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

[KageTokage]

All this discussion just leaves me wishing that the Sundering had genuinely just been an act of impulsive fear like the Ascians believed it to be, not this moral and ideological mess of a long game that feels like the writers intended for people to just not think about given how little sense it makes under deeper scrutiny.

[AziraSyuren]

It happened in the 8UC though with black rose. So it seems very possible. Look at the war of the magi as well. Major catastrophic events that could have or did potentially end the world. It really isn’t as rare as you might think, especially in a world where magic exists.

Calamities always happened with heavy input from the Ascians. While others might eventually be able to cause calamities of that scale, the Ascians are, at this point in time, the only ones with enough awareness of the world's metaphysics to enable that kind of destruction, magic or no.

We're just talking about technical means and the specifics of this scenario, IMO. Meteion as a creation does not require vast amounts of aether - quite the opposite. There is, in theory, nothing preventing the sundered from creating something very similar to her; the Allagans had all manner of sophisticated devices, achieved in some cases through reverse-engineering Omega, as did the Mhachi. Already Y'shtola is putting familiars through the Void - it would not take a great leap for an intepid space explorer to stick something like an entelechy into space. The only reason Meteion posed a particular issue is because of how elusive dynamis is and because Hermes allowed her to escape. Both Hermes and Venat could've prevented all this. All the ingredients for this plot are equally feasible in the sundered world... including the presence of individuals who act out of spite, like Yotsuyu or Amon, or those with the willingness to sacrifice mankind on the altar of their superior judgement, like Thordan, Ilberd, Vauthry, Zenos, etc. So if we're going to wipe out one world on a "pre-crime" basis, you could do the same to the sundered world for similar reasons.

Nobody in the sundered world has nigh-unlimited reality-warping powers. Only Alexander, pretty much the strongest of all primals of sundered creation, had the power necessary to actually destroy the world given enough time. And the ability to create such a thing still directly came from the Ascians.

It always leads back to them. It's always their fault. And Venat's for even leaving them alive to begin with.

Not that I think the Sundering was justified anyways. I don't subscribe to a utilitarian framework. But to anyone in this thread that does, Venat is your L, not mine.

All this discussion just leaves me wishing that the Sundering had genuinely just been an act of impulsive fear like the Ascians believed it to be, not this moral and ideological mess of a long game that feels like the writers intended for people to just not think about given how little sense it makes under deeper scrutiny.

Yeah the story would be a lot better off if it was.

It's not too late to retcon it, Ishikawa-san. Please.

[Lauront]

Again: it does not take "reality-warping powers" to create this situation. Meteion is not a creation which takes vast amounts of aether. The design feature which is relevant here is being an emotion sponge. Hermes just happened to be the first to do so, while violating the rules the ancients had set out to have their creations examined first before releasing them, and he assigned her the wrong question, which Emet points out very quickly after questioning him. So not sure where this argument is coming from or why the sundered would be incapable of reproducing a scenario like this.

[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.

[DevonEllwood]

I don't understand how Etheirys wouldn't be capable of killing itself without the ascians when plenty of other planets did. Even Alphanaud says they're all going to be "dust" some day.

[Theodric]

All this discussion just leaves me wishing that the Sundering had genuinely just been an act of impulsive fear like the Ascians believed it to be, not this moral and ideological mess of a long game that feels like the writers intended for people to just not think about given how little sense it makes under deeper scrutiny.

Yep. They were already willing to make Venat's actions hasty and without any real attempt to explore other possibilities. Any attempt to delay the act itself was entirely hidden behind false narratives such as 'needing' to keep Zodiark's power in check.

Having the Sundering be either an accident or something Venat came to regret would have let her come out of it all much better than by making it a deliberate act that she resorted to because traumatised people didn't react the 'right way' to the Final Days.

It just makes no sense. If Merlwyb started killing people who didn't react properly to the Final Days striking Limsa, the Scions would stop or kill her. As they have shown to be each and every time random civilians were cut down by an antagonist.

...and if nothing else, the development team can't be oblivious to all the issues in the real world lately. After increasingly divisive rhetoric where differences in opinion are met with death threats over both minor and major issues, Endwalker's narrative and solution to societal disagreement isn't the wholesome, uplifting statement it gaslights people into believing it to be.

[AnaviAnael]

The one thing I've been wanting since ARR. "Can someone tell me how to control this damn thing? I'm tired of passing out randomly!"

Back in 1.0, there were points where the game would ask you, "Use the power of the Echo?" [Yes/No] in order to progress in the plot. They decided to do away with that when 2.0 launched. They could always nerf the sundered version of it by having the aether conditions be just right for the Echo to be used.

[Ayuhra]

snip.

Fandaniel, our Fandaniel, is a character I wish we'd spent more time with and I feel like maybe we were supposed to but it didn't happen in the version of the game we got. Hermes definitely suffers from pacing issues that make his framing confusing but at least he gets a whole zone dedicated to him.

Fandaniel we don't get to see much of, or really learn about his despair. We are told he has despair but we don't SEE it much outside subtle animation and facial expressions (and the fact that a happy person probably wouldn't want to destroy the world.) For how important he is to the events of this expansion, his screen time feels limited. Not to mention that he's Amon, a character that has existed in lore since ARR. Fandaniel should have had a whole zone devoted to him too, and it should have been the moon. There is even an Allagan vessel up there and everything. It would have made the time between Anima and Zodiark feel less empty.

[Xirean]

Fandaniel, our Fandaniel, is a character I wish we'd spent more time with and I feel like maybe we were supposed to but it didn't happen in the version of the game we got. Hermes definitely suffers from pacing issues that make his framing confusing but at least he gets a whole zone dedicated to him.

Fandaniel we don't get to see much of, or really learn about his despair. We are told he has despair but we don't SEE it much outside subtle animation and facial expressions (and the fact that a happy person probably wouldn't want to destroy the world.) For how important he is to the events of this expansion, his screen time feels limited. Not to mention that he's Amon, a character that has existed in lore since ARR. Fandaniel should have had a whole zone devoted to him too, and it should have been the moon. There is even an Allagan vessel up there and everything. It would have made the time between Anima and Zodiark feel less empty.

The moon as a whole was a region that I had been looking forward to exploring until I got there. The narrative at the time you arrive has a very "go go go" feel to it and it made me feel like I couldn't pause until I got to the rabbits and I've never wanted to escape an environment so fast after that.

[Ritsuka-55]

The moon as a whole was a region that I had been looking forward to exploring until I got there. The narrative at the time you arrive has a very "go go go" feel to it and it made me feel like I couldn't pause until I got to the rabbits and I've never wanted to escape an environment so fast after that.

Agreed, the loporrits part was like going back to old ARR and post patch ARR, killed my mood completely.

Moon highlighted as an important thing and ended up just being bait.