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

[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.

[Yuella]

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.

I think we're supposed to agree that the ancients' culture was so static and stagnant that sundering and remaking the world was the only way forward but they made the mistake of making Emet-Selch TOO sympathetic in Shadowbringers, causing some players to defend the ancients' lifestyle

[Lyth]

There's nothing wrong with exploring a theme that has real world relevance in the context of fiction. But you do have an obligation to do apply the principles consistently.

I can see why people might want to talk about imperialism and colonialism in the context of the story lens. It's rather difficult to do this in the context of the World Unsundered, because most evidence we've seen points in favor of Amaurot being homogenous both in culture and in values.

You could argue that Amaurot's worldview carries an element of imperial detachment towards 'the provinces', as seen in both Debate and Discourse and the Volcano stories. But there's not a whole lot to go on outside of this, because the concept of 'other peoples' within the World Unsundered isn't really explored. The Sundering is definitely a unusual choice to talk about Colonialism, however. This is an act performed by a group of Amaurotines against their own government. It's a coup to take back political control. It's internal politics.

If anything, if colonialism was something that you were interested in engaging with, you'd be more likely to be talking about the actions of the Convocation across the past twelve-thousand years, where they pit nations against nations to divide and conquer, and set up puppet dictatorships like Allag and Garlemald to establish genuine colonial rule, suppress local values, and forcibly eradicate local religious practices using military force, all while maintaining a dehumanizing ideology that the Unsundered are merely 'twisted, malformed creatures' that are 'not truly alive'.

The discussion around genocide is another such example. Unfortunately, prior to Pandaemonium, Elidibus' most memorable moment involved him being chastised (by one of the game's most despicable villains, no less) for attempting to use chemical weaponry to eradicate both his own puppet state and our people in a single blow. It's probably Elidibus' worst moment, having literally just been chased out of Zenos' body by a standard imperial foot soldier in what amounts to the very pinnacle of cowardice.

And that's just the tip of the iceburg. Do we zero in on Venat's decision as 'cultural erasure', when her group attempts to put an end to the Convocation's authoritarian mandate from within her own nation? Her group forcibly erased the practice of involuntary human sacrifices, sure. You could point fingers at that, but it also raises the question whether all successful revolutions constitute 'erasure' of the value system of the old ousted dictatorship. And there's the bigger question of why you would not feel even more deeply uncomfortable around the mass murder of seven different worlds under Emet's leadership. It's all well and good to say that we should 'remember that he once lived', but who will remember the people of the Second, Third, Sixth, Seventh, Tenth, Twelfth, and Thirteenth reflections? There are so many cultures that the Convocation eradicated that we'll never even get to learn about now, and that's the saddest part.

I don't think that you need to 'feel bad' for liking any of the Amaurotine characters. Part of the point of stories is that it lets us explore ideas. But it seems like a lot of the discussions around these themes come across as a 'gotcha' in retaliation for the playerbase expressing genuine discomfort with the Convocation's actions historically across the past five expansions. And you can't really blame that for happening, because the Ascians were designed as one dimensional villains who were evil for the sake of being evil in ARR and Heavensward. Ishikawa trying to retrospectively salvage their characters doesn't change any of that.

It doesn't really help that none of this is particularly new ground, and it seems more a way of indirectly letting out frustration after every patch over the writers constructing the story the way that they want to. I'm not at all surprised that they want to move away from Amaurot, because it by and large seems to stifle more interesting discussion.

[Ayche]

Can't resist adding more kindling.
I know people were mad that Endwalker doubled down on the ancients with even making the natural disaster twist from Amarot result on convoluted series of events, so even the natural disaster was not natural in the end but self-inflicted, actively discouraging all that goodwill someone might had felt over 5.0, but that is real.

In our world, on this earth, people use trauma as a shield from fault, it is nothing new.

[Vyrerus]

There's nothing wrong with exploring a theme

No. No. And No.

There was no coup by Venat nor her followers. What they did was mass genocide against their own people for the sake of a future Venat heard about for roughly a day and a half. It wasn't taking control of the government. It was abolishing the government and installing Venat, and only Venat, as the dictator of the planet.

Again, you're wrong and ignoring large swathes of the setting. The puppet dictatorships weren't setup up to merely quell or colonize. They did those horrid things, yes, but they did them only so far as the Ascians let them, with the Ascians also fanning the flames and religious practices of their victims, trying to get them to summon their gods as primals. Please at least try to engage with the setting you're pantomiming understanding about. And if you can't, go back to the tank threads. At least there, you had interesting ideas more often than not.

Unsurprisingly, you say Elidibus's most memorable moment is having ZENOS chase him away from Zenos's body, and not, you know, the fucking Warrior of Light 6.3 Trial where he becomes a reflection of Sundered Azem, and battles us to the death set to what Soken thought might be his last musical composition in his whole life. And the moment you're talking about wasn't a standard imperial foot soldier. It was the monster that is Zenos wearing a decurion at the lowest. AKA the strongest individual antagonist in the setting. Good god, man. Have some class.'

You don't seek to replace an authoritarian mandate with another one, nor do you seek to supplant authoritarians with anarchy. That just leads to untold bloodshed. Untold bloodshed in this case being Venat knowing full well what her actions would lead to, namely the mentioned 7 worlds being destroyed. Which all first came at the cost of the first people's world. We also know that those destroyed worlds do live on in us, having been Rejoined, so there's at least some solace in the setting, but it's all a travesty that never needed to happen in the first place, and to say otherwise is to endorse genocide.

No. The Ascians started as one dimensional evil saturday morning cartoon villains, but even villains like that generally have some sort of back story. And in the case of RPGs, it is supremely common for villains to have a twist to their backstory. Even the original writers for XIV went into writing them with the understanding that they would be added to and changed over the course of the longterm story. All RPGs reveal little at the start to whet your appetite to know more, and then they capitalize on that desire later by revealing all. That doesn't mean we drop the issues we have with their villainous present, but it does mean that we understand why they did it, and in this case we empathize or should be able to empathize, because the setting we're in is fundamentally different than our real world, asking questions our real world has no clear answers for. If you can't empathize or at the very least sympathize with the Ascians, then it shows a lack of humanity and intelligence on your part. Either you refuse to embrace the bacon necktie, or you're operating selfishly. Surely, that's your prerogative, but it's not a good look.

You can't say what the writer's want. We'd love to think that the development team is given true creative freedom, but we all know that's not the case. They move away from Amaurot, because the overarching plot isn't about that, not necessarily because they want too. And in many ways they can't, since it's now an anchor to the game's lore. It will likely always have a tangential reference to it from here on out, since it is the origin of the world.

[Lurina]

If anything, if colonialism was something that you were interested in engaging with, you'd be more likely to be talking about the actions of the Convocation across the past twelve-thousand years, where they pit nations against nations to divide and conquer, and set up puppet dictatorships like Allag and Garlemald to establish genuine colonial rule, suppress local values, and forcibly eradicate local religious practices using military force, all while maintaining a dehumanizing ideology that the Unsundered are merely 'twisted, malformed creatures' that are 'not truly alive'.

Well, yeah. There's no point in discussing how Garlemald and Allag's actions are colonialist. The game is explicit about that already.

What makes the way FFXIV treats the Ancient's fate remarkable isn't that it's somehow the worst atrocity in the setting; in terms of bodycount, it's probably not even close. What makes it remarkable, and unique within its universe, is that the writers plainly want us to view it sympathetically.

I can't speak for anyone but myself, but I feel like what you - and sometimes Cleretic - do not or refuse to understand in these conversations is that the problem isn't diagetic (and I apologize for having let myself get caught up in meaningless arguments of in-universe fluff in the past). FFXIV is a work of fiction, and all of these groups and atrocities are made up. Venat didn't murder the Unsundered, the Ascians didn't murder even more millions in the successive Rejoinings, the Allagan Empire and the Ishgardians didn't commit a bunch of war crimes against dragons, and the Garleans didn't brutally subjugate two continents worth of people. It's all fake, and comparing these events is ultimately nerd navel-gazing. Fun, but basically meaningless.

What did happen, in real life, is that FFXIV's main scenario team wrote a story which seemed to ask me to understand a genocide as a necessary evil. And that is super weird. And it would have been no less weird if they had done this with, like, the Namazu instead.

To be blunt, I think you won't meet me or anyone else on these terms is because you are super invested in the setting, and feel uncomfortable in the position of having to defend the ethics of the writing itself. It's easier for you if everyone picking at this issue is just in-universe mad that their favorite characters "lost", because then you can then frame their feelings as selective and hypocritical sympathy.

But by refusing to meet the conversation where it is, you're just reinforcing the point, Lyth. Because if the Ancients really were as bad as you make them out to be - a bunch of god-playing, thuggishly authoritarian human-baby-sacrificers - all that would mean would be that the writers created a strawman with which to argue, intentionally or not, that indiscriminately exterminating a group (nation? race? species?) is sometimes for the greater good.

And that would be even worse.

The Ancient story is hardly unique in this, either; if in some alternate universe this forum was instead spending all this time arguing about the legitimacy of the Hannish government, it would also be facing this problem.

We should be arguing about that. EW trying to spin a "be yourself and people will love you" narrative around an eternal shadow dictator who just keeps on at it afterwards was the second weirdest part of the plot.

[Brinne]

I can see why people might want to talk about imperialism and colonialism in the context of the story lens.

Not remotely what was being discussed, but thank you for the lengthy, elaborate, bad faith take.