Quote Originally Posted by redheadturk View Post
I stated that both were genocide and both were wrong. I am much more inclined to excuse the Rejoinings to some extent because they were a reaction to Venat's initial genocide. Did the people still exist? Yeah, maybe, but with a much reduced aether capacity and lifespan. A slow murder is still a murder, and the destruction of a culture is still genocide even if some of the people survive.
It does not follow that just because the sundering happened, the only response had to be that of rejoining. There's been a lot of ink spilled about what Venat could have hypothetically done differently, so what about what the unsundered ascians could have done differently?

What if, instead of turning away from the sundered in horror and revulsion, the ascians had guided the sundered people out of thier confusion and disorientation, taught them the ways of the Amaurotine culture and helped thier civilizations thrive. With the ability to travel freely between the shards, and incredible magic at thier disposal, it would have been pretty easy for the unsundered to provide for all the people in the various shards.

Then, with the knowledge of minds of fourteen shards working together, they could have tried to devise means of communicating or travelling between shards. Figured out a way to consensually rejoin shards (after all, maybe people would be interested in making thier souls more whole, if the ascians had explained what that entailed). And as for the souls trapped in Zodiark, well if getting them back really required sacrificing non-sentient plants and animals, then the ascians and the sundered they were cooperating with could work on fixing that problem too.

I don't see how the rejoinings were the one and only choice they had in response to the sundering.