Zodiark: Good or evil? thoughts

[MikkoAkure]

I actually think she does temper people. If you look at the cutscene where the warriors of darkness meet with the Minfilia. Ardbert attemtps to cut her down, she stops him with a touch and a blue glow. Every primal tempering we have seen has generally been with a blue glow. After this touch Ardbert turns from enraged to placid, he is suddenly motionless for a moment as if confused.

It is easy to miss because Minfilia starts talking, but it certainly on a second look seems very out of character for Ardbert. So much so that i truly think he was tempered at this point. Essentially i think Hydealyn uses WOL to achive a goal and then casts them aside. Thats assuming she actually creates them, rather then just wakes them up and then claims to have "blessed" them.

I was under the impression that Minfilia just paralyzed him so that he could hear her out. He changed his attitude because she said "yeah Hydaelyn understands where you're coming from and she hears you and I'm going to help you" when the whole time, he thought Hydaelyn abandoned his world.

Another thing is that we already have proof in ARR that we ourselves are not tempered. Ifrit himself says something along the lines that he "cannot smell the taint of another" on us when attempting to temper us after one of his own tempered suggests that we're tempered by someone else. If we were indeed tempered by a being more powerful than he, you would think he would be able to notice.

Anyways. In the end I don't think people are going to stop arguing over whether Zodiark and Hydaelyn are evil, even after Endwalker. Ultimately, they are just complex programs following the rules by which they were designed for. Regardless of what you the player thinks though, our character's role in the game is to protect the world and in that perspective, Zodiark is the barrier to that goal. His supporters (and some users in this forum) do not feel that the life on our planet is equal and we're just resources to be used to make everything go back to the way it was before. If our character agreed and helped, then the game would be over. I think a lot of good vs evil media is poorly written and that has us conditioned to think that anything that has a good writing is "grey". A well-written villain has a reason for doing the things they are doing, but I don't necessarily think that makes their reasons OK.