Did Zodiark ever do anything wrong?

[Iscah]

They walked things back too far in retooling and reframing the Ascians. Zodiark still could have – should have, to fit with past canon – still been "evil" whether by design or by flaw. He could have been made with good intentions but a miscalculation of how he would behave... which is essentially the route they went with Meteion instead.

[Aline_D]

Elidibus was Zodiark and Zodiark was Elidibus. And Elidibus had done quite a lot of evil sh**t.

The creature we killed in Lamentorum was basically a pilotless entity without him. Primals are defined by their primary creator wishes, think how Titan was like a child in distress on his botched summoning.

As for Hydealin, people don't realize the ancients would sacrifice life ( which includes intelligent life, like you know, FF14s races) to bring back the Amarautians.

Ignoring the fact that they did not have the right to do such a despicable thing, the unsundered ancients woud be a) unableto stop Meteion due to their higher Aether and inability to use Dynamis b) even if they stopped Meteion, they would still die like all the other civilization Meteion met, so they would commit the massive genocide for no reason!

Amaraut was done for.

So knowing this, she "cheated" this destiny by sundering everyone into our lesser forms, which would struggle forever, but yet fight to survive and build great things nevertheless. She is not happy about it, but it was the best solution, from her POV.

And before someone says this is not hinted anywhere, this is literally the core meaning of "Aswer's" Lyrics. They might not have nailed down every detail, but the general concept/themes were there from day 1:

Now open your eyes while our plight is repeated
Still deaf to our cries, lost in hope we lie defeated
Our souls have been torn, and our bodies forsaken
Bearing sins of the past, for our future is taken

...

Tell us why, given Life, we are meant to die, helpless in our cries?

Thy Life is a riddle, to bear rapture and sorrow
To listen, to suffer, to entrust unto tomorrow
In one fleeting moment, from the Land doth life flow
Yet in one fleeting moment, for anew it doth grow
In the same fleeting moment thou must live, die and know

[Cleretic]

They walked things back too far in retooling and reframing the Ascians. Zodiark still could have – should have, to fit with past canon – still been "evil" whether by design or by flaw. He could have been made with good intentions but a miscalculation of how he would behave... which is essentially the route they went with Meteion instead.

I think that broadly is what we see with Zodiark, actually, just moving the 'flaw' off of it and onto the people who worship it: they started off doing something with nothing but positive intentions, but then gradually fell further and further from the ends justifying the means.

Which I think does work well for Zodiark, because it essentially finds a way to marry the Ascians' newer overall story and the reality of primals to the original nature of primals and their places within their own stories: much like Zodiark, there's nothing inherently evil about Ifrit, Garuda, Titan, or any other primals we met (well, with rare exception; I could certainly make an argument about Thordan and the Knights Twelve). They're simply a figure that people rally around, and those people happened to do evil things in the name of. In the story around Zodiark, we essentially see a by all means rational and irreligious society become exactly the same as every zealot tribe we've ever seen, as they deify what was essentially a tool of their own making and start using it to justify a cruel, hurtful and hateful worldview.

I do love a 'broken robot antagonist' who's just following a fundamentally incorrect premise to what, to it, seems to be a logical conclusion; Meteion's cool for that, as is Omega, and Nier Automata did a lot with it too. But I think the Zodiark/Ascian story is helped along by it being the complete opposite: for all their insanity, high scale and grand aims, that the Ascians ultimately fell into entirely human lines of thinking, and by all respects are no different to the people they've been treating as 'beneath' them. They were just people in a bad situation, who did the things people do in that situation--including, unfortunately, going way too far in what they think is a justified worldview.