Did Zodiark ever do anything wrong?

To answer the question of the title, ultimately -- yes.

Zodiark was functionally a tool, and like most tools, it is not inherently good or evil; but ultimately wound up being used for evil purposes, despite being created to do something that initially had good intentions. I think Hades makes it pretty clear at the end of Endwalker by saying their methods wouldn't have ultimately worked; so despite being created to stop an apocalypse which was Objectively Good, once you get further into the subsequent sacrifices where it goes from being willing Ancients offering themselves to forcing your ritual sacrifices onto life you deem "unworthy" or "less than", esp. post sundering, it's pretty clearly Not Good and Very Evil. While the Capital "E" Entity of Zodiark may not have possessed the will for most of it's creation to order people to do explicitly evil things (especially post-Elidibus removing himself), I think it's pretty obvious both explicitly and on the margins that its influence was directly responsible for a lot of Bad Things.

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Originally Posted by Eisi

Well Zodiark was the evil one. So it doesn't really matter if he did anything wrong does it? He was the evil one, Hydaelyn was the good one.
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True! She told everyone what was going on with Meteion and Dynamis and the truth of the final days. She wanted the ancients to succeed. Still people decided not to listen because they were incapable because of how inferior they were to us... she had to judge them by erasing their bodies and identities and instead replacing them with better stock. Sometimes that's the only way to save the world, no matter how tragic.

On the other hand wait wasn't Venat an ancient as well? So she must have already been kinda sundered I guess for her to be able to understand that something other than Zodiark could be done? For her to actually care I mean. I don't really know tho.

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Originally Posted by Eisi

I know, I know. Venat just did her thing and she was pretty much just 100% wrong let's face it. She's a cutie though. The convocation also was pretty incompetent, including Emet who didn't even care about the memory erasure incident. And nobody ever found out that it had to do anything with Dynamis, including Fandaniel who knew that it was a thing. The storyline is just really well written.

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You. I like you.

The storyline really only works when you assume every Ancient to be a massive idiot and Venat to be at best hugely incompetent or at worst actively sabotaging her people for the benefit of a "better" future humanity she saw exactly one (1) specimen of. One of the most important people on the planet (and his Kind Of A Big Deal friend) got his mind and memory tempered with? By a machine that instantly made him go "is this even legal??"? Why, of course this situation was never investigated! I guess it is a testament to how badly the Ancients deserved to die: they are such a bunch of idiots, it is a wonder their society managed to survive for millennia. I'm sure these immortal people, who each had massive magical powers capable of potentially ending the universe with a creation gone wrong yet still managed to function, and whose apparently global culture revolved around debate, the confrontation of different points of view and research, were just completely unable to handle themselves.

Genius Godakawa! Absolutely flawless.

And man, lol. Fandaniel's knowledge of Dynamis sure was a boon to the Convocation! He never even found out the Final Days were Dynamis. Wow. But I guess this is the same dude who asked for a random familiar's help to get himself down a tree while being a master of wind magicks and avian creations. If anything, this is a consistent character trait, which is more than I can say about the rest of Hermes's purported tenure of the Seat of Fandaniel – not that Hermes being a part of the Ancient Convocation of Fourteen or of the reincarnated Ascian paragons ever interested Ishikawa in the first place, it looks like.



But to answer the thread question: no. Or rather, not as Zodiark himself, but as Elidibus the Ascian after the Sundering, yes, though moreso as a well-intentioned (for his people) extremist type of antagonist. And IMO you cannot dissociate what Elidibus decided to do from what caused him to act this way, namely the Sundering breaking down reality and deleting his civilisation, and the remnants of his people being indefinitely trapped in the purgatory of Zodiark to serve as aether battery for what he views as the broken pieces of people he used to know and love. That sucks. And this isn't even touching upon the fact that Venat, as Hydaelyn, was by then fully onboard the time loop train, so whatever opposition she gave the Unsundered was pretty much lip service. Can't diverge from that timeline of 8 genocides too much! So yes, the post-Sundering, disembodied Heart of Zodiark acted the villain, exactly as according to her plans.

His actions as Zodiark however were as follows: stopping the Final Days, massively seeding the planet with life so it doesn't remain a barren rock floating in space, and coming out of the giant soul mecha cockpit to mediate matters when conflict erupted over what to do next with regards to the sacrificed people whose memories, awareness and souls in fact remained within Zodiark.

Tipping the aether balance of the twelve unsundered members of the Convocation who performed Zodiark's summoning over to Darkness is a thing that happened. Other than Altima's crystal's testimony of it, we have zero details on what this actually entails, other than Emet preferring the shade.

I think you're supposed to feel bad for Zodiark in his pathetic state. Hard-working primal maintains the balance for millennia, then loses parts of his body, and then who happens to show up but Hydaelyn's champion who promptly beats him to a pulp. Repeatedly.

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Originally Posted by Avenger

I think you're supposed to feel bad for Zodiark in his pathetic state. Hard-working primal maintains the balance for millennia, then loses parts of his body, and then who happens to show up but Hydaelyn's champion who promptly beats him to a pulp. Repeatedly.

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Hey, be fair. We didn't do it repeatedly, we only did it once, Extremes are non-canon! Also, Fancy Dan shoulders some of the blame, surely.

But yeah, to a degree I do feel sorry for it; not like I'd feel sorry for a person (since Zodiark has no will), but more like how I'd feel sorry for a long-standing piece of public infrastructure that gets taken for granted, like a train line or a river or something. 'You give us so much and people treat you like crap'. It's especially true when you consider the fact that Zodiark was never intended to do anything but put up the barrier, so all this stuff happened to it because of something it was never supposed to do in the first place.

EDIT: Also, minor clarification, we don't know how long Zodiark was doing its thing before the Sundering when it 'lost parts of its body', but it probably wasn't long as far as the Ancients' time scale. I very much doubt it was up for even a century before the Sundering; if I were to enforce human timescales onto the Ancients, I'd be surprised if the time between the first summoning and the Sundering was more than a year.

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Originally Posted by Avenger

I think you're supposed to feel bad for Zodiark in his pathetic state. Hard-working primal maintains the balance for millennia, then loses parts of his body, and then who happens to show up but Hydaelyn's champion who promptly beats him to a pulp. Repeatedly.

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Not only that but he was protecting the world for 12k years and literally is never thanked for it and it’s hardly even mentioned. Not even in his own codex entry.

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Originally Posted by KizuyaKatogami

Not only that but he was protecting the world for 12k years and literally is never thanked for it and it’s hardly even mentioned. Not even in his own codex entry.

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I mean, he should have been painted blue for us to like him. Purple is a evil color, I mean, Lahabrea Had a purple aura and he was evil, therefor Zodiark is evil.

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Originally Posted by Magikazam

I mean, he should have been painted blue for us to like him. Purple is a evil color, I mean, Lahabrea Had a purple aura and he was evil, therefor Zodiark is evil.

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You might be onto something. Purple is my favorite color…

I think it bears mention that despite Zodiark essentially being a glorified mecha that requires a heart/pilot to act, the souls that went into him were still conscious as we see them directly cry out to us and beg us to save him/them from Fandaniel (and the destruction he sought) and we even see them walk around on the moons surface.

Now their presence might be due to the towers binding him being shattered but we do speak with Hythlodaeus.

There is a implication that they were stuck immobile and aware for 12 000 years and could do nothing but cast their gaze at the ruined shard that once was their home.
Their hope of salvation edging a little bit closer each time a rejoining was performed only to be betrayed by a member of the convocation for the second time (counting Venat)

A terrible end for a tragic figure.

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Originally Posted by Adils

I think it bears mention that despite Zodiark essentially being a glorified mecha that requires a heart/pilot to act, the souls that went into him were still conscious as we see them directly cry out to us and beg us to save him/them from Fandaniel (and the destruction he sought) and we even see them walk around on the moons surface.

Now their presence might be due to the towers binding him being shattered but we do speak with Hythlodaeus.

There is a implication that they were stuck immobile and aware for 12 000 years and could do nothing but cast their gaze at the ruined shard that once was their home.
Their hope of salvation edging a little bit closer each time a rejoining was performed only to be betrayed by a member of the convocation for the second time (counting Venat)

A terrible end for a tragic figure.

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Something interesting about this is that I actually never got the idea that the souls within Zodiark regretted their decision, or even seemed to expect or want to be freed from it. There's one guy genuinely freaking out, but everyone is lamenting... well, not that they're in there, but that they're in there and it's not working. It's one thing to sacrifice yourself for the greater good, it's another thing to do that and then wake up learning that the greater good's not even winning.

It's also unclear how much of what had transpired or was going on that they even knew; they seemed to understand their literal at-the-moment reality of Zenos and Fandaniel ruining everything, and by Hyth's report they know the events up to their imprisonment and the sundering, but beyond that it's not clear--and even given that, they don't really express any opinions about the post-summoning, pre-Fandaniel-wakeup period, they're mostly just dwelling on that initial summoning's emotions. So it's hard to tell how tragic their in-the-end emotionality was, if they knew or lamented anything specific beyond 'we sacrificed ourselves for nothing'.

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Originally Posted by LilimoLimomo

Zodiark seems to often be framed negatively by the game's writers, despite — if I understand the lore correctly — never having done anything negative.

The Convocation made Zodiark to save the planet from The Final Days, and while this did not tackle the root of the problem, he did succeed in protecting the planet. It took a sacrifice of Ancient lives to create him, but they did so willingly....

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This outlines a fundamental parable throughout FFXIV's story: There's no absolute good or bad, light or dark, joy or sorrow. You have to accept both as a balance.

Ulimately, while Zodiark didn't do anything he wasn't asked to do, the issue was that his existence, in its whole being, posed a threat to the state the world had become due to Hydaelyn's actions. Were Zodiark to rejoin, so too would Etherys, and so too would Etherys' people. Hydaelyn split them so that they would have the means to combat against dynamis. Allowing them to rejoin takes that ability away from them again, leaving them totally vulnerable. We also don't kill Zodiark because he's a threat, but instead because Amon uses him to be an imminent threat. Were he to never have been used by Amon, we would have likely let him be.