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

[Brinne]

I agree it’s pretty silly that the circumstances weren’t further looked into, and that the truth obviously would have begun to crack open with the slightest scrutiny. Hythlodaeus’s comment about Venat is particularly bizarre, as it leaves us with the implication that beyond generally staying silent about what happened… did Venat, uh, blatantly lie to Hythlo’s face, too, when questioned?

But I do want to go ahead and say I think Emet’s characterization in the scene itself – and possibly, if you want to extend it, him maybe going to bat for Hermes when they brought him before the Convocation – is consistent, and I think it makes sense given what we know of him and what we’ve seen up until that point. Remembering the whole scene, Emet isn’t just brushing aside the question of the lost memories because he considers it unimportant – he’s prioritizing making sure Hermes is okay. The false memories after the wipe, as Venat said, left Hermes devastated because he believes Meteion just exploded before his eyes, so Emet is focused on that.

Because before things went to hell in Ktisis, Emet obviously really, really liked Hermes and sympathized with him a lot. Emet, of the three Ancients in our group, is the one who dwells on the fact of Hermes’s suffering and wonders more deeply upon it, trying to imagine what it would be like to feel as he does. When you talk to him directly after Hermes has his huge meltdown over the murder wolves, Emet’s comment - his response to that entire debacle - is that he thinks Hermes would be an excellent Fandaniel, and that the Convocation would be lesser without him. This is what he got out of seeing Hermes’s explosion of pain. He’s sympathetic. He repeats and urges him to take the offer to join the Convocation after he sees it happen – because he feels terrible for him and sees that this job is causing him misery, and also, I think, to offer him a platform to raise his concerns to a higher level where maybe he’ll be able to enact change. You’ll notice that Emet, in a way that might be a little surprising given how caustic he tries to be – also stays silent and just takes it when Hermes blows up in his face during that same meltdown.

Even from the beginning, when Emet is trying to kick us out of highly confidential Convocation business, he relents and lets us tag along because Hermes says he’ll feel better if we’re there for the conversation. Giving in to helping out Hermes with the charybdis – and when he lets his guard down, outright beaming about it – also speaks for itself. Emet is also the one who first proposes bringing Hermes into the group to figure out what’s going on with the Final Days and getting his help in understanding them. Emet-Selch is a bleeding heart. So of course at the end he’s not actually that concerned, asides from his usual tsundere whining, about what was done to him when he thinks Hermes could be seriously hurt.

(This all becomes sort of darkly hilarious because it's apparent that Hermes hates Emet. Really, at the edge of oblivion, the end of your tale, the end of the world, the person you focus on is Emet-Selch in hopes that he's seething as hard as possible? Okay my dude.)

We already saw Emet tell Hermes to take the Convocation seat because “oh no he’s sad” once. I could easily see him doing it again in the wake of Hermes mourning Meteion and beating himself up over the “accident.” Yes, Emet fussing about Hermes and offering him a seat on the highest governance in the world because he felt really bad for him is pretty dumb. But then again, literally every single thing he did in Shadowbringers in terms of reaching out to us was also pretty dumb, and led directly to his own demise. As Ishikawa said, his kindness is his downfall - pretty consistently, it turns out.