Quote Originally Posted by Raist View Post
In case you missed it... they are saying the remaining flesh is used in other recipes. This clearly is not a case of people carving off fins and releasing the shark back into the water. It describes instead that culinarians use the flesh in other recipes. Note this does not limit us to just the players that are culinarians....there are items in this game that the players cannot craft, but there are culinarians, alchemists, goldsmiths, etc. that do make things and sell them or we otherwise obtain them as rewards from events and instanced content--or even killing open world mobs.
The OP did not miss it, and directly mentions it in the first post. He believes that this text is an attempt to convince players of the game that this is the typical practice of real-life finners. He thinks that the text is attempting to justify real-life shark finning by tricking players into thinking that it's humane, in order to promote and justify real-life shark finning.

As I have mentioned in previous posts, I find this to be extremely unlikely, and that the text is instead meant to reassure in-game crafters that they are not horrible people for making Shark Fin soup, since the horrible real-life practices are NOT the methods used in-game.

For the OP's opinion to be fact, Square-Enix would need to have a significant interest in promoting shark-finning, enough to risk the political backlash that would come from taking a firm pro-finning stance. For this kind of message to make sense, SE would need to have powerful ties to the shark-finning industry - and to my knowledge, that simply isn't the case. They aren't going to take such a risk unless there's a substantial amount of personal gain to be had. Heck, shark fin soup isn't even all that popular in Japan - it's primarily consumed in China.

Since it makes absolutely no sense for SE to want to glorify shark finning, I maintain that SE is not attempting to glorify shark finning.