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

[thegreatonemal]

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.

All that says is that you don't understand those issues in the real world, so you apply those same misguided notions, intentionally or unintentionally to this situation.

You should probably stop.

[MikkoAkure]

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.

The problem with the Ancients is that they didn't exist at all when the setting was originally created.

Then the writers tried shoehorning something into a setting's background that wasn't there before, tried to make them empathetic despite the only ones we know being irredeemable bad guys, but at the same time tried to come up with a reason for the game's original world to survive over theirs. The writers couldn't balance all of those things together and bit off more than they could chew.

People could say that the fact we're still talking about it today means that it's "good writing" but the same could be said about clumsy writing where you don't know what the writers are trying to say and there's too many mixed messages and metaphors.

That all said, I went into ShB and EW supporting the pro-Hydaelyn narrative thinking that's the angle I'm 95% sure the writers wanted to take, considering all the focus Venat/Hydaelyn got and obvious cues for the WoL and main characters being on their side. The writers just seemed to fumble making everyone feel that way while trying to juggle everything else I guess. If they made Zodiark's godhood more of a terrifying prospect, or the Stomp and the subsequent shattering of the Source being accidental or at least more of a "last resort" type of deal than an intention, I think that would've had more, but not all on the same page.

[Brinne]

snip

I think this perspective - focusing on the awkward writing decisions and process that led us to a rather uncomfortable place - is also fair, and IIRC, I’ve had some good exchanges with you, Mikko, on the more Doylist perspective of the writers accidentally stepping on a bunch of Ancient and Hydaelyn-related rakes.

I will say, too, that in the Shadowbringers era, while I felt strongly about the overtones at the time that the Final Days were a senseless tragedy the Ancients never deserved, when it came to the Hydaelyn and Zodiark conflict, under the assumption that the Sundering and annihilation of the Ancients must have been an accident, Hydaelyn seemed pretty clearly more sympathetic and in the right (although basically lying and covering up history after the fact was not great, an interesting gray tinge to the narrative would be welcome too.)

Endwalker’s reveals and how we were obviously being asked to feel about them were subsequently, um, baffling. And, not going to lie, pretty depressing.

[RyuDragnier]

“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.

This was the line in question that made it sound like they were.

Now the dynamic between the playerbase and the unsundered however, that one reads like racism to me.

It doesn't help that immediately afterwards they did not make any statements to clarify anything, not on how the writing itself caused this problem, or on how it could be ignorance on the part of the playerbase (I myself didn't notice it was colonialism until Lurina pointed it out). It was also their first post, which makes it feel like it was purposefully trying to bait.

[Roselin]

Oh I am so sorry! I wasn't trying to bait! English is neither my first nor second language, but actually my fourth so I am not always the best at phrasing my intent. Sincere apologies I did not mean for my comment to come across that way.
Please let me try to rephrase. Some of the specific rhetoric used to defend the sundering is rhetoric that is racially loaded due to real life history. I did not mean to say the playerbase was racist, but that rather some of the rhetoric used does have some uncomfortable racial undertones to me.

I do not think people are being intentionally malicious for saying things like this, which is why I made that post, because I thought the playerbase wasn't intentionally racist and thus some people might've wanted to know the history and connotations of some of the rhetoric used here.

People are not racist for liking Venat, for disliking the ancients, for using these arguments, or any such things. I was merely trying to convey that some of this rhetoric has an unfortunate connotation and history.

Again I am so very sorry, I was not intending to call you racist, I just chose words poorly because of my inability to properly phrase myself, that is entirely my mistake and I will try to phrase myself better from now on.

Also it is my first post because I have been scared of posting for a long time due to my poor ability to phrase my intent, I was afraid people would read malice into anything I would try to write so I have just been lurking and thinking about these things to myself for a while. It seems I was correct about my language skills being bad enough to hurt people...

[Brinne]

Also it is my first post because I have been scared of posting for a long time due to my poor ability to phrase my intent, I was afraid people would read malice into anything I would try to write so I have just been lurking and thinking about these things to myself for a while. It seems I was correct about my language skills being bad enough to hurt people...

Don’t worry about it, Roselin. Your post was very clear, and the overall direction of the discussion was trending that way anyway. Some longtime posters - including myself at times (though, do I count as a longtime poster by now? A deeply harrowing thought) can lean towards reflexive cynicism due to prior encounters with bad faith posters. It has nothing to do with you.

Thank you again for putting forth your thoughts. It was really nice to read someone putting (a well-phrased, for the record) voice to a perspective I’ve quietly mulled over for some time now, but never felt was my place to really put forth in these sometimes fraught discussions, either.

[RyuDragnier]

Oh I am so sorry! I wasn't trying to bait! English is neither my first nor second language, but actually my fourth so I am not always the best at phrasing my intent. Sincere apologies I did not mean for my comment to come across that way.
Please let me try to rephrase. Some of the specific rhetoric used to defend the sundering is rhetoric that is racially loaded due to real life history. I did not mean to say the playerbase was racist, but that rather some of the rhetoric used does have some uncomfortable racial undertones to me.

I do not think people are being intentionally malicious for saying things like this, which is why I made that post, because I thought the playerbase wasn't intentionally racist and thus some people might've wanted to know the history and connotations of some of the rhetoric used here.

People are not racist for liking Venat, for disliking the ancients, for using these arguments, or any such things. I was merely trying to convey that some of this rhetoric has an unfortunate connotation and history.

Again I am so very sorry, I was not intending to call you racist, I just chose words poorly because of my inability to properly phrase myself, that is entirely my mistake and I will try to phrase myself better from now on.

Also it is my first post because I have been scared of posting for a long time due to my poor ability to phrase my intent, I was afraid people would read malice into anything I would try to write so I have just been lurking and thinking about these things to myself for a while. It seems I was correct about my language skills being bad enough to hurt people...

Thanks for clarifying. The rhetoric is definitely leaning that way towards being colonialism (again, thanks for pointing that out Lurina), and is definitely phrasing we need to work on. Because I feel like a lot of the issues still fall back to the old arguments of ShB, and how EW just seemed to make those arguments worse. Man those arguments back then were...oof.

[Lurina]

All that says is that you don't understand those issues in the real world, so you apply those same misguided notions, intentionally or unintentionally to this situation.

You should probably stop.

I think it's inherently a little tacky to compare the scenario for a fantasy game to anything serious in reality, which is why I didn't say anything even sorta-specific until someone else brought it up and why I qualified my statement so much. FFXIV is a game for teenagers. It's fundamentally not serious. And I do want to clarify that any sort of direct equation of the Ancients to indigenous people is obviously stupid, since their situation is pure fantasy from toe to tip - the start and end of it is the rhetorical devices used by the game (and the players, if only by uncomfortable extension) to justify their deaths post-hoc.

That being said, the reason we got on this conversational thread at all is because people were already equating Emet's beliefs, and sympathy for the Amaurotines by extension, with real world racial supremacist ideology. Unless you have a more specific problem with what I said, it's a little weird to act like the horse has only just bolted!

[Kozh]

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

I would say this is the case of EN localizer pushing their agenda to make the Ancients "scary". The same as previous "improvisations" people have been pointing out.

For example, y'shtola's line of "We have seen the havoc it may wreak" in 5.4 when speaking about Zodiark, which happens before EW and therefore doesn't make any sense. Meanwhile that part doesn't exist in other languages

[thegreatonemal]

I think it's inherently a little tacky to compare the scenario for a fantasy game to anything serious in reality, which is why I didn't say anything even sorta-specific until someone else brought it up and why I qualified my statement so much. FFXIV is a game for teenagers. It's fundamentally not serious. And I do want to clarify that any sort of direct equation of the Ancients to indigenous people is obviously stupid, since their situation is pure fantasy from toe to tip - the start and end of it is the rhetorical devices used by the game (and the players, if only by uncomfortable extension) to justify their deaths post-hoc.

That being said, the reason we got on this conversational thread at all is because people were already equating Emet's beliefs, and sympathy for the Amaurotines by extension, with real world racial supremacist ideology. Unless you have a more specific problem with what I said, it's a little weird to act like the horse has only just bolted!

That is what a few of you have been doing for a few pages now. You clearly don't understand the real world implications based on how you're applying them to talk about this fantasy one by you and the one that brought it up. That's all I'm saying feel free to go on any other tangent you wish