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

[Roselin]

Ableism and racism are two things that actually tend to be quite linked with one another, as an example my people were decreed to be mentally disabled on a racial basis and subjected to forced sterilizations during the eugenics period.
But I do indeed agree that the dynamic between sundered and unsundered reads more like ableism than racism, specifically because, while both terms focus a lot on bio-essential traits, racism is almost always laced with a culture, religion, and language element too, which is completely absent from Emet's framing of the sundered vs unsundered (the impulsivity he criticizes the sundered for is more connected with neurodivergence than culture).

Now the dynamic between the playerbase and the unsundered however, that one reads like unintentional racism to me (please keep in mind I am not trying to say people are being racist here). Everything from the "they were no angels" rhetoric, to the "evil savages" rhetoric, to the "they were biologically inferior due to dynamis" argument, to the "it was a necessary evil/it was for the greater good" argument, to the "they were doomed anyway so it's fine" argument. It is all rhetoric and arguments that the settlers use to justify what they did to my people, which is quite uncomfortable to me since the ancients read almost like an indigenous-coded people to me.

To explain a bit more. On the "they were no angels" one, every time my people try to point out and celebrate the positives of our culture, the settlers come along to remind us of all the bad parts, as if to blunt the horror of the genocide they committed against us.
We're not allowed to ever, ever just talk about the positives as a way to lift ourselves up after the endless demonization and dehumanization we're subjected to.

For the "evil savages" one, it's the "harsher" so to speak of the above one, actively putting us down by claiming we were evil, murderous, degenerate savages who simply needed to be "civilized" or outright removed for both our own and the rest of mankind's sake (in case you are wondering how this applies to playerbase criticisms of the ancients... I have seen an immense amount of "they deserved it cause they were evil/callous/uncaring" arguments).

I don't think I even need to say much on the "they couldn't use dynamis" argument, because that's literally just unfiltered eugenics.

As for the "necessary evil/greater good" argument, yeah I've heard that one before so many times as well, we simply had to go because our genes were polluting mankind and it was weakening mankind to a point where we were a threat to the future of the world, that or our "primitive ways" would stifle their beloved "progress" by "occupying" so much land that could be "developed" so therefore us and our culture simply had to be removed "for the greater good".

And finally for the "they were doomed anyway" argument, this one is literally just "I don't consider you alive therefore it's not murder", because truth is we're all doomed, we're all gonna die one day, every breath you take is just you "delaying the inevitable", every culture, every species, will go extinct one day in the future. But that is no reason to abandon the present, every moment of every life that is currently alive is precious and irreplaceable, they deserved to live out their lives and meet whatever natural doom would come to them one day.

[Brinne]

snip

Thanks for sharing your perspective. Although I’m a racial minority where I live, I’m not indigenous, so I never felt it was appropriate for me to try to talk about - but the line where the Ancients are referred to as “the first people” immediately struck me as I was playing. Coupled with the rhetoric used against them, it’s, yeah. It starts getting to be an uncomfortable reminder of how amenable a lot of people still are to those kinds of arguments, unfortunately, especially if there’s plausible deniability.

[thegreatonemal]

Oh wow, now I've heard everything.

[SannaR]

And to circle the topic back around to the OP: for what it's worth, I got my hands on a Japanese translation of the codex text, and unsurprisingly it made no mention of the Convocation ordering anyone to sacrifice themselves to Zodiark. All it said was:

"To summon Zodiark, approximately half of the survivors of the Final Days offered up their lives as sustenance, while the representatives of mankind, the Convocation of Fourteen, performed the ritual [lit. art/ magic."]

So there you go.

So is this a case where English doesn't have a proper word or where they felt like adding some flavor?

[RyuDragnier]

snip

Did...you really just call everybody in the playerbase a racist?

[thegreatonemal]

Did...you really just call everybody in the playerbase a racist?

I'd ignore them. This is a rather new low for their side.

[Brinne]

Did...you really just call everybody in the playerbase a racist?

“Some of the rhetoric used to justify the deaths of the Ancients overlaps with rhetoric typically used to defend racism” =/= “everyone in the playerbase is a racist.” Come on, Ryu.

[tokinokanatae]

Did...you really just call everybody in the playerbase a racist?

No, they didn’t.

Hope that helps!

(Difficulty with reading comprehension seems to be endemic, on the other hand…)

[Lurina]

It didn't feel appropriate to put it in those exact terms myself, but, well. I definitely do think there's sometimes a settler-colonialist undertone in the way that the playerbase talks about the Ancients at times. "They were doomed and already dying out anyway", "their culture was rotten so they had it coming" "They were intrinsically defective and so had to be swept away to bring about a prosperous future" are all rhetorical beats that I've heard a lot (though more "in the wild" in Reddit or on youtube comments than here) and evoke some uncomfortable grandpa conversations.

To be clear, I don't think it's bigoted to express those sort of sentiments in this context; if anything it's the fault of the writers for making those ideas part of the setting in the first place. Players cannot be blamed for correctly understanding a story's intent, even if that intent is, well, a little careless.

But it does make me kinda uneasy.

[Brinne]

To be clear, I don't think it's bigoted to express those sort of sentiments in this context; if anything it's the fault of the writers for making those ideas part of the setting in the first place. Players cannot be blamed for correctly understanding a story's intent, even if that intent is, well, a little careless.

But it does make me kinda uneasy.

Yeah, I don’t think it’s appropriate either to label anyone an out and out Racist due to fantasy video game opinions. I do think, however, it’s frankly demonstrable that - probably typically much more out of ignorance than malice, at least I really hope so - there’s either an openness to or a willingness to fall back onto historically racist or colonialist-affiliated words and rationalizations for reasons ranging from either Defending The Writing of their favorite video game, or because a certain character from the video game Made Them Really Mad.

As I said, I’m not indigenous - at best I’ve been at least a little adjacent to some of these issues, but it is definitely an underlying aspect of what makes this conversation so often exhausting and disheartening.

EDIT:

Oh man, this thread has gone places.

I think the framing of the genocide of the Ancients within the story as a positive or neutral thing and the lack of awareness when it comes to comparing and contrasting that with the Ascians' plans to commit genocide against the sundered people in order to bring their people back is really weird.

I've mulled it over myself and went back and forth, and come to the conclusion that what happened to the Ancients was undeniably genocide. It doesn't matter if they would have died out anyway or if it worked out for the best in the end, and two genocides doesn't make a right so it also doesn't justify additional genocide at the hands of the Ascians, but yeah. It was still genocide, a very intentional wiping out of an entire race of people and their language/culture/customs, and it was still terrible and they didn't deserve it.

I think this is a completely fair take. I don’t think anyone so far, at least in this thread, believes or has argued that the Ascians’ retaliation is acceptable or okay. Because it isn’t. But we can reject any attempted rationalizations and defenses for both cases of genocide, and understand that the writing itself failing to do so is, at best, Kinda Weird.