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

[Brinne]

I have seen ample evidence that Emet would lie to both us and ourselves to make the Ancients look better and like more of a tragic loss, and us as worse.

I mean, they were. They were absolutely a tragic loss.

Putting aside things like how inherently absurd it is to blame three ghost wizards for the totality of mankind’s vices, it continues to be very strange to me how much of a sticking point pointing at one of the sole survivors of what was a total eradication and erasure of his people (who is now four years real-time dead himself) and yelling “your dead race wasn’t as smart as you think they were!” I mean… okay, I guess. Are the Ancients less worth mourning if they weren’t as super smart as he claims, somehow? Are the Sundered less worth defending if they were?

The important thing to understand about Emet (it somehow always returns to Emet, even following a patch where he wasn’t even mentioned…) is that his rationalizations don’t even matter that much in the end, because none of it is the actual core reason he’s doing what he is, which is simply love and duty. The rest is fluff he layers on top to make it easier for himself because he hates it.

[SpectrePhantasia]

First of all: Again, their fault. Like, if that were truly his point, he's weakened it by intrusion. Real 'stop hitting yourself' energy there.

What do you think Emet-selch meant by 'measured your worth?' Him having a hand in Calamities doesn't take away from his point about the Sundered's nature. Unless you're about to tell me the Ascians are behind every catastrophe that's ever occurred in Sundered history. If anything, he has *more* of a point, because the strategies that he used to cause Rejoinings-- that of forming governments that collapse under the corruption of the Sundered who participate in it, worked both of the times he did it. It's quite literally the fact they are so easily exploitable in causing violence that he has a problem with.

The "Ascians" as we know them are hollowed out husks who've endured 12,000 years of suffering and obsession. Why would you use them, of all people, to judge what Emet is saying about their society in it's prime? People like Athena were dangerous *because* they were exceptional. The Ancients were ill prepared for the kind of person who would cause widespread destruction, because its not something that they oft contended with in their society. For the Sundered, that is Tuesday.

[Tehmon]

It's not really sundered nature, it's the mortality and their innate talents (or lack thereof). You take away ancient quasi-immortality and the ability to create whatever and we'll see how conflict-free the ancient world stays as. I mean, we will never know, but you can't sit there and say that the innate talents (immortality, creation magics) that ancients have don't influence their way of life and their relatively peaceful paradise that they created.

[Lurina]

The main thing here that suggests 'different nation' is just raw distance; it feels fairly unlikely that a city 'half a world away' could be in the same nation.

That's not what makes me conclude it was a different nation at all. It's that they felt it was inappropriate or conceited to involve themselves in their affairs. That line of thought doesn't really make any sense whatsoever if you're not crossing borders.

But to be blunt, the way it often keeps getting forcefully pushed - into conversations and discussions that had nothing to do with the topic, and via soft browbeating anyone who expresses potential sympathy on any level towards the Ascians as therefore sympathizing with racial supremicism or what have you - and the way it so often goes hand in hand with denigrating the Ancients themselves as a people and a culture, it comes across like it's less about actually opposing racism in principle and more about nursing a really deep-seated grudge about feeling personally insulted by Emet-Selch, especially in the context of a video game power fantasy.

For me, as a thought experiment, Shadowbringers (very gently) actually challenging the power fantasy was why it was so memorable. To ask the question, point blank, "if it isn't a given that we, the assigned protagonists, are the ones who are 'superior' by whatever measure, and who 'deserve to live' more, then what? How do we respond? What do we do?" And I absolutely loved Shadowbringers's answer for it. I don't have a problem, personally, acknowledging that there are individuals even within my own species who are better or superior than me in certain respects - athleticism, gaming skills, what have you. What many able-bodied people are able to do that I struggle with at the best of times. And sometimes, yes, even the capacity to make moral decisions, rather than self-interested ones. But that doesn't mean I don't have a right to live, just as much as anyone else.

Shadowbringers was compelling for asserting, and presenting a situation where, the only way to "win" against the question asked by Emet-Selch is to throw out the entire framework altogether. Hence why the Scions don't - can't - present any meaningful arguments against his claims of "superiority" in one realm or another - Alphinaud simply asserts that it doesn't matter in terms of being allowed to exist, and he was absolutely right.

Agreed. I think a lot of people aren't really willing to engage with, or outright reject (which to be clear is a lot better than the former - I sure reject a ton Endwalker's messages!) the thesis of Shadowbringers which it even explicitly spells out in some of the quest text: That Emet sort of had a point in some ways even while doing unforgivable things, and the situation between the Sundered and Unsundered at that point was genuinely kill or be killed, making both sides heroes to their own people - even if one is more of an anti-hero than the other.

It's also very annoying to be accused of agreeing with Emet's supremacist views every time you express sympathy for the Amaurotine's and invoke their humanity. They weren't nessecerily better people on any kind of fundamental level, but they were people, just as much as the Domans or the Sharlayans or the Ondo. If we're invoking real-world stuff here, then the background tone of these conversations always feels uncomfortably reminiscent of the Just-World Fallacy responses people can have to discussions of actual atrocity and tragedy to me, where they scramble to find ways in which the victims had it coming. A good example is the popular idea of the Rapa Nui people of Easter Island destroying themselves through devastating their own environment and turning to cannibalism, when what primarily happened is that Europeans showed up and gave them all smallpox. Or since Rome has been invoked already, we could talk about the prevailing narrative of it being destroyed by its own greed and decadence, when it was more about bad weather and having the misfortune to have overcentralized in response to military defeats right before the Migration Period.

Emet's actions were monstrous, but he was just one guy. The Amaurotines didn't really do anything wrong other than have a culture which some people consider creepy. As far as we know, they never persecuted anyone.

[Cleretic]

The important thing to understand about Emet (it somehow always returns to Emet, even following a patch where he wasn’t even mentioned…) is that his rationalizations don’t even matter that much in the end, because none of it is the actual core reason he’s doing what he is, which is simply love and duty. The rest is fluff he layers on top to make it easier for himself because he hates it.

Well, the thing with Emet in these discussions is that he's such a huge part of the framing of Amaurot. All of our learning about Ancient society in Shadowbringers either came directly from him, or were very directly connected to him (namely, Anamnesis only coming up because it wasn't Emet-curated), and his presence casts a shadow over what we learn in Endwalker, not just by way of him literally being there in Elpis, but through us inevitably comparing what we see to what he's said before. Even the parts unrelated to Emet become related to Emet, because he's our big initial touchpoint for them, so the inevitable thing we compare it to is 'what Emet said'.

And when Emet is not the most reliable source for several reasons, I find it important to interrogate his stated perspectives rather than just take it as a given. Emet always worked an angle, he was never just giving the unvarnished truth, so when he's the only source for a claim I think it's fair to call it into question. There's plenty of other sources I'd give similar scrutiny, but when it comes to Amaurot, Emet's the one that always comes up.

What do you think Emet-selch meant by 'measured your worth?' Him having a hand in Calamities doesn't take away from his point about the Sundered's nature. Unless you're about to tell me the Ascians are behind every catastrophe that's ever occurred in Sundered history. If anything, he has *more* of a point, because the strategies that he used to cause Rejoinings-- that of forming governments that collapse under the corruption of the Sundered who participate in it, worked both of the times he did it. It's quite literally the fact they are so easily exploitable in causing violence that he has a problem with.

I should say that I don't judge the Ancients as a society by the Ascians circa the Seventh Astral Era; that's absolutely in bad faith, and if you thought that was my intention, I misrepresented my own views. I more meant that, if Shadowbringers-Emet thought that about the sundered people (that sentence was more just an example by Lynaxia than text, though), he was at that point very hypocritical given both his own actions and those of his colleagues.

But I think Emet claiming he 'measured our worth' is more post-hoc justification on his part than actual reasoning. He and the other Ascians were going to perform the Calamities regardless, and maybe at some point early on they felt bad about that, but by the time we meet him in Shadowbringers he's well and truly too far down that road to be swayed. His way of testing us (as in, the WoL and Scions) was an inherently rigged game we couldn't have possibly won, and by the developers' own admission in interviews he had no plan for if we succeeded; he wasn't truly looking for us to prove him wrong, he was fishing for evidence he was right.

[tokinokanatae]

It's just such a strange way to talk about people, to me.

Like, even assuming the more negative reads--that I personally disagree with--of the Ancients are correct.

It's been pointed out that Sharlayan--in the very least--have a puffed up opinion of themselves. This has led to things like deciding they are the arbitrators of the people that will get to go on the moon ark, and the people that are the disruptive elements that will be left to a spectacularly terrible fate. (This genuinely horrified me when I read it and made me wonder why on earth Hydaelyn reached out to them in particular.)

Despite that, were a meteor to suddenly hit Sharlayan and wipe everyone there out, I don't think it would be expected of our WoL to frown and tut disapprovingly as the twins mourned the loss of their parents. We wouldn't engage them in debates about how their parents aren't worth mourning because they were part of a discriminatory society, and, really it's not a loss at all when you think about it because there are smart people in Ishgard that didn't get turned into a crater.

Emet-Selch is the survivor of a tragedy. That he then went on to do terrible things in the wake of it does not somehow negate said tragedy. It's unhelpful to try to frame the argument as, "if the Ancients weren't to-the-exact-letter as great as Emet-Selch said, then they all deserved to be ripped into fourteen pieces and die." Like, even if they were much worse than they actually are in canon, it's okay for Emet-Selch to have loved and valued them--and miss them.

[Lurina]

But I think Emet claiming he 'measured our worth' is more post-hoc justification on his part than actual reasoning. He and the other Ascians were going to perform the Calamities regardless, and maybe at some point early on they felt bad about that, but by the time we meet him in Shadowbringers he's well and truly too far down that road to be swayed. His way of testing us (as in, the WoL and Scions) was an inherently rigged game we couldn't have possibly won, and by the developers' own admission in interviews he had no plan for if we succeeded; he wasn't truly looking for us to prove him wrong, he was fishing for evidence he was right.

Emet was looking for victory or suicide-by-WoL. Yoshi-P outright suggested that he set up the situation so they'd be cured of the light if they overcame him.

Like Emet himself said earlier, at any point he could have just left. He was there for his quest to be vindicated or to be over.

[tokinokanatae]

Emet always worked an angle, he was never just giving the unvarnished truth, so when he's the only source for a claim I think it's fair to call it into question.

So what is the end result of this supposed "angle" you keep bringing up as self-evident? If you think he's deliberately obfuscating something about Ancient society, then what is he hiding and what are his goals in doing it?

[Cleretic]

So what is the end result of this supposed "angle" you keep bringing up as self-evident? If you think he's deliberately obfuscating something about Ancient society, then what is he hiding and what are his goals in doing it?

I actually wouldn't call it 'deliberate obfuscation', because that's not the main thing he does. Emet's more in the game of selective divulging of information, choosing what he reveals, how, and when to have the most dramatic and emotional effect while just... quietly dancing around the things that don't help his case.

In regards to Amaurot and the Ancients int his respect, 'what he's hiding' is, I think, actually just more of the general imperfections of Ancient society rather than any greatly damning smoking gun. When he discusses Amaurot he wants to paint them as essentially 'perfect angel' victims, both materially and morally, to really accentuate that whole 'we didn't deserve what happened to us' element. This might also be why his retelling of the events around it casually skips over everything between Zodiark's first summoning and Hydaelyn's summoning, and doesn't really bring up any dissent; he wants to ignore the parts that don't look so good for him, and also paint Hydaelyn as essentially an illegitimate rogue faction, or at least one whose reasonings don't matter enough to talk about.

One could argue he doesn't need to do that, and the facts stand on their own; an unfortunate death is always an unfortunate death, even if the victim wasn't a perfect angel. And that's not wrong; remember that the Garlemald zone in Endwalker was by and large a tragedy, and if Ul'dah exploded tomorrow, only the most heartless response would be 'good riddance to the Syndicate'. But, well, that's what Emet did, and Elpis and Pandaemonium showed it; he glossed over a lot, partially because of knowledge gaps but largely because some of those facts didn't look great for him. And from an out-of-game storytelling perspective it was probably the right move, too; we're ultimately people reading a story, and if a big-time villain is telling us about where he and all his other big-time villain friends came from, the writers have to work a little harder to make those people sympathetic and tragic than they would if, say, Y'shtola told us about her family.

All that said, I'd hardly say that I just described all of Emet. Something that really adds to his complexity is that he works so many angles over the course of Shadowbringers; it would be very possible (and perhaps not even a bad idea if you had the time) to go scene-by-scene for him and ask 'what is Emet trying to accomplish in this scene', because that actually changes constantly and yet he's never really contradictory in doing so. In some scenes he's trying to be conciliatory, sometimes he's trying to get information, or sometimes he's genuinely trying to help; in other times he's going raw scare tactics, or trying to sow doubt and distrust, or even, as Lurina said, trying to goad us into killing him.

So yeah, asking 'what's Emet's angle' actually requires very complicated answers, especially if we're talking about something that gets elaborated on across multiple scenes. Not because he's lying or hiding the truth in any of them (although he might be personally misinformed or in denial sometimes), but because he's choosing his words and what cards he reveals every single time; we need to constantly take the source of the information into account.

[SannaR]

The thing is we don't know how many didn't result in a rejoining calamities were of our own doing and had no Ascian involvement. As we do know they are capable of doing a slow burn/long con as that's what Bahamut ended up becoming. Course the destruction of knowledge probably was a necessary evil in that if anyone had started to pick up on the pattern they settled on for the rejoining calamities or signs of Ascian involvement would need to be wiped out. Or I doubt we'd of had seven successful rejoinings. Heck the fact that the 7th barely happened is probably proof that someone did. Course we wouldn't have a game to play if that didn't happen. Or at least not the one with the same set up. I would love to see past civilization architecture in game just to see which ones were the ones being manipulated as they seem to not be able to help themselves in adding some unsundered aesthetics. Which you only start to notice in places you know were influenced by them.