What's the point with that quite lackluster story in Endwalker?

[Lauront]

* The thing about the "humans are bastards and deserve to be extinct" motivation is that... you kinda need to show us humans really were despicable for it to be truly sympathetic. Rape, war, genocide. Heavy shit. Not a bunch of soft weenwoons who only thought about being the caretakers of the planet and were explicitly shown to mourn creations in Elpis. Except the story still wants you to go along with it and think that "Oh he totally has a point, he's just testing humans like these heartless researchers test animals in Elpis", and pretend this isn't just insane.

I'm not even convinced that it is saying he has a point. Venat doesn't really absorb any of that - she's only concerned with meeting his test in terms of survival. The sundered make even more gratuitous use of creations, both living and not - Sharlayan even emulates the practice of creating intelligent familiars, in some cases using animals, and let's not even go into what happens in the Ul'dah colosseum, in various fates, via your reaper avatar (which is fed with souls), etc etc., and yet none of that message is directed at them, either. G'raha does word it to suggest Amon/Hermes had grievances with his broader society, but does he take any of their twaddle on board when he's munching down on a burger? No, not really. Moreover, he attributes it to a propensity in Fandaniel's soul. That propensity being of a hypocritical nihilist with a hatred of the concept of death (consequently, also life) and a sadistic streak. Then you have the fact that through allowing Meteion to fly free, he's effectively damning all those creations, plus countless other stars, to doom. To me, the creations are just arcane entities at the end of the day, some of which may qualify for souls to become animals or plant life, with familiars more rarely qualifying for that... so I don't really consider his POV sane, but I also think it's besides the point and is just a means of him expressing his discomfort with death and finding reasons to dissociate with his broader society and justify that.

- When you watch it again in hindsight and you know about Hermes, it becomes kinda worse. First, you totally recognise that sad piano tune is night time Elpis. And then it dawns on you: this game wants you to mourn the unhinged vegan who literally okayed the end of the world and the extinction of every living thing on the planet because they should have reconsidered animal rights in that one facility somewhat. God, so much for being sad for the poor ravenous murder-machine Lykaons.

The lykaones remind me of Zenos and that entire lone soldier test he administers in Garlemald reminds me of the Sundering as a whole. I do think the game was marking him as tragic, but more in the sense that no matter what answer he got, he'd never be happy.

- This game wants you to mourn Hermes, but actually I am sitting here grieving Zodiark and his contribution to the story of this grand finale as the level 83 trial before we get to the real plot.

I think he is by far the biggest victim of the storytelling. At least he got the cool moon chanting.

* Honestly, I think I don't have this much of a problem with Hermes/Fandaniel himself as a villain, but everything surrounding him and how the plot wants to treat him. The plot offers so little questioning of his reasoning that it feels like it's tacitly justifying him. There is Emet opposing him and telling him his methodology is shit, and that approving the apocalypse on a whim is like kiiiiinnnda cringe, but then Emet gets hit with the meme beam and handed the Idiot Ball. Same goes for Venat just deciding not to tell anyone about him being a complete gremlin. My character just nodded to that? Stop trying to excuse Hermes and just fully commit to him being a bastard, and have characters call him (them both, tbh) out. In the process, flesh out the Ancients more so they aren't just collectively strawmen standing there to validate Hermes's and Venat's respective viewpoints.

If that was the aim of those scenes, they did a pretty poor job of it.

(At least Asahi got to drag him down to the worst hell or whatever. I kinda wanted the same scene with Venat and Elidibus.)

Yes, so long as he gets to leave once the job is done.