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

[Lauront]

I mean, I don't disagree with all that at all. My happy wholesome AU is one where Hermes gets proper medical attention rather than Emet's non-solution of figuratively kicking him upstairs to get him out of a job that emotionally destroyed him, and he slowly recovers and opens up, ending up cooperating against the whole Meteion business (this is also an AU where people are aware of Meteion and what happened, because goddamn that didn't make sense).

But yeah my main beef is that the main reaction I've seen to him is that he's a poor little baby who's the only person with feelings and Ancients totally sucked and were a bunch of meanies. We had a very particular person on this thread like 70 pages back, I still cringe thinking about their take.

...Okay so truth be told, I haven't interacted with the fandom outside of this very thread since like, mid December. I honestly just chose to filter out FFXIV social media then because the EW positivity seriously put a damper on my mood (oh no a feedback loop /echo chamber!). Maybe it's changed since then, but that particular reading of Hermes and Ancients really is not my jam.

It's actually not that bad generally speaking - you do get the odd person who will insist on ignoring all the lore contradicting the supposed "point" of the story, that the ancients were unfeeling automata or that this was some glaring flaw in their society but by and large it's acknowledged that he was a raging hypocrite who even mistreated his own supposedly beloved creation. Likewise, with the Plenty positioned as the rationale for Venat's actions (alongside dynamis manipulation), it is also more broadly acknowledged that their downfall was not due to any inherent flaws of theirs so much as where that pursuit might lead them. There's still plenty of brick walls on places like reddit, who will insist on selectively reading the story and (massively) dropping context to keep their Ascian hate boner alive, but it's improved since SHB, in all honesty. I think the Q&A largely silenced a lot of the more ardent Ascian haters - at least those who grasped the implications of it.

I still find it weird that nobody seems to care that their souls aren't whole or that they have fragments of themselves running around on other shards.

I don't get it, either.