What lore do you ignore?

[Anonymoose]

people assume Zodiark was doing something bad with that power, but there is no evidence of that. Given her goals and her explicitly stated reasons for her actions, the power she was trying to keep in check was Zodiark's power to alleviate the suffering of the Ancients

The summoning of Zodiark (however inadvertently) tempered the entire governing body of the planet (aside from the one person who quit)... (EDIT: Not that I'm saying this directly affected anything, per se...)

We summoned Him, as your kind might summon a primal─albeit an infinitely more powerful one.
And like one of your primals, He tempered us. It was only natural. There is no resisting such power.

...who were now overseeing the One True God being used to - despite already having done the thing it was summoned to do at the cost of 75% of the population - keep exchanging sacrifices (which had to be defended by other ancients) to walk back anything and everything that wasn't their previously perfect paradise, including the resurrection of the willing sacrifices (who to my knowledge - feel free to throw citations at me - offered no indications they expected to be resurrected or would even want to be resurrected at the cost of sacrificing others in exchange).

We can't accept it! We won't accept it! It will be ours again─a world free of sorrow!
O mighty Zodiark, god born of our boundless faith! We bid you hear our prayer!
Accept this offering of lives, and deliver unto us the lives we once had. Deliver unto us the days of old...

I'm all for exploring different perspectives and interpretations and interrogating how the big picture of the story looks in the light of the way the story was told but to casually toss around words like "genocide" and "fascistic" and say anyone who disagrees is inconsistent and morally compromised while completely minimizing and disregarding that as "there's no evidence of a problem" and "Venat just wanted to prevent them from alleviating their suffering" is ... whew. I don't know where the conversation would even go from there.

But, from another angle...

Encyclopaedia Eorzea, Vol. 3 (Page 011)

The Schism
The newly summoned Zodiark answered the Convocation's prayers with potent efficiency, scouring the world of abominations and stabilizing the chaotic surge of creation energies. The Final Days ebbed and faded as the will of the star wove laws to bind and restore.

Yet although oblivion was averted, much still lay in ruin. The survivors turned their efforts to repairing the ravaged lands—through the rendering of additional sacrifices. Once the star was duly returned to vitality, they would offer a portion of its living energy to Zodiar in turn, thus allowing them to resurrect their sacrificed brethren whose souls slumbered within the deity.

This undertaking, however, was not without its opponents. There were those who contended that the volatile failure of creation magicks was a clear sign that mankind could not continue as it always had. Whether the calamity had eroded faith in the Convocation, or the grim glimpse of despair had simply woken people up to a new perspective, the fact remained that anti-Zodiark sentiment was growing, and had found a champion in a woman by the name of Venat. Her followers were too numerous to ignore, but the Fourteen would not be dissuaded from their plans. A schism formed in the ancients' society, and conflict between the two factions erupted in earnest.

...this reads like the ancients who did want to stop the sacrifices, come to terms with what had happened, and solve the problem of creation magicks (A) were dismissed by the Convocation and (B) joined Veant, complicating the situation even further.

[Lady_Silvermoon]

*snip*

I do not believe this to be true and even if I did believe this to be true, 12 people being tempered does not justify eradicating a civilization. At worst it would justify killing the 12 tempered people. If there are Ancients who are against the third sacrifice then that means they aren't all brainwashed lemmings that need to be wiped out like cockroaches. The very point that there is conflict over what to do next proves that the situation wasn't completely hopeless and they were all brainwashed zombies fit for extermination and nothing else.

That would also mean she knew that the Convocation would turn into brainwashed zombies bent on sacrificing everything and everyone and said nothing...Her design is based off Zodiark's, you'd think if the Convocation was so bad at making gods, she wouldn't have modeled herself after him.

If we can't be sure the willing sacrifices would want to be removed from Zodiark and replaced with other life energy from the planet even though we can straight up just ask them because Hythlodaeus is able to communicate with us while in Zodiark. But all these justifications you make to justify why Venat did it has nothing to do with her stated reasons. She wasn't trying to stop the third sacrifice for her deep love of plants and animals. She wanted people to live with their friends and family trapped in Zodiark, removed from the life cycle so that they would get good at being depressed. And given that she did not tell them why she thought they needed to get good at being depressed, it's not surprising they didn't listen to her. She sundered them so they'd no longer have the power to protect the people they loved, so they could learn to live with the pain, like Estinien did. His family being murdered is what gave him the ability to get them past the dragons. So his family being murdered is part of her grand design. You can't understand that and then try to argue she did it all to save some unnamed life energy. When children watching their parents die are the goal of her world, why would she be trying to protect some random life energy that I'm sure you've made sentient in your headcannon to make her actions okay?

That scene is misleading because if they showed the real scene, people arguing in a safe, repaired world over whether to sacrifice cows or not to get their parents out of purgatory and she showed up and devolved them all back to apes in the middle of the debate, we wouldn't be arguing right now. Also even in their fake scene, the people are sacrificing themselves. These innocent people the Ancients wanted to sacrifice who don't seem to exist before or after the Sundering are headcannon.

[Vyrerus]

come to terms with what had happened

Oh no. EE3. I can't believe you've done this.

In attempting to bend over backwards to have the Convocation be the unreasonables due to tempering, it's explicitly laid more sins on Venat's shoulders.

This is an explicit example that she started a rebel faction in society and incited civil war over a false pretense, and then used her faction to attain godhood to actually do what she felt needed to be done, and in that doing, she ruptured and destroyed her faction and followers all the while lying to them.

Let alone them, but also the life they were fighting for...


It's not just the twelve any more. It's some big minority of the body politic.

Whoooo boy...

[Vyrerus]

I still don't think Sundering is murder. It's never been made a fact in-game or outside the game and would just make Venat's action seem like bad writing. She sundered to save new life, if Sundering was murder, then it doesn't make sense for her to kill everybody including the new children to save the new children. I think you're better off focusing other points because your argument is focused on something that's not even set in the baseline lore

The entire point of The Sundering was to remove the Ancients as a people along with all of their abilities and culture from the face of Etheirys. Literally to change mankind from what it was, to what would possibly pass Hermes's inherently flawed test. That is undeniable. It is very much set in the baseline lore. That's why there's a stink around the act. That's why it's a tragedy that begat even more tragedy. I mean, hell, there's even dead bodies in the metaphor scene where Venat walks down a path of darkness covered in blood.

It is akin to a cloning process that kills the donor. Sure, you get 14 clones out of the process, but you still killed the original. And the clones are all distorted and disfigured as their whole world around them has been. And even then, the first god that was made had to be maintained, and 12 new gods had to be built to shepherd the new people.

So yes, you've encountered bad writing, by your standard.

[Iscah]

I still don't think Sundering is murder. It's never been made a fact in-game or outside the game and would just make Venat's action seem like bad writing.

It's true that it was never established and indeed does not seem intended to be akin to murder, but the problem is that it is bad writing because the writers either failed to consider it might present as such or they have done a poor job of showing why it shouldn't be viewed that way.

[Lady_Silvermoon]

It's true that it was never established and indeed does not seem intended to be akin to murder, but the problem is that it is bad writing because the writers either failed to consider it might present as such or they have done a poor job of showing why it shouldn't be viewed that way.

Shadowbringers put them in an ethical hole, but there were a dozen ways for them to climb out of it. They could have had the Sundering be an accident in her fight with Zodiark. Then the conflict is just one over if the sundered are people or not. And I'd vote yes, we are, so please stop killing us. They could have had her attempting to reduce her people's ability to use creation magic without her realizing what reducing people to 1/14th their intelligence would do to them, the same way I have empathy for Hermes due to him being too innocent to realize letting the universe raise your kids for you is a jaw droppingly dumb idea. But to have her do it on purpose, with full knowledge of the consequences, to build a superior race she deemed more fit for survival. And even if I did buy it wasn't genocide (which I don't) they then pop out and say she let the Ascians go on purpose in order to preserve the timeline, ie, do the rejoinings. At that point, not only does every character in this game lose all agency besides Venat and the WoL, as they are just running on a loop they are unaware of, the same people that say the Sundering wasn't a genocide, do agree the rejoinings are and she's ultimately responsible for those too.

And that puts players in a position where they have to either accept a laundry list of horrific acts as right and good as they are the blood sacrifices required for their character's creation, or be haunted by them.

[Iscah]

Shadowbringers put them in an ethical hole, but there were a dozen ways for them to climb out of it.

As I keep saying – yes, I know.

And yes, we are left having to either accept a sequence of events that come off as worse than the writers apparently intended, or spend forevermore railing at the story for what it accidentally is rather than what it was supposed to be.

Pretend they wrote it in a way that makes more sense to you, turn the page, and enjoy the next chapter – which will almost certainly play out the same regardless of how the Sundering happened so long as it did. I personally will be headcanoning that shattering the worlds was an accident, but once it happened, Hydaelyn preferred to protect the individual lives on the shards than to rejoin them.

But when we come together to discuss, we still need to be talking about the same events, and that means not putting my own spin on things.

[Lady_Silvermoon]

But when we come together to discuss, we still need to be talking about the same events, and that means not putting my own spin on things.

We are talking about the same events. We just view them differently and I can't change how I view devolving people, erasing their culture and running them through a cycle of pain to make them strong.

What I'm being asked to do is lean into the framing and ignore the actions as presented, and I am incapable of doing that. If you take Freddy Krueger and cast him as a Disney Princess, I can't just accept that. And I also would likely push back against anyone who did, because I don't believe this is a case of live and let live. I believe what they did here is truly dangerous. And at this point I wish I could just close my browser and stop explaining why wiping out ten worlds worth of people is bad actually, but harm reduction is high on my list of moral values and I believe buying into her actions is harmful both to the people who were sold on them and the world at large.

[PercibelTheren]

I refuse to accept the whole message of DSR being "if Haurchefant hadn't died, we wouldn't have defeated Thordan on time". We were quite literally going after him already. I was eager to punch the obviously evil pope from the moment I laid my eyes on him.

[GoatOfWar]

Lyse existing.