is her nature. She is childlike in multiple ways, and this was likely done because Hermes wanted Meteion to learn from others, as a child does. He wanted no preconceptions, for her to face the societies of the stars and report back an unbiased account. People like Meteion because its not her fault what's happening to her. We want to save her from the dark conclusions she has come to. We want to prove that life is worth living. Hermes is deeply flawed, yes, and he's meant to be a contentious figure. I absolutely support criticizing him or not liking him, but I gotta disagree with the bulk of this video and say Hermes is pog, and Endwalker would not be my favorite storyline if he wasn't in it.
I feel bad for Hermes, but only because Ancient society for whatever reason didn't let him get the help he so clearly needed. Dude would have been fine with a sabbatical and a bunch of therapy. If I were to rewrite some of Elpis or maybe throw in a bonus "Tales from..." story, I'd show Hermes being a decent guy whose care for life actually helps him perform his duties in some way but then when his mentor dies Hermes starts spiraling into his nihilistic depression. I'd then show him actually trying to reach out to other people but people don't really understand his issues, and now he's in such a high position of authority that no one is willing to really question him. I wish the game had used Hermes to more explicitly show the flaws of the Ancients. We already knew from ShB that they couldn't handle tragedy, and I wish that EW had done more to show that some kind of tragedy was basically inevitable in their society. Athena in Pandaemonium also kind of feeds into this idea too. She clearly had issues, but no one stopped her until it was nearly too late. Even if Hermes and Athena both got stopped before causing an apocalypse I feel like sooner or later some other Ancient with unrecognized and unhelped issues would have slipped through the cracks and caused a different apocalypse with their nigh-godlike powers. I do feel bad for Meteion, though. I basically view her as a child and therefore not fully responsible for her actions. "Here kid, have universe-destroying nuke! Now look at all the war, plague, death, and other tragedies in the universe!"
The Ancients were already on the verge of a societal collapse. NPCs in Amaurot during Shadowbringers talk about the lack of creativity. Hythlodaeus mentions how any time a new concept is presented it gets run into the ground and becomes boring. Doing random quests around Elpis also pushes this narrative. What would happen to a world where the defining trait of the people was their ability to create were to find themselves creatively stagnant? Hermes even questions this. What would happen when everything is perfect? I'm thinking Ra-la or the Ea. Hermes surely saw that inevitability to have asked the question. It may have gotten to a point where the frequency of needing to put down more and more creations had been increasing because of this creative decline. Hythlodaeus talks about sharks being created with one arm or leg and various combinations. Obviously all of these creations wouldn't be viable and would need to be unmade. Would he have done the same if we hadn't told him about the future? He was coming to the conclusion that creativity was stagnating. He is probably having to kill more creations than cultivating. We tell him that the world is ending, twice. He finds out there is no life left in the universe. The closest thing to a child that he has is telling him that they all suffered in one way or another and life is meaningless. Now looking at her colorless face, devoid of her smile, what meaning could there be in life? Personally, I'm of the opinion that had Hermes not stopped us. If Meteion had been taken back with Emet-Selch, we wouldn't have been able to stop the Endsinger. Because by that point, the Meteia had already networked together and the Endsinger was created. Individual consciousness was suspended and the new hive mind was in control. If Meteion was taken back she probably would have been destroyed or sundered, but ultimately not survived. But by having her leave we were able to appeal to her in Ultima Thule. Thus fulfilling Hermes's test on whether we are fit to exist.
just like you think of the creature that was killed as nothing, I think he saw everyone else as nothing because to him they are the same. He sees himself as an outcast not one of them, so if that what they want him to be like then why not do the same to them but he give them a chance to change the out come because he still cared in the end a little or maybe Meteion held back
A pair of things that, while I agree Hermes' actions and statements do not line up with how he is attempted to be portrayed, he does succeed in a very amusing way to me: He suffers not from empathy but Projection as you said in so many words but also at the same time acts with the very same hubris that he so rails against in a wonderful spot of irony. I honestly wish he were given a different kind of spotlight or maybe that they would have used the Echo better at parts to let us see him maybe start idealistic and then fall into this hubris to explain why someone of his rank would do this or just... Either more time or a retooling of stage dressing or something. He feels like a good opportunity that got swept up in the crunch of the pace we were caught up in and never got a chance to properly breathe
On the basis of being a researcher Hermes failed a crucial part of his experiment with Meteion. He had no control data. One of the "shoulds" that he had done would have been establishing a baseline for the answers from Eitherys.
@@SynodicScribe A sadly all too common occurrence in basically every field, especially scientific ones; once you get to that high position, you've more than likely become convinced of your own brilliance and have trouble remembering you still have much you don't know. I suspect that was part of the point of showing both the bit with the aetherically unbalanced suwana and the bit with the murder happy creature: the former showed that Hermes really was brilliant and capable of seeing things that others missed while the latter showed that he was to confident in his abilities too recognize when he might be wrong despite others telling him how he was wrong.
7:32 I must object to you calling him ‘incompetent’. His plan to subject humanity to an unbiased trial, a plan he came up with incredibly quickly in the middle of a crisis, was nearly executed to perfection. In raw power, he was no match for 3 of the 4 opponents he faced; he did good to only allow 2 to escape.
I like how Endwalker's attempt to make a point about the need to understand the viewpoints of others and cooperate in order to find true happiness. I think it is really cool what they did with Emet, and how they added layers to a man who seemed like the apotheosis of a boomer meme, and showed how he was a soul cursed with endless grief that would truly would do anything at any time, just to preserve all that he loves. And above all else, I love the idea of how the finale of Endwalker, the final victory, is found by our hero making a crying, lonely little girl smile for the first time in what truly was forever. I do not think that Hermes should have been the villain to set this all in motion. I do not think he was introduced anywhere near early enough in the story to make his presence matter in any way. I do not like how his strife was portrayed, and I felt many a time like I could very clearly see the hand of the author moving plot points in order to get us where we needed to go. Personally, I would have preferred the Elpis revelations if: 1. Something like Athena's ascendance was actually what resulted in the fall of the Star. The problem being caused by selfish closed mindedness should at least be flash, or perhaps tied to a character we were already familiar with. Heck, just bust out the heart of Sabik and do a YuGiOh Season 4. Easy enough! 2. Meteion was actually a super young ancient who spend a seemingly endless eternity in confused grief alone at the corner of reality, isolated in fear and paranoia, until it bubbled over, and their creation magicks lashed out at everything around them. Aside from sociopathy, the mind of a child, which is unable so understand many of the incredible complexities we grapple with in our maturity, is another great example of having to temper your wants and views for the sake of others, when the person in question is generally incapable of keeping up with you. 3. The problem is solved by using Venat's gem to summon Inspector Hildebrand Manderville to make her feel better and fix everything. 4. Zenos does the Manderville mambo for all eternity after his defeat as penance for his crimes.
gonna hear you out, but Hermes is literally my favorite antagonist in the entire game and felt incredibly well done to me. edit: aaaand nope. only made it 5 minutes in before I considered your takes to be so weapons-grade bad it wasn't worth my time anymore.
Everyone is so quick to forgive and sympathize with Hermes and forget that his actions caused countless genocides. He feels so bad for the creation drafts but none for all the civilizations throughout the universe? And for what? Cause he was sad? It definitely felt like they put the MSQ on hold to have the Hermes and Meteion show. And they put the two of them on the end card assuming I cared for them?
The first time we meet Hermes in Elypis is at the tasting ground he oversees in his role as creating new life.before taking the seat of Fandaniel which as close as I can find has something to do with over seeing he entire process. Here he sits in paradise finding flaws with the very process of life itself. Hermes was worshiped in ancient times as both the god of healing and the death (Thoth) .Fandaniel dragging Amon away. I thought Hermes worked out well .
Well he is empathetic but he values the worth and opinion of EVERY Species, not just humans, he technically empathizes with the humans in an Gods vs. Humans scenario. Remember, his species was playing god for hundreds if not thousands of years if not even more, and often purely for fun just to all of a sudden kill them if they grew bored or disliked them. A good person or a good deed is always a thing of perspective, for the asciens his defend of meteon definitely wasn't or maybe even was for them but also just foolish but for any point of view of the victim, at least the theoretical revenge seeking once it was. He did exactly to the dot what his species did to so so many others, test their fitness to survive. He didn't flip a Killswitch to "destroy" humanity. He gave his own species a chance and forced them at the same time to prove that they themselves uphold the values and Requirements they put as minimum requirement to even allow to live
I agree totally. Once he became the focus, the story seemed to lull and the excitement for a conclusion fell flat. I loved the history of the Asceans and what led to the final days, but feel they could have improved his character by playing him off more selfish, almost a lawful evil character with the thought "nothing is perfect and doesn't deserve to exist." They touched on the experiments and how quickly they'd destroy failed ones and start again. Make it so that each star was an experiment, failed ones would die on their own or by an End of Days event, then they would start anew. A rebirth cycle for better or worse until a star proved worthy. Maybe even go further where those who "make it" are then given the "gift" of being "cleansed of sin" (killed anyways) and "allowed" to move into the aether where their souls would live forever. It'd be a direct correlation the Garleans and how they subjugated others to be their low ranks, rarely to move up but still be part of society. The cleansed would essentially be faux-Asceans, never the same but brought in to the society to live eternally because they "completed their work," similar to what the original Fandaniel did, but just without the choice to do so.
I think the point of the character of Hermes is that even the most empathetic and good-hearted person can deal a lot of damage, when left alone and without support in the face of traumatic events. Their trauma becomes so big that they just can't function anymore. We saw this with Nidhogg, Fordola and Yotsuyu, even Emet-selch. It's the reason why the Final Days happened. The main moral teaching that FF14 offers is that anyone can become a villain, in the worst situation. Being good requires effort, energy and the humilty necessary to stop and change, when becoming aware of their situation. Most of people out there simply refuse to get help out of habit, pride of whatever.
I had people like this in my life, dealing with crippling clinical depression and disability, so yeah. Endwalker was personally very impactful for me.
It is a good point that Hermes' expected role is clear, and in principle it's a unique, interesting and strong message to convey ("that even the most empathetic and good-hearted person can deal a lot of damage"). Personally, I felt like there were some missing steps (which I have associated more with Meteion), because I never felt that convinced that Hermes' honest curiosity would lead to Meteion down a path where she concludes that she must extinguish all life. All because she had been posed a question to which there was no obvious answer. Why could she not have returned saying "I don't know"? Why instead did she conclude that she must *personally* end all life?
I think Meteion's *expected* role was also clear. She was *somehow* meant to conclude that life is meaningless because it is transient. There is no clear destination to life, no clear state where one achieves maximal or stable happiness. She was then somehow *also* meant to conclude that death is the best state for all life. But I don't think Hermes' question about what the meaning of life is takes her all the way to this conclusion. It is a bit like saying that every Nihilist must inevitably conclude that life is pointless and the solution is death. That's not true. For example, one can interpret that the lack of an obvious *intrinsic* value to life does not prevent one from *creating* their own, personal value. This value may not be shared by everyone, and so it is not universal, but that doesn't make it any less important. Indeed, this view is precisely how the Scions, and we the player character, respond to the Endsinger. One can even go further to say that a Nihilist position actually suggests an incredible freedom - we are free to make of life in whatever way we choose, and this is how you get Existentialism.
TL;DR - I understand where the writers were going with Hermes and Meteion, but personally felt some steps were missing to really make the characters watertight.
@@paradoxicaldragon The issue is Hermes, when programming them, didn't program "I don't know" as a valid conclusion, which returns to the point of him skipping the peer review part where someone WOULD have told him, "Hey, this line of code/reasoning you've written is going to end badly" especially since he is designing a being to try and answer a question most all humans still struggle to form an answer to...so without "I don't know" as a valid failsafe in its mind, it jumped to the rogue AI conclusion of all life is meaningless.
It's similar to Skynet or Ultron but perhaps closer to Clu from Tron: Legacy. It can even include the MCP from the original. Both are doing exactly what they were programmed to do. The MCP just saw the government as another corporation cause it hadn't been programmed to know the difference, and Clu was perhaps the closest to Meteion because he was given an impossible goal because, by Flynn's own admission, he didn't know better at the time when he created Clu.
EXACTLY THANK YOU
You are supposed to hate and despise him. The front of him being a sadboy pity party is not supposed to last past the first fleeting moments of meeting him.
Hermes sin is very fitting of his name, his obsession with the message "what is the meaning of life?" was his downfall. His lack of understanding and his need to answer it was obsessive and thus shut out everything else, including help from others.
It didn't help that most people that got the forum seats were very emotionally unavailable people: look at how long it took Emet to come around or Lahabrea. So the greatest flaw of their society was doing everything so by the book and only caring about the star's wellbeing and not their own.
This shows in the final days how suddenly they cared little for the star and only to return to life before the calamity. This resulted in them pretending to care about the star's interest of solving the final days and instead hiding from the problem.
Meteion was an AMAZING character. She showed the possible flaw of creating intelligent life and failing to guide it properly. This resulted into her falling into despair due to finding life dead, causing death, or misunderstandings that led to all her sisters combining into this dynamis beast.
Hermes then came to the conclusion that the heartless nature of all of these civilizations deserved to pay penance which would be an eternal death, life never springing forth again, a kind of super hell or void.
Meteion knew this info who break his fragile mind which is why the one we were with ran away with the info to hide it from Hermes and not break him. Due to Hermes obsession with the answer, he believed that Ethyris and all the other planets deserved their fate for how cruel we were, passing judgement from essentially insanity.
Thusly he breaks down and tries to help the last meteion escape.
This obsession shows as his time as Fandaniel when he tries downright evil experiments under Allag's time. Ultimately his obsession and his answer loses to ours and thusly he realizes that he fucked up all those years ago. So the idea that maybe, with some therapy and some help, he could have been someone better is possible, but I do agree having him in the end screenshot was kinda weak...
Meteion deserves our love, after being driven to madness, escaping the rule of her sisters and being the spark of hope for them because of us, she ends up showing the importance of showing hope when things look most bleak. She is someone, that was abused, and yet came out clean on the other side, shining brightly despite what she had been through. A redemption of sorts. Thanks to her area, we being to bring some species back to life via Dynamis and help bring hope to hopeless creatures.
Hermes was more a mirror to Meteion, while he gave into despair, she gave way to hope, which is why she ended up the victor, she found the answer and he didn't. Do I think it could have been done better? Maybe, but we already knew that something bigger was out there from previous expansions, we just didn't know what it was that was the villain.
Can't wait to see where they go from here.
I still thought this was a great expansion, definitely loved the story 9/10.
A counter: If you do the side quests in Elpis, you find that they're *all* unsure, they're *all* anxious - that's why the blooms are white, which Hermes mistakes for contentment. But the blooms are the same color when the gleaners are anxiously working around Labyrinthos.
No, Hermes isn't the only one asking those questions. But he, like everyone else, is not *asking them of anyone else*. But his position as head of Elpis, and the ability to go around the peer review process, made all the difference.
Reminds me of the side quest where you explain memorial services to the Elpis workers. The Ancients had a very different understanding of death since they were not affected often by it.
Exactly, going around doing the side quests shows that a ton of his coworkers share his stance and concerns towards their creations, but he crowns himself to the pedestal of "only I feel this way, woe is me" to stand on and then completely falls apart as a result
Wonder how he'd turn out if he actually spoke with someone, anyone, instead of what we got
This really comes through int he short story as well. People did want to help him, but he very much isolated himself. The side quests really highlights that they are all human, too, and all have worries and questions. I also feel a sense that he doesn't like be disagreed with? Since he basically skipped peer review because he wanted to do things his way and that his way is better, when like any societal issues, it's a lot more complicated that deeper than meets the eyes.
@@kuronaialtani I don't think that necessarily presents much of an indictment of Hermes and more of Ancient society and how people felt reluctant to even air their worries in a meaningful way. "I don't think it's right, but I'll just keep quiet about it because I don't want to rock the boat." You're right though that he should've sought out people who felt similarly so that he at least didn't feel so isolated, but it doesn't resolve the issue of how society itself felt constricting to the point that people would rather just ignore their own concerns altogether. At best, they'd just become a congregation of "disgruntled Amaurotines." And we kind of saw how that went with Venat and her cohorts. A small selection of individuals who also didn't want to comply with the state of things (albeit that was more driven by the Final Days and Zodiark) and whose discomfort with the situation fell on deaf ears until they seemingly felt forced towards drastic measures.
But yes, it's good that this nuance exists, rather than this pretend-wonderland that only Hermes and Venat detested. Alas, those pesky facts often elude Amaurot enthusiasts.
wait that's a brilliant point. the ones in Labrynthos were white. Of course!
As much as I agree with your thoughts on Hermes, I do believe that we have opposite opinions on Meteion... for one specific reason: Meteion actually tried to stop the tragedy that her sisters were going to create. She failed, because what is one voice in a thousand going to do, but she put forth an effort that Hermes never did.
One thing that makes it worse is that the Meteion collective were effectively a group of AI sent into space to find out a meaning of life given flawed instructions by an idiot that should have known better but either didn't or chose to ignore good sense. Furthermore, where Hermes doubled down in both his life and his future incarnation, Meteion at least seems like she's trying to rebuild as a form of penance. I hope Hermes stays dead - it's the best thing that could happen for his character. I hope we see Meteion's efforts to rebuild the universe that she wrecked.
Yeah, people always seem to miss how whenever "our" Meteion is herself she tries to stop the bad stuff. In Elpis she runs away and tries to hide because she knows how hearing the report will break Hermes. After that she gets subsumed by the hivemind, then the moment we break her out of it she's back to trying to convince the rest to stop.
@@Enixon869 I believe she actually shows up again at the end of the Dead Ends dungeon as the little blue Starbird who's trying to stop the Endsinger and make her listen.
I also disagree with his assessment on Meteion. Also let's not forget that Meteion(as a species) was created to be the physical embodiment of empathy. Meaning they feel the exact feelings that others do. Not only that they are a collective consciousness. Basically "our Meteion had to break free from the hivemind to even try to stop these things. I think characters like Meteion are very interesting. The glory of the FFXIV story is everything can be interpreted different ways
It's funny that the very thing Amon and Fandaniel/Asahi wanted most--oblivion--was the one thing Hermes could have had right away. He would have been the first "not born anymore" soul she stuffed into her nest, but like a coward, he not only refused her "gift" but made himself and the witnesses forget that his experiment exploded so spectacularly in his face. Or that it, in its extremely broken state, is coming back around to judge not only us, but the entire universe and find us lacking based on a foregone conclusion that we are not worthy.
Hermes can come back, but like, only as a chocobo or something. Let him spend a couple thousand lifetimes eating lettuce until he gets his head on straight.
And I'll be honest, Hermes all but FORCED her to continue the download of her sisters' reports which was... sick. Like she is legit crying for him to press the abort button and he's like "No no I want to hear MORE!" while she is in agony, it was when he went off the deep end at that moment that he lost ALL sympathy...yes he had problems, but your creation that you swore up and down you cared about (to the degree that exceeded the norm for your society) is in mental pain because of what she is getting back from her sisters...and you're being a selfish p-k cause you want "answers".
Meteion was made to fail. The directive given forth by Hermes and the mental instability of him made her quest nearly impossible to not have fail
Emet literally says as much. Hermes did not take the worst possible edge cases into account, which is why he failed. To have an answer to "what meaning do you find in life," the people have to actually want to live and enjoy it. I do hope in the future Meteion finds worlds that are still going strong.
@@ApexGale I doubt Meteion will find any world besides our own that still thrives with life. Midgardsrmr tried looking for other places to settle down and found nothing, literally calling our star "the last bastion of hope". Maybe he didn't search as far and wide as Meteion, but Meteion was responsible for snuffing out life wherever she could find it, once her report was concluded. And she had 10 millenia to do it.
@@GhalanSmokeScale Midgardsormr was focused on finding a safe place for his clutch of eggs, he didn't have nearly as much time to search. The entire theme of Endwalker is "hope." That's literally what Elpis is (the greek word for hope). Meteion restored represents that hope that all is not lost. "After all, miracles happen every day, do they not?"
Maybe she won't find sentient life, but that's not to say she can't find a planet lush with plantlife or with animals. That is still life.
@@ApexGalenot only that, but she also pretty clearly states that while she was still capable of it her song of hope was meant to revitalize the universe that her and her sister nearly snuffed out. Recognizing that they can’t make up for the lives they have stolen, but can at least foster a seed for new life to spring forth
Add on the fact that since Hermes refused peer review most of the behavior the Meteions modeled and learned was from a guy who was a closet nihilist...of course when faced with a dead end with no off-ramp in her thought process to account for failure she came to the conclusion her creator would.
I disagree about Hermes' characterization and that he was rushed. While I also don't like that one person could cause so much strife in FFXIV (see also: Hydaelyn) I think the whole point of Endwalker is that people need community and connections to not give into despair and my perspective is that Hermes didn't feel that he could open up to people and discuss what he felt was wrong. This caused him to isolate himself, which then resulted in him creating another being that could empathize with him because he couldn't find that in other people.
Not sure if I missed a key point of the plot but I don't remember the creatures in Elpis being akin to bots, as you said? To me, the scene where he mourns that creature demonstrated that he basically shouldn't be working in Elpis since he's a doctor who's very uncomfortable with the idea of euthanasia. Either way, he viewed them as living creatures deserving of their own inherent right to live but this line of thinking made him eccentric to others and so he closed himself off when he didn't find understanding in others.
Imo, the story wants you to consider how that type of isolation can fester into something like hatred or anger (especially at what you could perceive as injustice) and then eventually the nihilism we see in Fandaniel. Personally, I read Hermes as an examination of a person living in a society with no mental health care or friends. I think Hermes could've chosen differently had he been able to open up to someone and basically get therapy. I don't think he would've chosen to doom the world if he had people that he actually loved living in it.
You articulated what I had trouble doing. This is how I felt. I've been low before. And when that wears on you it can actually manifest even in kind people in terrible ways.
Yeah, calling the creatures of Elphis no better than just... strings of code just sets off alarum bells of a different sort. We know these are proper creatures, hell we've seen their spawn in the 8th Astral Era after they were sundered just like the rest of us. I do agree with the idea that Hermes was feeling too much sympathy in the situation (the beasts were basically rabid if I understand it correctly) but it's still a living animal, it's almost literally the same sorta situation with the Hecatonkerie in Copperbell for heck's sake just with a slightly less sentient entity.
@@gratuitouslurking8610 I'm 100% on board with you on this. I'm honestly surprised to hear that anyone has this take, since the whole conflict with Emet-Selch in ShB was us proving our right to exist to someone who didn't even see us as real people. What we are now in the sundered world is the exact same thing that Hermes felt guilty over destroying out of hand. He was definitely in the wrong job, but like... Did we learn nothing from Hades?
You wrote my exact thoughts in a manner far better than I would of stood any chance at doing. The part when he spoke about the beast as a bot, kinda made me feel like he might of missed the plot or perhaps he had already formed an opinion of the character in his head that wouldn't allow him to see any other way. BUT that's Synodic's right to do so. And to me, yes Herm-dizzle isn't the best character but he certainly not the worst. (Mind you I'm sort of partial to post-stormblood Zenos, so I may have some screws loose myself).
@Boxkar24 I think everyone is. There's a great video on Zenos, and it also cottoned on to an important point. Zenos is like if you set up Game of Thrones and put Michael Myers on the throne. He actually doesn't fit or express the themes of Stomblood quite well enough. Also, the game did little to build him up as a threat that could rival us ahead of time. He didn't fit in Stormblood. He does in endwalker
I have to disagree with the perception that the Elpis creations are akin to AI bots or “not real”. Even if that is an accepted norm in the ancient society. This way of thinking is what led Emet to attempt the rejoining - the fact the lesser imperfect beings (including the sundered souls) are not “alive”. By your logic, Emet should have gone ahead with the rejoining without being stopped. What Hermes saw in the creations was their potential. They did not ask to be created, yet by the hands of their creators they were handed judgement with no control over their own fate. I think Hermes despised that they get to control life at a whim without considering the harsh reality faced by their creations. This resonated with the story of SHB where the wol proved their resolve to Emet that even as a sundered, incomplete, and “lesser” being, we can still be worthy enough to be entrusted with the burden of taking care of our star and our future. I think this was what Hermes wanted for all the creations in Elpis too.
I also feel that you misunderstood the MSQ. I didn't feel that it was trying to make us forgive him. I felt that it was trying to make us understand him. How a person could find despair in what is supposedly a paradise and how that could spiral into something that exposed the flaws in the Ancients society. Because it was flawed, deeply. It's why Venat split the world into its shards. It's why we saw the dead ends and a society like the Ancients choosing to commit mass suicide due to essentially feeling listless and disconnected from life.
Hermes answer was to give up.
Venat's answer was to plunge people and it's existence into one that has strife and despair nipping at its heels constantly. So that we may learn to overcome that despair.
Athena's answer was to hit the reset button and remake life to improve it. Athena essentially was the most extreme form of the Ancient's perspective on Elpis. She just happened to include the Ancients themselves in the process of experimentation and improvement.
Framing beats narrative. Sure, maybe that is what the story is trying to tell us. But the fact that they gave Hermes two very long death speeches? That he appears in the endcard with all of the Scions and the most important Ancient characters? Clearly the game wants you to associate Hermes with all of these characters you have grown to love and care for. I definitely felt that the game was trying to make us like him. I would have loved it if there was an option to not be kind to Amon as he faded away and in the final end card, Hermes did not appear on it.
@@invaderzam Yep. Additionally I've seen a lot of Japanese media with the "anyone can be forgiven" trope no matter how bad their atrocities.
@@Scerttle Similar to how the Japanese handled their atrocities in WW2. Japan's indifferent attitude towards their actions during WW2 stems from their belief that they can be forgiven under the notion that 'anyone can be forgiven'.
I don't share a lot of your thoughts and feelings on Hermes. But I really like your analysis of him! In the end he did in fact make a lot of selfish and horrific decisions born of his own disillusion with life. I feel for him, but in the same way I feel for a rabid animal. His circumstances may be tragic and he may be a broken person that simply couldn't handle the knowledge he received, but that shouldn't stop any of us from seeing he needs to be put down for the safety of others.
One thing I wanted to address first. Hermes wasn't mourning a soulless being. When the ancients create something that follows the rules of nature it gets a soul. You can tell from the way he's talking to it when he tells it to hate them if it wants to and live again if it wants to, that it will have a continued existence after death. The ancients have no problem killing beings with souls if they believe that's what in the best interest of the star.
I didn't feel Hermes was rushed at all and we learned everything we needed to know about him for him to be the antagonist of Endwalker. Shadowbringers sets up the question of who deserves to inherit Etheirys, the ancients or us. Emet-Selch argues the ancients were superior and therefore they are the ones who deserve to live. Hydaelyn argues that we are superior and therefore deserve to inherit the star. Hermes is the administrator of the test to settle the matter once and for all. He is playing by the exact same rules as the rest of his people, so if you hate him, you have to hate Emet-Selch and Venat too. They are all gods playing with lives as they see fit.
Also, when it becomes clear that Meteion is responsible for the final days, Hermes has to choose between protecting his daughters and letting his people slaughter them for the good of the star. It's already very clear he takes issue with murdering beings for the good of the star, so obviously the child he created with his own two hands he would not easily turn over to die. I think for a lot of parents if their kid suddenly turned evil and the state wanted to put them down they'd be like "fuck morality" and protect their kid. Human beings are just selfish that way. We tend to protect our own over the greater good. Meteion isn't simply an AI program. She has thoughts, dreams, desires, hopes. She's a person by every metric we have to measure personhood. Hermes wanted a fair contest rather than the ancients using their overwhelming power to put down his kids like some failed experiment.
What was more important to understand during the Elpis part was the ancient way of thinking. About the way they viewed life, purpose and their entitlements. It explains why out of the ancients we meet, only one of them (Hythlodaeus), hasn't committed genocide. They come from a society where death is no big deal so killing millions of people to reach the desired outcome isn't as horrendous to them as it is to us.
When Emet-Selch is giving the speech about how ancients are better because half their number were willing to sacrifice themselves for the other half I couldn't help but think, "we would have come up with a better plan." Necessity is the mother of invention. Because these were gods who had only known paradise, they were incapable of coming up with a plan better than making themselves a big strong daddy that ran off of human sacrifice.
Endwalker wasn't about Hermes, it was about human nature. It gave us a glimpse of what we might become if suffering wasn't part of the human experience -- weak and blind to the suffering of others.
This needs to be upvoted harder. You really hit the nail on the head.
Absolutely agree with this.
THANK YOU. At least in certain parts of the fandom, there is very much an uncritical, "take everything at face value" view of the ancients, which is a bit of a problem because, YES, their society does look like a paradise at first glance. But one of the biggest points of the Hermes arc, as well as other glimpses we've seen of it from, say, Emet, show that they had a Serious case of noblesse oblige towards both the star and anything they created. And perhaps some of that was deserved, but at the same time, they were going around and killing creatures with souls just because they didn't fit some grand purpose that they were supposed to. Switch it from animals to people (which is not a leap, considering how willing the ascians are to commit murder on a massive scale), and it gets very ugly, very quickly.
Hermes' curiosity is what caused his downfall and that of the ancients, yes, but if the society that he had lived in had been better and more empathetic, would he have been driven to create Meteion? Probably not. The end days, and especially the way that they were handled, are an indictment against the ancients as a whole, not just Hermes.
You cannot compare a parent protecting their child to Hermes protecting Meteion. A parent does not control many aspects about their child. A parent doesn't control their personality, their interests, any illnesses they may have inherited. Hermes literally created everything about Meteion. And rather than realizing that there mistakes in how she was made and the kind thing to do was to unmake the poor thing, Hermes doubles down. Also, if Endwalker wasn't about Hermes, why do we fight him three times? Why did he get two extremely drawn out death scenes? Hermes was intended to be one of the main figures of Endwalker.
@@invaderzamParents create children, both in the biological sense and in how the child is raised, and I don't see how Hermes shouldn't love Meteion as a child simply because he had access to her character creation screen as well. Soul or not, she is his life's work and wouldn't think rationally to the call to have her destroyed. Many stories have been told on that trope.
Furthermore, his selfishness proves the point that some people feel that the story is trying to tell: humans, even ancients, are imperfect beings and probably shouldn't have access to this level of creation magiks to begin with. "He tampered in God's domain," etc.
My summation of Hermes to a friend is that he tried to have Meteion to answer the Fermi Paradox, but all she found were the collected works of Friedrich Nietzsche.
As a result, he got so embarrassed he committed ALL the atrocities.
HAHAHAHAHA! Mind if I tell that joke to people?
@@SynodicScribe Go ahead.
I think you are missing the key part in his philosophy.
''To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering''
''To live is to suffer'' : This is suppose to refer to the negative aspect of life.
''to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering'' : This is suppose to refer to the positive aspect of life.
A lot of people cannot move past the initial claim his philosophy that life isn't pretty. Friedrich Nietzsche didn't like nihilism. He wanted people to move past it and become strong and know meaning
Let me rephrase that...
A lot of people cannot move past the initial claim her philosophy that life isn't pretty. Venat didn't like nihilism. She wanted people to move past it and become strong and know meaning/happiness.
@@fpqcgaming4770 Oh, I agree. I think the people who’ve actually read and understood Nietzsche can be characterized like a father happily sharing a beer with his son - calmly remarking that sometimes life has no meaning. Or hey, Zenos is probably a better embodiment of actually understanding what nihilism is about - just not in a particularly healthy manner.
@@fpqcgaming4770 Oh don't get me started on how every armchair philosopher thinks Nietzche is "Le god is dead, no morality is real" crap.
I was initially going to put this out as a reply to someone talking about the identities the various people modern Fandaniel has been has held but it's become its own thing and now i have a wall of text that's veered of topic enough to become its own point, i think.
I think if there is any validity in the statement that Hermes is a rush job of a character its because we only got a single zone to get to know him and i think a factor behind this is because Hermes' purpose in the story isn't to be his own character but to be dressing for Amon/modern Fandaniel. We see enough of him to get a little taste of who he is. Why he's unhappy so that we can both see what the ultimate cause of the final days were but also to see a fraction of what caused modern Fandaniel to become who he was.
Hermes had his own issues and Amon had the joyous experience of reliving splinters of them through dreams right up until the point where he joined up with the ascians and was given even more of those memories to chew on. Regardless of having those memories Amon lived a life of his own before accepting those memories, making his own lens by living through his own trials, victories and losses and he interpreted Hermes' memories with that lens. Amon was his own person and probably his own kind of messed up though. I say probably but an interesting distinction that current era Fandaniel makes is that Amon, or at least the Amon who lived during the reign of the Allagan empire is the "old" him and that he had abandoned this old him a long time ago.
He's obviously been doing a fair bit of changing over the thousands of years since the fall of the Allagan empire and it makes me wonder if the line Fandaniel says as he dies, something along the lines of the man i was would weep if they could see the man i've become actually meant Hermes or old Amon. I had initially taken it as being Hermes given the next new zone we go to is elpis and the amount of emphasis that is put on the memories Fandaniel inherited but i don't think it fits his character to dwell on the opinion someone who he inherited his soul from so why would he mourn for Hermes' opinion of him? I think it makes more sense that he was reflecting on his journey, Amon's. It's interesting to see Amon as a bad guy, by the standards of an outsider many thousands of years into his future but also as someone who was trying their best with what they had. its similar to Hermes, i'd say. It's interesting to see him as someone who clearly cared about SOMETHING at some point, as someone who saw the stagnation and rot that was spreading across his civilisation and was disturbed enough by it to do something about it all while being a product of his time and dealing with other people who were themselves products of their time. People who grew purpose built abominations and were utterly callous towards those they didn't view as worthy of empathy. They laughed at the fate of a person they'd subjected to some kind of transformation. I think in that sense Allag is a mirror to Ancient society or at lease Elpis. A difference is that despite being so technologically advanced by modern standards Allag didn't have the capacity or perhaps the inclination to construct a façade that appeared as clean or as beautiful as the ancient world had. To think of modern Fandaniel as falling by the standards of both Hermes who has never belonged to the identity modern Fandaniel built through his lifetime despite them having some impact on that identity simply by being a previous owner of his soul but also by the standards of the literal man he once was as well.
I'd also like to add that despite Modern Fandaniel's attempt to put forward the idea that he is is own person it's clear he has been dwelling on the things Hermes went through
For example the line when we engage Zodiark, the end has come and it will be beautiful comes across as something someone who has been thinking a lot about the problems Hermes had been going through and putting their own spin on it. In a sense modern Fandaniel has turned the thing that haunted Hermes into a kind of punchline. He very clearly enjoys the irony of it and of using Zodiark - the beacon of hope for the ancients as a tool to bring an end to the world. I also wonder if his choice of creating those terrible dark towers as a means of collecting aether has something to do with the irony of turning the crystal tower - a sort of symbol of hope for the survivors after the fall of allag despite the tower's disappearance and something we as viewers of the story understand has been a symbol of hope for the people of the first, though I doubt even as an ascian Fandaniel would be aware of the towers status on other reflections.
bit of a tangent hopefully it makes sense.
ALL. OF. THIS. YES! My exact sentiments too.
Very well put!
I've played through Endwalker twice now (once on my own, once with a girl friend) and my read on Hermes is he absolutely hated the other Ancients. He fundamentally despised his own people. When Meteion's sisters brought back the reality that, per their findings, not a single other planet was thriving or even simply surviving, Hermes was sharply cut off from what he wanted most: Proof that the way the Ancients were doing things was wrong. Any evidence that the paradise of pre-Final Days Etheryis wasn't as perfect and flawless as the other Ancients would have you believe. Lacking the validation that he so desperately craved, he broke and fell sharply into the "burn it all down" mentality.
I feel like we've all been there, albeit not to Hermes' extreme. That bitterness when you're truly at rock bottom that you just either want someone else to hurt like you do, or the "proof" that whatever it is you've focused your negativity on is really as bad as your emotional state has convinced you it is. That was Hermes to a T.
He disagreed with how the Ancients did things - and whether he was right or wrong is wholly irrelevant in this argument - and because of that he wanted to prove that they weren't doing things right. But when Meteion was like "yup, every other planet is dead, Etheryis is it" he realized that validation was impossible so when Meteion presented him with the option to destroy the source of his woes, he did.
This is made more frustrating because Etheryis was not some flawless bastion of pure bliss. It was a world that knew peace and plenty, but still had plenty of hardship, anxiety and stress to keep it from being a mythical paradise entirely. He just hated everyone around him so much that he couldn't reach out to learn that the validation he needed was literally right next door.
Remember kids: looking for external validation is setting yourself up for disappointment!
I don't think looking for external validation is wrong in itself. There's no shame into being praised.
But, being completely addicted to it and/or excessively relying on it is the wrong thing. There's shame into asking to be praised.
I would argue something slightly different. To an extent, you are correct. However, you should have highlighted the difference of defining yourself on external validation, (which is textbook narcissism), and just doing a good job at something.
Validation as a whole is not bad, as long as you don’t use it to define yourself.
@@siobahnhurley85 Agreed. And I do not feel like I generalized my statement; I did say "looking" for {external} validation.
If you get praise, cool! But if you don't get any that's fine too, because the only measure of worth that truly sticks is your own. Medicine and compliments won't cure depression, but lifestyle and mindset can treat it.
I agree with your observation- to me, Hermes' biggest sin is that he tried to find the answer only by *himself*. I can sympathize with him falling into despair and sorrow, but that he came to such a conclusion and then deciding that it must apply to *everyone* else is a catastrophic mistake on his part as a person and a researcher. (I mean hello? Peer reviews are a thing!)
But in that sense I get why he was needed in the story thematically, and I liked how our time in Elpis really highlighted *why* the Ancients were doomed to fail. Each of them displayed unchecked levels of hubris to varying degrees whether it's as innocuous as believing that paradise would last forever, to full-blown god-complexes like with Athena. If not Hermes, some other random Ancient was bound to damn the world sooner or later with all the crazy things they were doing.
I think Yoshi-P talked about it in a PLL, but even with someone as benevolent as Venat, she was bold enough to proclaim for all of humanity that they would "walk" henceforth. That kind of decision isn't one a mortal would even think to make.
Which, again back to Hermes, IMO puts him as the perfect foil for us with the themes they were trying to tell in Endwalker. It's the mortal races of Etheirys, and by extension us, who laughed, suffered, and were there for each other's sorrows that saved the planet. The best response to the question had always been to "answer together" all along.
I don't understand this point about ''peer review''. What on earth does that have to do with anything? As if peer review will somehow convince someone that their thoughts and feelings are misguided in some way?
I meant with his findings and the conclusion he took from Meteon's report specifically, but maybe I wasn't clear on that. His thoughts and feelings are another matter completely, but him taking Meteon's report and concluding that "yeah, civilizations are doomed to fail and nothing has meaning" is empirically true without discussing his findings with fellow researchers seems like a failure on his part. Especially considering how he didn't even stop to consider that his actions might just doom everyone.
@@Al-ji4gd peer review is relevant, because it would have pointed out all the DEEP, FUNDAMENTAL FLAWS in Meteion's design, mission and the question she was given.
Hades, within seconds of learning the question posed to Meteion, was able to point out a crippling error in it.
@@raseaces What could his fellow researchers do or say to prove him wrong, though? Absolutely nothing.
@@draochvar9646 That's just Hades' opinion, nothing more.
Ngl, I feel more pity for Meteion than Hermes. Meteion was used as a tool to ask a question that never had an answer to begin with as the meaning of life is subjective and is always different to everyone.
I don't know if I'd say the creations of the Ancients aren't alive; we see far too many non-standard lifeforms in XIV to just write them off entirely, and I would say Meteion is most definitely a living creature. More to the point, though, I would say the red flag of the scene with Hermes and the lykaon (or whatever it was called) for me was the fact that he spends so much time mourning the beast, but not the various creatures that it killed in the process!
And then there's the fact that not only does he choose himself over the universe, as you put it, but he tells Meteion to nest at the edge of the universe and tells her point blank that he intends to *fight against her.* Hermes knows better than anyone how Meteion works and how her mental state defines who she is. And he chooses to abandon her in a period where she needs consolation as much as he does, with the knowledge that he intends to raise forces to fight against her if he ever re-learns of her existence. And people in-game (or Omega at least) try to suggest that maybe he was right to do what he did!?
At the very least, before swearing him into the Convocation, whether they remembered him or not, Emet-Selch and Hythlodaeus should have at least presented him with the Trolley Problem...
There's something out of the Hermes debacle that definitely hit a chord with me, and that's part of the flaws of the ancients the story was trying to tell. The problem begins when the hubris and self importance of the ancients giving rise to cataclysmic consequence is a plot point carried exclusively by a single character. I think it would carry more weight and make more sense if Hermes was, perhaps, part of a group that was collectively dissatisfied with the ancients' self righteousness and playing god, and made Meteion and her sisters together as a symptom of that society's hidden flaws. The glimpse into the flaws of a society that believes it should decide what creatures should live and die across the entire world, as though their lives were leaves to be pruned on a bonsai, should never have been carried solely by a single character and their own sins, as it greatly diminishes the point by making it only *their* problem, and not a truely widely acknowledged one.
Except I don't see it as being carried by a single character, afterall he makes valid arguments with Emet about his discomfort with how their society is run and despite what Emet said in Shadowbringers about them being a society built on reasonable debate and listening to their fellow Ancients he is quick to shoot down any of Hermes legitimate complaints and concerns without a care because Hermes is an outlier that that society wasn't built for nor cared to consider
I think it's the main point that was missed in the video. why would hermes put his own desires ahead of society and the whole universe? Well it's because he's an outlier, the oddball. Perfect societies, like the ancient's, aren't very kind to the imperfect. if the universe doesn't care for him then why should he care for the universe.
i can't help think of that saying...if a child doesn't feel the warmth of the village then he'll warm himself by burning the village down
But his goal wasn't to destroy the universe or the world. He had the understanding of a child when it came to danger. The big bad thing he did was "talking to strangers without permission" and since his species had never experienced a kind of hardship they couldn't easily handle it would have never occurred to them how bad such a thing could go. Once he was aware of exactly how bad things would go, he was faced with a choice between letting the state execute his children or protecting his children regardless of what might happen. That is a very personal decision. I don't see how turning Hermes into a group better justifies what he did.
@@insertcognomen Which is exactly why Emet and friends had several discussions with him on the matter, aided in his breaking of Elpis protocol to protect at least 2 concepts which were supposed to be terminated, and - in the memory modified sequence of events, still gave him the job, even after the heavy grief of Meteion's (supposed) death on top of everything else. They just simply didn't care. It is so strange that the story is trying to make a point about how uncaring the Ancients supposedly were, and then try to convey it using a cast of some of the most empathetic, or at the very least caring, characters they had available. Heck, Emet and Hythlodaeus are both very scrutinous, and can see souls, so making them the interviewers on this matter actually makes the argument way worse.
But I digress. I think the ultimate point of the video hinged on one major point about the writing, that it wanted you to sympathize with Hermes plight - at the very least because that is how the writing seems to frame it. The problem is that comes off as a bit of a narrow-minded prick and a daydreamer, and doesn't do much to endear himself in any particular way. But even that aside, the ancient world was one where debates could be considered an Olympic sport, and you're telling me he couldn't find a single pen pal to chat with over this? More importantly, he might be an "oddball," but his "oddity" saw him single-handedly sentence reality itself to a collapse in a spiral of its own agony and despair, just so he could prove his nihilistic viewpoint correct... and he was wrong anyways. I think this time I can accept that society was probably better off without that one :\
to the point, I definitely agree that a society that runs on debates and reason whole heartedly should have a flourish of minds that think alike and hopefully a just and fair society. But if we take historical contexts, a lot of these societies still discriminated and disenfranchised a mass group of people.
I think that’s why it was such a nuanced look in SHB when emet compared his civilization as essentially a utopia. But even then, even when they could sacrifice themselves willingly for the greater good, there was still pushback. A very conformist society would no doubt shun and disenfranchise those that don’t conform.
Hermes did his best to try, and I see him as a person with severe and chronic depression in a society that doesn’t address or is grossly ill equipped to deal with it. And the tragedy was because his thoughts and feelings were silenced he made a very neglectful decision which unintentionally caused the destruction of his whole civilization. Big L. But yeah you can have a society polite people who still turn a deaf ear to your issues. I think in the msq we see a lot people who act like that towards Hermes. “Oh he’s great man, but he’s so quiet and sometimes distant, oh well.” “Oh Hermes you’re so silly for thinking those things.” Like it’s clear that his feelings on creation were foreign and his colleagues didn’t much care to understand his thoughts, which caused a troubled man to spiral.
Weirdly enough I liked that Hermes wasn't important until endwalker. He's a just a man. There's no way for us to have known about him before endwalker and we (hopefully) won't hear from him again after. He's just a guy who made some bad decisions (understatement I know). I know this is just my preference but There are other reasons that I like Hermes.
I disagree that he is not empathetic. If you have seen the movie Ex Machina, people can absolutely feel empathy for non-living things. Hermes has had to live through the turing test every day since he started working in Elpis. Over time that is gonna start to mess with someone's mind. Is it any wonder that he was unstable? Over and over again he had to destroy these creatures that he thought could be alive until he learned from Meteion that there was essentially no future. Imagine playing a game that has no good ending. You are told from the beginning that you will not win, it is impossible. What is your response then? Do you play the game and lose, or turn off the game? Either way there's no good outcome. Hermes is an unstable man who got caught up in the mother of all existential crisis.
Although his actions lead to every other bad thing to happen, that doesn't mean they are his fault. Emet-Selch doing basically all of shadowbringers? Those were still his decisions. Lahabrea tricking Gaius with the ultima weapon? Lahabrea's fault. The Garleans doing pretty much anything they do? The Ascians fault. Hermes had no hand in anything else that happened until he was Fandaniel in endwalker. So while he was technically responsible for the whole plot, only the final days were directly his fault.
I listened to this one the way back home and I spent the entire drive thinking about how to react to this because I have some HARD disagrees. I settled for a simple comment.
1) The aspect of presence
What I agree on is that Hermes' limited presence in the MSQ and other related content is a bit of a waste of the format. The format being a story-driven MMO with then 9 years under its belt. It could've been much more. However, Hermes exists in a contained space that is believably explained: Noone knew he was the root cause of anything and he would only be known as Fandaniel, who was one of the shattered Ascians and thus never truiy at the peak of his power, let alone knowledge... since he forgot everything thanks to Kairos. It's a bit of a cop-out, as I agreed, but I don't think it cheapens his part in the story. Sometimes great impact can be made by small roles.
2) The aspect of empathy
Your entire argument hinges on omitting context. You describe the beasts Hermes empathizes with metaphorically as "Artificial Intelligence" devoid of a right to exist independent from the whims of the Ancients. That is exactly the thinking the Ancients have. In all of Elpis, in the bits the MSQ shines light on as well as side quests and NPC conversations you get confronted again and again and again with the fact that the Ancients think absolutely nothing of their creations. They're like LEGO toys to them, to be created, changed and destroyed on a whim. Their merit comes from the prestige they bring their creator, which in turn hinges on their subjective "coolness/beauty" and their objective role in the ecosystem. The creatures have no agency.
They even do this to YOU, the Warrior of Light. Since you run around under the guise of being a familiar, something they created, several Ancients comment on various aspects of how you, as a mere tool, are surprisingly sophisticated and strong. I vaguely remember one even talking about taking you apart to study you. A clearly sentient, thinking being and you're still just a tool/toy.
Hermes questions this entire system, this way of thinking. He knows the creatures they create have thoughts and feelings, even though they technically lack a soul (as we know, a soul isn't necessary to create something that is technically alive, albeit less so than a "besouled" being (the whole Athena shtick)) and mourns for their pitiless role in the society of the Ancients. He has valid reason to think and feel this way. He think about it on a philosophical level. His role in Elpis is so high up, so abstract that he witnesses this cruel system from a bird's eye view (pun intended) and just can't stomach it anymore. Some of those beings are exceedingly strong and can even kill Ancients (looking at you, Pandaemonium, and your various inmates), which, following the logic of "survival of the fittest" calls the entire dominant position of the Ancients into question. Especially since most Ancients are seemingly entirely incapable of defending themselves when in combat, much like how a real world civilian would be faced with possible (or certain) death when confronted with a lion or even just a decently sized dog.
3) The aspect of Meteion
Meteion was supposed to answer a question that Hermes couldn't discuss with anyone else because noone else felt the way he did. He even commented on it IIRC, saying that his thoughts fell on deaf ears multiple times. So, naive and hopeful that he was, he looked for an answer far far away from Aetherys. Perhaps some other people would know what to do, what "life" really was and where its supposed purpose would lie. A society like the Ancients can't come up with a solution to that. That's the entire point of the story. He would never find an answer with his people. They'd steer towards certain doom like all others.
Though I do agree that he shouldn't have made the decision to make and send the Meteii all on his own.
4) The aspect of interpretation
By the point that it came to acting on the knowledge that Meteion brought, Hermes was already full of despair and anger. He saw himself faced with a hopeless situation: If all other civilizations had failed, his own would hardly make the cut, statistically speaking. Worse still, there was no way he could use Meteion to convince his fellow Ancients that their actions were morally and ethically dubious because there was no precedence and obviously no judge nor jury. He was back to square one. Although Meteion suddenly did become a solution: If all others failed and fell, then it would make perfect sense to submit to the Great Filter and see if his people could pull through... or not. Hythlodaeus said it himself. "One could hardly make it fairer." By erasing everyone's memories and letting Meteion go, Hermes set the stage for a fair judgement. Just how all the creatures they made and killed were subject to the system they were created in, his people would be judged by the universe. Meteion was just a catalyst that would accelerate that process.
5) The aspect of choosing himself over the universe
Just legit don't see that. He literally subjects himself to the same judgement that his entire people would face. In no shape or form is he trying to weasel his way out of anything. All he ever does is try to gain the knowledge to understand the situation and then he does provide for a "fair" trial. That's it. After that his memory is erased and he eventually gets shattered by Hydaelin following the Final Days.
6) The aspect of the MSQ trying to make you empathize with a maniac
Hermes was misguided in his attempt to do the right thing. Nothing he does is ever motivated by evil and the selfishness you propose is something I don't see. I do see his selfishness manifested in impatience, mistrust and perhaps even arrogance (thinking he can solve his predicament on his own) but otherwise I see him as someone selfless, trying to make the lives of others better, namely the creatures the Ancients are creating. So while he is eventually and undoubtedly responsible for immense suffering... he never intended any of it. You also make the claim that he is responsible for the death of world by means of Meteion but you forget that she was witnessing dead and dying civilizations all over the place before she went rogue and caused the death of more, which arguably would have died anyway because that is the point Endwalker is trying to make. The universe in FFXIV is generious in providing its inhabitants with so much plenty that they eventually grow bored of it and would rather kill themselves than live on (one of the more common topics (e.g.the Ea (difficult case but they DID eventually succumb to despair because they had so few problems left that the death of the damn universe was the most pressing matter) and the mask-guys whose name I forgot (who summoned Raya(?))), so it's hard to quantify how many could or would have made it. Going by the narrative, I'd say none.
So while he is to blame and guilty of many crimes, it's hard not to empathize. He just wanted to what he felt was right and his goal was inarguably noble. His means just didn't justify the ends.
that's the thing, his last act was to create suffering, knowingly. he erased the memories of everyone involved so that his people couldnt come up with a plan to survive. if all he wanted was a true 'fair judgement' situation he would have continued his work and let the higher ups start working on how to avoid doomsday:
intelligence is often belittled as 'unnatural' because we're the only ones who have it (in our current understanding of its meaning) and see ourselves non-animals. but intelligence is natural and it is the most powerful tool in nature bar none. by erasing memories Hermes artificially culled the knowledge of what was going to happen, he erased the intel created by investigation and curiosity. thus making the fight inherently unfair, tipping the scales against the ancients in a grossly malicious way. Hermes wasnt just sad or misunderstood. he was a maniac who killed billions on purpose jsut because he was too dumb and too emotional.
how can the great filter be fair if our greatest tool, intelligence in the form of foresight, information gathering and preparedness, is artificially destroyed by some ancient vegan who thinks the life of his literally soul-less dog is as important as the lives of every living being in the universe combined? feeling alone and misunderstood is no excuse. he had the intel of what was happening out there and buried it at the same time he freed the worst weapon in the universe and sicced it towards...everyone.
@@oldmanharley4018 i feel as if they wouldn't have survived regardless. it was noble at first that they sacrificed half of themselves to save the star, but then... they didn't want to survive through any of their destroyed world. they instead resort to sacrificing again to restore it, and then they even changed their minds on that to restore who they lost after that instead of move forward. it seems pretty apparent to me that they would have not survived - it was either paradise or it wasn't worth it. conflict on any large scale would rip that society apart either way. he did absolutely damn them under the, idk, hypocritical guise of a fair trial, but if the idea is the ancients would have had a better shot at survival if he didn't do this, i disagree.
I remember that, because I ran around trying to get those dialogues but they're optional and this missable...
I feel those creatures had soul but to the ancients they have such knowledge and curiosity and power that yes even if I've considered you alive and sentient, might actually take you apart to study you. Study your aether, soul, self and body. You seemed to get away with a lot of things because you seemed to be azems creation.
It's not far off from what the ancients did however. "This isn't flying, destroy them and try again" "this one is acting in it's predator instincts, kill it"
Even to THEMSELVES death is little more than an inconvenience. They know and most accept the cycle of rebirth.
@@seacchi17the other thing I heard looking around is the idea they'd learn an there was to learn and then perish of the boredom.
Every other Star that went on that route of knowledge simply gave up once they felt all was done. All was accomplished and thus life and creativity and knowledge lacked meaning
I feel like a lot of the problems you point out here are really misguided. Hermes is not just some random jobber, it is well known by his peers that he’s an incredible scientist and researcher, he got his role for being a highly acclaimed individual, and he was being offered the position of Fandaniel by Emet, cause the current Fandaniel (at the time) had recommended Hermes recognizing his talents. He wasn’t just some random bumbling idiot thrust upon to the role, he is a researcher through and through.
He is also not just obsessively selfish in every regard, he only acts selfish when it concerns his ideals, that being his aversion to the ancients lack of care for death. This oblivion is an idea that deeply scares Hermes, this concept of nothingness is something he’s adverse to and something which he seeks to find an alternative route around. It’s why he creates Meteion, and it’s why he selfishly pursues this answer, to redirect the ancients away from a path he is afraid they may stray into if left alone. He otherwise acts in accordance with his society, he wears the platitudes and fits in as best he can, despite just how different he knows it is. And it’s that difference that eats away at him and slowly grinds his insides, and we can finally see him let out all that frustration on Ktsis.
Also he doesn’t just end everything simply because he thinks the world is dumb and it should end. The Hermes we know is someone who deeply fears the end of the world, and while yes an element of his action is definitely to bite back at the society which he felt discarded him, the forward motive is still largely his desire to find an alternate path for society, and he felt there was no other way to do so unless said society was forced to face the inevitable truth he fears. I tbh don’t even really think Hermes was meant to be sympathetic like that, Amon though is definitely meant to be pitiable, but a lot of Hermes’ beliefs ended up ringing true. Even Venat see’s, that the ancients would do anything just to maintain this paradisiacal vision of the world no matter the absurd costs.
A lot of the lines later in the narrative which may seem to portray Hermes as “sympathetic” end up coming from people who have very deep relationships with him, which definitely make the context of each line very interpretive. Amon’s line about “Hermes the man who knew so much, but understood so little” comes from someone who couldn’t despise Hermes more, and blames them for the despair filled life they were born with. Meteion who says “we couldn’t find the answers Hermes yearned for, the answers he deserved” also comes from someone who’s literal directive as a creation was to do said things, and by nature of their construction was motivated to find said things to comfort the individual who is basically her father. I feel like they come across as pretty neutral sentiments in the grand scheme of the thematics. The main way Ishikawa addresses Hermes’ actions in Omega Beyond the Rift is as being a “necessary step in evolution”, which is less about the sympathy angle as well, compared to Emet who is 100000% meant to be someone you can empathize with. They just want you to understand the choices that Hermes felt like he needed to make, and I personally think they did an amazing job at using him to portray the pitfalls in ancient society, and give a valid reason as to the origin of the doom that would eventually create the Hydaleyn vs Zodiark saga. A reason that couldn’t be more thematically appropriate for FF14’s narrative.
Hermes was IMO someone who I could empathise with deeply, but not agree with morally.
His actions are 100% relatable to someone who has gone through depressive episodes.
but that doesn't make what he did right.
If he tried to end himself that is one thing, trying to end everyone else is unacceptable bc of one's personal despair.
@@1011skarn Hermes never tried to end anyone. Let's not confuse the Hermes in present day helping Zenos with Hermes in Elpis. The incarnation of him in present day is Amon, a shard that was infused with the original's memories that was previously an Allagan scientist.. except he actively rejected them and the role given to him by Emet and co. and waited until they were gone to make his move. They are completely different people.
Amon is a Xande simp. Everything he did in EW was for Xande. Heck, even when you kill him as Zodiark he has a flashback of a conversation he had with Xande in his last moments.
Hermes never knew that the Meteia would be the cause of the final days. No one knew, not even after telling them what would happen in the future. Hermes just wanted to know the answer to his question but the Meteia went completely off the rails like an AI given a task it was not trained for.
All this to say: The shards are no the same person as their unsundered counterpart.
It's interesting how the MSQ portrays him as more sympathetic while at the same time putting Venat's Action into question quite a bit.
The Ancients really were a scary bunch. Hermes almost doomed the whole Universe, Athena planned to remake Creation at the least on Etheirys and Venat literally split the world and everyone's Souls apart. You only need one Ancient with too much power to cause so much damage and we had at least three of them already
I honestly wouldn't be too worried about what the Ancients were able to do... I would be more focused on what can Ultima do? I really do wonder if she is the same Ultima we faced in Ivalice or not?
I get why Venat did what she did, though. The Ancients had been bloodied by the Final Days as their Utopia was brought to ruin. They were already showing symptoms of a society like to meet its end (looking at Dead Ends and all that).
More to the point though, I think the Sundering is why modern humanity was able to deal with the Final Days better than Ancient man. By then, war, loss, discord, and even the end of the world had become commonplace. Emet Selch may have believed that the rejoinings were different from the Final Days in terms of world ending calamities, and they were in a cosmic sense, but for your average person they were virtually indistinguishable--it hardened them against the true doom that those remaining Ancients wanted to stop.
See I got the opposite from my MSQ run, to me Hermes was sympathetic the way a rabid dog is sympathetic, it's sad the ancients apparently didn't have psychiatrists but he was long past "saving" and needed to be put down, while at same time the stuff he did absolved Venat's actions of any questionably by showing that yes they were necessary to stop the doomsday Hermes set into motion.
Way more than three. Each and every one of them was a galaxy destroying nuke. It took one chick and her twelve homies to sunder the star. That's it. One depressed zoo keeper and his pet bird to end all life in the universe. The ancients had to be nerfed.
This is why I hate time travel narratives. It is so easy to get it wrong. Why did Venat choose the burgeoning life on Eitherys over her own people? Did she have great love for them? Did she believe that they had a right to life and do not deserve to be sacrificed? Nope, turns out she didnt have a choice in the matter. She had to do these things to create the future where the WoL would be in a position to save Eitherys. Sure, she may have believed these things, but that is only one part of her calculations. The fact that the choice was made for her kinda clouds her motivations a bit.
I guess I'm unsure of what exactly made the wolf creature "not alive". If it feels fear and pain and it it's heaving its last breaths on the ground as it dies I think it's a bit different than a computer program. The Omicron gathering quests are largely about exploring this. Even though they are recreated beings they still have thoughts and feelings. What is materially different about killing them as compared to killing their original form? Emet-Selch says the same about the WoL in the MSQ: that we're an aberration and unwhole and killing us would not count as "murder" because we are not "truly alive". Do we agree? Does the circumstance of their creation alone make them undeserving of our empathy? It's a bit of a classic SciFi idea to play with.
I actually do take issue with the writing but more so that Hermes is the only one we see making these connections. This is not a society devoid of love and empathy so why isn't anyone else questioning why the Ancients feel that they have free reign to create and destroy life at a whim? I feel like surely someone else must have considered this as they watched someone unmake a dog for being 2% less fluffy than expected. Why is he so alone in this?
It's because these creations don't have souls.
The only way for something to have a soul is granted by the planet after being born. Naturally, that's why they are on elpis Is to see if the creations are stable enough to be Let loose to give birth naturally to a living being with a soul.
Y'know, Hades' line about his world not needing heroes popped into my head, when I started hearing the obvious "this man needs therapy" lines coming from Hermes. Hades' world could've used some psychiatrists, at the very least.
Like, the Ascians old society was in this weird state of manufactured "perfection" that its not surprising it produced the kinda sociopaths that would take the whole we like "creating life and messing with things beyond what we should be able to" to their furthest extent. If anything; I'm surprised it didn't happen sooner!
As for the odd Meteion take; her being literally not a single being really does make putting blame at her bird feet hard. Hell; Hermes creating a super empath creature with childlike understanding was bound to have some issues, and that's not even getting into the fact that the Meteion we meet isn't even the one that was sent out to become the Endsinger. Getting to the finale; and that blue bird finally breaking free of her sisters kinda puts in to perspective how hard it must've been to even break out of that collective hive mind.
As for her appearance being cute. . . I mean, they could do the opposite and made Meteion another Vauthry; would that have helped the story any? lol
I don't agree with your view of the creatures of Elpis; they are alive, they're just in beta testing to see if they can be worked into an ecosystem without horrifically disrupting it. Beyond that though, what really tipped me over the edge, before it became obvious what he did was a series of very deliberate and horrific choices, was also Hermes mourning the beast we put down. Hermes cares very selectively about life; the creature was killing not just it's Ancient handlers _it was wantonly slaughtering other Elpis creations for the fun of it._ So what, those other life forms under his care matter less than the uncontrollable rage-creature he got emotionally invested in? What was the alternative to killing it, locking it away for the rest of its natural life? How is that a kinder choice, exactly? He's a character who is, imo, very interesting in large part because he's a terrible person.
Meteion is a flawed creation and I firmly believe, that she is not at fault for her crimes. The only reason she did what she did is because Hermes made her that way. It's like blaming a machine for a work accident. If the robot was designed flawed and without a failsafe and someone got in an accident with it, we don't fault the machine, we fault the designer. If the machine was operated dangerously and without proper care, we fault the operator and not the machine.
I think Meteion is much the same, but she actually has emotions on top, which makes blaming her feel even more unfair to me.
if i remember an anectdote from a worldbuilding course for literature, every story in life will have thousands of the minute, relatively unimportant players. due to kairos and largely speaking the greater players of hydalen v zodiark, the background character of fandaniel/hermes had been forgotten as a narrative player, but he always there. actually think back to when G'raha asks us about if he'd be in our story, and you have three answers to give him. one of the options is most likely the answer that will be told come the aeons aheads, that he'd be a footnote in the margin or lost in name. he had more gravity in the story of shadowbringers as the Crystal Exarch, which might subsume his real name even in later tales. history told is often not the true events that transpired.
I wanted that one but it felt... Rude
Simply that not every story is told, not ever recollection accurate. No one knows the wol struggles UNLESS they've been there to witness it all, least for one adventure...
Every road block, every set back, every helping hand that came with no strings attached...
Hell there's so much that happens that I too forget what I was doing it what I did.
When you questioned why Hermes, this innately selfish individual, was still selected for the seat of Fandaniel, I had to wonder if that was actually part of the reason why.
We know that the individuals who take up the mantle of one of the seats have some kind of similarity to those who came before them. With the seat of Azem, we know that everyone had this desire to see the world and go adventuring. What if those traits we see in Hermes is something that is present in everyone who helmed the seat of Fandaniel?
The only other person who we see takes over the seat of Fandaniel is Amon, who was only interested in their experiments and bringing back the golden age of the Allagan Empire. Everything he did as Amon was conducted out of a sense of selfishness. He brought back the original ruler of the empire, only for them to question their existance and hope to be put to rest again. Both Amon and Hermes put their experiments and ideals over the betterment of society.
I know it could partly be explained by the memories being passed through the seat of Fandaniel. It just makes me wonder if these traits were apparent in everyone even before they took the seat.
The biggest problem I had with Hermes' character was that we were supposed to (I guess) feel sympathetic to his empathy for the creations, and the sadness he felt when he had to oversee their unmaking due to not being as their intended 'design'. I found it entirely hypocritical and contradictory because he literally ran the facility that created predatory animals designed to hunt and prey on other creations in order to keep their populations in check and various other reasons. He had no problem creating aggressive predatory animals to hunt other animals in the wild forever so they would live in fear and be eaten, but when he himself had to 'humanely' unmake them he acted like it was unthinkable. I didn't vibe with that, and he just seemed ignorant, selfish and shallow.
It is very weird... The ancients however approved all kinds of creations for testing.
Even themselves eat, and what is eating? Taking the resources you can from another source, often a living or once living thing. From meat to dehydrated tea leaves.
Still the creature made was supposed to be that way... Made to be an apex predator, made to be aggressive
"Shallow"? He's an antagonist that comes full circle TWICE in the same expansion through both his ancient persona and his Allagan persona. They didn't build up to him as well as they could have, but his existence as a character is NOT without depth.
I personally do not mind Hermes like you do and I think one of the key reasons why he worked for me and not for you was because I didn't FEEL like I was ever meant to forgive him or anything. I'm going to preface this by saying I am not trying to change your mind or anyone reading this. Just sharing my thoughts. Like you, I saw a broken man spiraling out of control with nonsensical reasons for doing the things he did. But he is a villain. He is not a good person just because he feels sad. He is objectively wrong, and while I do feel for him seeing as he is a man lost to despair, I never felt like I was intended to forgive him. His final fate, being sunken down to the pits of the aetherial sea with Asahi reinforces this for me. I can understand what could lead a broken, mentally unwell man to do the things he did. Being an ancient obviously doesn't incline you to the side of moral goodness. They too are very flawed beings just like the races of Etheirys. Ancients were INCREDIBLY powerful beings as individuals and seemingly, had very little restriction on their power, another comment pointed out Athena and Venat as examples. I could have missed or forgotten the lore bits about restrictions on their powers though. Even if there were restrictions... These are villains (with the exception of Venat, though I doubt the ancients would look on her very kindly in hindsight). Bad people who do not care about the restrictions or laws or whatever else, only about getting their desired result. Emet Selch is a man who was willing to sacrifice millions, possibly billions of people to get his friends back. He is a bad person. But it's easy to understand WHY he'd do it. He's lonely. He's one of the last of his kind. He misses his friends and the lives they once had. It does not make him right though. I do not find Emet Selch forgiveable. Hermes was so cracked and broken he was willing to let the universe die just to see if there was a point to it all. He was lost to despair. And he made the Meteia also suffer the same fate and become the harbingers of the final days by forcing his needs onto them. But I still feel sad for both Meteion and Hermes seeing them embrace despair and sadness and pain and sorrow. Meteion too did unforgivable things like you mentioned. I don't forgive Meteion either. While yes, she is essentially a little girl who didn't know any better and was carrying out the will of her creator, she still committed unforgivable atrocities. But I can't help but get choked up and sad after you defeat Endsinger when she rediscovers joy and hope. Meteion, before the fight with Zenos, was ready to die. She thought you were going to kill her. She calls you her final encounter. She asks you to let her sing a song of hope, and I quote, "Before I fall forever silent." While I can't forgive the actions of her or her creator, or various other characters in the story, I refuse to close my heart off to them completely and not feel something when I see them sad, or lonely, or happy. Zenos is another example of a truly awful person. He would murder people on a whim and cared for nothing more in this world than to fight strong foes so he could feel the rush and excitement. I ABSOLUTELY do not forgive Zenos for the things he did. I do, however, understand that he wanted to FEEL something, he wanted to feel the rush and joy life could offer. Again, this doesn't make him right or forgivable, but from these people's warped perspectives, I could see what they were getting at. I never felt like I was supposed to forgive these people. Only to understand them.
Y’know I would think that Amon would probably agree with every critique you have over his original persona of Hermes.
I honestly tie Hermes and Amon / Fandaniel as one continuous character arc rather than Hermes in isolation. Seems how we feel about Hermes depends on whether you have him stand as just the EW character, or the character we’ve seen hints about ever since Syrcus tower under another guise / iteration.
Also I feel the analogy between chatAI and the creature creations is a bit disingenuous given the latter is tied to the ancients’ duty to the world and the potential intrinsic impact the creature they make have on the life of planet. So I do feel he had every right to feel the way he did about the ancients dispersing their creatures if albeit prematurely at times. Was something definitely eating at his mental health for a long time.
@5:20
See, my view on this scean is that even though the concepts aren't fully alive, they have a degree of awareness/feelings so this creature did die in sorts.
Plus, Hermes and his bitterness to how the ancients would throwaway concepts is analogues to how Humans treat other species in our world.
Problem with Hermes is about scope. Is not about not understanding how one can do bad decisions or rushed decisions in a state of panic, depression or anxiety. But, is about the scope of this decisions. Whoever you can understand his thought process or not, he still dammed THE WHOLE WORLD because of that. Again: Scope. He never paused to think about that. About the magnitude of his actions.
Its like trying to justify someone that commited genocide because he was Sad or had a sad anime back story.
Can I understand Hermes feelings? Yes. It justifies what he did? Fuck no.
First of all, yes, EW msq was rushed. But I think Hermes fits well with the overall theme of "despair" and fighting against despair. You don't have to like or forgive him. His irrational and hypocritical decision IS the point, not his justifications, which are irrelevant. He's not Emet, but compared to some of the cartoon villains we sometimes get, Hermes felt human, and very real ... living as I do in a world full of mass murderers and terr0rists who think their nihilism and grievance justify inflicting horror pain and death on people they've never even met. The viral contagion of despair we witness in Thavnair, and the counterpoint in lyrics of With Hearts Aligned. ... Well, now I've lost my train of thought. But basically, I think Hermes works precisely because he isn't a great villain - he isn't meant to be, he's meant to fade into the background. If we had a big bad villain to focus on, we'd focus on that to the detriment of the theme we were actually supposed to be focusing on.
So after final sitting with the idea for awhile i want to share a thought/observation
We (The races of man, and playable races) are the sundered reflections of the ancients, correct?
What we call or used to call the Beast Tribes, and many of the non humanoid spoken races, are unlilely to share that aspect.
So considering Meteion, or Hermes' favorite sky fenrir. They could be considered to have more in common with some of the spoken that exist in our shard now like the Ixal and Lamiae, who are intelligent and sentient given life through presumably the lifestream.
And in that sense a much more poignant point could have been made, especally as it relates to the other intelligent life found apart from etherys like the Dragons or Omicron. Who are entirely foreign to our star but share the same "humanity" that we have.
I also believe its interesting that the target of a lot of ascian animosity were the Beastmen.
The Allagans, The Garleans, even in Ishgard. The Allagans conquered and subjugated the entirety of Eorzea and werent exactly averse to anything even experimentation and augmentation of themselves. But the list notable enemies for them is almost entirely non humanoid. Sephirot was summoned by treelikes, Zurvan by Centaur, Sophia is said to be by a multitude if races and beliefs, and the Dragons themselves.
The Garleans were beyond willing to purge all beastmen from Eorzea and asked for their cooperation
And despite Ishgards war starting with the betrayal of Thordan it makes me question, how exactly did he come to find out about a Dragons Eyes? Maybe thats a moment that i myself had missed. But i would not in the slightest be suprised to learn that he was tipped off by Ascians.
There just seems to always be this innate and consistent enmity and lack of compassion between Ancients/Ascians and- anything that wasnt not another Ancient or a direct derivative of them.
Everything else seems like "sorry this is just business" but if you were not a native at some point? "Fuck you in particular, we will remove you from existence"
As much as I understand the point of FFXIV, practically the lesson is “if you are not the split person of a powerful being who is a friend of the most approachable of the bad people, nothing will change”.
Being the 7/14 rejoined of Azem brings the Warrior of Light to Stormblood; being the friend of Emet-Selch actually solves the problem the Ascians made. In the end, it very literally is who you know. And while admittedly the Scions themselves, Haurchefant and Aymeric, and those putting the fight in Gyr Abania and Doma were still going to do whatever they were doing, nothing would have been solved if the Warrior of Light was not who he is.
It is, ironically, the most cynical take on the power of friendship ever. That change is pretty dependent on the person who can be the hero’s friends. To be fair, most of the time this is positive; when applied to what actually happened, it implies that salvation is beyond reach save a literal god empowered by another literal god who were friends of some of the evil gods who (except for the Dragonsong War and even then) were the friends of something. That is so impossible even by FFXIV standards that it ironically paints the bleakest picture. Emet-Selch would have kept going if the Warrior of Light was not 7/14ths (and later 8/14ths) of Azem.
idk what to think, i thought he was a character that was made to not be liked, i think he was in a good state of mind when he assumed the position of leader of Elpis, i really thinks that he was a good guy before we meet with him, but i can't ignore all mistakes, he's clearlly ill, but no one seems to care, that's kinda what fucked up too.
I liked Hermes personally. After everything we've gone through and all we learn about those initially presented as pure evil or good it strikes me as an appropriate thematic capstone that all this comes from one rando questioning but with no answers.
The entire time watching Hermes turn into our “Fandaniel” I was like, man I get it, but what the fuck
Something something watching a train wreck in slow motion
One of my favorite lines in a movie is from Enemy of the State where Gene Hackman's character is kind of laying out or unraveling the plot to an agent. It's a simple line, not impactful and most people would think nothing of it, but to me it's a great line. It goes something along these lines:
"She found out too much, so you killed the girl. I wouldn't have, but I understand the argument."
They're dealing with issues of national security, global consequences, and here's this guy who can simply read the situation and disagree with the action, but can understand why another would have taken it.
That was the Hermes situation for me drummed up to the highest level.... "I disagree with the approach, but I understand the argument."
I feel as though I'm more willing to forgive the execution because I understand the concept. Hermes for me is a statement about the flaws of the Ancients. And yes, his mindframe shift seems really out of left field, but I get what they were going for so I cant fault it too much.
I definitely do see what some people mean by the flaws of endwalker, but I still adore it.
Honestly, I think the biggest issue with Hermes is that bit at the end of Ktisis Hyperboreia. Before that, he wasn't my favorite character, but I can see what they were doing.
The whole chuuni turnabout "he he he I'm going to help Meteion bring about the apocalypse" shit is... probably a realistic representation of someone snapping after a situation like his, but it just doesn't really engender a lot of goodwill for a character. Like, yeah... We understand that Hermes was a tortured guy who slipped through the cracks and felt marginalized by the heavy boot of "the status quo" that everyone else seemed to him to agree with and revere. But the step towards "Okay, now I'm going to cause an omnicide" is far too great. And again, the chūnibyō "we live in a society i'm going to embrace my villainhood evil smirk who can tell me i'm wrong maybe you're all wrong im such a freak" demeanor made it difficult to sympathize.
I think the only time I truly warmed to him as a character (or well, Amon) was in the Aitiascope. That moment of introspection, that despair, that voice acting. It felt so raw, so genuine. It didn't redeem him as a character for me, but it did strike me, and I still think about it on occasion.
@@Zakjuh it was a heck of a performance, wasn't it? I feel like ff14 really stepped up their voice acting game
On the one hand while I agree that Hermes is hypocritical in the sense that he acts like life is sacred then willfully condemns all life, as a personal with a slew of mental illnesses and a past of abuse this leaves a bit of a sour taste in my mouth. The tragedy of Hermes isn't how empathetic he was, to me, as an abuse survivor its how willing everyone is to dismiss his problems. Noteworthy though, under this lens one can argue he perpetuates the cycle of abuse by bringing Meteion, who is characterized as a young girl with autistic tendencies (Do not flame me, I'm autistic myself) and like you said, forces his ideals, his problems unto her. And then Meteion, a being of pure emotion is overtaken by the despair of entire populations, all because of what her narcissistic parent brought her into and made her into. Hermes is deeply flawed and wrong, but its because of the outright lack of help he received, However, as someone undergoing therapy, one must want help to receive it, which Hermes, despite wanting others to gear his plight, didn't seem to want their help in solving his problems, which, like a parent who should not have children, he forced upon his daughter figure. A figure he was just as willing to condemn as everything else when she proved "a failure." Not trying to incite an argument or debate, but I wished to share my feelings, and let my thoughts be known.
Yeah I am not convinced. I recently had some existential shit to work through and still kind of working through it. Through the course I went from seeing life as something to be preserved, to seeing a valid argument that it's more merciful to end life itself. If I had the power to do so, that conflicts too much with my other ideals that deciding the fate for others is wrong so I wouldn't, but I would be lying if I were to deny that the thought of destroying all life on the planet would be considered as compassionate. Hermes is an example of another someone who struggled with this shit, I believe, and fell mad from it when it all blew up in his face late in the Elpis story. I slightly empathize with him, in realizing what likely made him who he became, but mostly, I pity him for falling to it.
In summation, I don't see him as a bad character. I would have liked more explorations of him, I'll agree on that front, but he's a really good example of staring into the abyss, and the abyss staring back being the thing that drives him mad. He wanted answers, and like some poor fool in a lovecraftian story, he got his answers, but it was not what he expected; it drove him mad when the answers (the abyss, in this metaphor) stared back at him, as unflinching as reality's callousness.
A side note: I also think it's rather genius that the thing that caused all these problems was a mistake. A poor directive given to an untested empathic being. It lends credibility to the things Meteion herself encountered; that life can be snuffed out so easily.
I disagree with a few of the details of your argument against Hermes, but I definitely agree overall. I've hated him all this time for mostly the same reasons.
One key difference would be the part you talk about around 4:40. While yes, I did find that cutscene to be a red flag also, I don't agree that this creature (or others in Elpis that similarly get put down) is not truly alive. They ARE living creatures, and in most cases, Hermes was RIGHT to mourn them and to be upset that no one else seemed to care. The Ancients basically see anything that is not mankind as simply aether to be repurposed into anything else at a moment's notice, and it's a big part of what was wrong with their society. For example, the Charybdis who was merely scared to fly, but the Ancients just assumed "Eh, prolly just a birth defect. Let's just wipe out the entire species and try remaking them better next time." That is horrifying, and Hermes damn well SHOULD be upset that he's the only one who thinks so. But it was made very clear that this creature (Lykaon or something?) in particular was just irredeemably horrible in every way. It was incredibly violent even when given absolutely no reason to be so. They were very thorough in making sure it wasn't being territorial, it wasn't hungry, it didn't feel threatened... it just killed for the sake of killing. For fun, perhaps. It would devestate any ecosystem it was placed into and then go extinct itself. It was all flaws and no positive aspects to balance said flaws. Yet he mourns it the same as he would have the Charybdis. THAT is why it is a red flag. He shows this so-called "empathy" even to things that don't deserve any.
Also, as far as Meteion goes, I (like many people) do not blame her for anything she did. Anything bad that came from her actions were on the shoulders of Hermes, not her. She tried to prevent it all once she realized what was going to happen, but due to the way Hermes made her, she was only one voice among who knows how many, and was designed without a way to shut out the feelings of others, so of course she was overwhelmed in the end. In the end, everything she did is just more reason to hate Hermes, not her. Especially since, in the end, once you've freed her from all this overwhelmingly negative dynamis or whatever, she immediately wants to go off and try and make things better again. To rebuild and make right what her creator made her destroy.
I agree with everything you said up til the last couple lines. Hermes didn't "make" her destroy anything. He sent her out into a universe he couldn't imagine given he was born in paradise and she came to the conclusion that the secret to happiness was not to exist. The ancients would have exterminated her and her sisters to save themselves. All Hermes did was set up a fair contest to see who is right rather than helping his people murder his daughters.
@@MissKashira By "making her" destroy everything, I didn't mean directly. I just mean that when he created her, he did not give her the ability to shut out all the feelings around her (which was a completely stupid oversight on his part, tbh), and so it's no wonder that she would get totally overwhelmed and taken over by the feelings of far too many beings she'd be encountering all at once (through her hivemind connection). It's not really "her" conclusion that life shouldn't exist - it's the conclusion of an amalgamation of all those suffering/dead people. Whatever will she may have had of her own is completely drowned out by the time that conclusion is drawn. And that's because of the way Hermes made her.
>They are not truly alive they are closer to AI constructs
But they aren't? Creating creatures out of thin air was just a more efficient method of iterating on their features. Meanwhile there is a building in Elpis where a couple ancients bred new species the regular way and were laughed at because of the "inefficiency" of such method.
By the same logic Ixal are not alive since they were artificially created by Allag.
>Hermies is an extremely selfish person
As opposed to Emet? Elidibus? Lahabrea? The mommy HERSELF?
Hell, Lahabrea built a whole ass prison to contain his wife who consorted with INTERDIMENSIONAL GOD and if given a chance would've reshaped whole world, or possibly whole universe to her liking.
Also, add Athena to the list of extremely selfish Ancients who would do anything in the name of research.
Huh... It's like there is a trend... Or a flaw with their society... HMMMM...
>trying to make me empathize with Hermies
FFXIV makes you empathize with majority of it's villains. Hell, it's easier to point out villains like Valens, who are just dirtbags with no redeeming qualities, than to list every mass murderer who had understandable motivations for their actions.
You could level the same critique against Venat. She went with her selfish reasoning without consulting others, she successfully genocided her own race, created untold amounts of suffering for sundered creatures and inadvertently caused 7 worlds with all living creatures on them to be completely destroyed.
And after all that you're supposed to smile and call her Venat before she dies.
Or maybe story doesn't make you empathize with anyone at all, and leaves that choice to you. And you're the one who should decide for yourself why you might think Emet was not that bad of a guy after all, and Venat was cool too, and maybe you don't like Hermies that much, and Yotsuyu's sadism was really fucked up despite her broken life...
At the end of the Omega questline, you are asked "Who was justified in their actions?" and game lets you pick an answer that best aligns with what you think is right.
You are absolutely valid in your hate for Hermies, but I think most of your arguments don't hold up.
I think one of the main points of the Elpis arc was to show us that the "perfect paradise" the ascians wished to bring back never existed. It wasn't perfect, and most certainly it wasn't a paradise. Everybody was equally happy, and everybody was happily working for the star. But when you look at it closer, the cracks show. Gross disregard to the lives they themselves created, the complete neglect of community and communication, the fact that they throw away their lives once "they finish their work", these all gather over time and create people like Hermes or Athena. Both maniacs, but Hermes fought with his depression and Athena got a god complex. And the majority of ancients never caught on to it, in their minds, everything is as it should be. Hermes was a brilliant researcher, nobody cared that he didn't submit his creation to inspection, even Hythlo drops the topic after Hermes tells him that she is still just an experiment for now. Which she was. And even when Hermes first rebelled, they never thought to actually fight him seriously (nobody in the party assumed their "battle form"). It was inconceivable to them that one of their own could be that far gone. Meteion didn't want to tell Hermes what her sisters found because she knew that it will break him. And it did. His actions are unforgivable. But it doesn't mean that we can't understand it or sympathize with its tragedy. All of this could have been avoided if the ancient society was actually the perfect paradise.
Very well said
disagree hard, i dont think the game portrays hermes as sympathetic at all, i feel like he simply was given motive for his actions and is unfaltering in swaying from his own beliefs no matter how horrid his actions which makes him a better and more intriguing character for that. ‘his motives paint him as a massive sociopath that no one in their right mind would ever forgive’ i feel like that is the point of his character as well, he is a bad person and i feel like you reading the story as trying to shine a sympathetic light on him is your own bias
I'll tell you what an English teacher told me once when I was equating characters that I don't like with bad characters. "Some characters aren't meant to be liked."
Oh, I think he's very much a Shining Example that the Ancients' society was incredibly messed-up and they brought about their own end. The Paragons were biased AF and their memories of their great society have more holes than the Rift.
Emet-Selch’s speech of whatever the virtues of Amaurotine society were were ripe for deconstruction; they reeked of a person who saw nothing but the best of his world. Elpis really was necessary.
The telling of Hermes story was flawed, but I think the intention is clear. They wanted to show a character who didn't think like the other ancients. His view about the creatures being unmade was less about the actual creature and much more about the casual view of death by the ancients. It's to show how few degrees away they were from seeing lesser races as not worth life and more clearly draw a line of how the Paragons got to their mentality.
He also is meant to tell a story of their hubris, and how the Ancients' policing of each other was lackluster to nonexistent. We see this repeated in Pandaemonium with Athena, or even just Lahabrea splitting his soul in half. Surely that act should have drawn more attention.
5:31 hold up I thought it was established that those creatures had souls. Doesn't the first Anabaseios raid boss kinda confirm it when he was eating the Behemoth soul for power?
The creatures of Elpis were concepts without souls. I.E. A safe and controlled enviroment to simulate life without harming the world. This is explained as soon as you enter Elpis by Hades and Hythlodaeus!
Different concepts. The first two bosses of the new tier is Athena experimenting with creating sentient life with souls. Kokytos and its' forms taking on forms we've encountered in old content is interesting, that it ate the aether that gave it those memories/abilities whatever you want to justify it as.
I assume Behemoths acquired souls over time, like Alpha did.
@@SynodicScribe That's simply wrong. The point of that part of the msq, even the point of pandamonium, is that the ancients, despite their ability to create beings, can't control what is life. They can't control if a being they created will end up with a soul or not. And despite that fact, they kill them with little thoughts. To think of them as no more than souless AI is to do the same mistake as the ancients and to miss why Hermes is the way he is. He is born in a society of people with immense powers but people who are blind to the consequences of said powers. They create being without realizing that those being have feeling and thoughts, with value, not just mere experiment you can discard. The fact that they can have a soul sometime is a mere curiosity for them. They create beings as a a hobby and send them to Elpis without much thoughts. That fact is evident when Hyathlodeus is talking about the number of shark concepts that people like to create. They create beings without seeing the consequences, without seeing them live and die.
If you talk to the researchers in Elpis, you realize the a number of them share some of Hermes anxiety about all of that, share the empathy for those beings. But much like Hermes, they can't express it in the ancient's society because this is a society where you're supposed to "sacrifice yourself to the star". People are expected to commit suicide, to want to commit suicide when they did what they could for the star. What's Emet reaction when Hermes have a little rant about those contradictions in the ancient's world ? It's that Hermes is unfit to work on his charge and that he should give up his very name to work for the star.
The reason why Hermes is like this is because he evolve in a society who has little regards for individuals but as a researcher on elpis, he directly see that this society is at odd with reality, that life is not just something that advance the star but feelings and thoughts and, yes, suffering. The contradiction between that fact and the society he's supposed to partake in is draining him and just like anyone, he has his limits. Hermes was at odds with how his society worked and the stars was the straw he was clinging on. When that hope was made fruitless by Meteion's discovery, he broke and applied mankind hypocrisy about other beings on itself.
@@18ShedinnThis. So much of this! I couldn’t have worded it better! But I doubt he’s going to care. As much as I like the Scribes videos, he’s very “I’m not going to care about this point because it disagreed with my opinion.” It’s very evident by the fact he only likes and acknowledges comments that back him up and agree with him, or are “wrong” so he needs to chime in. The latter of the two got us here with this comment in particular.
there are parts of the video I agree with. But the idea that the MSQ is trying to force us to forgive Hermes I don't agree with. I feel like the MSQ wanted us to forgive our Meteion, the one we met, that tried to stop her sisters, who was taken over and drowned out before we ended their song and set them free. Hermes/Amon/Fandaniel are unforgiveable but Meteion and her sisters were just his puppets sent out by a very flawed and stupid person. I have also been questioning the Ancients for a while as well XD
It’s always funny when someone plays their first final fantasy game and is surprised that the final boss motivating the story’s conflict is some one we have no clue existed until the last chapter
First off there's something you said about Elpis that is flat out wrong. All the creatures on Elpis are fully living breathing creatures. It is a testing ground to see if a new creation is a latent ecological disaster, not a simulation, not the Matrix. Being deconstructed from a living creature to loose aether is still death. The image he references of a creature fearing its end is something children hunting for the first time will comment on.
As for Hermes, I think he always hated the world for the way the Ancients accept death. He sees it as the Ancients imposing their view of it onto living creatures that only act to have another day. I'm willing to bet he joined Elpis for the sake of being a bringer of life, only to also have the responsibility of destroying failures. A whole part of the questline is him trying to get around that part of his duties with those flying snake things. He had become the very thing he hated and he knew it. Someone else in the comments described it as a doctor, someone who dedicated themselves to preserving life, being forced to prescribe euthanasia.
By the time we meet him at Elpis he had been stuck in that role for who know how long. All taht time with hatred of the Ancient's way of life festering, hatred for the callousness of Elpis festering, and most importantly, hatred for himself taking part of it all festering. With an ancient's lifespan, who knows how many times he considered a "premature return to the star." The Meteon Project probably was his last gasp, her results to going to decide for him whether or not to make his return early. Her results didn't just confirm that decision for him, but shattered him to the point his hatred for the Ancient's methods overflowed for him to make a game for the fate of all life.
Selfish, yes but well beyond the point the question of selfishness and selflessness being out the window.
My personal take is this.
Hermes is mad with grief of his soon to be late mentor. I feel personally that his actions are the result of ancient society refusing to acknowledge their own suffering and oppressive nature. You are not permitted an identity beyond what is necessary to make society function. Mask on, individuality snuffed, deviation from the norm is met with almost systemic disapproval. Not even your cloths can be different, black robes or shame. Remember the side quest with the robes? She thought we were children and we were still forced to try to make robes to blend in. Then when that norm involves not grieving the "life completion suicide" of your mentor. Well you might not be punished physically but socially you will be a pariah. That or you will mask your emotions and hide your pain until it makes you want to destroy everything in your path. "Is this society so great? Prove it, survive the collective despair of the universe"
Simply put, the ancients were a candy coated dystopia IMO.
Like, dose that SOUND sane to you? "I completed my life's work, time to off my self!". The response to that is normally "Well they are just so different from us, we can't understand them or their values" but that would swing both ways? Wouldn't it? They understand us and our values, and beyond that they don't really ACT significantly different from us either.
It's really kinda screwed up.
tbf it's not that far out of left field. it's certain aspects of japanese culture taken up to 11
The suicide finale is actually entirely understandable once you remember the sheer timescale of an Ancient's life. Once you run out of things to do, what's left except being incredibly bored for uncountable years? You already debated that guy hundreds of times! You already played two hundred times as much chess as any human grandmaster! There's nothing but repetition and a slow slide into apathy in that long of a future.
I'M so glad you brought their attire up! A society that forces you hide parts of yourself, don't express yourself, to perfectly blend in with uniform is not perfect. It resembles a working environment a lot more than a society, which is fitting ig. Their sole goal is "perfecting the star". Their culture is just working on something that I don't think even they know the end of. He seemed to be the only one to question it. What if they perfected the star? We know the answer of course. They would've ended up like the people of the Plenty in the Dead Ends dungeon.
@@weaselprime8654 Nah. They would just find longer tasks to do. Make new games and debate different topics. Experiment in different ways. We humans reach a similar point all the time. Not to mention they literally have an ENTIRE UNIVERSE to explore. You heavily underestimate a persons ability to create and find novelty in the things around them.
@@GaleGrim It's possible that's what they were trying to point out; they were on the path of reaching a certain point that they 'believed' was their final goal, and not having the imagination to see what was after. If we treat Elpis as a microcosm of Ancient thinking, then while we had a few researchers there that were all about 'discovery!', the majority held to the party line of 'I have decided I have reached my perfection, there is nothing left to go from here so time to start over!'. Another thing to keep in mind: a lot of us are analyzing from a western perspective; you can easily see an exaggeration in the Ancients of a lot of current Japanese societal issues and behaviors (shutting down individualism to blend in, and keeping quiet about mental illness to keep from disturbing others, etc) so it helps to keep in mind this may also be a way for the Japanese developers to offer commentary in an 'acceptable space' for those issues, and provoke discussion.
You have a very flawed understanding of how empathy works. Empathy is not the ability to understand or relate to the emotions of others -- that is sympathy. Empathy is the ability to feel other's emotions as one's own. The easiest way to explain empathy to most people is to have them recall a moment when something so embarrassing was happening in front of them that they were frozen with shame (as though it was their shame). For an empathic person it is not about "understanding" or "feeling bad" that someone else has been shamed (again, that is sympathy). For an empathic person there is no separation from the other person or their emotional experience in that moment. Now let us imagine than rather than shame the experience is pain, the helplessness of knowing yourself subjected to the will of a higher being that wishes to erase your existence because you do not fit its concept of perfection. An highly empathic person would experience that fear of being erased, that void of not mattering and having no choice, and the injustice of being judged unfit to exist by creatures who are just as flawed, every time they were forced to destroy a concept. Over time, they would internalize that struggle as their own feeling themselves invalidated, doomed to be erased and ultimately laboring for nothing -- which would lead them to question the fairness and purpose of life.
When you frame it as "good people do not feel like that" you underestimate (and rightly so, as you have likely never felt it) the level of severity and persistence of that experience. It has nothing to do with being good. Anyone in severe enough chronic pain would seek their own end. Anyone convinced that this is a universal experience, would seek to end it for all and see it a fair endeavor -- though just to be clear that is NOT what Hermes did. Rather than being consumed by that pain, Hermes sought to understand it and to every extent possible he sought to prove it wrong. He created the Metea and sought to use their empathy to understand the meaning of life, not as force-fed to him by the beliefs of his people, but as experienced by all manner of different civilizations across the universe. The experiment was flawed, as Emmet pointed out, both because it did not do enough to ensure the survey included a fair sampling of people willing and unwilling to continue living, and also because it did not consider that at some point the hyper-sensitive empathetic Metea would also internalize whatever the sisters found (like Hermes did before them). The Metea went on to experience the suffering, despair, resentment and loss of entire civilizations and planets as their own (empathy) not as something they were saddened by because it was happening to someone else (sympathy). And having experienced enough pain and convinced the whole universe was experiencing the same they south to end it. But even when confronted with the Metea's results, Hermes did not side with them. He merely did what was natural to him as chief of Elpis. He carried out a fitness experiment, no different than the experiments he conducted every day to evaluate the fitness to exist of other creatures. The only difference is that this test would be applied to his own people and to himself as he chose to remain, oppose the Metea and fought on the side of life until his sundering.
It would not be until several reincarnations later, during the age of the Allagan Empire that Hermes, now Amon, would come to the conclusion that life was simply not worth it. And he arrived at this conclusion only after granting eternal life to Xande and watching him crumble into misery and after experiencing for himself the decadence that emerged in the Allagan court -- the members of which were largely devoid of suffering but still sought to inflict suffering onto others ("test subjects") for pleasure - an exercise that brought them temporary joy but that eventually left them empty as well. When Ammon received his memories as Hermes it was those memories plus his current experience that led him to the conclusion that life suffering because even in a perfect eternal society (he had now been a part of 2 iterations), humans could not help but to inflict suffering on their "lessers" and to fail to find happiness for themselves. However, prior to this Hermes, as his original ancient self, stood on the side of life and Aetherys and he used all his know-how to forestall the end of his world. His work and experiments with etherical currents are the basis for the creation of Zodiark as a shield for the planet. He fought to preserve life, even when his own suffering, the suffering of the creatures under his care and the experiments conducted by the Metea told him not to. Even as he dies, now sure that life is not the answer, he laments that this was not the answer he wanted at all. And all his actions as Hermes suggest this is true. He wanted to be proved wrong - he fought to that end. And he was proved wrong in the end too, even if he was too twisted to see it by 1000s of years of living and suffering.
Hermes, in this sense, represents our curiosity. The existential need to know, the fear that our existence is pointless and the tragedy that we never truly get an answer in this life. He equally embodies a warning of how our inability to come to terms with the necessary uncertainty of our existence can twist us and consume us to the extent that we miss the point of life entirely and end up embracing its antithesis. So yes, he makes sense as a character and fits perfectly into the greater argument that the expansion was trying to make. Even more so when you compare him to figures like Athena, who acts as a mirror image of Hermes in her uncomplicated, unempathetic search for godhood at the expense of everything and everyone - all of whom she considers lesser beings. And then somewhere in the middle fits Hydelyn who accepted that the complexity of creation far exceeded her grasp, but did not allow this to overwhelm or challenge her desire to protect her world and her people. She knew that suffering was a part of the deal, that if we are to preserve life, we must have it in equal measure with joy and so she sought to make a world that would perpetually exist in the twilight. She understood this was unkind, but accepted that unkindness to be the price of life as an experience. And in the end she made the ultimate sacrifice, ceasing to exist entirely herself (her soul spent and gone forever), so that we could live again and again.
I want to pose a point-of-view that I saw Hermes at. He's the embodiment of failure and personal weakness. Not innately, not like he was born or fated to be a failure, but that he actively chooses failure for himself and everyone he ever encounters. Even as an Ancient. he is incredibly pathetic and weak-minded through his own choosing - near entirely.
He lets himself be outwitted and out-maneuvered by everyone around him, he condemns everyone to suffer because his own personal and morale failing that he chooses to imprint on himself and everyone else.
He is the epitome of all chosen weakness - personified in the game's entire narrative about him. It even corrupts his various incarnations. Now, I'm not a massive lore buff. but to me it's always seemed that whenever he learns of his own past that he falls back into that pattern of self-inflicted and all-condemning failure and weakness.
Seemingly every single iteration of him seems to be like that, particularly once he is made aware of himself as an Ascian.
In that sense, it really makes sense that his first chronological version of himself is the most absolute distillation of self-loathing and self-inflicted failure and self-chosen weakness.
He is the truest antithesis of the WoL, who chooses to do the right and just thing who aims and usually succeeds in making everything and everyone they encounter better and happy in some such hard-fought manner. Overcoming the odds.
In almost any situation you can easily parallel the canonical WoL to the opposite mindset and likely action of Hermes based on his own personal ideologies and views on everything.
From that perspective, he's more opposite to the WoL than even a character like Zenos is. He's not even worthy of being known as a friend to the WoL, but it's likely the WoL would consider him such despite how utterly awful and completely terrible of a person Hermes is.
Because that is what makes them different. Polar opposites even. Where as Hermes would condemn anyone for a weakness he himself possesses, the WoL wouldn't unless they were entirely forced to.
They are two sides of *"choosing how to see everything and everyone else."* The WoL will do everything they can to see the best of the worst people in all existence and Hermes will do his best to find the worst in a perfect world where most would consider it a paradise... Enough to condemn literally everyone in all of existence over a self-imposed flaw that only he considers a flaw.
We pity him because he is terrible by his own choice - personified, not because he deserves redemption. He's not even worth the pity, but the WoL would even still.
I agree, I threw up a bit too seeing Hermes there in that final cut artwork to the EW story... But I also knew that the canonical WoL would include him there... where if Hermes had a choice, he would include no one, not even himself. He hates and loathes everything but is too pathetic to do anything outside of forcing a literal created imitation of childlike innocence to force his paradoxical horror on... and then get her to destroy everything in all existence... while he pathetically chooses to do literally a *"both sides"* argument over it.
Literally the most pathetic choice possible, not even able to stand up for or against the ideology that makes him - him. Again, *by his own choice.*
He is one of the most gifted people in the entire story: powerful, recognized and living in paradise, the epitome of privileged. And he chooses failure and harm to everyone, including himself, every time.
A very interesting perspective. I'll have to remember that one.
I can get why you would hate Hermes but I always saw him as a product of his society. The Ancients toyed with life and did whatever they wanted, and sure to some degree some of that life may not of been as developed as others but these were still living beings to some degree. I liked that Hermes is there to question all of this and ask if playing god like this IS a good thing or not. From there we watch him as he grow tired of it and then out of spite use the ideals of his society against them. After all, if people die then just like all of the other creatures the ancients erased it was deserved. Hermes asking things that only he is thinks of I would not call that a flaw. I think its normal to at least have 1 person think differently about the society they live it, it happens all the time in reality at least. He might be a bit weaker than some of the other FFXIV villains but I don't think he was that bad.
Unrelated sidenote: The Meteion scene where she is points out all of the reasons why its "pointless" to live always scares me and fucked me up. Might be one of my more favorite scenes in any piece of fiction. I think the scariest part about it is that you see that it's all true, and she FORCES you to see that its all true.
3:41 you talk about hermes being the 'entire crux' of the story but that's just a blatant misreading, The point of the Final Days is you would've gotten to them eventually. FFXIV tells it that every immortal race was doomed to this reality., whether Hermes was the one to fall into depression or eventually Hades, who DOES fall into it, just alone.
Comparing the creatures of Elips to an AI chatbot is just wrong too... Like these are the creatures we see in our world, they've very much real. They've very clear that they have CREATED life. There's no artificiality about it, these creatures LIVE. Whether they live to their purpose is the question to the ancients, but Hermes asks (wrongly, but not for any reason you've brought up) if the ancients themselves have lived to their purpose.
Which is why people like Meteion. She's a victim of circumstance. She is given a mission, and HAS emotions and capacity for growth and satisfies everything that makes a living thing living. But Hermes robs her. Whether its discussed anywhere, hermes robs her of taste. He robs her of understanding (emotional intelligence). She feels emotions and responds to it but is never taught to handle it. The Warrior of Light eventually gives her some of this as she comes to realize how to cope with emotions. She cannot claim full responsibility for her atrocities because she was never able to understand what she was doing. Higher beings kept giving her incomprehensible answers. And all she can do is feel their emotions as they give those answers and despair over it.
Hermes is wrong, but he isn't just wrong as a character. he represents the eventual rot all of the ancients would face. As Venat made clear, they were but spared despair for a time.
there is a big aspect to this video with which I disagree, to say that the creations on Elpis are not /alive/ and akin to AI is major mischaracterization and undersells the true power of creation magicks. The things they make and unmake at will /are/ alive, they are as ensouled as any of the other life forms. I say this because 90% of the sidequests are about witnessing the creation of things like the Behemoth and other creatures with the implication that every notable creature in modern Etherys came from places like that. Hermes existed in a /culture/ that /considered/ those things not alive or of no importance, that self same callousness that makes Emet Selch believe what he does forever doesn't count because it isn't murder. Imagine feeling so isolated that you care that much about things that are not supposed to be alive but every fiber of your being is saying otherwise and by merit of Shadowbringers and Endwalker, are supposed to know quite well that those "lesser things" are alive and do matter.
If you fundamentally disagree that the creations are valid living creatures, you miss the point of the quest where you destroy the moths for robes, your character is upset by that and are told that is just the way things are in ancient society and how they view it. Also within the context of the world at large post sundering, if you believe that these creations are not alive, you should not weep for the injured chocobos or griffins or pets or any sort of animal companionship post sundering because it is highly likely there were a construct at one point, same goes for the Ixal, artificial creations or the Loporrits, who are just creation magicked bunny wards. Sure to the ancients it seems like created species are like ai chatbots but we as players are supposed to know that their viewpoint is /fucked/ and Hermes thinks the same way and believes he is /broken/ or something is wrong with him for it.
Should he be in charge of Elpis? No, just as much as someone who gets sad about giving lab rats cancer shouldn't be in charge of a bio-med lab but that doesn't make him mentally ill as you posit.
"you are entirely free to disagree with me."
Done. I've never disagreed with you on anything before really, but I could not possibly disagree more here. This honestly seems like a hot take just for the sake of a hot take. The hatred is completely irrational. It almost feels like those first criticism videos of the story I started seeing right after the expansion released. Where certain TH-camers were making insincere criticism and analysis videos of the story, trying to preemptively get a negative viewpoint out there because they thought it would make them look smarter than everyone else who had a positive viewpoint, as if the community are all a bunch of sheep, and only they were smart enough to appreciate the more subtle nuances of the story. Bear in mind I don't actually think that's what this video is. It just has a similar feeling.
No he's not the greatest character in the game, or even top 10, but come on. Really? I really think you're looking for connections and motivations that aren't actually there. Over complicating things to create the illusion of affirmation.
I think you made a genuine attempt here, and you do have some valid points. for example, I definitely think he could have been fleshed out better and they could have done more to make him earn how important they made him, but this was a terrible analysis overall, in my opinion.
Who are you to decide that those creatures are chat AIs just because they can be created easily? That doesn't mean their emotions or suffering aren't real in the setting.
"No empathetic/good person thinks this way" he broke. people break. it's human. and the story needed a villain. he's not meant as the villain of the entirety of 14, just one of them for endwalker.
While I agree that they hastily tried to make Hermes become the MSQ's sacrifical lamb, I think, on a whole, they did a good job in making Hermes a manifestation of all the contradictions of the Ancient's whole society. Shadowbringers wanted us to empathize with Emet-Selch because he wanted to bring back this perfect world at any cost, and ultimately Hermes (and the Pandaemonium story) is an illustration that even a utopian society is built on a foundation of darkness, in feeble opposition of the harsh realities of the universe. This is why Emet-Selch HAD to lose his quest to rejoin the shards to recreate this false utopia, and why Hydaelyn HAD to sunder humanity in order to save it and salvage some of their world's goodness. Hermes made Hydaelyn, the concept of Zodiark, and Emet-Selch better than they were before the start of the expansion.
Ultimately I don't like Hermes either, but remember that Emet-Selch has caused an untold amount of suffering too. Whether either one are redeemable is up to the judgement of the player.
I can't wait for you to cover Lahabrea next. I feel so mixed about him with how things have wrapped up since his introduction in ARR as this cackling madman. Insightful video!
aaaand that's why Hermes is a great character xD :D
sp, what about Emet-Selch? he's a maniac too.
And Elidibus - a rabid dog, right?
Oh thank god someone actually pointing out faults instead of vigorously twisting themselves into knots to justify heaping endless praise onto an extremely flawed narrative. You had me at the title. The video was just dessert.
It took almost two years for me to finally say what I've known form the beginning. lmao
Considering that these Ancients were so invested in traditions like sacrificing yourself after your tenure as part of the Convecation and weigh this on Venat but also let it slide, AND was willing to PLAN the full sacrifice of their people to bring in Zodiark to stop the End Days AND reverse them PRIOR to the summoning that thusly indoctrinated most, I greatly question their leadership, wisdom and society. After all, Elpis and Pandemonium show us how messed up things kinda were before the Final Days ever began, and the Aumorot we see is a fiction by a man indoctrinated by Zodiark, lost everyone he knew, and lived so long in such turmoils he had to force himself to believe his society was as perfect as he said to get any willpower to DO SOMETHING, ANYTHING AT ALL. As you showed, Emet-Selch by Shadowbringers is not reliable, lying to himself constantly, and he is the one who showed us the Ancients being so good, while our time-travel shows two major arcs totally opposed, both kept hush-hush due to LEADERS' actions, and so many side quests proving Eithyrus was no better than the 14 Reflections of Hydaelyn, and the Ancients were just as human as us players and our friends and enemies alike.
I feel that your comparison to the living creatures in Elpis to a "Chat AI Bot" is a totally inaccurate comparison. The creatures of Elpis, while prototypes, are still living creatures that can experience suffering, have children, and live full life cycles. It's like imagining a puppy into existence with bright blue fur with white stripes. And that puppy can grow up, having children with its own kind or other similar dogs, and grow old/die. It can suffer, eat, sleep, etc. So how is that not a living creature worthy of respect, emotional attachment, and sympathy?
The better analogy is to compare the life forms in Elpis like lab rats, or multi-cellular creatures in research work. At least with the way the Ancients viewed life forms besides themselves. Him being so distraught at having to put one down that was actively a danger does seem a little unusual, or even silly, in that context. But the point is that it also is a reflection of himself.
Hermes is not a typical Ancient. He doesn't feel apart of their society the way most do. He has depression, he struggles with finding a reason to live, and wonders if anyone else sees despair in existence where if you're ostracized and not the right kind of creature... This is proven by the part of the MSQ when he asks if you ever feel moments of weakness and fear and that life and hope seem fleeting. And you can sympathize or empathize with him. To which he feels honest commiseration with you. That there is someone else, even if you're not a "real person" to the Ancients way of viewing things.
Remember, for the entirety of the Elpis arc, all the characters around you think you're a Familiar of Azem. You're just some pet creation that someone sent there to do something for them. And the fact that Hermes treats you with respect rather than just the tolerance many seem to afford you instead... It speaks to his viewpoint of valuing life forms many Ancients consider beneath them.
I agree that the writing of Hermes is flawed. But I feel like there is such a fundamentally wrong basis you have that it makes many of the arguments you're basing it on just not work from the start because of it.
I absolutely agree with you about Hermes. He is a villain that should not of been empathized with. Even after being told about the final days, how it will bring the world to destruction, and realizing his own creation ended up being the cause, and his protecting her after it becomes obvious Meteon was the cause, made him the ultimate villain of the story
I view Hermes less as a character and more as a warning against the pre sundered society, that it wasn't perfect and let someone such as Hermes slip through the cracks. He feels like an allegory for Mental Health in our modern day when left untreated and scorned it can fester and become an epidemic within the populace.
I argue the entire civization could be a sublte criticism of Japanese society. Individuality is shunned to the point people refer and become their title instead of themselves. When all breaks down there is heavy sharlyan isolationist arguments (Isolation from the lower beings).
Heavy conformitionism (example: dress code but also their complete obediance to the 14) Venats acts was the more or less the very first act of rebellion against their government/superiors.
And in the end everyone keeps their problems to themselves because you don't want to be bothersome for others and this causes a decline in mental health. Sounds very japanese...
@@leiferikson850 It does definitely seem like a take on Japanese society and collectivism as a whole. When everyone is just treated as a cog in the greater machine and expected to do their part for the greater good. People will feel like odd ones out, marginalized, weird, ill-fitting and fall through the cracks. They'll get depressed, they'll snap, they'll do something drastic because they just feel like there's nothing else they can do.
An interesting analysis of Hermes, some of which echoes what I had thought (somewhat suprisingly; I hadn't sat down to think about it in the way you did). I also had misgivings with Endwalker's latter narrative half. I had the same feeling that the origin of the Final Days and the root cause of everything we face in the Hydaelyn-Zodiark saga was rather rushed. But rather than associating these issues with Hermes, at least to the extent you do, I ended up focusing more on Meteion. But I think at the end of the day, it's really the Hermes-Meteion pair that felt under-developed.
Since completing Endwalker and even until now, I have thought consistently that I felt unconvinced by Meteion's conclusion after her journey across distant stars, in search for the answers to the meaning of life. Why did she conclude that life is meaningless, and *therefore* it makes sense to extinguish all life in the universe? I never thought there was anything in Hermes' question that would have biased Meteion's search to reach *that* specific conclusion. In contrast, if Hermes had instead tasked her to find out if there is a way for a civilisation to, say, *be free from doubt and despair*, then I could see her reaching the conclusion she did. That is, the only definitive answer appears to be in death, because life is otherwise too unpredictable for there to be everlasting happiness (*or* everlasting despair).
I say this because I would expect that as Meteion travelled, she saw stars in all kinds of states, some of which she describes to us. In war. Lost to time. Advanced. Rudimentary, etc. Should we have expected that the civilisations of every star necessarily met their *definitive* end, with Meteion as witness? *Nothing* new emerged from the ashes? Did Meteion never come across any civilisation, any community, that was persisting, without any obvious looming extinction? If the answer to this expectation is yes, then this would imply Etheirys is unusually special. It suggests that Etheirys is the only star in the universe that trots along the path of life where so many others have failed. I have never thought that this was suggested by the lore of XIV, and in general I find it strange to invoke a uniqueness about a character or a community unless there is cause to. In short, I think the conclusion Meteion reaches is strangely biased considering how open Hermes' question was to her. I would have expected that Meteion would have failed to reach a conclusion. She was not asked to find a way to guarantee happiness. She was not asked to help understand how to guarantee a civilisation's future. She was not asked to *act* on what she discovered. And so I never felt very convinced that Meteion would turn into the melancholic Endsinger, who insists on *imposing* death on all life.
Another thing that irked me quite a lot was the musical choice for The Final Day, the level 90 trial where we face the Endsinger. The first phase's track is an arrangement including the motifs of boss battle themes from all preceding expansions. Ultima, Thordan, Shinryu, Hades. But I remember feeling that it was "undeserved", i.e. it did not make sense to associate that with the Endsinger. She did not have a strong link to these story events, and so it felt strange that, musically, it was being suggested that the Endsinger was the culmination of all of these significant events in the player character's story. Narratively, it was not justified. As far as I am concerned, the agency of the various villains we faced felt very much their own. Yes, the Ascians often had some role to play, but it did not feel like this connecting thread extended all the way until the Endsinger. At best, the Endsinger's relation to these events was circumstantial. In contrast, the Ascians' involvement was more direct, and so it would feel justified for Ascian characters to associate themselves with these fights.
It also did not feel like the Endsinger was a thematic extreme of any of these villains, as each villain had their own motivations that were more developed, and distinct from the Endsinger's reasons for extinguishing life. The only way the track makes sense is to instead associate the motifs with the player character. It represents all the trials and tribulations we have faced until this point; and it acts as a testament to our strength to overcome the many arduous obstacles that have been placed before us. In phase 2 of the trial, after the prayers of the Scions, we have the motif from Footfalls. Which is a very triumphant and cool moment which I really enjoyed. But perhaps you may see like I do, that this means that the music of The Final Day has everything to do with us, and next to nothing to do with the Endsinger. I thought that was a missed opportunity. I had thought that maybe a rearrangement of "What Comes of Despair" would be used as a musical representation of the Endsinger. Or, if they wanted to be more experimental: perhaps give us silence in the fight. To show how starkly different the Endsinger is, both as a being of Dynamis, and as a character who does not believe in the value of life.
In short, it felt like there were some missing steps. Something that could narratively justify *why* Meteion decides to bring all life to an end. It is not clear how simply observing countless civilisations leads to such a conclusion. Nihilist subjects can be taken in several directions, and I think the Hermes-Meteion treatment of it in XIV came across as somewhat shallow, forced towards a direction, without adequate discussion. Just so that we had an enemy fight at level 90. I could understand the destination. The writers wanted to pit two beliefs against each other: that life is meaningless because its value appears transient (Endsinger), and that life is meaningful because those transient moments of happiness can be what one lives *for* (player character/Scions). I also felt that Meteion's shallow nature was further exemplified by the trial itself, and I gave the music as one of my examples.
One only needs to look at a character like Emet-Selch to find the complete opposite in XIV: plenty of depth, plenty of difficulties that the player is encouraged to ponder on, all with great narrative justification. In fact, Emet-Selch goes further, as he *adds* some much needed dimensionality to the otherwise plain role that the Ascians played in previous expansions.
If you made it this far, thanks for reading! I'd welcome people's thoughts on what I've written, whether in agreement or disagreement!
kinda begs the question when do we get the choice of a person deserves forgiveness since we kill the people for far less.
I would disagree. From what I payed attention to not just "plot specific" dialogue but what the characters themselves have to say about the situations they are in. Endwalker is filled with a lot of key phrases that have deep meaning behind them but let the players themselves try to figure out the meaning of it themselves. One key phrase I payed attention to that is always missed by the community is the phrase about the elpis flower when speaking to Hermes, "It's always white". So this has lots of threads behind it. The ancients are near immortal, we all know this. So Hermes spent hundreds of years as the apprentice of the former head of Elphis, then took over the lead of Elphis once his friend was promoted to a Seat of 14. Then when his friend retired, hermes was recommended as a Seat of 14. So during this time, how many years do you think passed by? It's not 1 or 2 years. Hundreds of years, potentially reaching near 1000 years. At bare minimum, maybe like 500 years of Hermes seeing what Ancients do to their creation with the Elpis Flower always being white. Meaning that Hermes has seen who knows how many creatures being deleted with not a spec of remorse of the deletion for, at minimun, 500 years. You don't use the phrase of "Near immortal" and not think about what that means in years. Viera live for potentially 300 years and are not called "near immortal". The community makes the mistake of their own impression of the situation versus what is factually written in the game. This made it clear to me once patch 6.4 dropped, with the Tower of Zod citizen arc, the community misses the deeper meaning behind that quest line. I can explain this if someone asks, but that is a separate topic to this.
As for the animals in Elpis being AI? I'm not sure how the conclusion came to be. We already saw earlier with the flying snakes that they can reproduce and create offspring different from the parents. That also led to a potential deletion when it didn't fly right away. It doesn't require much for an ancient to decide whether or not a creature lives or dies. A creature doesn't need to be violent at all to just be deleted.
I'd like to hear your thoughts behind the Tower thing if you feel like talking about it.
@@daulpaul Sure. This isn't a super deep, change your life kind of meaning but one that does tap into the society of Japan itself. The tower of Zod is practically an allegory for Godzilla, or Gojira, when it was made. I have a friend who is a big fan of Godzilla and a simple wiki search tells you that the people of Japan did not like the announcement of Gojira being made. It was viewed, before release, as an insult to those that suffered from the atomic bomb in ww2. It took decades for Godzilla to turn from an insult to japanese society to their beloved mascot. The tower of zod arc of 6.4 is easily how japanese would of reacted to such a thing being activated again. With western people just telling the japanese, "to just get over it, you lost." from forums and reddit is very fascinating. The atomic bomb dropped in 1945, Gojira was released in 1954. 10 years passed and Japanese people were still very sensitive to the topic of an atomic weapon in movies, how do you think they would react if an atomic weapon was needed to save their lives?
It'd have been rough to not have enjoyed Hermes, you have my sympathy. :( They got a lot of mileage out of his actor appearing as all of his reflections and points in time. I'll try explain why he worked for me personally. I will say this much about his empathy and narcissism, which doesn't make him a good person, or maybe even a great character. But I'll explain why he worked for me, especially relative to Meteion.
It's hard to not see Hermes and Meteion's relationship as Geppetto and Pinnochio - she wants to be a real girl, he wants answers for why life should matter. Moreover, the Ancients are hugely flawed in allowing him on the Convocation, but i do think, opposite the overtly sardonic attitude of Emet-Selch, Fandaniel's post may attract a more heightened empathy, as one governs death and the other governs life. From there it's like that bit in Community, where Jeff says "Same way I can take this pencil, say his name is Steve, and go like this *breaks the pencil* and part of you dies." And I mean, yeah, people can separate simulated related and half-people, but then that's also how the Ascians observed the reflected, they're fractured imperfect people, no better than AI, not even real boys and real girls. A bunch of Meteions. Meddlers and parasites. The reason Zodiark was a necessity. The challenge I think for Hermes was that even Hythlodaeus, who was the kindest Ancient even after the Sundering, still struggled to understand why Hermes could have difficult emotions. Especially with all the Utopia analogies from Thomas More's book, a formula for a world of peace and harmony was far more important than individuality, hence the masks. So that very culture may have spurred him to be so reckless and anarchist. Which is not... good. He's not a good person for letting Meteion go, but for him, his little ChatGPT daughter did more for him than even the kindest people in his society - and that fixation and empathy is likely how he got his post as Overseer.
When I was younger, I would rage into a violent fit if someone took this stuffed animal and threw it or pretended to hurt it. It was stupid and childish and I needed to grow up a lot sooner than I did, got there, but somehow that stuffed animal could reflect my insecurities and be there in a way that people outside my own head could. I think Hermes is the logical extreme of that, where he lost sympathy and empathy altogether in a culture that only saw value in things if they were 'real'. And trust me, more recently, I was 1000% in your boat, in Detroid Become Human, I never treated as the androids as more than androids and the plot reflected that, but they weren't 'real,' it's just an exercise in empathy. Hermes' ego became such that he felt like he's the only one who ever had any, and he gets the final say, especially with no Emissary to keep the Convocation together. We also don't know a lot about other Convocation members who weren't Paragons, but it is clear that even no two Ascians fully agreed with each other completely after 10k+ years. Igeyorhm and Lahabrea acted out of the initial plan, forcing Elidibus to pull Emet out of 'retirement', Nabriales hated Lahabrea too, and who no one felt bad for when Nabriales died. The only one Mitron semed to care about was Loghrif and vice versa. And I broke the law of the Convocation by creating a crystal of Azem. So Fandaniel being elected despite his unhinged decisions is definitely an afterthought by the convocation, maybe not the Ancients as a whole. Fandaniel didn't want the post, but he needed to protect humanity from Meteion (and maybe he felt like he was the only one who could because he felt he was the only one who understood Meteion - again, more poor assessments from him), so he accepted the post. And the more time went on, the more he just felt like he 'got' Meteion, thus your classic final fantasy final boss nihilist arc. Also, quickly, the previous Fandaniel may have been more sentimental and decisive that it should be Hermes, maybe much like how Venat vouched for the new Azem before he/she was elected.
For me, most of all rushing Zodiark and Garlemald was a bit peevish to me, and it didn't even hit me until recently that we already fulfilled the prophecy of might and light from Louisoix's journal during our fight with Zenos... All to make way for Hermes' story, because it's ultimately a fight of light and dark - but we're in the middle as soon as we take up the crystal of Azem and oppose Elidibus in 5.3. And after Kairos activated, only WoL and Venat remembered the events of the Hyperborea - and by then she's not thinking about governance. She's ready to live, die and know - not save the world as it is, but create her reflections and rely on mankind's potential. And as for stretches, and forcing things... Omicron Questline. A lot to reach the theme of final despair and hope at the bottom of Pandora's Box.
But do I feel bad for him? ...After this much time, I don't think he ever stopped being idealistic and playing with dolls. Xande is kind of just another Meteion - this perfect idealization of a good person, so much so he cloned him, whether there's a soul attached or no. And Asahi was a doll as well - so yeah, dude needs to stop playing with dolls, especially when lives are the price. WoL by default empathizes with villains, and it's not always how I'd feel, but that's who we are, we're more agents of catharsis than dealers of judgement. Elidibus, Meteion, Zenos - whoever we fight, they leave the world with eyes unclouded, and that's the sad beauty of the writing. But yeah saying 'the devs' made Meteion cute is very reductive. Hermes did. The tragedy of Hermes is (again like a large number of final bosses in FF - heck, even in Endwalker if you want to include Zenos) - is that they became monsters before they could become adults, and they ignore the light at the end of the tunnel we don't see until we mature enough to search for it. Sephiroth, Kuja, Seymour, Kefka - even Garland in FF I, for all his idealizing of his romance with Sarah. Children wield power to judge the uncaring, when they don't realize that everyone cares - but it takes a LOT of pain to get there. That's what I got out of Hermes, anyways. Hope that helps expand your appreciation for it, because I'm positive what I read was what they were going for. But edit/final note, the big thing is we arent' sad that he's a genocidal maniac and that's just misunderstood. We understand what he could have been, and he chose nihilism over understanding - over living, dying, and knowing.
“It’s not alive anymore than a ChatGPT bot”. Woah slow down there Emet Junior.
Incoming long form response. I don’t think we’re supposed to love or like Hermes. I think him being part of the art work isn’t a fair measure of “This guy was part of the crew” This is the same team that forgot to put Kryle in the Scion portrait. So not exactly batting a thousand on Art think pieces.
Real talk though, Hermes is the greatest signifier of the dangers of depression. He didn’t empathize with the monster we slew. He sympathized. His longing for answers over purpose and refusal to accept ends of any form were marks of the potential flaws in the ancients. Their society was far from the perfect picture painted to us, but don’t let me get on about that til later.
As a person who lives with (sometimes even succeeds despite) depression, Hermes represents that tendency for my brain to cause damage to myself and everyone I care about. You spiral, nosediving into actions or thoughts that bring agony and bitterness all around you; all while your brain tricks you into thinking: this will help us somehow. For me and my smooth brain, depression spikes drive me to stop talking to anyone I care about. I don’t want them to see me like this. They wouldn’t like me if they knew. It would only hurt them if I’m around. All of these thoughts are wrong, and on good days my logic can do the Emet check of ‘and you didn’t think to ask anyone before acting on this?’
It’s not all good days though. Having depression doesn’t get you labeled as someone who should not be in charge. Unless you wave a giant flag screaming “I would prefer to not be responsible for even myself,” people will look toward the good in you. I’ve been praised, promoted, and even celebrated all while thinking to myself “Why the #%$& do they want me here?” At least at one point in life I was not okay at all, but still trusted to lead a team of people because of ‘my dedication and knowledge.’ It brought harm when I reluctantly accepted it. Am I going to break down and make an emotional delete the universe button? Nah, thankfully another chunk is laziness. Can I see what led Hermes to do it? Oh absolutely. Finally, I’ll just say it: this is the same dumbass council that had Laha-freaking-Breha on it. Powerful? Oh gods yes. The best representations of leaders? Hard pass.
The very themes of Endwalker explore finding purpose; and defining the difference between selfless and selfish purposes. The difference between Hermes and Zenos is that Hermes could not put aside his passion even at the cost of his purpose. Zenos, on the other hand, grew to choose delayed gratification in order to achieve his end goals. Thank the twelve we killed him or he might have become a whole ass person by 8.0
In conclusion, I don’t blame you for your perspective and respect your opinion. Perhaps though, perhaps you can understand why I don’t ‘nothing’ hermes. I see what unchecked selfish depression can cause. It makes me feel a stoic pity for him. Perhaps if Ancient Society was better they would have listened to him saying he was not ready for the seat. Perhaps if someone close to him had noticed he could not connect with people, they would have withdrawn him from Elips. They didn’t; he didn’t step back, and the world was shattered for it.
Here's my take: Hermes cared too much about life. He wanted to know what has meaning to it, what is the ultimate reason for existence and he had good intentions. Intentions however are always flawed. No matter who you are, intentions are always flawed - be they good or bad. By sending Meteion off to search for the answer without even once telling her, explaining her what that even is or even worse, not providing her any means of understanding the life has many answers instead of a defined single one, he basically gave Metion an impossible task that was doomed to fail from the start. And as such, came all the atrocities of thinking that the sole answer he wanted was to end it all.
Here's the truth of the matter though: Life does come to an end. That is a fate we all share - we die. To put it painly as one aspect of Death once said: "Beyond the beaten path lies the absolute end. It matters not who you are... Death awaits you." But I believe Hermes was so sure that there had to be more to life than just that. He blinded himself and flew so close to the sun he didn't just melt his wings, he set himself on fire and dove right back to the planet at top speed to commence his own version of Meteorfall. In the end, it's not that Hermes cared too much about life or he was empathetic. I think the real issue that lies with him is that, he was so sure, so convinced by his own ideals that there was a single perfect answer to why we all live, he deluded himself into thinking once he found it, it would inspire true change to him and all of Ethyris. Alas... That's never the case.
Hermes, to me, was a much better villain than Emet-Selch. Hot take, I know. I found him to be a perfect juxtaposition of the Ancients and their culture. Of course, my opinion doesn't come out without bias, since Shadowbringer I always argued the same points which Endwalker pointed towards the Ancients and I absolutely LOATHED how the narrative was forcing me to sympathize and care about Emet-Selch. So it felt good to feel justified with an actual character in-game that approached those topics. And funny enough, the sympathetic approach from his writing is not really as him as a character, but to bring a counter to the 'perfection' which was the Ancient society. At the very least I felt this was the whole reason for it. The very own commentary over "this beast wasn't alive" perfectly summarizes why many people don't like him. Anyone who really holds to that viewpoint, will not be able to connect with Hermes and instead, connect with the Ancients. This is funny, to me, Elpis was a massive red flag for the Ancient society instead. Erasing and creating creatures at will is an act of natural dubious morale, their entire society was maniacal and absolutely terrifying because there's no logical justification for where one can act as they did, and once they came to be Ascian, did even more and more atrocities. The very own fact that Hytholadeus makes you a robe out of butterflies, disgusted me. I think it's interesting how both viewpoints can be approached in the storyline in that regard and how this conflict, even in the community, can bring very fun debates.
They don't see things as living beings they just see aether that can me molded at a whim, but can you blame them really they were supreme beings almost god like with their abilities
I was going to write something out, but you more or less summed it up. I feel like Hermes should be pretty easy to "get" but the most people pull from it is "RRR HUMAN BAD THEY DIE NOW" In the end Emet was more palatable I guess despite him follow a similar trend.
@@SpaceElvisInc Then it falls on the realm of ethics if what they do is moral or not and if by being a "god" they still have the right to shape life by their own whims. We have Athena as the extremism point of what the Ancient culture could lead to, which is enough to point out that they are flawed as creations and their perceptive is equally flawed. To the point Emet asked Hermes: "Who are you to decide if we live or die?" displayed the vast hypocrisy that the Ancient culture has, for to do it with any other creation is OK. But when they are on the receivers end, it's not OK.
It's an interesting debate, won't deny it.
Honestly, I was relating with Hermes up until he took Meteion and let her go. He lost me at that point.
5:19 uhhhhhh they ARE alive. As much we are. The constructs made with creation magic are not just familiars bound to their creators wills. That is the whole point of Elpis as a facility. To evaluate creatures made by others for release into the wild so they can procreate and live on Etheirys. How did you miss that? They actually have commentary about how some of the subjects "Would be too devastating to the environ if they were released". They even call them life forms multiple times. These are fully sentient beings made by creation magic.
I noticed you didnt seem to talk about Fandaniel at all. Seeing as he's basically an extension of Hermes (no matter how much Amon may try to deny it) in the end he realises how much Fandaniel had influenced his development. I think the element of Fandaniel being introduced in 5.3-5.55 and early EW adds a lot to Hermes' character.
I also think that Hermes' didn't account for Meteion's temperamental change and he wasn't doing it out of pure malice as you may paint him to be. As Emet said, the question he gave Meteion was inherently flawed. But Meteion took this and scaled it up to 100. By that point, she was her own being. I doubt anything Hermes' could've said or done would've changed her from her course at that point.
So no, I don't think Hermes' is the inherent cause for every conflict leading up to EW. Meteion took the other half and ran with it where Hermes' was second guessing himself.
If you think the MSQ was trying to make you forgive Hermes, you weren't paying attention. They wanted you to know how he came to the decision he came to. Nothing more. Some of your points were spot on, but you missed ther mark on some.
So I am in a weird spot, your points are all good and I agree with them but something about it does not sit right with me. For example when it comes to the creature we put down. I see the point about it being an ai. However, at the same time we have to look at the fact that this is a creature set to be wiped away completely from existence. There will be no back up made. There is no second chance or remaking it. In addition who is to say they are not actually alive? They hunt and travel around, they can learn and they can pass away. All of these points are shown in elpis.
Second this is the big point that often gives me pause when it comes to him. His biggest question was "are we alone in the universe." and "Is it worth living." Something I will point out is that most races he comes in contact with are races that have some function of immortality. Be it through science or evolution they have prolonged their life to the point of forever. Therefor I think the answer he got back was there is no point in living forever. Not that life has no purpose. I would love to hear counter points and observations.
My points on the thing being "alive" seems to be a point of contention for a some people. As explained upon arrival, the reason the concepts of Elpis aren't considered alive is because they lack a soul. The world/reality doesn't gain or lose anything from a concept being made or destroyed. This is why places like Elpis were considered important, they were contained simulation grounds. The Ancients saw this as the most ethical way to simulate life without actually harming a true ecosystem. If you destroy a concept, nothing happens. But if you kill a soul baring creature, that misery can be carried back to the aetherial realm. Also, I find it oddly hypocritical for people to say a soulless concept is an important living thing in Endwalker while ignoring the countless soul baring people/creatures we've happily killed up to that expansion. lol
Secondly, Hermes was ultimately acting in self interest. Oh sure, people act things like "Is life worth living?" all the time. But Hermes wasn't searching for an answer that would benefit his peers, the world or the universe. He was only doing it for his own sake. And when he didn't get the response he wanted, he decided that the "imperfect" slate might as well be cleaned. I can't imagine any good or sane person coming to the same conclusion.
Hope that helps!
I like you Synodic, I always will but I think you have completely swept a lot about Hermes under the rug here including his depression and the crisis of identity. You are not as wise with some of this game's lore as you think you are. Stout Helm and Zurichn should educate on you on Hermes.
While I don't think he drags down Endwalker, I do agree that people really shouldn't be thinking of him as empathetic.
There's a line in the dungeon that really tips his hand. Paraphrased from memory: "I won't let you kill her, not before I hear my answer."
This instance of Meteion is the one creation he spent the most time with. He shared his emotions and burdens, shared his favorite food, had been around him at nearly all times. There should be no creation in all of Elpis that Hermes cares for more. And yet with his goal so close in front of him, the truth is he doesn't give a shit about her beyond what value he can gain from her.
As much as he made a big production about caring for the creatures, he was using them as an external vessel for his feelings about how ancient society as a whole handles death, and the creatures themselves never mattered.
As an aside about the selection of Hermes as Fandaniel, I will remind you though, that while no one catches the warning signs, once Hermes lays it all out in the open, Emet's immediate response is "You should never have been put in charge of Elpis with that mental state." ('Because that job is destroying you' is implied by my recollection.)
This is a gross misreading of the character and his motivations.
This. Thank you. People really latch onto the idea that his empathy for other creatures is totally real and not just a projection of his self-pity for himself. Truly empathetic people totally condemn all life in the universe to certain death without a second thought, certainly.
The targets of Hermes' projected empathy are primarily creatures he knows to be lesser than himself. They're either animal creations, who can't talk back to him, or his own creation Meteion, who he literally created to make himself feel better by acting as his emotional sponge and getting him his "answers". He has power over these lesser creatures, so he can freely project his feelings onto them and feel sorry for them as a proxy for feeling sorry for himself. He has no empathy for or connection to his actual peers - he "claws at them", to quote his short story; he feels stifled by them, because they are his equals in that they could actually talk back and challenge him. He has to isolate himself and put up an act because if he were to actually open his mouth and air out what he truly feels, his peers might lead him to doubt his preconceptions - especially those he has about himself, i.e. "I am the only one with feelings here".
And then again, in Elpis he is not among equals. He is Chief in Elpis and everyone gives him a wide berth because a) he keeps to himself and b) he has power over them.
The second he has to engage with an actual peer, an actual equal, someone he has no actual power over - Hermes gets criticized. It takes Emet-Selch seconds to see the flaws with his work and Hermes *explodes*. Emet's criticism is valid, it comes from a place of power, and he knows he can't actually address it; his lifeline is cut off and he's made to suddenly come to the realization that he's been wrong all this time? Welp!! He goes hostile and tries to kill them all. Which ultimately culminates in him knowingly condemning all life in the universe - human, animal, everything - to certain death.
It's not empathy what he felt, never was. It was his vanity and pride, projected into small mirrors of himself. The second *he* felt threatened, he was ready to end it all.
PS. Hermes witnesses a Meteion being "unmade" in his short story, with the little girl dying in his arms, and his immediate thought is that he's not gonna get his "answers". lmao.
Hearing that line again... I wonder if the original translation is like that
@@Al-ji4gdwould you have a rebuttal?
@@elgatochurro I have a comment elsewhere in this comment section.
Man sends a biological, emotionally-stunted Skynet into deep space with zero peer review or oversight, then when Skynet decides to end all life, he doesn't even ATTEMPT to console his creation or reason with it, choosing to force his "experiment" regarding the right to exist on the entire UNIVERSE. Hermes' kill count makes Emet-Selch look like a damn Care Bear.
Facts right there.
Woahhhh your assertion that the creature is not alive is incorrect. It is explained to us in 6.0 that Man can create anything, but they have no control over whether what they create has a soul, or if it is an arcane entity. I remember this because I contemplated it for a long while when I read it; asking myself "If Man is not responsible, then who dictates what can and cannot exist with a soul?" With this in mind, I do not think you can safely say that the creature is not a living thing possessed of a soul. It is a beast, it can eat to replenish aether, it can feel pain, and it could breed. I would assume it would have a soul, and would not be considered an arcane entity.
Next, you say Hermes is selfish for circumventing his society and for making an ultimatum for his people. The entire point of Hermes is that his society is unjust, and indulges in casual genocide because it suits the society. He, as leader of Elpis, is in a unique position to come to the conclusion that what they are doing is wrong. The line about humanity not having power over what has a soul is evidence of this. Man does what he wants, but not out of some divine authority, but out of convenience. We see this first hand in Shadowbringers. We are living, we have souls, we have populations, but to the Ascians we are a simple mistake that can be rectified by genocide so they can start over.
Yes, if Hermes went through the proper channels, the great flaw in Meteion's question could have been avoided under the watchful eye of Emet Selch, and yet Emet Selch is also the chief example of how diluted and hubristic the ancients were. He is the example of the reason Hermes felt like he needed to act outside of the law. But it was not selfishness which motivated his actions, it was the desire to bring a new perspective to his people, so that they could grow. And he's also deeply conflicted about this. He wants to ask the stars for answers because he is not confident that his individual perspective is valid compared to his society.
When Hermes learns that the stars hold only despair, not knowing at the time that Meteion has unintentionally caused much of it, he is not willing to fully accept this. The fact that the stars told him they feel the same as him was not enough for him to fully throw his lot in with Despair, instead, he elects to allow mankind to be judged in the exact same way that Man has judged all the creatures possessed of souls that they have discarded. If anything, despite the fact that Hermes is the one allowing this to happen, everything about Hermes is quite selfless. I'd say he's significantly more selfless than Hades or Venat, in that he's not forcing his will, he's allowing things to take their natural course.
As for Meteion, She is what she feels. This is her nature. She is childlike in multiple ways, and this was likely done because Hermes wanted Meteion to learn from others, as a child does. He wanted no preconceptions, for her to face the societies of the stars and report back an unbiased account. People like Meteion because its not her fault what's happening to her. We want to save her from the dark conclusions she has come to. We want to prove that life is worth living.
Hermes is deeply flawed, yes, and he's meant to be a contentious figure. I absolutely support criticizing him or not liking him, but I gotta disagree with the bulk of this video and say Hermes is pog, and Endwalker would not be my favorite storyline if he wasn't in it.
I feel bad for Hermes, but only because Ancient society for whatever reason didn't let him get the help he so clearly needed. Dude would have been fine with a sabbatical and a bunch of therapy. If I were to rewrite some of Elpis or maybe throw in a bonus "Tales from..." story, I'd show Hermes being a decent guy whose care for life actually helps him perform his duties in some way but then when his mentor dies Hermes starts spiraling into his nihilistic depression. I'd then show him actually trying to reach out to other people but people don't really understand his issues, and now he's in such a high position of authority that no one is willing to really question him.
I wish the game had used Hermes to more explicitly show the flaws of the Ancients. We already knew from ShB that they couldn't handle tragedy, and I wish that EW had done more to show that some kind of tragedy was basically inevitable in their society. Athena in Pandaemonium also kind of feeds into this idea too. She clearly had issues, but no one stopped her until it was nearly too late. Even if Hermes and Athena both got stopped before causing an apocalypse I feel like sooner or later some other Ancient with unrecognized and unhelped issues would have slipped through the cracks and caused a different apocalypse with their nigh-godlike powers.
I do feel bad for Meteion, though. I basically view her as a child and therefore not fully responsible for her actions. "Here kid, have universe-destroying nuke! Now look at all the war, plague, death, and other tragedies in the universe!"
I think you're right on all counts here. The Ancient society was at best metastable
The Ancients were already on the verge of a societal collapse. NPCs in Amaurot during Shadowbringers talk about the lack of creativity. Hythlodaeus mentions how any time a new concept is presented it gets run into the ground and becomes boring. Doing random quests around Elpis also pushes this narrative. What would happen to a world where the defining trait of the people was their ability to create were to find themselves creatively stagnant? Hermes even questions this. What would happen when everything is perfect? I'm thinking Ra-la or the Ea. Hermes surely saw that inevitability to have asked the question. It may have gotten to a point where the frequency of needing to put down more and more creations had been increasing because of this creative decline. Hythlodaeus talks about sharks being created with one arm or leg and various combinations. Obviously all of these creations wouldn't be viable and would need to be unmade.
Would he have done the same if we hadn't told him about the future? He was coming to the conclusion that creativity was stagnating. He is probably having to kill more creations than cultivating. We tell him that the world is ending, twice. He finds out there is no life left in the universe. The closest thing to a child that he has is telling him that they all suffered in one way or another and life is meaningless. Now looking at her colorless face, devoid of her smile, what meaning could there be in life?
Personally, I'm of the opinion that had Hermes not stopped us. If Meteion had been taken back with Emet-Selch, we wouldn't have been able to stop the Endsinger. Because by that point, the Meteia had already networked together and the Endsinger was created. Individual consciousness was suspended and the new hive mind was in control. If Meteion was taken back she probably would have been destroyed or sundered, but ultimately not survived. But by having her leave we were able to appeal to her in Ultima Thule. Thus fulfilling Hermes's test on whether we are fit to exist.
just like you think of the creature that was killed as nothing, I think he saw everyone else as nothing because to him they are the same. He sees himself as an outcast not one of them, so if that what they want him to be like then why not do the same to them but he give them a chance to change the out come because he still cared in the end a little or maybe Meteion held back
A pair of things that, while I agree Hermes' actions and statements do not line up with how he is attempted to be portrayed, he does succeed in a very amusing way to me: He suffers not from empathy but Projection as you said in so many words but also at the same time acts with the very same hubris that he so rails against in a wonderful spot of irony. I honestly wish he were given a different kind of spotlight or maybe that they would have used the Echo better at parts to let us see him maybe start idealistic and then fall into this hubris to explain why someone of his rank would do this or just... Either more time or a retooling of stage dressing or something. He feels like a good opportunity that got swept up in the crunch of the pace we were caught up in and never got a chance to properly breathe
On the basis of being a researcher Hermes failed a crucial part of his experiment with Meteion. He had no control data. One of the "shoulds" that he had done would have been establishing a baseline for the answers from Eitherys.
The lead researcher of Elpis didn't know what a Peer Review is. And that's dumb. haha
@@SynodicScribe A sadly all too common occurrence in basically every field, especially scientific ones; once you get to that high position, you've more than likely become convinced of your own brilliance and have trouble remembering you still have much you don't know. I suspect that was part of the point of showing both the bit with the aetherically unbalanced suwana and the bit with the murder happy creature: the former showed that Hermes really was brilliant and capable of seeing things that others missed while the latter showed that he was to confident in his abilities too recognize when he might be wrong despite others telling him how he was wrong.
@@SynodicScribe HIgh INT, Low WIS.
You would be amazed how many scientists dump wis.
@@SynodicScribe now just imagine having Emet Selch as Reviewer 2.
Like emett, most people juat understand where he came from.
That doesnt mean we "like him" or will ever agree with what they did.
7:32 I must object to you calling him ‘incompetent’. His plan to subject humanity to an unbiased trial, a plan he came up with incredibly quickly in the middle of a crisis, was nearly executed to perfection. In raw power, he was no match for 3 of the 4 opponents he faced; he did good to only allow 2 to escape.
I like how Endwalker's attempt to make a point about the need to understand the viewpoints of others and cooperate in order to find true happiness. I think it is really cool what they did with Emet, and how they added layers to a man who seemed like the apotheosis of a boomer meme, and showed how he was a soul cursed with endless grief that would truly would do anything at any time, just to preserve all that he loves. And above all else, I love the idea of how the finale of Endwalker, the final victory, is found by our hero making a crying, lonely little girl smile for the first time in what truly was forever.
I do not think that Hermes should have been the villain to set this all in motion. I do not think he was introduced anywhere near early enough in the story to make his presence matter in any way. I do not like how his strife was portrayed, and I felt many a time like I could very clearly see the hand of the author moving plot points in order to get us where we needed to go.
Personally, I would have preferred the Elpis revelations if:
1. Something like Athena's ascendance was actually what resulted in the fall of the Star. The problem being caused by selfish closed mindedness should at least be flash, or perhaps tied to a character we were already familiar with. Heck, just bust out the heart of Sabik and do a YuGiOh Season 4. Easy enough!
2. Meteion was actually a super young ancient who spend a seemingly endless eternity in confused grief alone at the corner of reality, isolated in fear and paranoia, until it bubbled over, and their creation magicks lashed out at everything around them. Aside from sociopathy, the mind of a child, which is unable so understand many of the incredible complexities we grapple with in our maturity, is another great example of having to temper your wants and views for the sake of others, when the person in question is generally incapable of keeping up with you.
3. The problem is solved by using Venat's gem to summon Inspector Hildebrand Manderville to make her feel better and fix everything.
4. Zenos does the Manderville mambo for all eternity after his defeat as penance for his crimes.
gonna hear you out, but Hermes is literally my favorite antagonist in the entire game and felt incredibly well done to me.
edit: aaaand nope. only made it 5 minutes in before I considered your takes to be so weapons-grade bad it wasn't worth my time anymore.
Everyone is so quick to forgive and sympathize with Hermes and forget that his actions caused countless genocides. He feels so bad for the creation drafts but none for all the civilizations throughout the universe? And for what? Cause he was sad? It definitely felt like they put the MSQ on hold to have the Hermes and Meteion show. And they put the two of them on the end card assuming I cared for them?
The first time we meet Hermes in Elypis is at the tasting ground he oversees in his role as creating new life.before taking the seat of Fandaniel which as close as I can find has something to do with over seeing he entire process. Here he sits in paradise finding flaws with the very process of life itself. Hermes was worshiped in ancient times as both the god of healing and the death (Thoth) .Fandaniel dragging Amon away. I thought Hermes worked out well .
Well he is empathetic but he values the worth and opinion of EVERY Species, not just humans, he technically empathizes with the humans in an Gods vs. Humans scenario.
Remember, his species was playing god for hundreds if not thousands of years if not even more, and often purely for fun just to all of a sudden kill them if they grew bored or disliked them.
A good person or a good deed is always a thing of perspective, for the asciens his defend of meteon definitely wasn't or maybe even was for them but also just foolish but for any point of view of the victim, at least the theoretical revenge seeking once it was. He did exactly to the dot what his species did to so so many others, test their fitness to survive.
He didn't flip a Killswitch to "destroy" humanity.
He gave his own species a chance and forced them at the same time to prove that they themselves uphold the values and Requirements they put as minimum requirement to even allow to live
I agree totally. Once he became the focus, the story seemed to lull and the excitement for a conclusion fell flat. I loved the history of the Asceans and what led to the final days, but feel they could have improved his character by playing him off more selfish, almost a lawful evil character with the thought "nothing is perfect and doesn't deserve to exist." They touched on the experiments and how quickly they'd destroy failed ones and start again. Make it so that each star was an experiment, failed ones would die on their own or by an End of Days event, then they would start anew. A rebirth cycle for better or worse until a star proved worthy. Maybe even go further where those who "make it" are then given the "gift" of being "cleansed of sin" (killed anyways) and "allowed" to move into the aether where their souls would live forever. It'd be a direct correlation the Garleans and how they subjugated others to be their low ranks, rarely to move up but still be part of society. The cleansed would essentially be faux-Asceans, never the same but brought in to the society to live eternally because they "completed their work," similar to what the original Fandaniel did, but just without the choice to do so.
The second I saw the head wings on meteion I knew she was the big baddie lol