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

[KageTokage]

I'm still left feeling like the core issue is that they felt insistent on incorporating time travel into the plot mostly for fanservice reasons, but due to the fact that such would've ended up forming a causal loop by necessity thanks to XIV's pre-established time travel logic, they dug themselves into a narrative pitfall that they couldn't get out of without leaving the deep thinkers with questions.

As it stands, there's still no actual explanation why we're even able to keep returning to Elpis whenever we want after it was made to sound as though our time there was limited.

[BrokentoothMarch]

I'm still left feeling like the core issue is that they felt insistent on incorporating time travel into the plot mostly for fanservice reasons, but due to the fact that such would've ended up forming a causal loop by necessity thanks to XIV's pre-established time travel logic, they dug themselves into a narrative pitfall that they couldn't get out of without leaving the deep thinkers with questions.

Time Travel is the bane of any serious story because it's borderline impossible to reconcile. I don't know why they went for this because it's quite literally one of the first critiques voiced in most creative writing classes, but here we are--

[Brinne]

I'm still left feeling like the core issue is that they felt insistent on incorporating time travel into the plot mostly for fanservice reasons, but due to the fact that such would've ended up forming a causal loop by necessity thanks to XIV's pre-established time travel logic, they dug themselves into a narrative pitfall that they couldn't get out of without leaving the deep thinkers with questions.

As it stands, there's still no actual explanation why we're even able to keep returning to Elpis whenever we want after it was made to sound as though our time there was limited.

My impression is more the core issue being hellbent on Making You Love Hydaelyn and making clear that she is Good as part and parcel of a Feel-Good, Uplifting expansion where everyone is united and everyone wants to save the world and rally behind the WoL. When the primary writing intent behind a character is "making the audience like them," it rarely leads to great places, I think.

The time travel device isn't necessarily my problem at all. It's all the narrative framing around Venat herself and the story desperately wanting to sell you on seeing her in a particular way regardless of what she actually does.

[Kyohei]

It's a bit of both, if there wasn't a time travel or if Venat had lost her memories more people would be inclined to empathize. As it stands she seemed to be the only one with all the cards but went for a dreadful hand.

[Brinne]

It's a bit of both, if there wasn't a time travel or if Venat had lost her memories more people would be inclined to empathize. As it stands she seemed to be the only one with all the cards but went for a dreadful hand.

And I think this still would have been fine if you just let Venat be what she is! I don't find her, removing her from the tone and framing surrounding her, an uninteresting character. I can actually have a lot of fun picking through her thought processes, how she makes her decisions - and even a hint of a certain flavor of tragedy in how she seems to have trouble connecting to individual, living, breathing people rather than abstractions - and most importantly, memeing about THE STRONG EAT, THE WEAK ARE EATEN, THUMPS CHEST - I MEAN, UH, FIND YOUR INNER LIGHT MY CHILDREN WINK WINK in increasingly absurd contexts at her expense.

Venat's writing comes across, to me, as dripping with insecurity. The feeling I get - and again, this is probably speculating irresponsibly - is that they were very self-aware that a lot of people very skeptical and suspicious of Hydaelyn after Shadowbringers, so they really made it their focal point to pull out all the stops and play all the tricks to make her Very, Very Likable first and foremost, and then super jankily had to make this fit in with the pre-existing lore. Uh, do your best to not do this if you are a writer! It's okay if your character isn't traditionally "likable" as long as they are interesting! Let the character play out organically, authentic to both themselves and how the other characters would react to them! Embrace Venat for the very strange and very ruthless person that she is! The material is all there! There were so many options. Alas.

[BrokentoothMarch]

Uh, do your best to not do this if you are a writer! It's okay if your character isn't traditionally "likable" as long as they are interesting! Let the character play out organically, authentic to both themselves and how the other characters would react to them! Embrace Venat for the very strange and very ruthless person that she is!

This is especially important. Sometimes we disassociate from the humanity of characters because they're, well, characters. They aren't real. However, they're meant to act as a construct that we can translate as real. The problem is that humans, like most animals, are pretty good at noticing when something isn't part of their species. The Uncanny Valley is a visual component to this, but writing has it's own version in character-building.

The point is that you're writing a person. People act in ways that can eventually be predicted, analyzed, and judged from. Many of our systems that apply to humans hinge off this fact. When there's a sudden veer in someone's personality or how they're perceived, most other people will be pretty quick to identify that to varying degrees of specificity (This especially applies to Hermes, in my opinion). That's what you don't want. What you want is to make someone consistent. People are consistent. Even in their inconsistency, they can be consistent ("Oh, Bob is always late!"). And not everyone will like that character because, well, not everyone likes everyone.

This is all without mentioning that in stories where it seems we're being forced to do something, the reader's/watcher's natural reaction is to often do the opposite. If Venat was the way she is, but the story played straight that she is a person of rather poor character who suspiciously always errs on the side of Might Makes Right despite her pleas of righteousness, I would have liked her far more. She'd still be an awful person, but she'd be a far better written character with those simple tweaks alone.

[Brinne]

If Venat was the way she is, but the story played straight that she is a person of rather poor character who suspiciously always errs on the side of Might Makes Right despite her pleas of righteousness, I would have liked her far more. She'd still be an awful person, but she'd be a far better written character with those simple tweaks alone.

The vast majority of my favorite characters across tons of stories are basically terrible people in one way or another. I might be in the minority among people who criticize Venat, but I actually think Hermes is a fantastic character who feels very human in his choice to wallow in his own (authentic!) pain to the point of slapping away or ignoring any attempts or opportunities for outreach. The way his natural sense of empathy rotted inside of him until it twisted into a blanketed sort of sneering contempt towards everyone around him, the way the poison just seeps in deeper because of the conflict of his self-loathing, the line between Hermes in Elpis and Amon's full-throated nihilism and shift to open contempt and atrocities when his loathing toward his society actually becomes justifiable. It's great. He is completely and utterly terrible and an absolute hypocrite, while genuinely being in pain. He is great. I can easily see why Ishikawa loves him. Because Hermes is allowed to embrace being Terrible as a person (his ultimate ending is being dunked on by Asahi and calling himself an idiot, for goodness' sake), you then become able to do actually interesting things with him as a character. I truly wish Venat had that freedom. I only want to see her thrive!

(One exception to the "characters I love tend to be terrible people" trend might be Themis, though. Themis did nothing wrong, okay?)

[Kyohei]

And I think this still would have been fine if you just let Venat be what she is! I don't find her, removing her from the tone and framing surrounding her, an uninteresting character. I can actually have a lot of fun picking through her thought processes, how she makes her decisions - and even a hint of a certain flavor of tragedy in how she seems to have trouble connecting to individual, living, breathing people rather than abstractions - and most importantly, memeing about THE STRONG EAT, THE WEAK ARE EATEN, THUMPS CHEST - I MEAN, UH, FIND YOUR INNER LIGHT MY CHILDREN WINK WINK in increasingly absurd contexts at her expense.

Venat's writing comes across, to me, as dripping with insecurity. The feeling I get - and again, this is probably speculating irresponsibly - is that they were very self-aware that a lot of people very skeptical and suspicious of Hydaelyn after Shadowbringers, so they really made it their focal point to pull out all the stops and play all the tricks to make her Very, Very Likable first and foremost, and then super jankily had to make this fit in with the pre-existing lore. Uh, do your best to not do this if you are a writer! It's okay if your character isn't traditionally "likable" as long as they are interesting! Let the character play out organically, authentic to both themselves and how the other characters would react to them! Embrace Venat for the very strange and very ruthless person that she is! The material is all there! There were so many options. Alas.

I don't disagree, but the time travel doesn't help making her likeable at the end of Elpis, this was my point.
She can stays the way she is but then that meant giving up on making her really likeable because as we see many can't appreciate someone who willingly with all the knowledge they posses decides the only solution involves the end of their own civilisation.
It was either one or the other, but they mixed both and thus this thread appears (along with many others reasons, but the way they handled her is one of the main points).
It's not only the players that were sceptical, npcs like Y'shtola had dialogue harbouring doubts too when talking with her in Rising Stones. They made it so we were in doubts and seemed to assume it fully. Then Endwalker arrived and doubts vanished to leave place to acceptance and adoration again out of nowhere. That instead of accepting Venat as a flawed person who made mistakes as much as ascians counterparts.
So I stand by saying both time travel and trying to persuade Venat as good are issues on their own, which mixed lead to even bigger issues.

On a side note, Hermes' development while it might not be rational/logical from the point of view of a sane mind is still understandable, because his emotions devoured him until nihilism. When emotions are unchecked the way it is with him, they are hardly ever rational. He sunk deeper and deeper and I do understand it, the same way I understand Zenos is actually interesting as a product of his environment.

[Brinne]

On a side note, Hermes' development while it might not be rational/logical from the point of view of a sane mind is still understandable, because his emotions devoured him until nihilism. When emotions are unchecked the way it is with him, they are hardly ever rational. He sunk deeper and deeper and I do understand it, the same way I understand Zenos is actually interesting as a product of his environment.

Hermes and Zenos in relation to one another are so interesting in a way that leaves Venat completely out of the thematic spectrum, hilariously. Hermes's fundamental problem - both its origin point and his choice to continue wallowing in it until it broke him into something steeped in poison - was isolation. He believed he was isolated, and his attachment to his self-image as The Only One Struggling With Empathy meant that he, subconsciously or otherwise, kept himself isolated, which cycled into his despair and led him to viewing his society and world with contempt that eventually spiraled out of control. Emet makes some (clumsy, admittedly) attempts to reach a hand out to him in Elpis, but Hermes reacts with raw hostility, because on some level, he doesn't want help from people who "don't get it," so to speak.

Zenos is positioned in a similar way - the difference is, while Zenos is also a thoroughly Terrible person, he recognizes his struggle with isolation and rejection from the person he longs to connect with and is willing to re-evaluate himself and his approach, and then start to do the work to amend them. He doesn't fundamentally change himself - he's Zenos through and through to the end, callous war criminal extraordinaire - but he learns, after genuine self-reflection without the accompanying agenda of wallowing in self-pity, to better meet the WoL on their own terms. He recognizes that while there are vast areas of the WoL's person that he will never understand and honestly isn't interested in understanding. He will never "get it," but that doesn't mean he can't recognize them and support them in his own, deadpan dragon sort of way. Zenos, of all people, learns to actually connect with another human being, and this revelation ultimately saves the universe. It's the lesson that Hermes never figured out, even as Meteion worries about him until the end, hoping desperately for his happiness.

Fundamentally, Hermes's speech to the fire wolf was very telling. His empathy and pain at having to put the creature down was sincere and real, but he urges it to "hate, if it be your wont - we are not undeserving" specifically. Hermes is distraught over the way the creations are discarded in large part because he projects himself onto them. And deep down, he has begun to hate. Zenos, for all his massive, massive flaws and crimes, does not actually hate. He'll murder you and look down upon you, but he doesn't hate you. He is driven by love, as twisted and weird and unsettling as it might be, and there is a sincerity in it that allowed him to self-reflect, have an epiphany, and then transform into a giant space dragon after eating a big rock.

In that way, love, support, and connections emerge as the answer to despair, not engineering an environment of suffering to force people through until they just get used to living through it. (Well, a few of them, anyway. Most of them probably just die but, yes, anyway, light everlasting and all that.) That's my story and I'm sticking to it!

There really is some fantastic stuff in Endwalker, I think. I really do. Just, Venat and her albatross of "we must establish she is Likable and a Good Person at all costs." Oof. (Not going to lie, it's maybe a breath of fresh air to talk about the things I actually loved about Endwalker? Maybe the wrong thread, though, so excuse me for the weird tangent!)

[Kyohei]

Hermes and Zenos in relation to one another are so interesting in a way that leaves Venat completely out of the thematic spectrum, hilariously. Hermes's fundamental problem - both its origin point and his choice to continue wallowing in it until it broke him into something steeped in poison - was isolation. He believed he was isolated, and his attachment to his self-image as The Only One Struggling With Empathy meant that he, subconsciously or otherwise, kept himself isolated, which cycled into his despair and led him to viewing his society and world with contempt that eventually spiraled out of control. Emet makes some (clumsy, admittedly) attempts to reach a hand out to him in Elpis, but Hermes reacts with raw hostility, because on some level, he doesn't want help from people who "don't get it," so to speak.
...

There really is some fantastic stuff in Endwalker, I think. I really do. Just, Venat and her albatross of "we must establish she is Likable and a Good Person at all costs." Oof. (Not going to lie, it's maybe a breath of fresh air to talk about the things I actually loved about Endwalker? Maybe the wrong thread, though, so excuse me for the weird tangent!)

That's beautifully said.

One thing I thought after the story is Hermes wasn't mature enough emotionally to occupy his office. His natural tendencies to let's say it really, depression and how he alienated himself from other ancients were overlooked by the mentor who passed the reign onto him. He especially was a poor choice to occupy a function such as overlooking creations in Elpis and making decisions about their fate. Akin to the reason a surgeon should not operate on a family member, he should not have been overseeing creations as he was too emotionally impacted by it.
While it could have been a strength because this would encourage him to to his duty carefully, it was also a weakness and we see why.