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

[Kaoru_Nagisa]

Until I've written up my giant dissertation of feelings and opinions regarding everything I found lacking or just flat out lazy in Endwalker, I'll be providing snippets of my internal thought process - be it related to current discussions or not.

Today's episode is: Hermes and Meteion aren't bad characters, but they - like so much else in EW - suffered from poor pacing and bad or twisted writing.

I'm not inclined to think Ishikawa would normally write characters like them this badly, if she was given proper time. She's made some incredibly poignant characters in the past that, regardless of their morality, go on to be favored by many due to the character simply being written incredibly well and explored thoroughly. I feel like had Yoshida not been desperate to end this 10-year story to the point of cutting an entire other expansion and forcing constant rewrites and condensing, that they would have shined much more at the end.

My personal opinion: Hermes isn't a sociopath, and I especially think interviews where they've stated he's some incorrigible evil are incredibly tone-deaf to what was presented to us. Which, and again - some may not agree, that's fine, I speak from my own experience - is that Hermes was an autistic man with severe depression, suffering from the crushing weight of existentialism and feelings of isolation due to how few seemed to share in the pains he personally felt. As someone on the autism spectrum also suffering from severe depression more days than not, I felt Hermes' actions were guided not by a sociopathic desire to burn it all, but the misguided thoughts which arose from his pain and loneliness, made all the worse once delivered Meteion's grim tidings from other worlds.

This of course doesn't excuse any actions he took, and never will. But what they're trying to state he was, and what he actually seemed to be, are two separate things.

Note I've said Hermes. Not Fandaniel. The Fandaniel we are met with, the fragmented parts of Hermes' original soul, can certainly be considered on the sociopathic scale. I still don't feel it is Hermes who is the sociopath in this case, however, and more so Amon, who - while a shard of Hermes that was eventually introduced back into the memories of Hermes' time as Fandaniel - was not actually the Hermes we meet in Elpis. There is enough memory and shards of him left to form that connection, but ultimately our Fandaniel is more Amon driven insane by his own life experiences coupled with the memories of Fandaniel provided to him when he's raised up into the seat of the Convocation.

All of this, of course, gets muddied to hell and back due to the incredibly poor pacing of the story once we get to Elpis. We're barely given any actual time with Hermes beyond a few important cutscenes to show how he as a person feels in this perfect world, how he feels broken and different because he doesn't feel or act like the others (what he perceives as the norm). We barely get any time to see how he interacts with others in Elpis outside of our little group, we barely even get to see much of his time interacting with Meteion. Had we more time with him, more opportunity to see his day to day and his own inner workings outside of that, even more Echo visions maybe, I feel a clearer picture of Hermes would have been painted.

Instead, like so much else, we got a butchered and tone-deaf version of a potentially good character who ultimately suffered from the pacing and lack of time to properly write him out. And then on top of it, what we're presented in Elpis is a far cry from the Fandaniel we associate with in the present day, and I think referring not to Fandaniel, but Hermes as the evil one is incredibly icky on the part of Yoshida and Ishikawa. It may not have been Ishikawa's intention to write Hermes akin to an autistic man suffering from depression (especially given the subject of mental health and disorders is still incredibly poor in Japan right now), but that's sure what it came off as. His subsequent treatment in the story and portrayal left an incredibly bad taste in my mouth, more so when so many seem to read him as just an insane sociopath at the end of the day.

He wasn't given the time or care deserved for a story like that. And I'll die mad about it.

I'll talk about Meteion some time later, but she ultimately suffers from similar issues as Hermes.