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

[Lurina]

I still do not understand why this "official" extra text from Emet's perspective goes against how he describes the Sundering within the game, where he demonstrates it as perfectly splitting a person into two copies with no mention of the horror of seeing them reduced to literal malformed creatures.

This is what Emet says about the Sundered in that scene.

Two individuals, identical in appearance, yet reduced in all respects. Strength, intelligence, the soul itself--all is halved.

The inhabitants of these fourteen fragments were feeble, frail, and foolish. Oblivious to their imperfection, ignorant of their past.

It's a narrative necessity that the way he explains the concept to Ryne is a simplification, as the player races are, via word of god, variants of the Ancients that mutated in response to the Sundering. This is what Emet means when he calls them "malformed creatures". They were physically different, weaker, and had lost "their" (so to speak) identities and almost all memory of the Ancient world.

He's kind of an asshole about it, but there's nothing contradictory about the core details.

[Brinne]

Which tells us nothing. Here's the exerts from it, written out from the imgur screenshots.

This originally came up because of the question of the potential "die-off" made by Venat blasting all forms of life back to the Stone Age. The insight that the forms of humanity that emerged from the Sundering couldn't even form words is relevant to that conversation, I would think.

I still do not understand why this "official" extra text from Emet's perspective goes against how he describes the Sundering within the game, where he demonstrates it as perfectly splitting a person into two copies with no mention of the horror of seeing them reduced to literal malformed creatures.

When there's a mismatch between actual canon and a simplified summary written for the audience of another game (and in this case until and unless we get a better explanation from the creators), I'm going to assume the discrepancy is down to the external version taking creative liberties for the sake of a self-contained capsule of story.

As I've said to you before, we also had hard confirmation in the text that the Sundering did, in fact, physically change its subjects in a way not reflected by Emet's PowerPoint demonstration, simply because of the sheer size difference between the Sundered and the original Ancients. So his explanation could never have been fully accurate. We also now have Oda's answers from the recent Korean Q&A confirming that the Sundering physically warped its targets to the point that they should be considered a different species, and confirmation from him prior that the Sundered Ancients had to "evolve" into the player races we know now, so there was a large degree of physical malleability in the early stages, considering Roegadyn versus Lalafell.

So we have Ishikawa's word, Oda's word, and what we literally see in-game in one corner, and Emet-Selch providing a simplified introductory explanation on the other.

I'm not sure why the suggestion of "Emet-Selch's biased viewpoint" must necessarily reflect "oh, he must be lying in the third-person sequence written by Ishikawa about his experiences and perspective for no reason" instead of "he simplifies and partially sanitizes the explanation of what was a horrifying and traumatic experience for him when speaking to a crowd that includes a child."

Edit: Actually, forget it. I genuinely don't have the energy for this anymore, lol.

If we're at the point of ignoring overt and fundamental plot points, refusing to acknowledge lore written by the main scenario writer herself and now moving into painting the Amaurotines as fanatical fascists who conscripted innocent bystanders unto their deaths, go ahead. Have fun.

This has been going on since 5.0 when Amaurot was revealed, sadly. It can get a bit exhausting and disheartening, yeah - play down their humanity, play down the atrocity inflicted on them. Ah well.

[Lurina]

Which tells us nothing. Here's the exerts from it, written out from the imgur screenshots.

Nothing about that tells us anything about the time between the Sundering and the first Calamity. Supposedly the Twelve were around during that time, and we have no clue what they were doing either. 6.5 might tell us with the final 24-man's story, but until then, we know absolutely nothing.

Sorry, I missed this on the last page.

My point in bringing up the Nier short story is that it firmly establishes that mankind post-Sundering lost their cultural knowledge, though that's already inferrable from the text of Shadowbringers stating twice that they lost their memories and the fact that were reduced to making cave paintings. Actually, it was probably unnecessary to bring up the Nier stuff at all. All the rest of it, including this discussion on the meaning of "malformed creatures" and the state of their physical bodies, isn't even really relevant.

No cultural knowledge + no magic = hunter-gatherers.

Bringing up the 12 as stewards of the planet is a fair point, but even then they were only active on the Source, so for 13/14 people "created" post-Sundering they're not really relevant. That's not to say the game won't add more information and make the post-Sundering period come across differently, but with the information we have about the 0th Era we have at the moment, that's how it seems to me.

[Kozh]

I'm not really sure why there's so much agitation over the revelation that the Convocation ordered the people of Amaurot to sacrifice themselves to their God. Conscription is just the logical extension of the decision to summon Zodiark in the first place. It seems a bit silly to fail the summoning ritual simply because you met part of, but not all of the sacrificial quota.

ShB moral message: the sundered may not be as selfless as the Ancients are. Half of the population won't voluntarily sacrifice themselves to save the Star. But doesn't mean that they are a lesser for it, nor that it's okay to kill them (rejoining) because of it.

Meanwhile, some people: "noo the convocation definitely ordered them to sacrifice themselves! Probably rounded those people up themselves to be taken behind the shed!"

It's also interesting that the decision around additional sacrifices didn't seem to be part of the original plan -

Yes, it is interesting to see the effect of emotional trauma that happens after seeing: 1) Mosters everywhere eating people, 2) your world nearly died, 3) 75% of the remaining population (including your loved ones) sacrifice themselves to save the planet

Bonus point: the realization that those souls are not in forever purgatory and couldn't even return to lifestream. A culture they held in high regard.

[Lyth]

I think the correct term for what the writers are describing in that translated letter (as well as the March 2022 live letter) is evolutionary divergence. Contrary to what is often suggested in popular culture, a mutation refers to a singular statistical event that causes that divergence as it is accumulated over time (these events are happening in us every second due to replication errors and strand breaks, but most get caught). It's not quite the same as dramatically morphing yourself a pair of helmet destroying rabbit ears (although this is still possible with the power of Fantasia.)

Genes will naturally show gradual changes over time in response to selection pressures from the environment. Amaurotines had significantly longer lifespans, so you would expect their generation time would be slower on average than current populations. In addition, as people dispersed and migrated to remote areas following the Sundering, this rate of divergence would have become more rapid, leading to the modern peoples that we see in Etheirys now.

Language is acquired, and the meaning of those sounds is established through social convention and our collective memory. Like our genes, our languages evolve over time as well. Even if you look at English in isolation, you'll see how dramatically the language has changed on its own the span of a thousand years. In the wake of the Sundering, you would expect a dramatic linguistic divergence as people dispersed and formed new cultures. In short, Babel.

As for the description provided in the Nier retelling, Emet uses the exact same words to describe our own modern peoples of Etheirys, in the Crystarium scene:

'The inhabitants of these fourteen fragments were feeble, frail, and foolish. Oblivious to their imperfection, ignorant of their past. Malformed creatures thrashing blindly about. Pitiful. Disturbing. Depressing.'

'Case in point - I do not consider you to be truly alive. Ergo, I will not be guilty of murder if I kill you.'

To Emet and his brethren, the people of our civilizations were less than human. This is not at all unique to Amaurotine thinking. There are plenty of 'enlightened' human civilizations in history that have seen their neighbors as savages who lacked the sophistication to speak the 'correct' language. This is the rhetoric that gets used in jingoism and war. It's just that the Convocation has the capability to escalate this to an entirely different level, having the ability to incite widespread warfare and destroy entire worlds.

[Cleretic]

'The inhabitants of these fourteen fragments were feeble, frail, and foolish. Oblivious to their imperfection, ignorant of their past. Malformed creatures thrashing blindly about. Pitiful. Disturbing. Depressing.'

'Case in point - I do not consider you to be truly alive. Ergo, I will not be guilty of murder if I kill you.'

To Emet and his brethren, the people of our civilizations were less than human. This is not at all unique to Amaurotine thinking. There are plenty of 'enlightened' human civilizations in history that have seen their neighbors as savages who lacked the sophistication to speak the 'correct' language. This is the rhetoric that gets used in jingoism and war. It's just that the Convocation has the capability to escalate this to an entirely different level, having the ability to incite widespread warfare and destroy entire worlds.

It's rhetoric that you can see literally today if you know where to look, and/or are the sort of person that these people consider 'less than' enough to attack.

(This is the main reason I do not consider Emet particularly sympathetic, but that's beside the point.)

[Lurina]

I think the correct term for what the writers are describing in that translated letter (as well as the March 2022 live letter) is evolutionary divergence. Contrary to what is often suggested in popular culture, a mutation refers to a singular statistical event that causes that divergence as it is accumulated over time (these events are happening in us every second due to replication errors and strand breaks, but most get caught). It's not quite the same as dramatically morphing yourself a pair of helmet destroying rabbit ears (although this is still possible with the power of Fantasia.)

Genes will naturally show gradual changes over time in response to selection pressures from the environment. Amaurotines had significantly longer lifespans, so you would expect their generation time would be slower on average than current populations. In addition, as people dispersed and migrated to remote areas following the Sundering, this rate of divergence would have become more rapid, leading to the modern peoples that we see in Etheirys now.

Language is acquired, and the meaning of those sounds is established through social convention and our collective memory. Like our genes, our languages evolve over time as well. Even if you look at English in isolation, you'll see how dramatically the language has changed on its own the span of a thousand years. In the wake of the Sundering, you would expect a dramatic linguistic divergence as people dispersed and formed new cultures. In short, Babel.

The idea that the divergence of the Sundered races happened over time rather than as an immediate response to the event makes no sense because the player races are the same across all Shards, when if that were the case they should be radically different in accord with their divergent early history. The only alternative explanation is Doylist - that the writers didn't think it through when re-writing the setting's foundations.

As for language, I don't know how many times the game can say "they all lost their memory" before people will actually believe it. It's even in the Zodiark codex this thread is about.

[Ayche]

Half of the Elpis episode and Panda raid was to talk about how the many years of struggle radicalized lot of the Ascians, so well yeah.

[Lurina]

It's rhetoric that you can see literally today if you know where to look, and/or are the sort of person that these people consider 'less than' enough to attack.

(This is the main reason I do not consider Emet particularly sympathetic, but that's beside the point.)

Cleretic, this isn't even about Emet! No one in this conversation is denying he's a huge fantasy racist(ableist...?)!

[Brinne]

As for the description provided in the Nier retelling, Emet uses the exact same words to describe our own modern peoples of Etheirys, in the Crystarium scene:

'The inhabitants of these fourteen fragments were feeble, frail, and foolish. Oblivious to their imperfection, ignorant of their past. Malformed creatures thrashing blindly about. Pitiful. Disturbing. Depressing.'

This quote is from when Emet is explaining what it was like to witness the Sundering and its immediate effects, hence the past tense. So it actually lines up very neatly with the Nier portrayal.

Only three were fortunate enough to escape the sundering─me being one of them.

When I beheld the shattered remnants of our home, I knew deepest despair.

The inhabitants of these fourteen fragments were feeble, frail, and foolish. Oblivious to their imperfection, ignorant of their past.

Malformed creatures thrashing blindly about. Pitiful. Disturbing. Depressing.

So we took it upon ourselves to rejoin the worlds.

Why is there such a determination to prove the Nier portrayal as wrong and invalid, anyway? It's kinda weird seeing people rush to discredit it. What happens that's so terrible if we accept it as basically accurate? Even if it's accurate, it doesn't do anything to further justify Emet and the Ascians' actions. That has no bearing.