Did Zodiark ever do anything wrong?

[Alenore]

What options?

The final cutscene in Elpis where we part, she pretty much has decided the course of actions, fully expect the Final Days to come, and that humanity would need a way to resolve the problem by bringing the fight to Meteion ("much less take the battle to Meteion at her nest")
She even says so herself : "Bewildered and divided, we would perisg like the peoples of those celestial ruins". She then proceeds to form a faction of a few people knowing the actual truth (or do they?), working against the collective will of their people, thus dividing them.


She refuses, here and there, to call upon the Fourteen based on flawed arguments.

• "Hermes might become a foe if he knew" => Then don't tell him. He's not Fandaniel yet, his name was just suggested and Emet is talking with him right now. Interrupt them, show Emet what actually transpired using the Echo, and I'm pretty sure that proposition will be rescinded.
• "We might alienate Fandaniel from helping in the tragedy to come" => Good, the point is to try to prevent the tragedy.
• As far as we're told, Hermes-as-Fandaniel contribution to the problem was identifying that it happened where the celestial currents were weak. Something she now knows.
• She differenciate telling the Convocation and telling the masses, showing that she thinks they could hold the information hidden. So this is not an issue of "if I tell them, Hermes will 100% know".

Even then, Hermes as our resident expert in Dynamis matters might prove very useful on fixing the issue if he even knew it was Dynamis in the first place, even if he had no idea it was Meteion.
As you said yourself, she managed to convince a lot of important people to act. Perhaps those people would have been better used actually working on trying to solve the initial problem, instead of doing damage control.

Like, what would have gone worse if she actually told everybody? People panicking into sacrificing themselves to save their lives, and their civilization being virtually gone? That's what happened anyway.



If you really can't see the options she might have had...

Right after Elpis :

• Tell the Convocation instead of playing 14d chess, and reach a consensus on what they should do. If they can't, apply plan B ;
• Actually "fortify their defenses", something she said they had to do but visibly never acted on since the Final days hit hard ;
• Assemble a team of experts on Dynamis around Etheirys to work on actual countermeasures to strong Dynamis waves, study its potential effect. Hermes is hardly the only one aware of dynamis ;
• Start studying entelechies, starting with the Elpis flowers, and continuing with checking how Meteion was created, if need be using the Echo ;
• Have Ancients start to research interstellar travel, super dense aether storage, to reach the Nest ;
• Since she knows time travel is possible, go back in time and prevent Meteion's creation in the first place ;
• Find ways to summon an entity like Zodiark without the requirement of sacrificing so many people ;

During the Final Days, to mitigate the issue :

• Tell them from the very beginning it seems to come from where the Celestial currents are the weakest instead of letting them find out for themselves after X days / week / months / years of damage has been done ;
• Implement solutionsto counteract the despair: showing hope in the form of Elpis flower apparently worked to convince Meteion, explain to them why it happens, so they can try to not lose control ;
• She knows of Meteion's location. Instead of a bubble bigger than the actual orbit of the Moon, perhaps a localized shield between Meteion and the Star would suffice ;
• Don't waste time trying to bring Azem or the Convocation into the fold since you know it won't happen ;
• Push for the creation of Zodiark and go through the sacrifice of 50% of the population before the world is broken to the point they need to sacrifice 25% more (if less wasn't enough to create a localized shield) ;

If everythings fails and she has to go through the Sundering :

• Create artifacts, magicks, or tools to protect somebody from dynamis waves, so they aren't unmade as soon as they reach UT and have to rely on a Deus Ex Machina to survive. Like a personal version of what Zodiark does ;
• Instead of creating Loporrits for the sole purpose of evacuating Etheirys, also tell them to create a ship to reach Meteion and study Dynamis? That was the initial long term plan, and something had to be put together at the eleventh hour to even get there ;
• Have loporrits help her gather aether for her plan, like for instance, capitalizing on the free floating aether Zodiark released when he disappeared. Might have been useful ;
• Create a simulacrum like the Watcher or the Twelve that can actually help with the problem instead of being asked stuff outside his purview and with fragmented memories ;
• Compile this story and informations somewhere, so that people don't have to guess everything and find out every details, especially if the timeline might have changed and key elements to fulfill the loop lost : Akasa might have never been studied, the Elpis flower might have disappeared, perhaps Elidibus would have been definitively killed, the Ragnarok never built, etc ;
• Actually study how it would be for the people in the Moon in outer space. It's not like Meteion is not broadcasting despair everywhere, albeit in lower concentration than she does toward Etheirys, and it might very well trigger despair related effects, especially after the entirety of the population just lost relatives, their homes, their whole planet and are facing the unknown ;
• Imagine an escape plan which doesn't leave the majority of the population, the Reflections, to an unknown fate, probably annihilation.

Tthe game explained she couldn't do that because reasons. But again, that's my point. Writing it like that just forced Venat into picking this option out of potentially many, giving bad reasons why, when it brought absolutely nothing to the story, except confusion.

If Venat had forgotten, she would have gone with the initial plan, we would meet her in Elpis, we'd go to the Aetherial Sea, she'd sacrifice herself and be free of her long duty, we'd go to Ultima Thule and end Meteion.
If you want to have her know what happened in Elpis, make it that she finally remembers what happened because she has an Echo vision of us in Elpis, and voilà, we're at the exact same point in the story.

[Cleretic]

Right after Elpis :

• Tell the Convocation instead of playing 14d chess, and reach a consensus on what they should do. If they can't, apply plan B ;

I don't need to read any more of this. You have already shown your hand: you are ignoring what the game says, to claim that the game is wrong about what it says.

This exact point, your absolute Plan A, is something that that game explicitly says is a bad idea. Not only does Venat say that she can't tell the Convocation, we know that's right, because we've already seen it: Emet-Selch is a by-the-books square doing exactly what the Convocation is supposed to do, and he made the problem so much worse that Kairos is the only reason they managed to still have a Zodiark afterwards. If your first point is so easily debunked that the game itself did it, you don't have any other points.

Everything else you said is exactly what I thought: your own imagined scenarios based off of no evidence, because your very first point was to reject the evidence we actually had.

[Alenore]

snippity

You're just not even trying to understand, I think.

I'm not ignoring what the game says. I'm pointing that what the game says is a poor justification based on a bad reasoning, and that their argument don't hold water.

Show me when we're told that Venat is right and that telling the Convocation would have been a bad idea, outside of Venat saying so. I'll wait.

You're saying Emet-Selch is supposed to act "by the book" when we're repeatedly told he twists the rules to help Azem, he somehow ignores the major issue of Kairos being forbidden, he's shown acting out of anger, and then trying to do the right thing ? The same Emet-Selch that will, after the Sundering, be implementing a grand scheme to rejoin everything, constantly hiding things, manipulating people?
Do you actually truly believe that if Emet was shown that his memory was wiped by Hermes, and that there's a planetary wide threat he would actually just go see the guy responsible and tell him everything? If yes, then you're simply acting in bad faith.

Everything else you said is exactly what I thought

? Of course these are imagined scenarios. These options have obviously never been explored. They are all "what if", things she could have done.

Anyway, I'm done.

[thegreatonemal]

It's been literal years and y'all still yapping about this.

[unlimitedBLACK]

It's been literal years and y'all still yapping about this.

Dude, I don't know what you're expecting to contribute by saying this. You could just not respond if you don't think the conversation is worth having.

[Cilia]

Show me when we're told that Venat is right and that telling the Convocation would have been a bad idea, outside of Venat saying so.

...

Of course these are imagined scenarios. These options have obviously never been explored. They are all "what if", things she could have done.

The whole point is that Venat did what she did knowing she would be vilified by her people and that the action was immoral because she believed it was the best path forward (as opposed to the stagnation or regression Zodiark represents). Trying to say that she was wrong or throwing out hypothetical alternatives ignores the fact her choice to sunder Etheirys was entirely based on her philosophical ideals and convictions, not a moral code.

Hydaelyn (Venat) doesn't say what she did was right; she argues it was a grim necessity to create the best future. Whether you agree or not is immaterial because there's no universe we can observe where she made a different choice. It's just the way things have - or had, I suppose - to happen. Can't turn out any other way. Did you not believe Elidibus when he told us our actions on Elpis wouldn't effect meaningful change?

(I don't need more timey-wimey nonsense. I'm miffed enough about the VII Remake project indulging way too heavily in that for my taste.)

[Cleretic]

Do you actually truly believe that if Emet was shown that his memory was wiped by Hermes, and that there's a planetary wide threat he would actually just go see the guy responsible and tell him everything

Yes. Because had exactly that information in Elpis before Kairos, and he does pursue the guy responsible and do things he shouldn't do. Yes, Emet bends the rules for Azem, but that's because Azem's his friend: Hermes isn't, and Venat isn't. (In fact I kinda feel like he doesn't like either of them even before the big turn.)

Emet in Elpis acts as, in part, a display of exactly what the existing systems and heirarchies of Amaurot would do in this scenario... and what those systems and heirarchies would do is make the problem worse. Of course they would: the entire situation was a reaction to their status quo in the first place, and Amaurot by nature is not self-aware enough to solve itself.

In fact, straying from that point (which I will happily do, thegreatonemal is right that this is a worthless, stale argument), I would actually say that Emet-Selch never stopped being that stuck-up stickler for the rules beyond what was helpful or healthy. After all, what do we see in Shadowbringers but a man who's stubbornly sticking to plans, definitions and outlooks that are abjectly horrifying and bad for everyone but he and his own, that he himself apparently struggles with while never actually questioning? He swapped out codified laws of an existing society with self-made plans and declarations, but he was still the exact same bitter, joyless enforcer, who'll only bend for a scant few exceptions.

[thegreatonemal]

Dude, I don't know what you're expecting to contribute by saying this. You could just not respond if you don't think the conversation is worth having.

There was a conversation worth having here?