Did Zodiark ever do anything wrong?

[Cilia]

snip

Something to consider here is that the story's lore isn't written beforehand and then pieces moved to suit the story; pieces are added in to facilitate the story the writer(s) want to tell.

Zodiark's darkness wasn't a threat in and of itself - the threat was what his controller(s) wanted to do with him. The implication is that yes, the Ancients would have eventually ended up wiping the planet barren of life in their attempt to restore Amaurot, or otherwise left it in societal stasis until their inevitable end. The Plenty from the Dead Ends are very much meant to show what Amaurotine civilization could have become if they had actually succeeded.

Zodiark and Hydaelyn are unique among primals in that they were made with real creation magicks - the primal summoning rites are bastardized (for want of a better term) versions of this and come with some caveats, the excessive aether drain and tempering chief among them. Zodiark still needed to consume vast quantities of aether to do his mojo, but such a thing as terraforming is no mean feat even for beings as powerful as the Ancients.

[Cleretic]

Fast-forwarding past the 'oh it was a retcon' situation and just getting right to the facts as put forward by Shadowbringers and Endwalker when these things were established as more than just vagaries here.

Cillia and thegreatoatmeal are correct on this: we can't read Zodiark as having any morality in and of itself, good or evil, because after a point very early in its life when Elidibus left it, it doesn't have the capacity or agency to do anything of its own; the question is akin to asking 'was the bomb guilty of destroying the building'. Zodiark is a thing, albeit a thing with gnarly teeth. And like all other things, we assign it morality instead as an extension of those who use it, either as a tool or as a symbol. And in Zodiark's case it happens to be both, as it's being used by a group who wants to destroy planets full of living, sentient and sapient people, both as justification ('we have to rejoin all these planets so Zodiark will be whole and can bring back our world') and as mechanism (Zodiark is powered by living sacrifices, which he was both doing before the sundering and what we can deduce they were going to do after the rejoinings). With at some point sympathetic reasons, and for originally benevolent purposes, but there comes a point when the bloodbath obscures all else; they went far beyond the line of what's reasonable.

Basically: Zodiark is not evil, not because it's morally good, but because it's morally nothing. And at the time of its creation, it may have even been a tool for good. But by the time of the game itself, the people using Zodiark had gone far beyond the pale and into unambiguous evil, and so their tool and symbol gets described as evil by extension.


EDIT: Also, since tempering came up while I was writing this, worth clarifying: while tempering was jacked up to the point of being a clear and present threat, Zodiark was indeed so enormously huge that he was causing tempering anyway; we have this confirmation from Livingway, from Emet-Selch, and from one of the Etched in the Stars crystals; at least one of those is probably compelling enough evidence to anyone. Hydaelyn may have been big enough to do this too, but we never got confirmation that she ever did.

[WhiteArchmage]

EDIT: Also, since tempering came up while I was writing this, worth clarifying: while tempering was jacked up to the point of being a clear and present threat, Zodiark was indeed so enormously huge that he was causing tempering anyway; we have this confirmation from Livingway, from Emet-Selch, and from one of the Etched in the Stars crystals; at least one of those is probably compelling enough evidence to anyone. Hydaelyn may have been big enough to do this too, but we never got confirmation that she ever did.

I want to hang on from this because we actually end up with... kind of evidence for the opposite of Hydaelin tempering, and it has to do with Endwalker retconning/clarifying the Blessing of Light. Zenos says that the Echo is just a way to force your will onto others, but everything else points out that he was wrong about that. Especially when Emet casually tells us he and the rest of Zodiark's summoners were tempered by Him. If they all had the Echo, then they wouldn't've been tempered (edit because this sounded weird: The sheer size of Zodiark overpowered their Echo, maybe the Ward could've protected them, maybe not); but then Endwalker places the "protection from corruption" into the Blessing of Light/Traveller's Ward. And during ShB patches we learned that Hydaelin gave everyone, or at least almost everyone, the "Hear. Feel. Think." answering machine message, and that kind of implies She bestowed the Ward on everyone who received it.

Granted, that last part is speculation, perhaps only the Echo-blessed who hear more than the initial message get the Blessing, or the Blessing as the Path of the Twelve/Scions understood it was different than it truly is and they had a different metric for deciding someone has or doesn't have the Blessing. (And since the artificial Echo, aka the Resonance, was copied from Krile, who explicitly has the Blessing, one could, again speculate that's how Zenos and Fordola got their protection.

Hydaelin might have been big enough to temper Her original summoners, had they not given themselves into Her summoning. But at least the evidence points to her protecting the Echo-blessed against it with her Traveler's Ward.

As for the topic title... well, it's been said repeatedly but... Zodiark is a Mecha... He didn't do anything wrong himself, his pilot and builders did it, instead. We could complain this robs Zodiark of agency, but, honestly... that's not the worst scenario? Zodiark was already such a non-entity since 2.x, and 5.3 killed whatever remained of Zodiark as a character that we could probably have a better discussion if we renamed this "Did Elidibus ever do anything wrong?"

[KageTokage]

Zenos having the ability to control primals really doesn't make any sense with the "proper" explanation we got for the Echo/blessing, yet he maintains that ability in Endwalker with his control over Anima.

I'm just going to attribute that to being a weird holdover from the writers originally wanting to take things in a different direction.

[Cleretic]

Zenos having the ability to control primals really doesn't make any sense with the "proper" explanation we got for the Echo/blessing, yet he maintains that ability in Endwalker with his control over Anima.

I'm just going to attribute that to being a weird holdover from the writers originally wanting to take things in a different direction.

Does he control Anima? Or is he just immune to Anima and just lets it do its own thing? I don't remember him actually exerting any control there.

Now, control over the second Shinryu, yeah, he did do that. And we never got a great amount of explanation for it; I wouldn't exactly call Zenos the most reliable source of scientific fact on the best of days, since even the stuff he does know is couched entirely in the context of combat, conquest and domination.

[WhiteArchmage]

I don't think he controlled Anima, or rather, didn't control it the way he stepped into the pilot seat of Shinryu. The second Shinryu I just assumed he "gorged himself on the remnants of the Mothercrystal" and primalized himself like Ysayle did for Shiva, no actual primal to hijack there.

[KageTokage]

Does he control Anima? Or is he just immune to Anima and just lets it do its own thing? I don't remember him actually exerting any control there.

Now, control over the second Shinryu, yeah, he did do that. And we never got a great amount of explanation for it; I wouldn't exactly call Zenos the most reliable source of scientific fact on the best of days, since even the stuff he does know is couched entirely in the context of combat, conquest and domination.

There is that bit in 5.4/5 with Fandaniel asking him if he's ready to control the "you know what", and he also specifically states he made it order its thralls to cause as much destruction as possible in the event of its demise before he departs to Mare Lamentorum.

[Cleretic]

There is that bit in 5.4/5 with Fandaniel asking him if he's ready to control the "you know what", and he also specifically states he made it order its thralls to cause as much destruction as possible in the event of its demise before he departs to Mare Lamentorum.

I was always pretty certain that the 'you know what' was Zodiark, given that was clearly the end destination of their whole plan even back then.

Incidentally, any assumptions about how possessing a primal works therefore has to also factor in that Zenos isn't the one that takes Zodiark, Fandaniel is.

[Lyth]

If you wanted to know the basis of Hydaelyn's actions, you would look to Her Heart, Venat. If you wanted to know the basis of Zodiark's actions, you look to His Heart, Elidibus.

Going off of 'Ere Our Curtain Falls', Emet makes it fairly clear that Elidibus became a very different person after he was sacrificed to create Zodiark. The reason that Z-Elidibus left Zodiark's body in the first place was to ensure that the Amaurotines performed the third set of sacrifices:

'No small number, however, insisted that the fate of our world should be entrusted to those selfsame freshly minted souls. All were at our wits' end.

At once, we saw it, shimmering. It poured out of Zodiark's breast, and resolved into the shape of a man. As he looked us over ─ mouths agape, no doubt ─ he gave what passed for an earnest smile.

"Fear...not... You will make...the right choice. And I will see it through."'

I really love Emet's dry commentary on 'what passed for an earnest smile' because it's in stark contrast to the enthusiastic 'younger brother' of the Convocation that we knew from a few paragraphs earlier. A point that Emet drives home in the second half of the story.

When you remember that the corrupted and fragmented mind of Elidibus that we knew in Shadowbringers was at the core of Zodiark's being, you hardly need to recount Elidibus' lengthy career as an Ascian to understand the sort of being Zodiark truly was. A necessary evil, and a tragic figure.

[Iscah]

They walked things back too far in retooling and reframing the Ascians. Zodiark still could have – should have, to fit with past canon – still been "evil" whether by design or by flaw. He could have been made with good intentions but a miscalculation of how he would behave... which is essentially the route they went with Meteion instead.