Zodiark's Codex entry what do we think about it?

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Originally Posted by Brinne

- From the "restore the planet" POV - (again, for the plan as it was established in the text - you can argue whatever you believe about them perhaps being on a slippery slope, or whatever) it's not solely about "aether." To maintain a living world, one that could stay healthy even if "a portion" of it was offered to Zodiark - one vibrant and "bursting with vitality," as Hythlodaeus put it - you also need diversity, different shapes of life, etc. So again, starting with the rudimentary forms of life that would pave the way to grow into and branch out into at least the map for a new and healthy ecosystem - rather than asking Themis to micro-manage everything top to bottom - is what makes the most sense to me because the primary goal was to let the world heal and support life again, first and foremost. Reclaiming the souls was always the secondary goal once the first was firmly stabilized and safe - hence why Venat is comfortable saying the Convocation shouldn't be spoken ill of, and is only doing what it truly sees as best for the world, like herself.

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Hmmm. Then I'm not sure where it was. As I do remember getting said impression from someone's reaction to the pre- sundered new life as not being what they were expecting. Kind of like how if you baked something and it didn't come out as you hoped it would all due to you having accidentally over aerating the batter. You parsed the rest correctly. As what we get shown are the Ancients able to create things that wouldn't be at seed or seedling level.

That if the reason for the need of cultivation was only due to their thinness in aether then why did Zodiark make them thin in the 1st place? You wouldn't need to cultivate as much if you started with something thicker. Like plants some you can transplant either from plug-ins or transplant after they've grown some from seed. Meanwhile things like your root vegetables don't really transplant at all if you have to well uproot them so that others can go and plant them in their garden.

And yet one would think Zodiark should be able to at least do more than pop out something that had such thin aetheric density. Unless as I said the reason why was because they didn't think to make it be thicker than their normal creations. Or if they did think and try to make the new life as thick in aether as the ancients themselves, but they ended up regular creation thin then maybe there was a problem. Which we wouldn't know about as time and well plot didn't get to see if the thin aether density was accidental or not.

Considering Z-Elidibus wasn't outside of Zodiark yet, I think the creations of the new life were exactly how they were supposed to be made by the planet. There's a possibility that Zodiark, who was created to save the planet and safeguard it while acting as its will, didn't even think the Ancients would sacrifice the new life it was creating. After all, they made decisions prior that took the planet's needs into account first and foremost, there was no logical reason to believe they would use that life for something else at the time. It wasn't until the arguments after the 2nd set of sacrifices had happened when Z-Elidibus came into form, meaning the time when Zodiark needed to consult and figure out what was best for all, since the people were now divided when they were once not.

The story raises a few questions in sequence.

From what we've seen of Amaurot, they were a secular society. It doesn't look like they viewed their Creations with reverence as 'gods' (as you might expect that in a society of Summoners, instead). Yet when they summoned Zodiark, He immediately became the subject of religious worship overnight. That's a bit unusual to begin with.

Zodiark became the 'Will of the Star'. This sounds like a title of some sort, but it's probably better interpreted in the literal sense. When Hydaelyn became the 'Will of the Star', She was within in the lifestream, merged with the center of the planet. Light is associated with tranquility and stasis, which in turn caused the aether around Her to crystallize into the Mothercrystal.

Zodiark employed the powers of darkness, which as Urianger suggests, is 'the pole aligned with activity and growth'. He stopped the Final Days by accelerating the celestial currents (Coriolis effect?), effectively removing the aether free regions where the Final Days were observed to be initiated from. So if he were to rejuvenate the planet after the Final Days, by becoming the 'Will of the Star', then how would he go about it? I would expect that He would simply accelerate the lifestream from within it to bring new souls to life. Whether these new souls were 'inferior life' worth killing or 'equivalent life' is a bit of rhetorical legerdemain, but let's leave that aside as an unknown for now. Let's hope He didn't have His designs set on eating the West Mandra Empire.

And then there comes the decision itself, as described in 'Ere our Curtain Falls':

'The people were divided, unable to decide what to do with the future that now stretched out before them. Many wished to trade the new life which had sprung forth to reclaim those lost in sacrifice to Zodiark. No small number, however, insisted that the fate of our world should be entrusted to those selfsame freshly minted souls. All were at our wits' end.

At once, we saw it, shimmering. It poured out of Zodiark's breast, and resolved into the shape of a man. As he looked us over─mouths agape, no doubt─he gave what passed for an earnest smile.

"Fear...not... You will make...the right choice. And I will see it through."'

So the people were at an impasse over a fairly significant ethical decision around new souls, which again fits in with the above. And then Zodiark, eldest and most powerful of primals, sends out his Heart in the form of Elidibus, to help the Amaurotines 'make the right choice'. And it's very clear that this 'Elidibus' is nothing like the boy we knew prior to his death.

'I opened my eyes to take in my brother's face, but the lips visible below his mask bore no expression. Would he never again show what he felt for us, as he once had so readily? Were those very sentiments long lost?'

We tend to view Zodiark as a sort of passive agent in all this, because by the time we encounter Him, His Heart is dead, and His body gets treated as a mecha suit by Fandaniel before being discarded. We know that primals have their own will and desires. So what was His take on all this? Why did He seek to influence the Amaurotine decisions around the sacrifices? Did He enthrall His people, as primals are wont to do? If so, this isn't anything new compared to what we've seen with the likes of Ifrit and so on, and we would have been obligated to put an end to Him ourselves regardless.

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Originally Posted by Lyth

We tend to view Zodiark as a sort of passive agent in all this, because by the time we encounter Him, His Heart is dead, and His body gets treated as a mecha suit by Fandaniel before being discarded. We know that primals have their own will and desires. So what was His take on all this? Why did He seek to influence the Amaurotine decisions around the sacrifices? Did He enthrall His people, as primals are wont to do? If so, this isn't anything new compared to what we've seen with the likes of Ifrit and so on, and we would have been obligated to put an end to Him ourselves regardless.

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If we assume the Heart of the primal is basically its mind and desires (like Venat for Hydaelyn), then Zodiark, through Elidibus, truly was passive. He came out to serve as mediator because Elidibus saw his own role as such, serving as mediator and helping people determine what was best for the planet.

The "primal" Elidibus is also treated in full like the soul and persona of the true Themis, for all intents and purposes, but with his mind muddled from a combination of constantly being bombarded with the other feelings and thoughts of the Ancient sacrifices, and refusing to use his memory crystal out of fear it would cause him unbearable pain. In his dying moments, Themis also remembers why he emerged from Zodiark at the time, and it was 100%, absolutely him, "the boy we knew" - he simply wanted his people to stop fighting, and wished to be of help to those he loved.

We know that the modern primals we're familiar with can't be treated as equivalent to Zodiark and Hydaelyn, since the Ascians intentionally twisted the creation process in order to cause more destruction, so I don't think we can refer to them as a hard source as to what to expect in this case.

Assuming we're done with Zodiark - the end of the Zodiark-Hydaelyn saga and all that - I agree that Zodiark can be understood to essentially be truly passive. Y'shtola's point to Elidibus was not that Zodiark's will was muddling his own, but the collective wills of the uncountable people who made up Zodiark. We also get a good look into the "guts" of Zodiark when Fandaniel seizes control, and as Y'shtola said, it truly just seems to be an amalgamation of the wills and thoughts of those Ancients, mourning their fates and yet still wanting to keep the world safe, and begging Fandaniel not to force them into the opposite, rather than any sense of an independent Zodiark entity.

Zodiark's tempering also fits as a passive process as described by both Emet - "naturally there is no resisting such power"- and the Loporrits - "a slight tug" caused by his sheer raw power.

So I do think it's helpful to keep in mind that when we talk about the things "Zodiark" was doing or that "Zodiark" was potentially demanding, we are in fact talking about Themis, possibly supplemented by the souls of the Ancients who wished to save the world, since the degradation of Themis's own mind is described as a gradual process that happened over the next twelve thousand years.

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Originally Posted by Brinne

truth by someone actually paying attention and not arguing in bad faith

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I'd like to say 100% that anyone who thinks of Zodiark as some sort of blood god eternally demanding sacrifice rather than as Themis hearing his brethren (which do not have much weight by themselves in the Zodiark decision process, as demonstrated by a sundered Fandaniel achieving full control a couple of minutes in) and genuinely being himself is outing themselves as either a disingenuous bad actor or as someone not paying as much attention to the lore as they claim to; but part of the blame for this lies with the terrible writing and planning. For all Endwalker was supposed to be the great finale of the Hydaelyn and Zodiark saga answering everything and tying up all loose ends (lmao), they sure failed at making sure 95% of the fandom understood what Elidibus's situation was.

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Originally Posted by thegreatonemal

The only differences between zodiark and other primals(not even all of them) is the amount of aether used and a person to serve as a vessel for the summoning. I'd imagine the people of the world were deeply traumatized by the final days and Zodiark, put an end to them. He was created with thoughts of salvation, of course they worship him, not unlike a god.

It's a valid question. The people that gave themselves did so willingly, sacrificing themselves so that others and the star itself might live. Did they do this under the assumption that they'd be brought back? Nothing in the game suggests that. Souls inside zodiark said "We are the will of the star, now and forevermore.

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Hythlodaeus on the Moon said, that Hydaelyn didn't allowed them to return to the star. So I guess they wanted to return but couldn't untill Zodiark was killed.

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Originally Posted by Aneshda

Hythlodaeus on the Moon said, that Hydaelyn didn't allowed them to return to the star. So I guess they wanted to return but couldn't untill Zodiark was killed.

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No he didn't. Like, in no way at all was this something Real Hythlodaeus said in his moon scene. I just reviewed that scene, and this is the only part where he even mentions Hydaelyn. (Actual line bolded, adjacent lines also included for context's sake.)

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Originally Posted by Real Hythlodaeus

We remember in vivid detail the events leading to our purgatory.
The plans and plots for our resurrection. Hydaelyn's intervention, and Zodiark's--and the star's--final fate.
And then we drifted in a waking dream, our minds steeped in fog...until you came.

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For extra clarification, while this was a scene with a bunch of other nameless spirits that could've been confused with Hythlodaeus, none of them mention Hydaelyn either, they were all locked in on that whole 'sacrifice ourselves to bring back our paradise' part; honestly it feels like they were completely in a mental stasis and don't even know time has passed since their sacrifices at all.

So at best, you're misremembering something, and I'd recommend you look back at things to refresh your memory and find the thing you are thinking of. At worst, I worry that you're remembering nothing and have been working from a complete misconception this whole time.

It's more that Hydaelyn sealed Zodiark into stasis, and the individual souls comprising/powering Zodiark were collateral damage in the primary need to keep Zodiark alive but sealed. She wasn't wilfully keeping the people trapped just for the sake of it.

It's partly a thing we can blame on the writers – they chose to write the souls within Zodiark as still individual and lucid all this time, when they could have been long dead with their souls returned to the sea and only their remnant corporeal aether powering the primal. That was the tragic situation we generally took to be the case in Shadowbringers and it amplified the tragedy of what was driving Emet. Somehow having it be an actual arranged possibility for them to be revived later weakens that whole earlier plotline.

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Originally Posted by Iscah

It's partly a thing we can blame on the writers – they chose to write the souls within Zodiark as still individual and lucid all this time, when they could have been long dead with their souls returned to the sea and only their remnant corporeal aether powering the primal. That was the tragic situation we generally took to be the case in Shadowbringers and it amplified the tragedy of what was driving Emet. Somehow having it be an actual arranged possibility for them to be revived later weakens that whole earlier plotline.

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I honestly never read it as 'the souls fell out and are in the aetherial sea'; the third sacrifice was a confirmed element as far back as 5.0, and that particular part only really makes sense if there are souls still in there. After all, we heard the tale from Emet (and Fake Hythlodaeus, who's basically an extension of such for these purposes); he knows and accepts how the life cycle works, so he wouldn't be so torn up over this unless it wasn't working as he expects it to. So yeah, them still being in there, and the Ascians being the only ones with a plan to get them out of there, seems to be how the story was always intended to work, it was just made explicit rather than remaining clearly implied. I've always had the question of if Zodiark was powered by souls or merely aether, but that's really just a semantic difference given that they were sacrificing lives to it anyway; the answer doesn't matter and would change nothing.

I think the core thing we learned about those guys in Endwalker wasn't actually related to the situation going on around them--none of that really seemed to change, although the context was colored in more--and more about what it's like in there. The fact that they seemed to be conscious up until the point of the sundering, and then 'drifted into a waking dream' until the events around when we turned up. Their general mental state, too, was news: that only one actually seems to regret their sacrifice, and the rest are more mourning--depending on the individual--either the fact it had to happen, or the fact that it doesn't seem to be working. (Or are Hythlodaeus, who seems kinda just okay with it.) In fiction, one person's story trumps a swathe of just plain facts, so I will note that that one guy was probably representative of a larger group of regretful people in there, but he was a minority even among the people we did hear from. Most of them seemed content with their sacrifice, they just wish it worked.

EDIT: All of this is to say, yeah, the writers wrote this, but they wrote this with intention and reason; it accentuates the tragedy of both the sacrifices and the Ascians, as well as an irony that the third sacrifice was all for the purposes of returning people who, for the most part, didn't want their sacrifice undone.