The nature of the Sundering has been spelled out in a Nier Reincarnation side story.

[OhNooo]

I remember people saying that the sundering didn't wipe people's memories. Well now we have confirmation that they forgot everything, even how to talk, and had to relearn how to do basic things. Pretty much had to re-evolve.

[EaraGrace]

I remember people saying that the sundering didn't wipe people's memories. Well now we have confirmation that they forgot everything, even how to talk, and had to relearn how to do basic things. Pretty much had to re-evolve.

Yeah I admit I thought that was an exaggeration back in ShB. Looking back now it makes sense to do so for Venats plan, ie. the discussion with the Watcher and all.

[Lurina]

I remember people saying that the sundering didn't wipe people's memories. Well now we have confirmation that they forgot everything, even how to talk, and had to relearn how to do basic things. Pretty much had to re-evolve.

I hope this stuff will settle the "was the Sundering murder?" question in favor of "yeah", since it's clear it completely destroyed people's identities and even physical forms, but I kinda doubt it.

[EaraGrace]

I hope this stuff will settle the "was the Sundering murder?" question in favor of "yeah", since it's clear it completely destroyed people's identities and even physical forms, but I kinda doubt it.

The discussion will never end because people will never agree on what is moral, true or good, as there are as many definitions and ways of thinking about it as there are people.

[Rulakir]

A couple days ago, a new event series focusing on Emet-Selch was released written by Natsuko Ishikawa.

This is confirmed? Faith restored in Ishikawa.

I hope this stuff will settle the "was the Sundering murder?" question in favor of "yeah", since it's clear it completely destroyed people's identities and even physical forms, but I kinda doubt it.

Not to mention: "In the simplest of ways, they die and die." Given they were devolved to such a primitive state it's likely their life expectancy was short as well, probably dying to things like the common cold and infections from cuts. What a horrific thought.

[Cleretic]

I hope this stuff will settle the "was the Sundering murder?" question in favor of "yeah", since it's clear it completely destroyed people's identities and even physical forms, but I kinda doubt it.

Honestly, that argument was always kind of a weird decoy anyway. Because sure, the sundering is murder, but you know what else is murder? Murder. And the Ascians committed a lot more murder.

It's a weird play for equivalency that then refuses to admit equivalency.

[Lurina]

Not to mention: "In the simplest of ways, they die and die." Given they were devolved to such a primitive state it's likely their life expectancy was short as well, probably dying to things like the common cold and infections from cuts. What a horrific thought.

If we take the description literally, then it makes it sound like people were more or less reduced to the level of infants in terms of intellectual development at first. Combined with the fact that Ancient civilization was clearly global and occupied dense cities, and EE1 saying that early humanity was basically just some scattered tribes, a die-off on a catastrophic scale becomes implicit. It's not like they would have known how to farm or hunt.

Honestly, that argument was always kind of a weird decoy anyway. Because sure, the sundering is murder, but you know what else is murder? Murder. And the Ascians committed a lot more murder.

It's a weird play for equivalency that then refuses to admit equivalency.

Though I'd say that the lead in bodycount seems debatable considering the above (14 worlds, all beginning with mass death), regardless of what other people feel, I've never believed that the Ascians are more righteous than Venat, despite finding their motives more comprehensible. My complaint has always just been that the text is far more sympathetic towards one than the other in a way that comes across as sort of creepy, and ties into the broader messy plotting.

Though admittedly, I've also kinda come to dislike how EW went out of its way to compel you to forgive and like Emet, or more specifically to see the Rejoinings as part of some grander plan that "had to happen" to achieve this happy ending. FFXIV seems weirdly keen to have you stan mass-murderers, and I'm not really here for it.

[Cleretic]

I mean, regardless of what other people feel, I've never believed that the Ascians are more righteous than Venat, despite finding their motives more comprehensible. My complaint has always just been that the text is far more sympathetic towards one than the other in a way that comes across as sort of creepy, and ties into the broader messy plotting.

Though admittedly, I've kinda come to dislike how EW went out of its way to compel you to forgive and like Emet, or see the Rejoinings as part of some grander plan that "had to happen" to achieve this happy ending. FFXIV seems weirdly keen to have you stan mass-murderers, and I'm not really here for it.

My complaint here was more pointed at Shadowbringers as the initial instigator than Endwalker, but I do agree. I've heard that from around Shadowbringers on (which feasibly could've also influenced Stormblood and its patches) they wanted to write a story with no clear 'evil', where nobody is doing things for no reason beyond malice, because they don't want to put a story like that out into the world. And that's fine... but when we're talking about a setting where the main ongoing villains were omnicidal ghost wizards and a mashup of the Romans and the Nazis, trying to turn that setting into a story with 'no clear villains' apparently means finding pathos that justifies extremely horrible crimes. It doesn't feel right to compel forgiveness and liking for Emet-Selch, given his very tangible actions.

I've mentioned before that I swallowed Endwalker's attempts to do so much better, I think because the crimes of Venat, Fandaniel and Meteion are so much more fantastical and less relatable to real-world events. Venat feels like a figure in a creation myth, Fandaniel feels like... well, a JRPG villain, and Meteion feels like a figure in a philosophical thought exercise like Laplace's Demon. That's actually a good angle for villains that 'aren't clearly evil', because their crimes become abstract and conceptual rather than things with real-world analogues. To me, the Sundering is like the flood from the story of Noah, it's too impossibly enormous to be declared much of anything.

[Rulakir]

I've mentioned before that I swallowed Endwalker's attempts to do so much better, I think because the crimes of Venat, Fandaniel and Meteion are so much more fantastical and less relatable to real-world events. Venat feels like a figure in a creation myth, Fandaniel feels like... well, a JRPG villain, and Meteion feels like a figure in a philosophical thought exercise like Laplace's Demon. That's actually a good angle for villains that 'aren't clearly evil', because their crimes become abstract and conceptual rather than things with real-world analogues. To me, the Sundering is like the flood from the story of Noah, it's too impossibly enormous to be declared much of anything.

This just sounds like "A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic." We don't even know what happens during a rejoining, we've never seen one from a shard's POV. However, we know in almost painful detail now what happened during the Final Days and after the sundering. It's odd to me that you place more emphasis on a situation that we know next to nothing about vs. the ones we do and yet claim that the one shrouded in mystery is more vile, especially because it's on an arguably smaller scale (it's still a whole planet)?

[Cleretic]

This just sounds like "A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic." We don't even know what happens during a rejoining, we've never seen one from a shard's POV. However, we know in almost painful detail now what happened during the Final Days and after the sundering. It's odd to me that you place more emphasis on a situation that we know next to nothing about vs. the ones we do and yet claim that the one shrouded in mystery is more vile, especially because it's on an arguably smaller scale (it's still a whole planet)?

You're right that we don't really know what a Rejoining is like. But we do know what being nuked is like. We know what genocidal campaigns are like. We know what lethal gas weapons are like.

The thing that casts an unforgivable shadow on the Ascians to me isn't the big, weird, conceptual part (again, I actually like Fandaniel); it's that they perform atrocities we know of from recent real-world history and just treat that as an acceptable course of events, and to accept the pathos that the game wants me to it wants me to brush all that under the rug. It's much the same thing that turned me away from Assassin's Creed's meta-plot, actually; assert alien influence on esoteric historical popes all you want, but the moment you declare the same thing to be responsible for Henry Ford's poor factory conditions and Hitler's rise to power, your faux-conspiracy's stopped being cute.