Quote Originally Posted by kpxmanifesto View Post
The Tales of the Dawn sidestory, A Friendship of Record, seems a little more indicative of there being some kind of fight between Hydaelyn and Zodiark.
That isn't merging, though – it's going back to the "old" narrative that Hydaelyn battled Zodiark with no mention of it ending in a philosophical clash between the factions.

Merging the two would require actually talking about what happened when Hydaelyn and Zodiark fought each other while clearly connecting it to the allegorical cutscene, which they seem extremely averse to doing.

Either they really did try to overwrite "the fight" with "Venat turned up at a meeting", or they've written it confusingly enough that a fair chunk of the audience feels like they did that, and either way they have made no attempt to explain or justify the discrepancy – not in further stories and not in interviews. They just avoid any explanation of it, which makes me feel like they don't actually have a good answer for how to reconcile the two.