[SPOILERS] Hermes is a hypocrite.

[JohncarterIx]

Hermes is a evil mr rogers

[Absimiliard]

The 'Venat bad' argument is just brutally simplifying and ignoring a genuine debate for... I dunno, the sake of being contrarian?

A number of very strong reasons for this opinion have been put forward in the numerous debates over the subject throughout various threads. Only a handful of posters are just going "lol Venat bad," while the rest have made excellent points.

[Iscah]

[Hermes] decried Amaurotian society for their wanton sacrifice of other lifeforms, but he did release a number of creatures against us [...] Obviously we were going to kill them. He was aware of the WoL's fight abilities, and also Emet-Selch and Venat were there, two of the most powerful people of their time. Those animals didn't have a chance and he couldn't have been ignorant to that.

He thought that hearing his answer was more important, that it justified the sacrifice. But isn't that exactly what the Amaurotians were doing? Sacrificing life for "the greater good"?. Regardless of one's opinion on that, Hermes clearly went back on his ideals. He was against the sacrifice of living creatures until if suited his needs.

I think the initial post is making two big misassumptions:


1. Hermes knew we would kill everything he sent at us.

He may have thought – certainly hoped – that it was enough to overwhelm us. We are weakened by the spell placed on the facility by the state of alarm, even if the creatures are too.

Perhaps the spell doesn't bring things to a fraction of their strength, but sets everything to an equally low value, thus having a greater effect on our power levels than those of the creatures. After all, if Emet is really as powerful as he's made out to be, he should be able to defeat a few minor creatures solo, not require a party of four while he plays the part of an average tank or black mage.

Likewise, Venat could KO the shark in one hit earlier, but inside the facility she's again brought down to being much weaker and needing help to bring down smaller enemies.

(In fact, if you want to judge their strength entirely on gameplay mechanics, assuming all the trusts do operate at similar strength and competence, we've all been brought down to the same level as Hythlodaeus who claims to be weaker than the others by far.)


2. Hermes has changed from caring to not caring about the creatures.

He may have shifted from "save them at all costs" to judging them as less valuable than Meteion, but this much is a rational conclusion by the ancients' way of thinking. They are merely concepts, many potentially doomed and the rest able to be created over again. But Meteion is unique and precious and if he loses her, especially before she completes her report, he has lost something irreplaceable.

(Perhaps after being told so many times to stop caring so much about things that can be replaced and remade, some part of him says "fine".)

Still, that doesn't mean that he feels nothing for the creatures he sends against us. Each one would be an agonising decision, each death another layer of guilt upon him in his already highly distressed state.

I don't think he would see it as simply "abandoning his ideals" but being placed in a position where he is forced to make a cruel decision between two ideals that he can't protect at once. He would know he is betraying one thing he holds precious to protect another.

It should also be noted that just prior to Meteion receiving the report, we decided to bring Hermes into the secret and tell him everything. He's just been told that he is destined to become a villain, if not here then in a future life, and may feel that the others are suspicious of him even though they reassure him otherwise. And then Emet demands to take Meteion into custody. Intentionally or not, they have put him in a corner where he feels extremely threatened and is not thinking straight.

[Manny_Maneater]

So the overarching message of Endwalker says. But what if the Ancients hadn't been eradicated? What if, instead of committing omnicide with very little deliberation, Venat gave them a fair chance? Their reactions to the calamity that befell them were perfectly reasonable. Trauma tends to make one behave irrationally for a time. Those memories would've stuck with them even after Zodiark healed the world -- even after those sacrificed to save everything were brought back. They were never given a chance. To think such an enlightened race would be incapable of learning from those awful experiences seems... shortsighted, to put it bluntly. It wasn't just Hermes' test that was rigged; Venat's was as well.

They're both massive hypocrites. But then, so is nearly every other major character in the story. The WoL is quite a hypocrite themselves.

Venat gave them a chance. We see that during the cutscene at the end of Elpis. The ancients were going to sacrifice not only over half of their population, but future souls to be born so they could have their "perfect paradise" again. She didn't act the second they summoned Zodiark. She didn't act when they sacrificed another 50% to get the planed to be fertile again. She acter when they decided to forsake the future to restore their past. But they never ever acknowledged that their past was already broken before Meteion.

[vehere]

Hermes hypocrisy is pretty clear early on in how he treats Meteion (and her sisters). He says he wants her to experience life, but is dismissive to her desire for a sweet because "you can't eat, and besides, you only like that because I like it". You would think he could have made it possible for her to eat things for fun, rather than doing it for nourishment, but it doesn't occur to him to do it. When Meteion wants to cheer him up, she asks for your help with the flowers. While he is appreciative, he is still in the end rather dismissive of the gesture on Meteion's part.

This isn't getting into how he sent what were essentially a bunch of beings with the emotional maturity of toddlers into space to gets answers he wanted, with completely untested abilities that ended up causing feedback loops. Or how, despite Meteion being obviously distressed and in pain, wanting to hide and avoid giving her report, Hermes disregarded this. He did not care that she was in pain and did not want to tell him. He wanted his answers. When the answers turned out to be nothing like he expected, he didn't consider trying to calm the Meteia to try convincing them that even if there were many dead worlds, it does not mean all hope is lost. No, instead he decided to let the Meteia have their suicidal cosmic temper tantrum and doomed his own people.

Basically Hermes is an abusive parent, where a child is a means to an end rather than a fully living being with their own thoughts and dreams to them. Yes, these kinds of parents often think and believe deeply that they're doing what's best for the kid but it ends up being the exact opposite.

[KizuyaKatogami]

Venat gave them a chance. We see that during the cutscene at the end of Elpis. The ancients were going to sacrifice not only over half of their population, but future souls to be born so they could have their "perfect paradise" again. She didn't act the second they summoned Zodiark. She didn't act when they sacrificed another 50% to get the planed to be fertile again. She acter when they decided to forsake the future to restore their past. But they never ever acknowledged that their past was already broken before Meteion.

1.She gave them a chance after the final days had already hit, when in actuality she had the knowledge beforehand and could’ve helped to prevent it entirely.
2.Where are you getting them forsaking their future? Even hythlodaeus himself states that they would only sacrifice a portion of the new life to bring the souls back and then they would go back and resume their role as stewards of the star. As far as simplifying venat’s situation goes. Correct me if i’m wrong but she herself stated what she did was a horrible thing and that she wasn’t very good for it. So i’m not sure how simplified people joking around and saying “venat bad” really is. What happened in all actuality is she contradicted the theme of the expansion and gave up hope on her own people. Plain and simple.

[Manny_Maneater]

1.She gave them a chance after the final days had already hit, when in actuality she had the knowledge beforehand and could’ve helped to prevent it entirely.
2.Where are you getting them forsaking their future? Even hythlodaeus himself states that they would only sacrifice a portion of the new life to bring the souls back and then they would go back and resume their role as stewards of the star. As far as simplifying venat’s situation goes. Correct me if i’m wrong but she herself stated what she did was a horrible thing and that she wasn’t very good for it. So i’m not sure how simplified people joking around and saying “venat bad” really is. What happened in all actuality is she contradicted the theme of the expansion and gave up hope on her own people. Plain and simple.

Yes, she sundered the world after the End of Days had come...and the Amaurotians chose the wrong path. They "gave up on the future" because they were going to sacrifice all new souls born to bring back the ones sacrificed to Zodiark originally. If that isn't "giving up on the future", I don't know what is. And yes, the choices Venat made weren't all nice or kind, but they worked. We stoped the End of Days. Venat's plan was succesful. Now, yes, she could have just said "there is some birb girl, go kill her" and maybe that would have stopped the End of Days, but it would have done nothing to change the systemic problems with their society. The Ancients were already broken, and their obsession in restoring their paradise was folly.

And about Venat saying she isn't "very good". Although I don't remember her saying things of the sort, being "good" was never really her core philosophy (I think "good" and "bad" are quite simplistic interpretations of any of the characters. Venat's philosophy is of pragmatism. That problems can be solved, but you need to accept the difficulties. Finding joy in the darkest times.

[Manny_Maneater]

Hermes hypocrisy is pretty clear early on in how he treats Meteion (and her sisters). He says he wants her to experience life, but is dismissive to her desire for a sweet because "you can't eat, and besides, you only like that because I like it". You would think he could have made it possible for her to eat things for fun, rather than doing it for nourishment, but it doesn't occur to him to do it. When Meteion wants to cheer him up, she asks for your help with the flowers. While he is appreciative, he is still in the end rather dismissive of the gesture on Meteion's part.

This isn't getting into how he sent what were essentially a bunch of beings with the emotional maturity of toddlers into space to gets answers he wanted, with completely untested abilities that ended up causing feedback loops. Or how, despite Meteion being obviously distressed and in pain, wanting to hide and avoid giving her report, Hermes disregarded this. He did not care that she was in pain and did not want to tell him. He wanted his answers. When the answers turned out to be nothing like he expected, he didn't consider trying to calm the Meteia to try convincing them that even if there were many dead worlds, it does not mean all hope is lost. No, instead he decided to let the Meteia have their suicidal cosmic temper tantrum and doomed his own people.

Good point. Another good example of Hermes presenting as altruism his own selfish desires. Tbh, if he had just presented Meteion to the Bureau of the Architect instead of deploying with literally zero testing, maybe the ancients could have lived enough to discover entropy and become suicidal.

[Iscah]

Hermes hypocrisy is pretty clear early on in how he treats Meteion (and her sisters). He says he wants her to experience life, but is dismissive to her desire for a sweet because "you can't eat, and besides, you only like that because I like it". You would think he could have made it possible for her to eat things for fun, rather than doing it for nourishment, but it doesn't occur to him to do it. When Meteion wants to cheer him up, she asks for your help with the flowers. While he is appreciative, he is still in the end rather dismissive of the gesture on Meteion's part.

This is the second time I've seen someone say Hermes is abusive for reminding Meteion that she can't physically eat, and I'm not seeing it that way at all. If she wasn't portrayed as human-like and instead was a robot with human-like intelligence, would it be cruel to remind the robot that it is incompatible with human food? Because that's essentially what she is, just magical rather than mechanical.

And at a practical level, it absolutely does make sense that you would design your spacefaring entity to not require food, and instead draw on some other energy source (probably dynamis directly, in Meteion's case) because she won't be able to find food in space and there's no guarantee of it at the other end. In fact, making her unable to eat is possibly a safeguard against her accidentally eating something poisonous out of curiosity.

Also, for the record, it's a separate conversation with one of the other researchers where she specifically gets told that apples aren't her favourite food but Hermes', although separately he does respond to her asking for one with "and how would you eat it?" – but it just gives me the impression that it's an ongoing thing with her, and they're constantly trying to teach her to pick apart her own feelings from the ones she has absorbed from other people. It's probably a warning sign of her "programming flaw", really, but nobody else has the knowledge to detect that it's a potential issue.

Overall, I think Hermes is doing his best to look after Meteion, although the way he has designed her is imperfect and causes pain for her as an empath, but he does his best to care for her and shield her from unhappy things. The same philosophy he applies to the other creations, he applies to her: give her every chance to live as she is, and look after her as best he can.

And I think he does genuinely care for her as an individual, despite also naturally regarding her as the uplink to the whole Meteia project. She's clearly "not the same person" when disconnected from the hive mind.

Tracking her down when she didn't want to give the report was... complicated, I guess. From his perspective he's finally ready to get his answers and Meteion is inexplicably misbehaving and distressed for unclear reasons. Perhaps he intends to receive his report from the hive mind and then comfort "his" Meteion when she returns to her individual consciousness.

[Manny_Maneater]

I think the initial post is making two big misassumptions:


1. Hermes knew we would kill everything he sent at us.


2. Hermes has changed from caring to not caring about the creatures.

1 - That is true, and something I touched on in another answer. He may not have been necessarily a hypocrite, just a moron. Because if he thought that Venat and Emet-Selch would be stopped by some animals, despite the aether limitations, he really didn't know anything about anything. Also, he was aware that we were powerful combatant despite being relatively low on aether, and thus the limtations didn't even affect us. So either he was good with sacrificing the animals, or he is not very smart.

2 - Interesting point. But falling back on the ancient's way of thinking, which he despised so much, would be abandoning his ideals. Now, I must stress that my point wasnt that he went from "caring to not caring" about creatures. Hermes's philosophy was quite extreme, he was against the sacrificing of living creatures for any purpose, even if they were dangerous and unatural. So sacrificing them for a "greater good" makes him exactly the same as the other ancients, with the only difference is that they were honest about their views on other lifeforms.

I also don't see "hearing Meteion's report" as one of Hermes's core values. That was a desire, not a principle. He WANTED to know what Meteion had found, and he was willing to forsake his morals to do that. And, of course, he was not in the best state of mind when he did that. As I mentioned before, I think Hermes was not mentally stable even before we arrived on Hermes, as he had already done the monumentally reckless thing of deploying the Meteia into space. But we also see a number of characters that, in moments of crisis, hold strong to their ideals. Hell, Emet-Selch only wavered in his belief that Amaurotian society was the best possible civilization when we threw an axe through his chest. On that front, he stayed consistent. So did Venat, even as she suffered with each rejoining. And that's just the Elpis cast, pretty much every Scion has held strong to their ideals in moments of great crisis. Hermes, on the other hand, didn't. Because those values were never really all that important, in the end.