Did Zodiark ever do anything wrong?

[Aline_D]

Elidibus was Zodiark and Zodiark was Elidibus. And Elidibus had done quite a lot of evil sh**t.

The creature we killed in Lamentorum was basically a pilotless entity without him. Primals are defined by their primary creator wishes, think how Titan was like a child in distress on his botched summoning.

As for Hydealin, people don't realize the ancients would sacrifice life ( which includes intelligent life, like you know, FF14s races) to bring back the Amarautians.

Ignoring the fact that they did not have the right to do such a despicable thing, the unsundered ancients woud be a) unableto stop Meteion due to their higher Aether and inability to use Dynamis b) even if they stopped Meteion, they would still die like all the other civilization Meteion met, so they would commit the massive genocide for no reason!

Amaraut was done for.

So knowing this, she "cheated" this destiny by sundering everyone into our lesser forms, which would struggle forever, but yet fight to survive and build great things nevertheless. She is not happy about it, but it was the best solution, from her POV.

And before someone says this is not hinted anywhere, this is literally the core meaning of "Aswer's" Lyrics. They might not have nailed down every detail, but the general concept/themes were there from day 1:

Now open your eyes while our plight is repeated
Still deaf to our cries, lost in hope we lie defeated
Our souls have been torn, and our bodies forsaken
Bearing sins of the past, for our future is taken

...

Tell us why, given Life, we are meant to die, helpless in our cries?

Thy Life is a riddle, to bear rapture and sorrow
To listen, to suffer, to entrust unto tomorrow
In one fleeting moment, from the Land doth life flow
Yet in one fleeting moment, for anew it doth grow
In the same fleeting moment thou must live, die and know

[Korbei]

Zodiark is a means to an end and that end is evil. Like the atomic bomb. His creators' judgment was clouded by desperation. He's not a person and he's not worth anthropomorphising.

[Cleretic]

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.

I think that broadly is what we see with Zodiark, actually, just moving the 'flaw' off of it and onto the people who worship it: they started off doing something with nothing but positive intentions, but then gradually fell further and further from the ends justifying the means.

Which I think does work well for Zodiark, because it essentially finds a way to marry the Ascians' newer overall story and the reality of primals to the original nature of primals and their places within their own stories: much like Zodiark, there's nothing inherently evil about Ifrit, Garuda, Titan, or any other primals we met (well, with rare exception; I could certainly make an argument about Thordan and the Knights Twelve). They're simply a figure that people rally around, and those people happened to do evil things in the name of. In the story around Zodiark, we essentially see a by all means rational and irreligious society become exactly the same as every zealot tribe we've ever seen, as they deify what was essentially a tool of their own making and start using it to justify a cruel, hurtful and hateful worldview.

I do love a 'broken robot antagonist' who's just following a fundamentally incorrect premise to what, to it, seems to be a logical conclusion; Meteion's cool for that, as is Omega, and Nier Automata did a lot with it too. But I think the Zodiark/Ascian story is helped along by it being the complete opposite: for all their insanity, high scale and grand aims, that the Ascians ultimately fell into entirely human lines of thinking, and by all respects are no different to the people they've been treating as 'beneath' them. They were just people in a bad situation, who did the things people do in that situation--including, unfortunately, going way too far in what they think is a justified worldview.

[Vyrerus]

Zodiark seems to often be framed negatively

In SHB when FFXIV was under Ishikawa's auspices more completely, they dipped their toes in some nuance water. Yoshi-P has been trying to dry them off ever since, so the minor concessions the game makes with regards to Zodiark's role as Savior of Etheirys, but more importantly with the Scions acknowledging in text that he was a force for good, are huge deals to the devs (Yoshi-P).

Elissar has the best post in this entire thread. All of Zodiark's actions were necessary for our modern setting. They were necessary so Hydaelyn could commit omnicide as well. He didn't just fix the celestial aether current stagnation, he also restored the planet from desolation, and was the one responsible for seeding it with new life(left vague in this text and in the often mentioned sacrifices). Of course, this was all actually the will of 3/4ths of the Ancient Ascian population, who sacrificed themselves (Half and then half again) to do it.

This made the planet strong enough so that it could withstand The Sundering. This more or less makes Zodiark a non-consenting "father" to The Sundered as well.

But you see, this is explaining to you the nuance of how the scenario actually is, rather than why it's portrayed negatively. The reason Zodiark is portrayed negatively, again, is because Yoshi-P is trying to cast out nuance from this entire scenario. Yoshi-P very very much wants us to view it as Zodiark bad, Hydaelyn good. You saw him put on the Hydaelyn trouncing Zodiark letterman jacket, right?

In spite of Hydaelyn being complicit and responsible for what evil the villains of our setting would accomplish in addition to her own sins. Someone in the thread said she cheated destiny, but that's the wrong read. She tenderly embraced it to maintain the timeline.

The real reason is more or less, "Don't think too hard about all this. Just go out and slay a few Ascians. It's for your own good." Yoshi-P is Gehrman from Bloodborne, baby!

[kaynide]

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

It’s a story beat I’m not a big fan of, but the idea is Elon Hyd needed to waste money sunder the world in order to create people(s) that were less aetherically dense in order to harness the power of feelings Dynamis to ultimately go into deep space via SpaceX a really convenient and already constructed spaceship to destroy Twitter The Endsinger.

That’s it. That’s the answer to the song “answers” (why must we suffer?)

[Aline_D]

It’s a story beat I’m not a big fan of, but the idea is Elon Hyd needed to waste money sunder the world in order to create people(s) that were less aesthetically dense in order to harness the power of feelings Dynamis to ultimately go into deep space via SpaceX a really convenient and already constructed spaceship to destroy Twitter The Endsinger.

That’s it. That’s the answer to the song “answers” (why must we suffer?)

You forgot the MAJOR part where the sundered are more capable of surviving the cataclysms the other civilizations suffered, particularly Utopias like the Ea or the masked people that committed mass suicide due to ennui.

The storyline of Elpis directly shows they were heading straight into this, or killing themselves with how cavalier they were with creating dangerous lifeforms (and this technically still happened since Meteion was the catalyst for their downfall). Hydalin tried to inoculate us against this danger.

The story is not really clear if what she did will work or if it was the best solution, but going back to Amaraut would definitely be a death sentence.

[thegreatonemal]

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.

It was pretty plain. He just did what Iceheart, Thordan, Bozja queen did. He summoned a primal using his body as a vessal. The first time was the special one. He possessed an already existing primal, kinda like what Fandaniel did to Zodiark

[KageTokage]

You forgot the MAJOR part where the sundered are more capable of surviving the cataclysms the other civilizations suffered, particularly Utopias like the Ea or the masked people that committed mass suicide due to ennui.

The storyline of Elpis directly shows they were heading straight into this, or killing themselves with how cavalier they were with creating dangerous lifeforms (and this technically still happened since Meteion was the catalyst for their downfall). Hydalin tried to inoculate us against this danger.

The story is not really clear if what she did will work or if it was the best solution, but going back to Amaraut would definitely be a death sentence.

All of the ends we saw were ones that the sundered world is in no way immune to falling victim to; Nibirun included because unlike the Ancients, they started off as flawed mortals who eventually became obsessed with "perfection" and tried to cast away their woes, only to lose their joys in the process.

I also feel a touch disinclined to think the Ancient world was so horribly flawed and doomed to die when by all accounts it had already persisted for countless millenia whilst maintaining an overall better state of being for man and beast alike. The whole Meteion situation only blew up because someone decided to blatantly sidestep safety protocol and then the one who actually had power to do something about it in the moment chose not to.

[Cilia]

All of the ends we saw were ones that the sundered world is in no way immune to falling victim to; Nibirun included because unlike the Ancients, they started off as flawed mortals who eventually became obsessed with "perfection" and tried to cast away their woes, only to lose their joys in the process.

I also feel a touch disinclined to think the Ancient world was so horribly flawed and doomed to die when by all accounts it had already persisted for countless millenia whilst maintaining an overall better state of being for man and beast alike. The whole Meteion situation only blew up because someone decided to blatantly sidestep safety protocol and then the one who actually had power to do something about it in the moment chose not to.

The point of it all is not to say "this is how Amaurotine civilization would have ended," but to point out that everything ends. No matter what form it took, Amaurotine civilization would have eventually ended, and a civilization prolonging its existence by way of continuous mass sacrifice has already gone the way of the dodo.

The Nibirun are very much intended to show a possible end for Amaurotine civilization, but even if it didn't meet that specific end, it would have ended eventually.

[KageTokage]

Yeah, I get that's the message they were trying to get across, but I fundamentally dislike them also trying to push the argument of "It's okay to cause the end of the world and humanity as we know it because you think it's doomed anyways."

It runs contrary to the story's more persistent message of never losing hope when it treated the Ancient world as an absolute failstate instead of something that was simply lost due to a misunderstanding or something else less...calculated.