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

[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.