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

[SpectrePhantasia]

Surely there are better ways to criticize each other's takes than with "ur dumb"-style zingers, y'all. If you think you've met a dead end, just stop responding lol.

When someone *creates* a dead end with done-to-death bait of that low quality, zingers like that are really all they deserve.

As for the talk of Genocide. Is it reductive? Sure, there's more nuance to it than simply that, but I really don't think there's any point in decrying its use in describing events in the plot. The end-game of both the Ascians and Hydaelyn are the intentional wiping out of a specific classification of people to fit an ideal or purpose. The writing is what has gotten us to this point--the point where acts of that scale are what necessitate the survival of one side or the other. Of course, its a fictional fantasy story where circumstances like these would never apply to reality, but it doesn't erase the tangible things these characters have to do to get to that point. Speaking for myself, I certainly don't use it to disregard the numerous layers of moral ambiguity that go behind it, I'm just not going to handwave the scale of what is being done to entire civilizations by using euphemisms. Adults can have adult conversations about things, even in dumb JRPG's.

[Brinne]

I also want to add: if you (general you, to be clear) just flat out don't care about the weird writing choices or the moral dissonance, because it's not a topic that interests you or is important to you, or you just plain out don't like the race/faction that was on the bad end of it, or you dislike a prominent character in that faction, that's fine. This is a video game. For example, I absolutely hate the Sylphs and would probably mostly just chuckle a little if they all tragically dropped dead in-universe.

But it also just means there's not really much need for you to chime in, and possibly unintentionally derail, a discussion of people who are interested in those weird writing choices and how it disrupts the narrative for them. For the Sylphs, in the event of their theoretical massacre I can personally think "thank god they're gone and I don't have to put up with them anymore" while also being capable of going "yeah this is kinda weird" if the game's protagonist faction treated it as necessary and even a grimly heroic choice to wipe them out. Or: I'm not personally too worked up over the really hilarious white-washing Solus absolutely gets in Endwalker, but I can acknowledge it was absolutely there, it was pretty cowardly and transparent in light of the character's popularity, and intellectually agree with the points that a better-written version of the story wouldn't have done it. Which means I'm not going to try to invalidate anyone who is, completely rightfully, more bothered by it than I am.

It is, in fact, not that hard to perhaps shrug and indifferently say, "yeah, obviously genocide is always wrong and the writing was inconsistent in a weird way about it," even if you don't spend any more time dwelling on it and think the Ancients are dumb ugly smelly jerks.