Quote Originally Posted by Brinne View Post
He made stupid decisions, yes, but it was established that he had no conscious intentions of hurting anyone or destroying the world throughout all of Elpis to destroy the world. He was self-centered, he was contemptuous of others, he was naive. In that moment, hearing Meteion's conclusion and Emet's words striking a bad nerve in him, yes, it was horrifying and despicable, but he did not intend to do it until that moment. There was no intent until after he fought the party, listened to the full report, and decided he really wanted to spite Emet-Selch by turning his own words (and the ideals of the society he loved) against him.

I am hard on board the reading that Amon = Hermes in all the ways that are important, and his protests otherwise are mostly self-delusion, but even Amon says - and I think we're supposed to take him at his word - that the Hermes of the past would hate what Amon actually became.
If someone continuously makes stupid decisions that they are warned will result in the deaths and suffering of countless people, they don't get a free pass just because each individual decision wasn't malicious.

If someone removes the breaks from their car on a dare, breaks the headlights of their car playing around carelessly with power tools, gets their license revoked by the state and continues driving anyway, and then gets drunk one night, knocks out his friends that try to stop him from getting in his car, and drives the car they should not be legally driving while it has no headlights and no breaks, and then plows into a crowd of people, killing hundreds...they don't get to cry "I'm sorry. I made mistakes, but I never did them with the intent of hurting anyone."

He removed all safety nets that would have prevented the tragedy before it occurred, he ignored his peers who tried to warn him that it would lead to tragedy, and he then literally fought them as they tried to tell him how much harm he was doing would cause. Hermes did not make naive "mistakes". He was a manchild who ignored the well-being of literally everyone else (and I mean literally EVERYONE else) just to get his emotional catharsis.

To paraphrase "Gray's Law": "Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice."