Zodiark's Codex entry what do we think about it?

[Turnintino]

Surely there are better ways to criticize each other's takes than with "ur dumb"-style zingers, y'all. If you think you've met a dead end, just stop responding lol.

[SpectrePhantasia]

Surely there are better ways to criticize each other's takes than with "ur dumb"-style zingers, y'all. If you think you've met a dead end, just stop responding lol.

When someone *creates* a dead end with done-to-death bait of that low quality, zingers like that are really all they deserve.

As for the talk of Genocide. Is it reductive? Sure, there's more nuance to it than simply that, but I really don't think there's any point in decrying its use in describing events in the plot. The end-game of both the Ascians and Hydaelyn are the intentional wiping out of a specific classification of people to fit an ideal or purpose. The writing is what has gotten us to this point--the point where acts of that scale are what necessitate the survival of one side or the other. Of course, its a fictional fantasy story where circumstances like these would never apply to reality, but it doesn't erase the tangible things these characters have to do to get to that point. Speaking for myself, I certainly don't use it to disregard the numerous layers of moral ambiguity that go behind it, I'm just not going to handwave the scale of what is being done to entire civilizations by using euphemisms. Adults can have adult conversations about things, even in dumb JRPG's.

[Brinne]

I also want to add: if you (general you, to be clear) just flat out don't care about the weird writing choices or the moral dissonance, because it's not a topic that interests you or is important to you, or you just plain out don't like the race/faction that was on the bad end of it, or you dislike a prominent character in that faction, that's fine. This is a video game. For example, I absolutely hate the Sylphs and would probably mostly just chuckle a little if they all tragically dropped dead in-universe.

But it also just means there's not really much need for you to chime in, and possibly unintentionally derail, a discussion of people who are interested in those weird writing choices and how it disrupts the narrative for them. For the Sylphs, in the event of their theoretical massacre I can personally think "thank god they're gone and I don't have to put up with them anymore" while also being capable of going "yeah this is kinda weird" if the game's protagonist faction treated it as necessary and even a grimly heroic choice to wipe them out. Or: I'm not personally too worked up over the really hilarious white-washing Solus absolutely gets in Endwalker, but I can acknowledge it was absolutely there, it was pretty cowardly and transparent in light of the character's popularity, and intellectually agree with the points that a better-written version of the story wouldn't have done it. Which means I'm not going to try to invalidate anyone who is, completely rightfully, more bothered by it than I am.

It is, in fact, not that hard to perhaps shrug and indifferently say, "yeah, obviously genocide is always wrong and the writing was inconsistent in a weird way about it," even if you don't spend any more time dwelling on it and think the Ancients are dumb ugly smelly jerks.

[Lyth]

As for the talk of Genocide. Is it reductive? Sure, there's more nuance to it than simply that, but I really don't think there's any point in decrying its use in describing events in the plot. The end-game of both the Ascians and Hydaelyn are the intentional wiping out of a specific classification of people to fit an ideal or purpose. The writing is what has gotten us to this point--the point where acts of that scale are what necessitate the survival of one side or the other. Of course, its a fictional fantasy story where circumstances like these would never apply to reality, but it doesn't erase the tangible things these characters have to do to get to that point. Speaking for myself, I certainly don't use it to disregard the numerous layers of moral ambiguity that go behind it, I'm just not going to handwave the scale of what is being done to entire civilizations by using euphemisms. Adults can have adult conversations about things, even in dumb JRPG's.

There's nothing wrong with having a critical discussion on the topic of genocide if you apply the word appropriately. As an example, when Elidibus releases chemical weaponry in the midst of the clash between his own Garlean forces and the Eorzeans during the Eighth Umbral Calamity, an act which wipes out most of the human population of the continent, it's unambiguously correct to describe this act as genocide. The use of chemical weaponry, even on its own, is explicitly classified as a war crime in human society. Likewise, when Emet and his Convocation launch into their crusade to eradicate the entire human population of seven different worlds on the basis of the fact that they were 'inferior' and thus less deserving of life, the coding of this act in the text is pretty much unambiguous.

The crux of the issue with the Sundering is that we don't actually have any frame of reference for what it actually entails. It doesn't kill, and we have no real world analogy for losing our magical powers. So now we come to why someone would bring up the topic of genocide in the context of the Sundering, based on the limited information that we do have about it. Are we talking about killing off a group of people? No. We've already established that the Sundering doesn't kill its target, from Emet's demonstration in the Ocular.

So now we come to genocide in the context of 'cultural erasure'. Hostile intent is actually a fairly critical part of the definition, and with very good reason. Cultures are not static and change over time (especially when you're talking about a time period of twelve thousand years). Even the simple act of people emigrating to a new area can give rise to new cultures are very different from the original. Changing a country's governance can have a profound impact on its culture as well. These are not 'acts of cultural erasure'.

Even if we look within Amaurot's history, the decision to summon Zodiark vastly altered the local culture. The Amaurotine people went from being a very secular people to one that worshipped Zodiark as a God and offered Him human sacrifices. Do we then make the claim that the Convocation committed genocide against the Amaurotine people by altering their culture? Yet intuitively we know this doesn't make sense, because the Convocation members themselves are Amaurotine, and aren't acting with hostile intent towards themselves. The same is true with Venat, as an Amaurotine herself. An internal political clash over the ideological values of your own people doesn't constitute genocide. Rebellion to remove the societal control of an oppressive government doesn't constitute cultural erasure. The people of Eorzea are the descendants of the Amaurotine people, twelve thousand years later.

So why does the word genocide get misused in this context? The answer is simple. Equivocation. As was stated earlier, the etymological root of the suffix '-cide' means 'to kill'. You end up twisting the narrative into one in which Venat 'kills' the world (despite the story itself pointing to the contrary), bringing her group down to the level of the Convocation. It allows you to paint both groups under the same brush in a thinly veiled 'gotcha'.

[Roselin]

Genocide actually can come from within a nation too. And we actually do have a description of the Sundering (written by Ishikawa) which is this one: https://i.imgur.com/CWFRPdy.png
Factually speaking, the Sundering resulted in the total destruction of the Amaurotine culture.

Why you want to call those other things "genocide" yet refuse to apply the term to an equally horrific and destructive event is beyond me. And we do have real world analogies for an event which forces a people to forget their culture and language: the thing I was subjected to, being taken away by force from my family as a child and subjected to forced cultural assimilation and religious conversion, my cultural identity was completely and irreversibly fractured by that event.

And also genocide does not require murder to be a genocide
"It is intended rather to signify a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves. The objectives of such a plan would be disintegration of the political and social institutions, of culture, language, national feelings, religion, and the economic existence of national groups, and the destruction of the personal security, liberty, health, dignity, and even the lives of the individuals belonging to such groups. Genocide is directed against the national group as an entity, and the actions involved are directed against individuals, not in their individual capacity, but as members of the national group." - Raphael Lemkin, "Axis Rule in Occupied Europe"

The Sundering undeniably destroyed them as a national group, and Venat knew this would be the result and intended it because, as said by Yoshida in an interview, she thought her people's culture was leading them down a path of stagnation, to the same fate as the Nibirun. The intent was clearly to purge the culture in question from existence since it was the culture she had a problem with.

[Lurina]

There's nothing wrong with having a critical discussion on the topic of genocide if you apply the word appropriately. As an example, when Elidibus releases chemical weaponry in the midst of the clash between his own Garlean forces and the Eorzeans during the Eighth Umbral Calamity, an act which wipes out most of the human population of the continent, it's unambiguously correct to describe this act as genocide. The use of chemical weaponry, even on its own, is explicitly classified as a war crime in human society. Likewise, when Emet and his Convocation launch into their crusade to eradicate the entire human population of seven different worlds on the basis of the fact that they were 'inferior' and thus less deserving of life, the coding of this act in the text is pretty much unambiguous.

The crux of the issue with the Sundering is that we don't actually have any frame of reference for what it actually entails. It doesn't kill, and we have no real world analogy for losing our magical powers. So now we come to why someone would bring up the topic of genocide in the context of the Sundering, based on the limited information that we do have about it. Are we talking about killing off a group of people? No. We've already established that the Sundering doesn't kill its target, from Emet's demonstration in the Ocular.[...]

So why does the word genocide get misused in this context? The answer is simple. Equivocation. As was stated earlier, the etymological root of the suffix '-cide' means 'to kill'. You end up twisting the narrative into one in which Venat 'kills' the world (despite the story itself pointing to the contrary), bringing her group down to the level of the Convocation. It allows you to paint both groups under the same brush in a thinly veiled 'gotcha'.

You wanna argue in bad faith, Lyth? I can play the part of the factionalist Ascian-fan you're fishing for for a moment, even if it's not what I think.

A "Rejoining" is a make-believe magical process where people from different realities are fused together. The souls are combined and one set of memories disappears, but nothing is actually lost. It's just two people becoming one person, where one lives on in the other, like the WoL and Ardbert.

No one "dies". Ergo, you're ridiculous for equivocating the Rejoinings to real life mass-murder. Why are you pretending they are for a "gotcha"?

See? I can do it too.

From the ground up, this is a fantasy game where the metaphysics of life and death are completely different to our own. Souls exist. Under close scrutiny, nothing is meaningfully comparable to the real world. The Garleans didn't "kill" anybody because their immortal essences provably still exist and returned to the Aetherial sea. If you think about it that way, all their war crimes are less like murder and more like just wiping people's memories and giving them new bodies. We go underground and meet up with Papalymo on the way to meet Hydaelyn! He's fine!

Except obviously not. You're right to zone in on the coding, but you're selective in how you apply that versus diagetic analysis. The truth is, there is only coding, and the only meaningful disagreement is how we interpret it, which is where the "mythological" argument with Cleretic is at. But IMO, The Sundering and the Rejoinings are both coded as omnicidal acts where X group exists, Y thing happens, and then X group doesn't exist anymore. The errata of the respective situations just distracts from what actually matters, which is how the writing comes across.

Your underlying point seems to be that, since the thrust of the text in aggregate seems to be to present the Rejoinings as ambiguously less bad than the Sundering, then it's being a dishonest reader/player not to meet the writers there. But we don't judge the content and messages of stories on what they meant to do. The dissonance between how the text wants us to feel and the perceived coding is the problem.

Their culture was a lost cause after they started planning the third sacrifice anyway.

God.

[Lyth]

The Sundering undeniably destroyed them as a national group, and Venat knew this would be the result and intended it because, as said by Yoshida in an interview, she thought her people's culture was leading them down a path of stagnation, to the same fate as the Nibirun. The intent was clearly to purge the culture in question from existence since it was the culture she had a problem with.

Thank you for your earlier reply. The issue that I take with a lot of these arguments is that you cannot simply 'fill in' what you feel might have happened and assign blame based off of a guess. There are large historical gaps that we know next to nothing about. Did Amaurot truly 'disappear' overnight? Or did people gradually drift away over thousands of years? The only comparison points that we have are spaced twelve thousand years apart.

The reconstructed 'memory' of Amaurot at the Macarenses Angle represents a time before Zodiark's summoning. Was the place even intact by the time Zodiark was summoned? Did it survive the battle between Zodiark and Hydaelyn? It seems to me that if Amaurot itself was even partially standing, it should be serviceable as a place of shelter. If Emet was present in the midst of this, you'd surely think that he might of lead a push for people to settle there and attempt to rebuild and restore Amaurot to what it was. Did he succeed, for a time? There's no way of knowing without more information. I expect that most human nations would not remain culturally unchanged across twelve thousand years, even if he did.

This story leaves me with more questions than answers, and I'm always surprised at how sure everyone seems to be of themselves. 'Doubt' is good.

A "Rejoining" is a make-believe magical process where people from different realities are fused together. The souls are combined and one set of memories disappears, but nothing is actually lost. It's just two people becoming one person, where one lives on in the other, like the WoL and Ardbert.

No one "dies".

This is inaccurate. The catalyst for the rejoinings were a widespread loss of life on both the Source and the associated world, prior to their souls migrating en masse. These include events like Elidibus' Black Rose, or the Flood. Y'shtola points out to Emet in the Crystarium that in order to bring about his Rejoinings, he has directly murdered millions of people.

I don't think that there would be an objection to 'restoring Amaurot' if there was a way to do it without disrupting everyone else's lives. But the Sundering in effect has given rise to 14 times the number of people that we had previously. There's not really a way to 'undo' that, as the reverse of that process is going invariably going to involve killing them. That's the crux of the problem.

[Lurina]

I will admit that I am more of a lore forum drifter where I like reading this place and rarely really joining in the discussions, but I don't know if you reacted like this because of general frustration already at the time or like ... it is weird for me to be still upset over their plan to wholesale kill the entire new natural world?

Well, they weren't - Hythlodaeus says they were planning to sacrifice only a portion of the new life - but that's kinda beside the point.

It just felt a little tone deaf in the middle of a discussion about the rhetoric people use to describe the Ancients being killed sometimes sounds uncomfortably close to the way people post-hoc justify the extinction of real world groups. That's not to accuse you of any flippancy. Again, I think it's the fault of the writers for constructing the scenario without fully thinking through the coding.

[RyuDragnier]

Something that popped into my head...it was mentioned before (by Yoshi-P?) that we still don't know how Hydaelyn erased people's memories of the WoL before ARR's start. This makes me question just how the memory erasure during the Sundering actually worked. Was it indeed an effect of the Sundering itself, or was something else in play at the same time to guarantee people's memories were completely wiped of the past? Hopefully something that gets answered when the final alliance raid hits in 6.5. Not that a full "people's memories were erased after the fact" would make things much better, it's just something I'm genuinely curious about.

[Cleretic]

Something that popped into my head...it was mentioned before (by Yoshi-P?) that we still don't know how Hydaelyn erased people's memories of the WoL before ARR's start. This makes me question just how the memory erasure during the Sundering actually worked. Was it indeed an effect of the Sundering itself, or was something else in play at the same time to guarantee people's memories were completely wiped of the past? Hopefully something that gets answered when the final alliance raid hits in 6.5. Not that a full "people's memories were erased after the fact" would make things much better, it's just something I'm genuinely curious about.

We don't even know enough about that Calamity memory loss to know Hydaelyn did it. Honestly, we still don't really know anything about that memory loss, and I do find it interesting that it was brought back up in Endwalker basically only to say 'yeah we still don't know, but here's how it works scientifically'; I can't decide if that reads like 'tying in the last time they happened to write something like this', or 'putting the Chekhov's Gun back on the set so we remember it's there for later'. I'm thinking my suspect for who did it might be Louisoix, personally, we know he's up on the level with people who know how to do stuff like that.


But I'm not continuing with this thread, because it's turned into exactly what I warned it would: using the G-word as a cudgel against anyone who dares disagree or want to have a different conversation than 'the character I dislike is The Worst Criminal'. And I'm disappointed that even the people who supposedly agreed with me on this are still doing it, and that I as the person who pointed out that this doesn't help is being called slurs in response.

Everyone, please, stop arguing about Global Enforced Mitosis as if it's a crime to be tried in the Hague, in a thread that's supposedly about the word choice in an entirely different codex entry. It's not helping anyone, it's not convincing anyone, and it's not making anyone happy.