I had a sneaking suspicion Ishikawa was under pressure to change the script halfway. She's too aware of current world politics and news to make this into a simple story with "paradise bad, uhh keep fighting cause anime" morals. If this is true then man did they screw up what could've been an incredible story arc encompassing the franchise, and I really mean that. I made a comment in another thread about how the story DEFINITELY felt rushed with a significant amount of missing pages of script.

The message in Endwalker rings hollow and stupidly pretentious to me: Achieving peace and happiness for all is how society grows complacent, so man needs to be made to suffer for eternity and just fight through the pain cuz YOLO? Are you kidding me? How in seven HELLS do you justify the suffering of millions and millions and their subsequent horrific deaths?

The Dynamis is such an obvious MacGuffin shoved in with Meteion at the last minute to justify the sundering, which the Ascians took issue with AFTER Hydaelyn decided to sabotage their plans of saving the star. This reminds me of Spira in FFX. Hydaelyn literally creates an unending spiral of death and DESPAIR, and we're manipulated to frame this as a necessary evil. The ironic thing for me is that Venat ultimately became less interesting than her FFXII namesake since there's not much to say on whether her actions were ultimately deplorable and nuanced. They both aim for the same goal, but the ffxii version had a certain mystery behind its actions compounded with the fact that it sides with the antagonists.

All of this just reminds me when Ishikawa said her favorite character was "Fandaniel and his ???" I wondered if she meant Hermes, as in his past self, and the larger conflict originally involved the isolation of divergent beings that weren't "fit" to exist within the perfect social systems and institutions that encompassed the entire star. I feel like Hermes and Fandaniel were supposed to be a lot more than what they were written to be. Meteion was only a facet of Hermes' nature, and she's clearly symbolic of his depression. She lacks any real agency when she turns into the villain anyways. I just don't understand why Meteion exists outside of justifying Hydaelyn's actions.