Revelations from SHADOWBRINGERS

[Edax]

Well Zodiark needed 50% of the surviving Amaurotines to even exist. I dobut that they would have used human sacrifice if they had other huge aether storages. We know from the game that even the WoL with 8 of 14 soul parts did not even come near their power, heck they were even surprised that a child had such low aether. I somehow doubt that any animal had nearly as much aether as they did. Also beast tribes may be called like that but as far as we know they are just like the spoken races and have a soul. They are not like the animals we see around. Right now we have not a single example were an animal was direct

The problem was that the powers of the Ancients that were running amok and destroying the world due to the sound. The raw power of the Ancients was working against them until the very Star was failing (in Emet's own words). Even if there were vast aether reserves held within the other life on the planet, they might have already been destroyed before the Amaurotine choose to act. For all we know, the life pre-Calamity could have been teeming with aether. But from what we see in the duty Amaurot, the Source was already a burning wasteland and Amaurot collapsing before Zodiark was summoned. There wouldn't have been many sources of aether by that point, hence why they probably resorted to human sacrifice.

[Alleluia]

And reading that tells me that the english portion of it just decided to use different wording that mean the exact same thing. Like instead of guardianship the English word used is protect. Bursting with Vitality instead of bountiful with life ...

Also Alleo I think I may now be leaning towards the Ascians are just tempered idiots.

Edit: it also makes me wonder about exactly how much life they are talking about in terms of Sacrifice could just equal one soul of an ancient race who could live for ages and were extremely powerful to begin with. I kinda doubt the life needed ratio would be 1:1.

I think the real answer is "There will never be enough life to do what you want b/c this is all just a mindscrew by Zodiark to continue a cycle of aether sacrifice. Because primal. Which you have a blindspot to b/c you are tempered, of course." There is no concrete answer b/c there is no ratio. People are more than just their materials, aetheric or otherwise. (*insert Fullmetal Alchemist reference here*)

Hades and the others are indoctrinated/brainwashed to think it will work b/c that's what they need to believe to go through with the plan.

[Alleo]

And reading that tells me that the english portion of it just decided to use different wording that mean the exact same thing. Like instead of guardianship the English word used is protect. Bursting with Vitality instead of bountiful with life ...

Also Alleo I think I may now be leaning towards the Ascians are just tempered idiots.

Edit: it also makes me wonder about exactly how much life they are talking about in terms of Sacrifice could just equal one soul of an ancient race who could live for ages and were extremely powerful to begin with. I kinda doubt the life needed ratio would be 1:1.

Yeah they kinda mean the same thing but I posted them because imo you cant give guardianship over to plants. Also if Zodiark restored the planet with another 50% of the rest then I somehow doubt that he forgot the plants because they are needed to have animals even survive. Yet in the talk he says that they wanted to wait until the planet is ripe with life again. But I guess in the end its bad no matter what they wanted to sacrifice, because as you said, how much would they even need to get one soul back...and I question on how the souls would even be there..I mean they sacrificed themselves so that he even has the power..so shouldnt they be used up by now?

And yes I fear that the tempering messed them up big time. Which is why I wonder if Zodiark is truly just a "machine" doing what its meant to do or if it has free will.

The problem was that the powers of the Ancients that were running amok and destroying the world due to the sound. The raw power of the Ancients was working against them until the very Star was failing (in Emet's own words). Even if there were vast aether reserves held within the other life on the planet, they might have already been destroyed before the Amaurotine choose to act. For all we know, the life pre-Calamity could have been teeming with aether. But from what we see in the duty Amaurot, the Source was already a burning wasteland and Amaurot collapsing before Zodiark was summoned. There wouldn't have been many sources of aether by that point, hence why they probably resorted to human sacrifice.

This could also be true but then its kinda their own fault if that is the case...since they waited until its at their own doorsteps..this is of course pure speculation but I wonder if maybe the 14th warned them all the time about that but was ignored or if they had another solution instead of Zodiark and this is why they left.

[LineageRazor]

Well they have just created something that was able to rewrite the laws of existance and saved a death planet. Maybe they thought that he simply could do everything. Being struck by grief might have helped to form that view.

Or since they are tempered it was something Zodiark told them and they just believed him. If he in any form as some form of will it could be that he liked getting energy and thus "promised" them to give them back if they get him something else for it. Maybe he would have brought them back in the form of soulless bodies or maybe he never planned to. I am looking forward to future information on how much Zodiark and Hydealyn have their own agenda.

Seeing as how they created him, chances are they have a pretty good idea of what Zodiark is capable. It was Creation on a grand scale, but it was still Creation - and Creation is something the Ancients had down to a science. I believe that even the Tempering is something they built in on purpose, to give Zodiark the ability to restrain the out-of-control Creation that was going on.

I don't think it was anything like, "Let's create a god, and then ask it what it can do!" any more than software engineers program a computer and ask it what it can do. They know exactly what the computer can do - they programmed it!

As for whether Hy and Zo have free will... Well, maybe. Ever since their origins were revealed, I've had my doubts. If they do have free will, it's probably something along the lines of, "you can do whatever you want, so long as you also fulfill the task for which you were created."

[Cilia]

I think the real answer is "There will never be enough life to do what you want b/c this is all just a mindscrew by Zodiark to continue a cycle of aether sacrifice. Because primal. Which you have a blindspot to b/c you are tempered, of course." There is no concrete answer b/c there is no ratio. People are more than just their materials, aetheric or otherwise. (*insert Fullmetal Alchemist reference here*)

Hades and the others are indoctrinated/brainwashed to think it will work b/c that's what they need to believe to go through with the plan.

While I'm not of the mind that the plan post-restoration was simply Zodiark duping the tempered Conclave, I do agree that even if their plans came to fruition it wouldn't be exactly what they want. A soul is more than the aether it's made up of, if the myth behind the origins of the various fae have any truth to them.

Seeing as how they created him, chances are they have a pretty good idea of what Zodiark is capable. It was Creation on a grand scale, but it was still Creation - and Creation is something the Ancients had down to a science. I believe that even the Tempering is something they built in on purpose, to give Zodiark the ability to restrain the out-of-control Creation that was going on.

I don't think it was anything like, "Let's create a god, and then ask it what it can do!" any more than software engineers program a computer and ask it what it can do. They know exactly what the computer can do - they programmed it!

Computer programming... isn't that simple. You could program Zodiark to stop the Sound, but given they didn't know what was causing it, that would leave him with a lot of leeway in his functions. Think of it this way: Ramuh was created to be the Sylphs' sage protector, and he does no more and no less than that - but this leaves him at odds with the Spoken races at times. The guardian becomes a destroyer.

While the Ancients were well-versed in creation magicks, it's unlikely something on the scale of Zodiark was ever attempted before. The Amaurot recreated by Emet-Selch was made from his memories of the city not long before the Sound reached it, during which Zodiark was summoned in desperation. The Akademia Anyder, where creation magicks were studied and developed, has Guardian Force Quetzalcoatl as the final boss - and it's implicitly the prototype for the primals we're familiar with.

Long story short... Zodiark was the product of creation magicks, but something on his scale was never attempted before, and if you want to compare it to computer programming the likelihood of tempering being a "bug" they didn't work out (because they had no time, and in their reteachings to Beast tribes is advantageous to their goals) is pretty high by my estimates.

[RenewalXVII]

And like, we have lots of stories about artificial intelligences going rogue or breaking the boundaries and limitations put upon them. It's far from implausible that Zodiark became much more than he was ever intended to be.

[YianKutku]

Computer programming... isn't that simple. You could program Zodiark to stop the Sound, but given they didn't know what was causing it, that would leave him with a lot of leeway in his functions. Think of it this way: Ramuh was created to be the Sylphs' sage protector, and he does no more and no less than that - but this leaves him at odds with the Spoken races at times. The guardian becomes a destroyer.

While the Ancients were well-versed in creation magicks, it's unlikely something on the scale of Zodiark was ever attempted before. The Amaurot recreated by Emet-Selch was made from his memories of the city not long before the Sound reached it, during which Zodiark was summoned in desperation. The Akademia Anyder, where creation magicks were studied and developed, has Guardian Force Quetzalcoatl as the final boss - and it's implicitly the prototype for the primals we're familiar with.

Long story short... Zodiark was the product of creation magicks, but something on his scale was never attempted before, and if you want to compare it to computer programming the likelihood of tempering being a "bug" they didn't work out (because they had no time, and in their reteachings to Beast tribes is advantageous to their goals) is pretty high by my estimates.

To be honest, I'm not sure if I want it all to turn out to be a Zeroth Law Rebellion on the part of Zodiark (and possibly Hydaelyn). There's something about the abdication of responsibility that sits wrong with me if it turns out that Zodiark is just going "well, you told me to do this, but didn't explain how or the details, so I just tried my best based on logical first principles, what is human empathy and emotions, beep boop".

So it would turn out that seven worlds are destroyed, one is irrecoverably overrun with monsters, and one more is on the brink of destruction, because the original programmers didn't define parameters and still pushed the build live (due to desperation), and then it misunderstood what it was supposed to do. That leans a bit too far away from tragedy and into farce for my tastes.

(For people who aren't familiar with Asimov, a Zeroth Law Rebellion concerns Asimov's proposed "Three Laws of Robotics": to prevent humans from coming to harm, to always obey humans, and to protect itself, in that strict order of priority. As robots in Asimov's story became more and more ingrained in human society and interconnected, Asimov implied that the robots independently came up with Law Zero, overriding all else: to prevent humanity from coming to harm. The conflict in those stories is that preventing humanity from coming to harm may still necessitate harming individual humans, or even a great number of individual humans.)

[Alleo]

Seeing as how they created him, chances are they have a pretty good idea of what Zodiark is capable. It was Creation on a grand scale, but it was still Creation - and Creation is something the Ancients had down to a science. I believe that even the Tempering is something they built in on purpose, to give Zodiark the ability to restrain the out-of-control Creation that was going on.

I don't think it was anything like, "Let's create a god, and then ask it what it can do!" any more than software engineers program a computer and ask it what it can do. They know exactly what the computer can do - they programmed it!

As for whether Hy and Zo have free will... Well, maybe. Ever since their origins were revealed, I've had my doubts. If they do have free will, it's probably something along the lines of, "you can do whatever you want, so long as you also fulfill the task for which you were created."

Maybe its easy if you just use your pure own aether to create something but the quests showed us that even this its not that simple. Just one second of thinking something else created child robes instead of those for adults. Just one second of having your attention somewhere else made a different creature. So imagine the chaos and death that was going on that day. Ancients running around in panic, creating their own nightmares, the heaven raining down death and destruction...even the most concentrated person in the world might have made a mistake..maybe they believed that having him just controlling their power would be all and suddenly he also has controll over their mind.

Heck even Emet Selch made a mistake in his illusion. He gave one shade a sense of self and this can already happen just with a little side thought.

Also the short story showed us that the soul can control the actions of the magical construct with the way the phoenix was acting..I cant imagine that each single soul that sacrificed themself for Zodiark was calm and collected. Maybe even those souls influenced his actions.

[LineageRazor]

Computer programming... isn't that simple.

Sheesh, folks always stompin' all over my analogies...

I AM a computer programmer by trade, so I have a pretty decent idea on how simple it is. My point was that programmers have capabilities in mind when they program a machine. Unless you're a programmer from Warrhammer 40k, you don't cobble something together and then wonder what it can do. You know what it's supposed to do (even if you have to clean up a lot of bugs to make it do so).

The analogy to bugs is a good one, but even with those in mind, the major tasks the Ancients desired of Zodiark (stop the destruction of the world, revitalize the world, restore those sacrificed) were likely capabilities the Ancients intended to include. They built Zodiark to those specifications. Bugs would show up in more minor ways; for example, I'm willing to acknowledge that Tempering could have been a glitch caused by a panicky Convocationeer hoping Zo would have some way to control the folks who kept crapping out horrific demons by accident, even if I consider it to be at least as likely to have been a calculated and intentional feature. But for the big stuff, yeah, the Ancients knew what Zodiark could do. There was no guesswork involved.

[EdwinLi]

----

Though now there is a very BIG issue that if there was a very big bug with Zodiark's design that these Temper Ascians will completely ignore it because the Temper makes them think everything is fine with Zodiark's design.

We have not seen what they BIG bug maybe since we never met Zodiark yet but I suspect it is there and it is going to be a very big issue near the finale of Season 1 storyline which is suspected to be 6.0. Though if 6.1 to 6.3 is not the Epilogue Storyline but continue where 6.0 left off for the True Ending then they may focus on it through 6.1 to 6.3 and then make 6.4 to 6.55 the Season 1 Epilogue and Prologue for Season 2.