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

[Lurina]

There's nothing wrong with having a critical discussion on the topic of genocide if you apply the word appropriately. As an example, when Elidibus releases chemical weaponry in the midst of the clash between his own Garlean forces and the Eorzeans during the Eighth Umbral Calamity, an act which wipes out most of the human population of the continent, it's unambiguously correct to describe this act as genocide. The use of chemical weaponry, even on its own, is explicitly classified as a war crime in human society. Likewise, when Emet and his Convocation launch into their crusade to eradicate the entire human population of seven different worlds on the basis of the fact that they were 'inferior' and thus less deserving of life, the coding of this act in the text is pretty much unambiguous.

The crux of the issue with the Sundering is that we don't actually have any frame of reference for what it actually entails. It doesn't kill, and we have no real world analogy for losing our magical powers. So now we come to why someone would bring up the topic of genocide in the context of the Sundering, based on the limited information that we do have about it. Are we talking about killing off a group of people? No. We've already established that the Sundering doesn't kill its target, from Emet's demonstration in the Ocular.[...]

So why does the word genocide get misused in this context? The answer is simple. Equivocation. As was stated earlier, the etymological root of the suffix '-cide' means 'to kill'. You end up twisting the narrative into one in which Venat 'kills' the world (despite the story itself pointing to the contrary), bringing her group down to the level of the Convocation. It allows you to paint both groups under the same brush in a thinly veiled 'gotcha'.

You wanna argue in bad faith, Lyth? I can play the part of the factionalist Ascian-fan you're fishing for for a moment, even if it's not what I think.

A "Rejoining" is a make-believe magical process where people from different realities are fused together. The souls are combined and one set of memories disappears, but nothing is actually lost. It's just two people becoming one person, where one lives on in the other, like the WoL and Ardbert.

No one "dies". Ergo, you're ridiculous for equivocating the Rejoinings to real life mass-murder. Why are you pretending they are for a "gotcha"?

See? I can do it too.

From the ground up, this is a fantasy game where the metaphysics of life and death are completely different to our own. Souls exist. Under close scrutiny, nothing is meaningfully comparable to the real world. The Garleans didn't "kill" anybody because their immortal essences provably still exist and returned to the Aetherial sea. If you think about it that way, all their war crimes are less like murder and more like just wiping people's memories and giving them new bodies. We go underground and meet up with Papalymo on the way to meet Hydaelyn! He's fine!

Except obviously not. You're right to zone in on the coding, but you're selective in how you apply that versus diagetic analysis. The truth is, there is only coding, and the only meaningful disagreement is how we interpret it, which is where the "mythological" argument with Cleretic is at. But IMO, The Sundering and the Rejoinings are both coded as omnicidal acts where X group exists, Y thing happens, and then X group doesn't exist anymore. The errata of the respective situations just distracts from what actually matters, which is how the writing comes across.

Your underlying point seems to be that, since the thrust of the text in aggregate seems to be to present the Rejoinings as ambiguously less bad than the Sundering, then it's being a dishonest reader/player not to meet the writers there. But we don't judge the content and messages of stories on what they meant to do. The dissonance between how the text wants us to feel and the perceived coding is the problem.

Their culture was a lost cause after they started planning the third sacrifice anyway.

God.