Quote Originally Posted by anhaato View Post
I mean, yeah, that's exactly why they failed. In making us sympathize with the Ascians over Shadowbringers they made Zodiark into a Not Actually Evil god, thus writing themselves into a hole that made it hard to justify why what Venat did was good. When they made Zodiark neutral at worst, the introduction of "oh the world was gonna die anyway" didn't really stick. Instead of accepting that Hydaelyn is now a morally gray figure at best (allowing us to defeat an intergalactic world-ender, at the price of ending a civilization) they tried and failed to retcon that back to Hydey good Zodey bad world gonna die (I feel like YoshiP was partly responsible for this) and it fell apart. This is intent vs result, my point.
I mean, then we're in absolute agreement. I don't think the writers intentionally set forth to specifically do a Genocide Apologism. However, in the actual story they wrote and published, the text does, in fact, contain a Genocide Apologism. My feeling is they were so laser-focused on making the playerbase love Hydaelyn and convey that she was Good that they were careless and didn't think things through - at least, that's my hope - and here we are.