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

[Lurina]

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'.

I don't mean to be brusque, Cleretic, but you were one of the first people in this thread to start invoking grudges against specific characters and speaking about how an element of the fiction evokes, to your eye, a serious issue in the real world.

It's rhetoric that you can see literally today if you know where to look, and/or are the sort of person that these people consider 'less than' enough to attack.

(This is the main reason I do not consider Emet particularly sympathetic, but that's beside the point.)

You wrote this on page 7. I'm sorry that person yelling slurs at you hasn't been perma-banned, but it's kind of goofy for you to act like you're somehow above this.

[Cleretic]

I don't mean to be brusque, Cleretic, but you were one of the first people in this thread to start invoking grudges against specific characters and speaking about how an element of the fiction evokes, to your eye, a serious issue in the real world.



You wrote this on page 7. I'm sorry that person yelling slurs at you hasn't been perma-banned, but it's kind of goofy for you to act like you're somehow above this.

I regret saying that, because while there is a place and time for that conversation, it was neither here nor then. But what's done is done, and I didn't feel that removing the post after realizing that was going to do anything.

[Lurina]

I regret saying that, because while there is a place and time for that conversation, it was neither here nor then. But what's done is done, and I didn't feel that removing the post after realizing that was going to do anything.

That's fair. I apologize for bringing it up again.

Like I said, I think this sort of discourse becomes self-perpetuating. Ultimately, we are discussing an emotional response to a story beat that touches on delicate ideas. Obviously people can't help but be drawn into arguments when the legitimacy of them being offended by a piece of fiction (one they've probably spent a lot of money and time on) comes under attack via either appeals to the setting's fluff, or insinuations that they're not even being genuine about their feelings. The same is true in reverse - if you were really positively affected by something, an attack on it can feel like an attack on you personally.

That's probably why conversations about this part of Endwalker always spiral into a mess, even if they're constructive for a while. Again, the more you escalate an argument about a piece of fiction, the more you end up talking about it like reality.

You're probably right that it's better to just stop, but at the same time, I don't think it's helpful to just say it. This latest round of arguments is happening because everyone still wants to talk about the new content on their own terms, but can't without those "terms" coming under attack. Short of everyone agreeing to just ignore replies they don't agree with completely, it can't really be helped.

But of course, there are degrees of being deranged about video games online.

Yoshida might be a dev, but he isn't as focused on lore as one of the writers. So his take on what happened on all shards plus the source goes against even what little evidence of evolution we've been given is said to work. Which is how we ourselves understand it. To have every shard and the source's races develop the exact same way with very slight alterations while not completely improbable the possibility of it happening is very slim.

Yoshi-P mentioned in that interview that he'd consulted with the rest of the main scenario team about the questions. I agree with you that it makes no sense, but it's canon that makes no sense.

[Ayche]

Wow that guy actually got canned, I had such low faith that I expected nothing to come about that.

God.

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?

[Roselin]

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.

I know that the story can sometimes be a bit fuzzy and vague, but honestly every answer Ishikawa and Oda have given on the Sundering indicates to me that it was an immediate destruction of the world and it's inhabitants.
After all, I don't think Emet said "That Light split the world, and every life upon it!" because culture just naturally developed and changed over time, and I also don't think Ishikawa wrote "Language, culture, knowledge - forgotten" directly after the Sundering scene to indicate "yeah they just sort of naturally changed over time, no big deal".

(Also the rhetoric and denialism I talked about legit bothers me, someone disagreeing with me on lore and thinking I'm silly and wrong on the lore doesn't bother me at all, so please don't think I'm using my experiences to try to guilt people into agreeing with me on lore. I really am fine with just disagreements on the story, I am very much not fine with the unironic usage of dehumanizing rhetoric, or attempts at downplaying the severity of cultural erasure. I hope you can understand).

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?

I know I'm not the person you responded to here, but since your previous post was a response to mine I hope you wont mind.
The thing I personally would object to here was the rhetoric in your post there, not the whole "being upset about the plan to wholesale kill the entire new natural world" part. I am not one who will defend the actions of the Ascians anyway.

But yes the real problem I have with your rhetoric is that it essentially boils down to "they brought their destruction on themselves by being evil savages", which is an excuse that gets lobbed against me and my people in real life all the time to justify our destruction, the attempt to find some sort of moral deficiency with which to excuse the deliberate wholesale destruction of a national group.

[Lyth]

I know that the story can sometimes be a bit fuzzy and vague, but honestly every answer Ishikawa and Oda have given on the Sundering indicates to me that it was an immediate destruction of the world and it's inhabitants.
After all, I don't think Emet said "That Light split the world, and every life upon it!" because culture just naturally developed and changed over time, and I also don't think Ishikawa wrote "Language, culture, knowledge - forgotten" directly after the Sundering scene to indicate "yeah they just sort of naturally changed over time, no big deal".

It sounds like there were a lot of cataclysmic events that occurred around that time, between the Final Days, the battle between Zodiark and Hydaelyn, and the Sundering itself. There was also a lot of physical destruction around both the Final Days and the battle. But we have no actual description around what 'sundering' someone actually is outside of the fact that it duplicates and enervates them. Like if you sunder a table, does that just give you two smaller tables, or does it destroy the table? On a larger scale, if you sunder the world, does it destroy everything on it, or does it simply split everything into parallel dimensions and enervates the contents? You saw some of the confusion around this earlier as well. One person read into Emet's statements about the sundered people being 'twisted, malformed creatures' to imply that the sundering had spontaneously mutated them into something non-human in that same Nier piece. Do you take that statement completely literally, or do you recognize that he also thinks that modern humans are 'twisted, malformed creatures' compared to their unsundered counterparts?

Regarding the amnesia, I can see how that could happen. In FFXIV's universe, your memories are engraved on your soul, so you might expect different 'regions' of your soul to encode specific memories. Is it possible that, post-Sundering, different reflections of the same person retained different fragments of their old memory? Yet we have characters like Amon, who is able to recall vivid memories of his entire past life as Hermes, thousands of years after the sundering, even despite only inheriting a shard of Hermes' soul. And for whatever reason, using a soulstone restores all of your memories, regardless of which fragment you return the soulstone to.

Mitron pointed this out as well. He was stranded in a semi-conscious state for a hundred years as Eden by Emet. if Emet actually needed to use his former friend, he could have picked any other Mitron reflection at random off of the other shards and just given them Mitron's soulstone. That does imply that there's a complete set of memories that can be reawakened on every reflection of a person. So I don't think that it's cut and dry, nor can we assume that Earth's rules around memory apply to Etheirys.

Edit:

No, I am not. Perhaps your questions are better directed at this so-called 'Lyt' individual, who has very kindly provided a means of correspondence? As I often say, names are always important.

[Thenightvortex]

Jesus Christ.

You called?

[RyuDragnier]

Jesus Christ.

Just report him, he is not somebody we need in this thread when all of his posts can just come across as brash and insulting. Such an individual should not be here in the Lore subforums, where we at least TRY to have decorum.

[Ayche]

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

[Brinne]

And the "unironic use of historical colonialist-genocide apologism rhetoric deployed for the sacred purpose of defending the writing in a video game" rears its ugly head again, only after the thread has already pointed it out and discussed it, so we can now, unfortunately, take "ignorance" off the table of the plausible deniability for those who use it.