[Fortuna]: Luck depends on no one....right? (4/3)

I don't know, deathsight is a little wibbly-wobbly. When he was trying to save his friend from the user in the side story he say his friends ETR rapidly drop until his friend was ripped apart. Or maybe I misremember?

I'll admit that I don't fully remember that part of the story, but eeeeh. I don't really buy the fact that Hermes death is so immutable. Quite frankly, I think that he's becoming the architect of his own destruction, and trying to talk him down before it happens.

Consider! What we HAD almost resembling a plan was postulated by Helios: Get as many gods on our side, as well as as many limbo gods, as possible. Get them powered up to as strong as we could, and get them to help us fight The Sun God. That, to my knowledge, was our original plan. The only way to unlock a god's greatest abilities that we know of is to befriend that god. To max their social links, to borrow Persona parliance. Soooo, it mechanically makes no SENSE for us to kill Hermes unless we want to claim his powers for ourselves, or for a god we favor. Doing that with Hephestus, however, gave us diminishing returns. We DIDN'T get all of Hephestus' powers. We got a fraction of them. And currently I see no reason why giving the powers of a god to another god instead of ourselves wouldn't work the same way regarding diminishing returns.

So unless I am missing something, from a cold, purely mechanical perspective, the best way to get the most out of Hermes power set is to keep Hermes alive and bond with him as a person.

And that's not factoring in the morality of it. Hermes is, for all intents and purposes, a person. He might be a person with no ethical qualms against killing crew members (Like most gods, it's likely he doesn't really see them as people) but he's a person with feelings and sentience, and honestly deserves to be allowed to live so long as long as his actions don't endanger other people. Now... well, given Herme's life, you might argue that he's probably killed people before, or at least has no empathy for most people and may DESERVE death, buuut. Eh. I don't subscribe to that myself. If I wanted to get soppy and Kumbyah about it, I'd argue that Hermes should be allowed to live and have a chance at redemption for any sins he may have committed. But he just had to get in our WAY here, which complicates things. His actions aren't threatening us specifically, but by potentially denying us our full Fortuna rewards, he's actively inhibiting our chances to SAVE THE ENTIRE UNIVERSE from destruction/corruption at the Sun God's hands.

But I'm sorry. I was on a tangent. I didn't mean to get into Ethics. Hermes behavior makes the most sense as that of a terrifed, paranoid person. He's afriad of death, and probably not thinking straight. But the course of action he's taken to try and prevent his death is actively adversarial towards people, which in my opinion actively INCREASES his chances of death. He's only giving our avatar, plus probably Athena and maybe even Helios, more of a reason to see killing him as a good idea. By taking this stand of his, he's making himself an obstacle instead of an ally. Even if everyone gets out of this alive, you can bet Athena and Helios probably won't be happy with him.

The best thing Hermes could have done, in my humble opinion, would have been to either flee the player as soon as he possibly could (Assuming he was afraid that someone in the player's crew was a danger) or to ally himself firmly with the player, since we control MOST of our crew and can presumably protect him from any of our own crew as well as from the gods we have as patreons and from external threats. It's understandable why he wouldn't have drawn those conclusions, though. He had no reason to trust us and we didn't go out of our way to reassure him. But still, the actions he's taking are ones born out of desperation, and he needs to be talked DOWN before someone or something does something drastic that kills him.

Both mechanically and from a social perspective, we're better off with Hermes alive than dead.

Also, why does he think one of our crew is a danger to him? A hiddne god or a hero, I think he said?