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

[Lurina]

I will admit that I am more of a lore forum drifter where I like reading this place and rarely really joining in the discussions, but I don't know if you reacted like this because of general frustration already at the time or like ... it is weird for me to be still upset over their plan to wholesale kill the entire new natural world?

Well, they weren't - Hythlodaeus says they were planning to sacrifice only a portion of the new life - but that's kinda beside the point.

It just felt a little tone deaf in the middle of a discussion about the rhetoric people use to describe the Ancients being killed sometimes sounds uncomfortably close to the way people post-hoc justify the extinction of real world groups. That's not to accuse you of any flippancy. Again, I think it's the fault of the writers for constructing the scenario without fully thinking through the coding.

[Lyth]

I know that the story can sometimes be a bit fuzzy and vague, but honestly every answer Ishikawa and Oda have given on the Sundering indicates to me that it was an immediate destruction of the world and it's inhabitants.
After all, I don't think Emet said "That Light split the world, and every life upon it!" because culture just naturally developed and changed over time, and I also don't think Ishikawa wrote "Language, culture, knowledge - forgotten" directly after the Sundering scene to indicate "yeah they just sort of naturally changed over time, no big deal".

It sounds like there were a lot of cataclysmic events that occurred around that time, between the Final Days, the battle between Zodiark and Hydaelyn, and the Sundering itself. There was also a lot of physical destruction around both the Final Days and the battle. But we have no actual description around what 'sundering' someone actually is outside of the fact that it duplicates and enervates them. Like if you sunder a table, does that just give you two smaller tables, or does it destroy the table? On a larger scale, if you sunder the world, does it destroy everything on it, or does it simply split everything into parallel dimensions and enervates the contents? You saw some of the confusion around this earlier as well. One person read into Emet's statements about the sundered people being 'twisted, malformed creatures' to imply that the sundering had spontaneously mutated them into something non-human in that same Nier piece. Do you take that statement completely literally, or do you recognize that he also thinks that modern humans are 'twisted, malformed creatures' compared to their unsundered counterparts?

Regarding the amnesia, I can see how that could happen. In FFXIV's universe, your memories are engraved on your soul, so you might expect different 'regions' of your soul to encode specific memories. Is it possible that, post-Sundering, different reflections of the same person retained different fragments of their old memory? Yet we have characters like Amon, who is able to recall vivid memories of his entire past life as Hermes, thousands of years after the sundering, even despite only inheriting a shard of Hermes' soul. And for whatever reason, using a soulstone restores all of your memories, regardless of which fragment you return the soulstone to.

Mitron pointed this out as well. He was stranded in a semi-conscious state for a hundred years as Eden by Emet. if Emet actually needed to use his former friend, he could have picked any other Mitron reflection at random off of the other shards and just given them Mitron's soulstone. That does imply that there's a complete set of memories that can be reawakened on every reflection of a person. So I don't think that it's cut and dry, nor can we assume that Earth's rules around memory apply to Etheirys.

Edit:

No, I am not. Perhaps your questions are better directed at this so-called 'Lyt' individual, who has very kindly provided a means of correspondence? As I often say, names are always important.

[Lurina]

edit: Never mind. Like I said, I'll take you at your word. I apologize for implicitly indulging this, whatever our other disagreements.

[Ayche]

I know I'm not the person you responded to here, but since your previous post was a response to mine I hope you wont mind.
The thing I personally would object to here was the rhetoric in your post there, not the whole "being upset about the plan to wholesale kill the entire new natural world" part. I am not one who will defend the actions of the Ascians anyway.

But yes the real problem I have with your rhetoric is that it essentially boils down to "they brought their destruction on themselves by being evil savages", which is an excuse that gets lobbed against me and my people in real life all the time to justify our destruction, the attempt to find some sort of moral deficiency with which to excuse the deliberate wholesale destruction of a national group.

I was thinking what is the best way to respond, I think in the end I just want to say I hope nothing in FFXIV is coded in such a way that it feels like an attack on you and yours directly. In fiction it is fine to indulge in intense emotions because majority of the time the things we love or hate are completely disconnected from reality with little coding to anything in real life. I make my moral judgements on the fictional entities of FFXIV on the face that they are icons of their own design.

Well, they weren't - Hythlodaeus says they were planning to sacrifice only a portion of the new life - but that's kinda beside the point.

It just felt a little tone deaf in the middle of a discussion about the rhetoric people use to describe the Ancients being killed sometimes sounds uncomfortably close to the way people post-hoc justify the extinction of real world groups. That's not to accuse you of any flippancy. Again, I think it's the fault of the writers for constructing the scenario without fully thinking through the coding.

Portion then, I admit forgetting that they specified on it... in Elpis?

My post was mostly to push back on the idea that it was a neutral conflict, that there was no moral skew on the sides. I think I have gone softer on the pre-final days ancients, they were not secretly evil but rather rolled snake eyes at a very unfortunate moment with Hermes, but the resulting disaster did turn them towards a dark path. Life is sacred, and while x pounds of moogles/beasts/sylphies = 1 ancient soul, there is no way to make that math moral.

So I am inclined to put the moral higher ground on ending their society before it goes, I dunno, like the omicrons in their own way.

[TowaIsBestGirl]

This can only end well. Wonder who it may attract.

[Kozh]

It's a bit contradictory to make a defamatory statement in one breath, and then complain about a lack of 'good faith' in the next, Lurina. If you want to have a genuine discussion about the story, I'm willing to give the benefit of the doubt, but I take each post on individual merit anyways. No point wasting time on the other stuff.

You posts on this thread have all been bad-faith arguments, lyt. You don't have the right to complain about "good faith" when you yourself refuse to do that.

[Brinne]

Portion then, I admit forgetting that they specified on it... in Elpis?

The Convocation decided thus: we would nurture our world until it was bursting with vitality. Then, when the time was right, we would offer some portion of its living energy to Zodiark...

I entirely disagree that pre-emptively 'ending a society' based on possible perceived upcoming 'I dunno'-type sins (that even Venat herself concedes were never made out of malice and out of belief of what was best for the world) could ever be moral - that mindset is pretty scary to me, honestly, in ways that go back to that historically troubled rhetoric - but it is what it is.

[redheadturk]

Right. So in short, nothing is killed in the process of Sundering. Thank you for your answer.

Identity death is still death, and destruction of a culture is still considered genocide. If such a thing was done in the real world Venat would be rightfully condemned for it.

[jameseoakes]

I entirely disagree that pre-emptively 'ending a society' based on possible perceived upcoming 'I dunno'-type sins (that even Venat herself concedes were never made out of malice and out of belief of what was best for the world) could ever be moral - that mindset is pretty scary to me, honestly, in ways that go back to that historically troubled rhetoric - but it is what it is.

Endwalker really went too far with the othering of the Ancients and then pushing the idea that they didn't deserve to exist as they were both culturally and biologically wrong, it's therefore a good thing they were replaced with the correct races. It's a really heinous plot and the amount of praise it heaps on the people that did it is pretty vile

[SilversLyu]

Endwalker really went too far with the othering of the Ancients and then pushing the idea that they didn't deserve to exist as they were both culturally and biologically wrong, it's therefore a good thing they were replaced with the correct races. It's a really heinous plot and the amount of praise it heaps on the people that did it is pretty vile

What Venat did was in essence eugenics, replacement of the race for a stronger and "better" race. The only other type of person who tops her in this regard is Athena, the very epitome of evil. Regardless if Venat had good faith or not, was fully aware of all the implications of the sundering or not. The devs paint a more or less onesided picture, they may not have noticed it until it was too late but these discussions are testament that the ancients had more potential to survive than is let on.