Zodiark's Codex entry what do we think about it?

[Cleretic]

Yeah we do. There was that NieR crossover short story.

That's a two-degrees removed tale, clearly taking heavy liberties, where at least one of the two sources was heavily biased. And from what I've heard from Nier Reincarnation players, Mama isn't the most reliable narrator either.

I'd struggle to enter it in as evidence for much of anything.

[Brinne]

That story was personally written by Ishikawa herself and is our only insight into what the Sundering and its aftermath actually looked like. It was broadly new information. Nothing contradicts it, either, or actually suggests in the text that it's a distortion, beyond people making very, very heavy inferences cross-referencing their own interpretation of characterization from completely separate scenes across platforms and games.

So claiming Ishikawa wrote the entire thing as a fakeout for some unspecified reason, and trying to write it off as "that depiction didn't count because I said so and it takes unspecified heavy liberties because I said so" seems... odd.

[Lurina]

That's a two-degrees removed tale, clearly taking heavy liberties, where at least one of the two sources was heavily biased. And from what I've heard from Nier Reincarnation players, Mama isn't the most reliable narrator either.

I'd struggle to enter it in as evidence for much of anything.

That's a little pedantic. Obviously it's biased, but it still presents one person's perspective of events faithfully, otherwise there'd be no point in it as a dramatic device. So no matter what, there's still something to be gleaned from the fundamentals.

You might as well use that argument to say there's no point in paying attention to Encyclopedia Eorzea's reckoning of the early eras either, since it's all presented as pseudo-in-universe inference.

[Cleretic]

You might as well use that argument to say there's no point in paying attention to Encyclopedia Eorzea's reckoning of the early eras either, since it's all presented as pseudo-in-universe inference.

Bad example, I don't pay much attention to those, because there's basically nothing substantial about them except in the cases of the Third and Fifth, where we have substantial physical evidence anyway. Probably mostly true, but also probably about as relevant to the present day as the Songhai's history is to my life.

If we ever went back to the Second Astral Era it would turn out more complex and nuanced than what the Encyclopedia tells us, which was basically 'holy wars happened and things burned'. At that point I'll care, but at that point I'll also have more to care about.