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

[Cleretic]

God damnit, and now we've introduced The G Word into this. This is exactly what I was referring to. I hate when people try to drag this in (and yes, I do regret using it myself for this in the past), because it does exactly what I was talking about, it breaks and warps the discussion into something that the subject matter was never intended to even remotely resemble.

Genocide is a very real crime and concept. It is, perhaps, the greatest of real crimes, not just in terms of scale, but in terms of the scars that current, living populations still bear. As a result, it holds not just a dictionary and 'criminal court' definition, but a very real cultural one, bearing very deep meaning and representing real, still-extant wounds. Hell, the term itself is part of that legacy; it was coined because there wasn't even a word to describe what happened to the Armenian people or in the Holocaust, no crime existing to charge them of.

Applying it to fake, insane fantasy nonsense like the Sundering or the Calamities, things that aren't even intended to be anything heavier than 'Noah's Flood if God felt bad about it', does nothing but cheapen and damage both the term and every single person and concept involved in the discussion, including the word itself.

• For the writers, the intention and ideas of the story is thrown out the window in favor of 'Who Did The Worst War Crime'; we're basically not meaningfully discussing the story as it was written anymore.
• For the characters themselves (Venat and the Ascians most of all), their entire arc has been flattened because what was supposed to be very abstract, indescribable actions that are intentionally impossible to judge on a human scale, and the character arcs of those involved, are now suddenly reduced to 'plain villainy'.
• For the people trying to discuss the subject as it was actually given to us, it's now all but impossible to actually talk about it without the conversation getting stomped all over with blind vilification.
• And for the term itself, suddenly we're associating a word intended to describe awful but realistic human crimes with the single least realistic, least human action I can even think of; something that on a baseline level can't even happen to humans. We've demeaned it to the point we can't use it properly. It's just used as a cudgel against people who disagree about a meaningless debate.

I'm not comfortable with saying any part of these effects are 'the worst part', because to do so would feel insulting; just as forum arguments about a weird fantasy concept in a video game are a poor fit for the term, so too is describing any of that argument's effects as 'worst' when the scale in any way includes the act itself. But I will say that this part of the ongoing argument has stifled my own ability to talk about the game's lore here, because there are parts where it's an appropriate term.

I don't feel like I can talk about the most interesting part of Sil'dih's variant dungeon to me. I loved that dungeon, and a big part was its exploration of what happened to Sil'dih, both in events and in people's response. Sil'dih was subject to a genocide, using recognizably human language, techniques, and tools; it was essentially a heightened version of what we'd know as early biological warfare, including the aftermath, where the culprits just... paved over the people they killed, and only generations later did anyone find the truth enough to reflect on it. I'd very much like to discuss this point and how well they wrote it, with the proper terms and gravitas.

But I can't. Because I know exactly what the discussion will turn into, and how quickly that initial intention will be lost in it.

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.

I'd love to have this conversation, but this thread wouldn't be the right place even if we were still on the original topic. (For the record, my view is 'conceptually I disagree with it, and I still have concerns, but he's pulling it off and I'm not one to argue with results'.)