okay, I never had a say in whether what hydaelyn did was genocide or not because I wasn't sure if the Ancients were killed or not. So I just stayed out of it. My dum dum brain thought that's all it was, killing people. Then someone kindly dropped the definition for the word and, did anyone actually read the site?

https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/genocide.shtml

I mean, actually read the whole thing? What Hydaelyn did that was deliberate and conscious of the outcome because of time travel was: 1. Changing the physical makeup of a group of people and removing their capabilities to deal with their environment (soul sundering, loss of creation magic), and 2. Removing the majority of their memories and identity and erase them from history (so they are not tempted to find a paradise again).

So, look at the definition again:


Article II of the Genocide Convention contains a narrow definition of the crime of genocide, which includes two main elements:

-A mental element: the "intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such"; and
-A physical element, which includes the following five acts, enumerated exhaustively:
*Killing members of the group
* Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group
* Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part
*Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group
*Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group


Mental element? Check, her intent was pretty clear and that says destroy, not kill. For the physical element I crossed out things that don't matter. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group is definitely something that happened. Erasure of memory is mental harm. The other definition is more fun though. Hydaelyn removed the ability to use creation magic. She inflicted a condition on them that would bring their destruction. She dropped a bunch of philosophers, office workers, and scientists who, with now shortened lifespans, are used to getting their every need magically created in world that's destroyed and only just starting to get back on its feet. I'm pretty sure that fits that definition.

You do not have to directly kill a group of people for it to be considered genocide. What she did was genocide. What's funny about this is that by what we know, the acians are actually less guilty of genocide from the definitions. Thy set up conditions for other people to cause their own demise accidentally. They made a big point of not actually killing the sundered themselves and instead coerce groups of people into performing things for them. Still really bad though, killed a lot of people.

WoL is guilty though. We deliberately went out and killed every last one of a group of people in the intent to wipe them out.

If you still think what Hydaelyn did isn't genocide after spelling it out, then you are doing what the developers intended people to do, so congrats.

I really wanted to have my weekly post be about how Shadowbringers patch Venat and Endwalker Venat kind of contradict each other in that SHB Venat was concerned about life continuing to exist on the planet, as opposed to EW Venat wholy concerned about mankind's existence to the point she was willing to abandon the plant and all life on it. And then there's Hades's stone mentioning "malformed" creatures, which everyone thought was the player races. The life that Zodiark brought before the sundering. Which contradicts Yoshida saying the races developed after the sundering.
There was clear story re-write and they didn't pick up that breadcrumb trail. I really wonder what the story was like before it was re-written. I wonder what an entire Garlean expansion would have been like.