Quote Originally Posted by Tharne View Post
It was said that the sound was "distorting all living things within earshot and also wrested control of their creation magicks". They weren't in control anymore. The chance of something like that happening again ? We can't really know for sure since we don't even know what was the source of this sound, but wasn't it stopped by the summoning of Zodiark ? Then he probably acts as a fail safe against that, even then they probably would have try to take measure to avoid such a thing to happen again.
I don't see any needless sacrifice with what they were going to do.
Emet explains that if Hydaelyn strikes you, it creates a clone in appearance but everything else is halved, are you still you then ? No, you are not, the Real Original You is no more, I equate that to killing yes.
Except there was nothing to stop the original cause of the calamity from happening again. The very foundations of reality was breaking down, and that is not a natural occurrence unless something was damaging reality all this time. Which there was only one possible cause in that regard: The very creation magics they relied on and constantly used every day of their life by potentially billions of people.

Which would mean that while Zodiark used the vast amounts of creation magic he was summoned with to repair reality, if they continued to have him use creation magic on that scale then the calamity would repeat itself in short order. Faster with all the people brought back using their creation magic all the time as they tried to rebuild their lives. Leading to them again having to sacrifice half their population to repair the reality they were actively accidentally destroying ad creating a cycle of sacrifice until their souls were so degraded that it makes Hydaelyn splitting everyone the far more merciful and future granting method.