Tales from the Dawn #3: "A Question of Life" (Hermes)

[Brinne]

I have trouble viewing either the sundering or the rejoinings as genocidal for the same reason - that they are so abstracted from anything that could ever happen in real life, and in no way resemble any kind of real life genocide.

Really, asking if the Ancient society was perfect is doubly useless because for one, even if it was perfect, that doesn't justify the acts of genocide the ascians enacted in order to try and restore it.

I mean. Okay.

It's weird to me to say you can't take the eradication of a race and culture seriously as 'genocide' simply because the methodology is fantastical, in what has always been a fantasy story. Regardless of how you want to phrase it or handwave it as "taking away godhood", Venat's actions deliberately resulted in the extremely premature destruction of the Ancients both physically and mentally, and she then continued to go on deliberately attempting to erase them from history altogether. This is not something fantastical to me - the latter part in particular is very harrowing in terms of real world atrocities and parallels.

To me, I don't see much distinction between saying "Venat's actions can't be described as genocide because they're too fantastical" and "the Allagan Empire's actions can't be described as genocide because they're too fantastical" because we don't have alien dragons or primals or Tempering or the capacity to create artificial moons with a combination of all of the above to use as a battery. Murder is murder, the forceful ending of one's life is the forceful ending of one's life, regardless of if you're using weird magic as the means to carry it out. And in-game, the Ancients are portrayed as being equally human, full of quirks and idiosyncrasies and emotions and textured relationships and hopes and dreams and frustrations and aspirations, as any other NPC group we interact with. The thematic final word on them in Ultima Thule (from G'raha, if I'm recalling correctly) once again reinforces that they were simply people. And as a people, they were snuffed out wholesale in an act of violence.