Did Zodiark ever do anything wrong?

[LilimoLimomo]

Zodiark seems to often be framed negatively by the game's writers, despite — if I understand the lore correctly — never having done anything negative.

The Convocation made Zodiark to save the planet from The Final Days, and while this did not tackle the root of the problem, he did succeed in protecting the planet. It took a sacrifice of Ancient lives to create him, but they did so willingly.

However, the planet had been damaged in such a way that it wasn't flourishing the way it used to, so a willing group of Ancients sacrificed themselves so that their aether could fuel Zodiark in solving that problem. And he did. Cool. So far, Zodiark is just doing good things and the folks fueling him are willingly making personal sacrifices to help their planet. Admirable.

Now here's where it gets iffy. A seeming majority of the Ancients wanted their fellow Ancients who had been previously sacrificed to return to life. To fuel this, the plan was to offer Zodiark some of the "life" (I don't believe it is ever specified what form this life took, whether it was plants, animals, sentient non-Ancients, etc) that had developed. The implication is that this 3rd wave of sacrifices would differ from the previous ones in that they would quite understandably not be consenting to this. So this comes across as selfish, as sacrificing the well-being of an out-group to satisfy the needs of your in-group. Not cool.

However, here's the thing: from what we're told, it sounds like the Ancients are the ones who wanted this sacrifice to happen. And while it's implied that Zodiark would have done it (as he was a creation that was presumably subservient to the desires of those who had created him), he didn't instigate the plan and he never even did it.

Meanwhile, Hydaelyn most definitely committed genocide. Wiped out an entire race of people and their culture. And let's be fair: she did this to prevent a great harm from occurring. But surely there was another way to prevent that besides literal genocide. (Especially since in sundering everything, she sundered not only the aggressors, but also their intended victims.)

In Endwalker, Urianger has a very thoughtful monologue that contains this quote:

"No effort did I make to see out alternatives. Ones that would not demand such terrible costs. That resignation weigheth heavy on my mind"

When I think about Hydaelyn, I think about that quote.

I don't think any of this is as simple as "X is good, Y is bad", but I do feel like the game frames Zodiark far too negatively for an entity that saved the planet and then almost did something bad, while Hydaelyn is framed far too positively and uncritically for an entity whose solution to the problem of mass-murder was a world-wide genocide.

[MikkoAkure]

Zodiark is framed that way because the writers didn’t know what it would be for half of the game’s lifetime and critically, at its inception.

In the beginning, Zodiark was said to represent darkness, chaos, and destruction and the writers just had the Ascians do random acts of evil until they could figure out what their actual story was later.

It’s kind of hard to completely walk all that back when you later decide to change the story and say “well ACTUALLY, Zodiark was the bestest boy and tried to save the world but was put into stasis and split up and the Ascians were just trying their best to make it right again”. Especially when the Ascian plan still remained “kill millions upon millions of people across multiple worlds for tens of thousands of years”.

The context of the Ascian plan was invented late into the story and revealed to the players even later. To us, or at least the WoL and their buddies, Zodiark still represents the end of their world and everything they know and the Ascians must be stopped.

From the Ascian view, the Scions are evil, but we don’t play an Ascian.

[FairyDJ]

These are some very interesting takes. I just understood that H and Z were opposites. I know they were trying to revive Z so that they could rejoin the world. (We already had 8 of those and avoided a 9th in Shadowbringers). Although he is seen as bad. It comes down to the ascians playing him out as even worse then he actually was. Also, H was a being that was created out of the wishes of the people to Stop Z, but she was also an ancient. EW left more questions to Z then answers.

[SannaR]

I guess it depends on what you consider as Zodiark. Along with how you interpret what Elidibus says after popping out of Zodiark. Zodiark itself isn't bad. When you add other context to it on the other hand it can be made to look bad.

[SannaR]

These are some very interesting takes. I just understood that H and Z were opposites. I know they were trying to revive Z so that they could rejoin the world. (We already had 8 of those and avoided a 9th in Shadowbringers). Although he is seen as bad. It comes down to the ascians playing him out as even worse then he actually was. Also, H was a being that was created out of the wishes of the people to Stop Z, but she was also an ancient. EW left more questions to Z then answers.

We only had seven and avoided a eighth in Shadowbringers.

[thegreatonemal]

Zodiark was a band-aid fix to an underlying problem with an unintended side effect. Nothing more.

[Cilia]

Zodiark is framed negatively not because of anything he did, but because of what he represents in Endwalker - the Ancients' toxic nostalgia for the glory days of Amaurot, and their willingness to sacrifice anything to bring them back.

In a story all about moving forward, a symbol of the past is necessarily going to be viewed in a negative light. (Hydaelyn / Venat is not viewed as negatively because she is self-willed and benevolent toward contemporary life, but like her counterpart she too is gone by the story's close.)

[semnork]

I'm interested in this lore too, because the motivations behind Hydaelyn's summoning are a bit unclear to me.

Zodiark's alignment with darkness was a way to restore the flow of aether to the star after the final days began, due to dark's tendency towards change, but it seems that Hydaelyn's alignment with light was purely in relation to Zodiark. That may be purely as a way to give her the greatest possible power against him, but it also feels implied that the reason to summon a light-aspected primal would be to balance Zodiark's dark-aspected aether. Is there any evidence in-game that the darkness generated by Zodiark was a threat without a light-aspected primal to balance it? Or was it that Zodiark would require continuous sacrifices and aether, and the only way to prevent the steady death of the Ancients, and eventually the entire star, was to use a second primal to contain him?

Zodiark was sundered and contained on the moon, but his effect on dark aether was strong enough that it was the only thing keeping the star's aether flowing strongly enough to prevent the final days, and it was implied that the reason the moon is barren is that he's continuously draining its aether. Hydaelyn was always weaker than Zodiark, but you would have to assume she was also draining the star's aether. I've been under the impression that she gets it from the core of the star and its reflections; is it ever addressed whether that would cause harm in and of itself? Perhaps the star simply didn't show the effects of this because it's much larger and more aetherically dense than the moon?

Of course the fact that the lore of them being primals and the conditions of their summonings wasn't developed until later is relevant here, because it does feel like he was initially intended to be a manifestation of evil while she was the manifestation of good. With the events on the First and the Thirteenth shedding light on the actual effects of light and dark aether, though, the fact that an excess of either type is a negative thing makes their aetherical alignments more a result of circumstance than either being "good" or "evil". It ends up coming down to Zodiac's darkness being a result of his purpose (to encourage the flow of aether) and Hydaelyn's light being a result of her direct opposition to Zodiark. It then evolves into Hydaelyn's motivation being to prevent the rejoining and Zodiark's motivation being to facilitate it, thus aligning light with the Scions' cause and darkness with their enemies.

Sorry if this is a bit rambling, I'm kind of putting my thoughts together as I write them. I think the actual answer for why that ambiguity exists is just the fact that the lore is being developed over the course of the game's plot rather than having been developed beforehand, but it's interesting to think about how to work within the established information to make it more coherent.

[Yuella]

He tempered the ancients into being reliant of him and caused them to be unable to handle their sufferings.

[Elissar]

Morally speaking, they let us decide. If you didn't, you need to do the Omega quest in post Endwalker.
IMO, Zodiark did nothing wrong, i wish we had more time with him. Would be shocking to see Elidibus' sacrifice.

We don't have that much characters that is bad and do wrong stuff for pleasure like Zenos. We see them as victims of circumstances and neurosis.
Zodiark was a necessary evil, so to speak. The "beauty" of EW message is showing that everyone sacrificed everything for the star with the best knowledge they had and if you take one event out, everything falls apart.


https://danbooru.donmai.us/posts/5628836