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

[PawPaw]

In that long Famitsu interview, there's a bit that wasn't translated directly where Yoshida actually goes into how he thought players would leave Elpis thinking the Ancient society was "scary" - listing all the reasons he figured they'd be a little disturbing - but that instead, most people came away with thinking they were just "good people" instead.

I am just as baffled by this as I was at hearing that he was surprised at people liking Emet-Selch while not liking Hermes and that being something he couldn't wrap his head around.

taking it upon themselves to create beings even with souls, feeling it's better to erase creations that are slightly flawed.

Also..."slightly" flawed? Putting the Charybdis aside, because I could see the argument for not giving up on them, but was I supposed to feel terrible about their reverting the animals that were killing everything? If an animal in our world was doing this in a neighborhood, no one would hesitate to call in Animal Control to handle the threat. Why in the name of all the gods would I feel that it was scary and inhuman for people to protect others from a group of dangerous animals that have already been given chances and continue to be a threat to the environment?

[CrownySuccubus]

I am just as baffled by this as I was at hearing that he was surprised at people liking Emet-Selch while not liking Hermes and that being something he couldn't wrap his head around.

It's because of what I said here:

Yeah, that's definitely not the interpretation I got. It felt like Hermes' "care" for Meteion was merely a means to an end. As I've seen other people mention, despite his disdain for seeing living concepts as tools, Hermes did just that. Despite Meteion's clear suffering and fear of delivering it, Hermes decided he just had to hear it, no matter what. His own existential need was more important than her fear.

On a personal level, I personally just found Hermes to make too many bad/foolish decisions subsequently for me to have any sympathy for him. If he had JUST created Meteion and her abilities in secret, that would have been fine. If had JUST given her sisters their missions and sent them into space in secret, that would have been fine. If he had JUST ignored Venat, Hyth and Emet to hear Meteion's report, that would have been fine. If he had JUST erased everyone's memories, that would have been fine. If he had JUST issued his "challenge" to humanity as an impulsive decision, that would have been fine.

But Hermes doing ALL of these things, one after another, slowly made me lose any sympathy with his character. Whatever sympathetic character he may have once had before Elpis, by the end of Elpis, all I saw was an insane villain.

The writers thought that by having Hermes point out what made his society "scary" and then issuing a challenge to humanity to overcome their flaws, that Hermes would be seen as sympathetic.

But as I said before, by the time we got to Hermes erasing everyone's memories, I already saw him as an insane bastard. Sure, his motives may have ONCE been sympathetic, but he made so many selfish and irrational decisions, even after having explained to him that this would lead to trillions of deaths, that I had no sympathy left.

The memory erasure was the last straw for me. I saw that as a horrible violation of peoples' minds and bodies. And the fact that he erased his own memory so that he could just blend back in and act as if he did nothing was even more galling.