[All The Spoilers] Can we talk about Zodiark?

[NegativeS]

I will say, we also know from Shadowbringers that the Final Days came and then Zodiark was summoned in response. So the whole time the question of "who or what caused the Final Days" was always lurking in the back of our minds.

It was never going to be Zodiark, because he didn't exist at that point.

Sure, but the cause could potentially have been sundered along with the star. The ancients had no idea that the cause of the Final Days was coming from off-world.

All we knew before the events in Elpis were that Zodiark was bad and ate babies, but his existence stopped the end of days from happening.

It would have made more sense to me if we addressed the root cause of the star's cancer before taking it off life support, but that's just me...

[ArkenaeuxBelmont]

All we knew before the events in Elpis were that Zodiark was bad and ate babies, but his existence stopped the end of days from happening.

That's not exactly true. We knew he was summoned to stop the Final Days, we knew that Elidabus was his heart the same as Venat was the heart of Hydaelyn. But nowhere was it ever stated that Zodiark was "evil".

In fact I'd go to say that the entire point of Shadowbringers was to show us that the conventional terms of "darkness" and "light" aren't evil and good, they are grey. It's how they are used, indulged, etc.

Zodiark was merely a tool. His personality we already knew, it was Elidebus. Once he left the core of Zodiark, Zodiark sat empty. Just a force of nature, like you said in the original post.

If anything this makes us relate to Emet, Laha and Elidabus even more. They were merely doing what they thought was right. Granted, sacrificing the lives of everyone on the shards to restore the sundered ancients and allow Zodiark to bring back those were used to summon him, we see as genocide. But the crux of the matter that we learn through Emet was how the Ancients didn't consider the sundered, lesser beings "beings". It's like how we look at an ant. We don't even concern ourselves with one that's crawling around our shoes, and we accidently step on them without realizing it.

From their point of view, they were trying to save their people. That's why Emet's line at the very end of EW was so impactful. His ideals were invincible. To be fair, they kind of were. Zodiark was a shield against the final days. As long as Zodiark existed, our star was safe.

But he concedes that our ideals have even more merit, by saying that their methods wouldn't have brought them this far. Zodiark was a stall tactic, a way to protect their people. We showed that with balance, both aetherial and dynamis, we could go further than they could, and prevented the final days.

We gave him hope. That was the entire point of the expansion, to show that hope is a powerful force.