Quote Originally Posted by PawPaw View Post
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:

Quote Originally Posted by CrownySuccubus View Post
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.