Quote Originally Posted by EaraGrace View Post
No, it doesn’t.
Yes, it does. Saying that other scholars knew means that Hermes wasn't the only option.

Let me use an example. Vaccines, in their most basic form, take a disease and use a deactivated form of it to ready the immune system for the real thing. A simple concept. Could you make a vaccine?

Or how about another. Local weather conditions are largely impacted by regular cold and warm fronts. A simple concept. Can you tell what the weather will be?
To turn these around into significantly more pertinent questions for this discussion, are Jerome Kim and Jim Cantore the only people in the world that can possibly make vaccines or predict the weather? The entire basis of your argument isn't "Well YOU couldn't do it!" it's "Well NOBODY ELSE could do it!" Do you seriously mean to tell me that Hermes was not just a brilliant mind, but also the sole singular pioneer into both Dynamis and the celestial aether currents, two completely unrelated fields of study, all while also running Elpis full time, an entirely different third disconnected realm of science?

Aside from the fact that this is clearly not believable, remember once more that Hermes' own mentor, the previous seat of Fandaniel, was yet still alive.

Yes a Convocation member and former head of Elpis doing everything in his power to destroy the world, with 2/3 of the worlds population stuck inside of a god he was instrumental in designing, Etheirys barely recovering from the destruction, and Amaurot divided in such a major way for the first time, is no big deal.
Sundering all life on the planet and the fabric of reality was a far "bigger deal" than all of that. A last resort, not something you pull out because you're afraid of upsetting others with the truth. The fact is, if it came out that Hermes had caused everything then he would be standing alone, nobody would stick up for him if he was the root cause of so much death and destruction, and he would be unable to cause anymore harm - If that is even what he would have intended to do, which Venat doesn't even concede, instead merely saying that she doesn't know for sure either way if he would be friend or foe.

That’s not even considering the fact that telling a tempered convocation, preparing a sacrifice of innocent life to Zodiark, is a pointless move. Their answer was clear.
And yet Venat DID try to talk to them, except she was lying to them in doing so by withholding the truth. This whole "tempering = had to be killed" nonsense is way past done with the revelations from Shadowbringers and Endwalker anyway, namely that Zodiark was actually Elidibus, a guy that just wanted to find a peaceful solution for each faction, and that Zodiark wasn't even capable of tempering people outright to begin with, instead only "tugging" their aether towards his astral aspect somewhat, something completely supported in ShB when Emet acts against the Zodiark cause's best interests on numerous occasions.