Did Zodiark ever do anything wrong?

[unlimitedBLACK]

Zodiark did nothing wrong, because Zodiark did not have a will of His own. He was a turbo-charged superfamiliar empowered through a TON of Ancient sacrifice to rewrite the rules of the star and agitate places of stagnant aether, since those were the places where blasphemies kept showing up.

The Ancient Convocation deciding to continue making additional sacrifices was arguably "doing good in an evil way" because the objective was to save their world, but it meant sacrificing all the new life that had sprouted up, and Venat effectively argued that what the Ancients needed to do was move forward instead of backward.

Meanwhile, consider Venat. When we get to Endwalker, the key thing we learn is that Venat did this STRICTLY because of the bootstrap paradox of the WoL going back to Elpis and telling her what happened, and she concluded that only by allowing the Ancients to be decimated by the Final Days (AND allowing the new life to flourish AND ultimately sundering the star entirely so that the new life was more capable of manipulating dynamis in order to combat Meteion) was she going to prevent Meteion from winning. She allowed all of the death and suffering that occurred as a result of that decision (on the Source through the calamities, on the shards because of the Rejoinings, throughout all time) because she knew that was the only future where Meteion could be defeated, and if she deviated from the bootstrap paradox, she MIGHT save one world, but she'd doom the original world and every possible timeway that would spiral off of it if she did so.

So Venat, too, could be argued to have been doing evil in a good way, since it would ULTIMATELY, HOPEFULLY, lead to a resolution that rejected Meteion's nihilism, but it required a ton of bloodshed in order to work. Which is a big reason why Hydaelyn uses the last of Her conscious strength to get in a final bout with the WoL; She knows that She needs to pay some kind of penance for what She's done, and getting killed by Her own champion is the best way to do it.

But at the end of the day, Zodiark didn't do anything wrong; the Ascians did a LOT of evil in the name of reactivating Zodiark, and Zodiark WOULD have been used to commit huge evils if the Ascians had succeeded, but ZODIARK wasn't the source of that evil.

[Alenore]

Meanwhile, consider Venat. When we get to Endwalker, the key thing we learn is that Venat did this STRICTLY because of the bootstrap paradox of the WoL going back to Elpis and telling her what happened, and she concluded that only by allowing the Ancients to be decimated by the Final Days (AND allowing the new life to flourish AND ultimately sundering the star entirely so that the new life was more capable of manipulating dynamis in order to combat Meteion) was she going to prevent Meteion from winning. She allowed all of the death and suffering that occurred as a result of that decision (on the Source through the calamities, on the shards because of the Rejoinings, throughout all time) because she knew that was the only future where Meteion could be defeated, and if she deviated from the bootstrap paradox, she MIGHT save one world, but she'd doom the original world and every possible timeway that would spiral off of it if she did so.

I've always felt like it was a weak point in her reasoning.

"I know if I follow this road, I'll destroy the entirety of my civilization, introduce war, illness, death and suffering in everybodies life, that 7 entire worlds will be wiped.

If I do that, there'll be some other form of humanity that hasn't fixed the problem and face imminent extinction. It won't be for thousands of years, while Meteion wipes the universe clean of all life and gets stronger in her corner of the universe.

I really hope I'll have a solution by then..."

And then, her solution is "I know your form of life can simply be erased from existence by Meteion through Dynamis, but please go there and find a way".

As if 12000 years of Ancients studying how to fix the issue and preventing Etheirys from being ruined in the first place wouldn't have granted some results.

It would have been better for the story if we were the only ones remembering what happened, really.