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.

[SannaR]

The outright stated the reason we have so many races of humans was because after the ancients souls were torn apart there bodies physically adapted to address the damage done, so all the human races are post sundering

That doesn't explain why or how all the shards ended with the same result in races. The first only has two races that were made by others. The pixies and fuath are the result of souls being weird. Though technically the pixies were/are constructs as there was a quest dealing with them in Elpis. What makes more sense is if the new races were the new life/generation that came about after the 2nd sacrifice. As it also explains partially why there are more who can't awaken to the echo due to being born post final days as seeing a star shower tends to be the key. Than there are those who are capable of reawakening to the echo. The other is more new souls over time were made.

[Cleretic]

Something that popped into my head...it was mentioned before (by Yoshi-P?) that we still don't know how Hydaelyn erased people's memories of the WoL before ARR's start. This makes me question just how the memory erasure during the Sundering actually worked. Was it indeed an effect of the Sundering itself, or was something else in play at the same time to guarantee people's memories were completely wiped of the past? Hopefully something that gets answered when the final alliance raid hits in 6.5. Not that a full "people's memories were erased after the fact" would make things much better, it's just something I'm genuinely curious about.

We don't even know enough about that Calamity memory loss to know Hydaelyn did it. Honestly, we still don't really know anything about that memory loss, and I do find it interesting that it was brought back up in Endwalker basically only to say 'yeah we still don't know, but here's how it works scientifically'; I can't decide if that reads like 'tying in the last time they happened to write something like this', or 'putting the Chekhov's Gun back on the set so we remember it's there for later'. I'm thinking my suspect for who did it might be Louisoix, personally, we know he's up on the level with people who know how to do stuff like that.


But I'm not continuing with this thread, because it's turned into exactly what I warned it would: using the G-word as a cudgel against anyone who dares disagree or want to have a different conversation than 'the character I dislike is The Worst Criminal'. And I'm disappointed that even the people who supposedly agreed with me on this are still doing it, and that I as the person who pointed out that this doesn't help is being called slurs in response.

Everyone, please, stop arguing about Global Enforced Mitosis as if it's a crime to be tried in the Hague, in a thread that's supposedly about the word choice in an entirely different codex entry. It's not helping anyone, it's not convincing anyone, and it's not making anyone happy.

[jameseoakes]

That doesn't explain why or how all the shards ended with the same result in races. The first only has two races that were made by others. The pixies and fuath are the result of souls being weird. Though technically the pixies were/are constructs as there was a quest dealing with them in Elpis. What makes more sense is if the new races were the new life/generation that came about after the 2nd sacrifice. As it also explains partially why there are more who can't awaken to the echo due to being born post final days as seeing a star shower tends to be the key. Than there are those who are capable of reawakening to the echo. The other is more new souls over time were made.

That's not what the games dev team has explicitly stated and if that is the case then we are back with Venat intentionally betraying and purging her own race to make way for races that fit her ideal of how to confront the final days which is eugenics and evil

[Lurina]

But I'm not continuing with this thread, because it's turned into exactly what I warned it would: using the G-word as a cudgel against anyone who dares disagree or want to have a different conversation than 'the character I dislike is The Worst Criminal'.

I don't mean to be brusque, Cleretic, but you were one of the first people in this thread to start invoking grudges against specific characters and speaking about how an element of the fiction evokes, to your eye, a serious issue in the real world.

It's rhetoric that you can see literally today if you know where to look, and/or are the sort of person that these people consider 'less than' enough to attack.

(This is the main reason I do not consider Emet particularly sympathetic, but that's beside the point.)

You wrote this on page 7. I'm sorry that person yelling slurs at you hasn't been perma-banned, but it's kind of goofy for you to act like you're somehow above this.

[Thenightvortex]

Jesus Christ.

You called?

[Cleretic]

I don't mean to be brusque, Cleretic, but you were one of the first people in this thread to start invoking grudges against specific characters and speaking about how an element of the fiction evokes, to your eye, a serious issue in the real world.



You wrote this on page 7. I'm sorry that person yelling slurs at you hasn't been perma-banned, but it's kind of goofy for you to act like you're somehow above this.

I regret saying that, because while there is a place and time for that conversation, it was neither here nor then. But what's done is done, and I didn't feel that removing the post after realizing that was going to do anything.

[Kozh]

That doesn't explain why or how all the shards ended with the same result in races. The first only has two races that were made by others. The pixies and fuath are the result of souls being weird. Though technically the pixies were/are constructs as there was a quest dealing with them in Elpis. What makes more sense is if the new races were the new life/generation that came about after the 2nd sacrifice. As it also explains partially why there are more who can't awaken to the echo due to being born post final days as seeing a star shower tends to be the key. Than there are those who are capable of reawakening to the echo. The other is more new souls over time were made.

Are you going to ignore Word of God, aka Yoshi-p explanation of this issue? Please watch the lore Q&A, he said there that the current races are result of evolution due to compensation of weakness.

Sure the excuse is weak as hell, after all imagine going from hyur-like body into Lalafell, but clearly this is what happens when you don't plan your story from the start and because of meta-reasoning. The playable races are a thing from 1.0, viera is because many people ask for it (and hroth is, idk, Yoshi-p wants it because wow have beast race too).

[SannaR]

That's not what the games dev team has explicitly stated and if that is the case then we are back with Venat intentionally betraying and purging her own race to make way for races that fit her ideal of how to confront the final days which is eugenics and evil

Yoshida might be a dev, but he isn't as focused on lore as one of the writers. So his take on what happened on all shards plus the source goes against even what little evidence of evolution we've been given is said to work. Which is how we ourselves understand it. To have every shard and the source's races develop the exact same way with very slight alterations while not completely improbable the possibility of it happening is very slim.

[Lurina]

I regret saying that, because while there is a place and time for that conversation, it was neither here nor then. But what's done is done, and I didn't feel that removing the post after realizing that was going to do anything.

That's fair. I apologize for bringing it up again.

Like I said, I think this sort of discourse becomes self-perpetuating. Ultimately, we are discussing an emotional response to a story beat that touches on delicate ideas. Obviously people can't help but be drawn into arguments when the legitimacy of them being offended by a piece of fiction (one they've probably spent a lot of money and time on) comes under attack via either appeals to the setting's fluff, or insinuations that they're not even being genuine about their feelings. The same is true in reverse - if you were really positively affected by something, an attack on it can feel like an attack on you personally.

That's probably why conversations about this part of Endwalker always spiral into a mess, even if they're constructive for a while. Again, the more you escalate an argument about a piece of fiction, the more you end up talking about it like reality.

You're probably right that it's better to just stop, but at the same time, I don't think it's helpful to just say it. This latest round of arguments is happening because everyone still wants to talk about the new content on their own terms, but can't without those "terms" coming under attack. Short of everyone agreeing to just ignore replies they don't agree with completely, it can't really be helped.

But of course, there are degrees of being deranged about video games online.

Yoshida might be a dev, but he isn't as focused on lore as one of the writers. So his take on what happened on all shards plus the source goes against even what little evidence of evolution we've been given is said to work. Which is how we ourselves understand it. To have every shard and the source's races develop the exact same way with very slight alterations while not completely improbable the possibility of it happening is very slim.

Yoshi-P mentioned in that interview that he'd consulted with the rest of the main scenario team about the questions. I agree with you that it makes no sense, but it's canon that makes no sense.