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"simple genocide is reductive"
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May 10, 2022 23:15
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TheWorldsaStage posted:I wonder with all these animal disguises the gods are using if we're finally gonna get an answer on if the Shoebill is just a Shoebill. A creepy-esque, unflinching, stalker Shoebill who appeared at the bottom of the ocean. My money's on it being Althyk. God of time, surveyor of space, would explain how he got all the way to the First and ages back to the time of Elpis. He's also described as "an austere emperor", while the shoebill's description calls it "possessed of a regal air." Plus they could do a lot of funny things with "shoebill boss battle." I'm thinking Gaze mechanics 
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May 10, 2022 23:38
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TheWorldsaStage posted:I wonder with all these animal disguises the gods are using if we're finally gonna get an answer on if the Shoebill is just a Shoebill. A creepy-esque, unflinching, stalker Shoebill who appeared at the bottom of the ocean. We're going to find out that Shoebill is Althyk, just watch. efb Edit 2: Considering the poo poo that goes down at Crystal Tower and the players involved, I cannot help but imagine the whole thing is SUCH a headache. Gearhead fucked around with this message at 23:48 on May 10, 2022 |
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May 10, 2022 23:39
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Bloody Emissary posted:My money's on it being Althyk. God of time, surveyor of space, would explain how he got all the way to the First and ages back to the time of Elpis. He's also described as "an austere emperor", while the shoebill's description calls it "possessed of a regal air." I'm going to be horribly disappointed if this isn't exactly what it is.
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May 10, 2022 23:50
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Sometimes a shoebill is just a shoebill.
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May 10, 2022 23:55
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Bruceski posted:Sometimes a shoebill is just a shoebill. Comedy option: You find out he's the Shoebill and suddenly he starts showing up in every replayed cutscene.
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May 11, 2022 00:04
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CJ posted:I always thought that bit was weird. I wonder if the writers were worried that people wouldn't care about the first and would want to cause a calamity so they had to add the part where all your friends would get blended up and fed to Zodiark to make it unambiguous that he was the bad guy. I think it's just a logical consequence of primals not actually being omnipotent gods, so they still need aether to do the poo poo they do. If you pull a bunch of aether out of him you need to replace it or the end of days start up again. TGLT fucked around with this message at 00:12 on May 11, 2022 |
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May 11, 2022 00:07
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TGLT posted:I think it's just a logical consequence of primals not actually being omnipotent gods, so they still need aether to do the poo poo they do. If you pull a bunch of aether out of him you need to replace it or the end of days start up again. I mean that's textually why. Emet would rather Zodiark be powered by a forsaken catgirl or a million than his dead boyfriend. He still wants there to be no Final Days.
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May 11, 2022 00:19
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Pigbuster posted:People have put together all the stories from the mobile Nier game + FFXIV crossover: So Emet loving loved partying, is what I'm getting out of that story.
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May 11, 2022 00:37
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wizardofloneliness posted:So Emet loving loved partying, is what I'm getting out of that story. Emet liked partying with Hythlodeus and Azem. Other people? Debatable.
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May 11, 2022 00:45
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wizardofloneliness posted:So Emet loving loved partying, is what I'm getting out of that story. If Emet likes to party so much then he should be usable as a trust in more than 1 dungeon!!!
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May 11, 2022 01:33
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Emet-Selch is the type to go to a party and sit in the kitchen and drink wine by himself all night but gets extremely offended if you don’t invite him to come
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May 11, 2022 01:57
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hopeandjoy posted:I mean that's textually why. Emet would rather Zodiark be powered by a forsaken catgirl or a million than his dead boyfriend. He still wants there to be no Final Days. Yeah, but also I'm saying I don't think they added it in because it made the Zodiark thing extra worse like CJ was suggesting. It's just such an obvious consequence of their fantasy physics that to not bring it up would be a little weird.
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May 11, 2022 01:58
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Yeah and I think the big thing is that's crucial to explain why people had a moral objection to it from the very beginning while also establishing that they weren't necessarily originally genocidal per se - it could be framed as farming nonsapient beings. It's not, on the cosmic time scale, the danger to the Star's very existence that "look they would just keep spiralling until they reached the Plenty's level of Dead World With a Little Bubble of Paradise Atop end state" is. Having it be that he wanted to switch out what was in Zodiark is sort of crucial. It's how Ishikawa can thread the needle of "you can see where he was coming from initially and it wasn't initially Genocidal Monster Fare, but now it's just a catastrophe that will ultimately end in a dead world." Jetrauben fucked around with this message at 02:34 on May 11, 2022 |
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May 11, 2022 02:29
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TGLT posted:Weird groaning noises like "don't kill me" and "I love you papa" and "the fish and chips'll be 300 gil" I was talking about what happened in the video. Valentin posted:Is this confirmed anywhere? This seems to go against how Emet-Selch describes sundering as creating copies that are identical but halved (or whatever fraction). e: ah okay but all amnesiacs, so I can see how you get to this even if I think it overstates the case by a fair amount and that any equivalence between this and the rejoinings is pretty false. I don't wanna go on another weird tangent about this topic, but I don't really get how. This isn't to say that rejoinings are somehow okay or justifiable because of the comparison as they're obviously not. But if someone loses their sense of self because their soul got split apart, that seems just as much like death to me as losing it because it got mushed together with someone else's. The whole point of the Gaia plotline in Eden was that what defines a person as a person is tied to memory, not anything existential. PoorWeather fucked around with this message at 03:13 on May 11, 2022 |
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May 11, 2022 02:55
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PoorWeather posted:I was talking about what happened in the video.
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May 11, 2022 03:02
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TGLT posted:
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May 11, 2022 03:05
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PoorWeather posted:
edit: Emet-Selch's character trajectory: "ugg gross cavemen ugg" > "*slams a wine cooler* wow actually i think maybe i fancy this one" > "uggh i can't believe i did that well at least this is only like a five decade gig" > "i will kill everyone, actually" TGLT fucked around with this message at 03:15 on May 11, 2022 |
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May 11, 2022 03:09
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PoorWeather posted:I don't wanna go on another weird tangent about this topic, but I don't really get how. This isn't to say that rejoinings are somehow okay or justifiable because of the comparison as they're obviously not. But if someone loses their sense of self because their soul got split apart, that seems just as much like death to me as losing it because it got mushed together with someone else's. The whole point of the Gaia plotline in Eden was that what defines a person as a person is tied to memory, not anything existential. because we have things in the real world that can cause massive alterations to the sense of self, up to and including loss of memories, and those aren't the same as killing someone. the thing is that the death equivalent for the ancients is just death. there's no extra metaphysical layers of complication needed. not that it wouldn't be awful if you woke up one day and someone had somehow induced near total amnesia in everyone but you, I think it would be pretty reasonable to view that as a major crime and mass violation. but it wouldn't be the same as killing everyone.
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May 11, 2022 04:12
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Valentin posted:because we have things in the real world that can cause massive alterations to the sense of self, up to and including loss of memories, and those aren't the same as killing someone. the thing is that the death equivalent for the ancients is just death. there's no extra metaphysical layers of complication needed. not that it wouldn't be awful if you woke up one day and someone had somehow induced near total amnesia in everyone but you, I think it would be pretty reasonable to view that as a major crime and mass violation. but it wouldn't be the same as killing everyone. But a Rejoining doesn't cause straightforward death, either. It merges the soul of the rejoined with the original at the expense of their identity. It doesn't make sense to me to parse one as worse than the other unless it's based on an opinion on the broader situation. Both involve identity death on a global scale that strictly speaking doesn't destroy anything fundamental (the merging or splitting of everyone's soul) as well as a whole lot of more conventional death (the actual calamities for Rejoining, and the mass die-off as the futuristic society of the Ancients transitions into hunter-gatherers for the Sundering). It also feels kinda unreasonable to compare real world retrograde amnesia to it. They're not just losing their memories. Their fundamental selves, mental and physical, are being literally split into pieces.
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May 11, 2022 04:29
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PoorWeather posted:But a Rejoining doesn't cause straightforward death, either. It merges the soul of the rejoined with the original at the expense of their identity. In the Sundering nobody actually lost anything, it all just got spread out across 14 sundered lives. All of a sudden there are 14 times as many people all with different pieces of fragmented memories. No one died. In a rejoining, you have 2 separate and unique people who happen to share a soul. One is subsumed into the other, their personality and sense of self completely obliterated. At best the person they joined gets some small feeling of what that person was, but they were a separate person and they are gone. A person has died, and this is repeated for every soul on the planet. The Sundering created life in a really hosed up way. The Rejoinings just end life to make other life 'better.' Not even close to the same.
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May 11, 2022 05:50
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sweet geek swag posted:In the Sundering nobody actually lost anything, it all just got spread out across 14 sundered lives. All of a sudden there are 14 times as many people all with different pieces of fragmented memories. No one died. Also the Ascians caused some considerably more unarguable instances of actual mass murder (every single Calamity, the Bozja Incident, Black Rose...). It's at first unrelated to the point, but I think it's important to the overall question of declaring Venat or the Ascians as guilty of murder or genocide. The Sundering and Rejoinings are nebulous and whether or not they're 'murders' depends on your personal definition of 'murder'... but you know what does count as murder? Murder. And the Ascians have been directly responsible for some really unarguable acts of that. Which, honestly, also casts a shadow on the Rejoinings; if the perpetrators of those are the same people that saw no issue whatsoever with nuking Bozja, can we really take their word that the Rejoinings are a kindness?
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May 11, 2022 06:21
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thetoughestbean posted:Emet-Selch is the type to go to a party and sit in the kitchen and drink wine by himself all night but gets extremely offended if you don’t invite him to come That sounds about right.
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May 11, 2022 06:30
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sweet geek swag posted:In the Sundering nobody actually lost anything, it all just got spread out across 14 sundered lives. All of a sudden there are 14 times as many people all with different pieces of fragmented memories. No one died. I honestly do not get the distinction you are trying to draw, or how you can say that someone's mind can be split into less than 10% of its original self without the original self being 'dead', and not also apply that same thinking to the other scenario. In both cases, a person is functionally obliterated as a discrete being, while the parts that comprise them are moved around. The best way I can think to approach it is through the lens of horticulture. Let's say I take a bush and cut it into 14 pieces down to the root. I then replant these cuttings in different gardens. In doing this, I haven't created more life. I've created the potential for more life if we assume that all of those cuttings will eventually grow into bushes themselves, but they aren't and will never be straight up copies of the original bush, which I destroyed as a thing unto itself while doing the original cutting. They are entities born from the pieces of the bush. Likewise, if I were to graft a bunch of smaller bushes on to an existing bush, I haven't contrastedly 'ended life to make other life better'. I've done the same thing: Destroyed an existing entity to move the life that composed it somewhere else. PoorWeather fucked around with this message at 06:47 on May 11, 2022 |
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May 11, 2022 06:31
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PoorWeather posted:In doing this, I haven't created more life. I've created the potential for more life if we assume that all of those cuttings will eventually grow into bushes themselves, but they aren't and will never be straight up copies of the original bush, which I destroyed as a thing unto itself while doing the original cutting. They are entities born from the pieces of the bush.
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May 11, 2022 06:44
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Nessus posted:The metaphysical complication with no easy pat 1:1 analogy to political or military actions of the 19th-21st centuries era vulgaris is, as best as can be told, Ancient society was not going to get off the sacrifice-fueled train it was on; as such, Venat seized a desperate golden shiny wire of hope. Venat's way produced fourteen cuttings for every original bush; the Ancient trajectory would have produced zero original bushes, just potential-bushes seated inside of Zodiark, until Zodiark broke down (which we may presume would have happened eventually) and then -- nothin' but a bird. I'm not trying to start more discourse about how justified Venat was or EW's broader plot, I'm just side-eyeing the idea that the identity death involved in a Rejoining is somehow less bad than the identity death involved in the Sundering. The Ancients got their selfhood cut into 14 chunks. They died.
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May 11, 2022 06:49
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PoorWeather posted:I'm not trying to start more discourse about how justified Venat was or EW's broader plot, I'm just side-eyeing the idea that the identity death involved in a Rejoining is somehow less bad than the identity death involved in the Sundering. Again, people in real life lose their memories, and while it marks a huge change in their lives, they are not considered dead.
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May 11, 2022 07:01
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I think chasing the idea of 'less wrong' is a bad road to take on this. Both were pretty poo poo decisions that made a lot of suffering happen. Both sides believed that they were correct in what they were doing, but only in retrospect, after basically all of the primary parties responsible are extremely dead, do we know that one of them made a decision that had the potential to not gently caress the entire universe over. But even Venat's plan hinged on someone actually doing the impossible and seeing the invisible before all was said and done.
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May 11, 2022 07:05
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sweet geek swag posted:Again, people in real life lose their memories, and while it marks a huge change in their lives, they are not considered dead. You say that like the issue of whether a total amnesiac should or should not be considered a new person hasn't been the subject of a huge amount of media and philosophical literature. It's not some settled question. There's even some muddy case law about whether an amnesiac can be legally judged for their past crimes. But like I said, the people immediately post-Sundering weren't amnesiacs. They were literally broken-off pieces of someone's mind and physical essence, and having almost no memory of those lives was just a symptom of that state. Someone IRL who loses their memory is nevertheless an unambiguous continuation/successor of their previous self even if they develop into someone completely different, but the Sundered were just pieces of destroyed bush. It's an inherently fantastical situation that I don't understand how people process so differently from Rejoining, considering both are about a person ceasing to exist as themselves but persisting metaphysically. You've got a Star Trek avatar. Have you ever seen the Tuvix episode? The whole scenario reminds me a lot of it from both ends.
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May 11, 2022 07:35
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I would say the thing is that with the exception of Ardbert/WoL, and perhaps G'raha/G'raha, Rejoinings typically occur in the course of the total annihilation of one person's entire, like, world in an enormous flood of devastation, and the probable death of the other person. In the Exarch timeline, most of the people who were 'rejoined' died from either the eruption of Black Rose or the resulting Mad Max hellscape. So in Venat's initial thing, arguably she killed everyone, but left fourteen new people for each person she killed, and also left their souls to be able to circulate within the lifestream and be reborn in less horrible situations once the dust settled. An Ascian rejoining takes two people and definitely kills one of them, and probably kills the other one too. You are left with fewer people, one of them comprehensively - Ardbert will never be reborn, save in the sense that the WoL presumably will be at some point. The Ascian rejoinings are also being done almost solely to satisfy the desires of three people, who were, at best, on a tragic journey to fulfill their vows to those who they loved and who would not stop without being forced. Repeatedly. It would have cost the Ascians zero gil to have, at any time, stopped completely; even to set themselves up as interdimensional philosopher-kings.
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May 11, 2022 08:30
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The interdimensional philosopher king thing also comes with the benefit of maybe working out a safe way to perform rejoinings, at least of the soul part.
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May 11, 2022 08:58
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Nah, if they set themselves up as interdimensional philosopher Kings they'd still have ended up as raid/trial bosses somehow.
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May 11, 2022 09:08
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Miftan posted:Nah, if they set themselves up as interdimensional philosopher Kings they'd still have ended up as raid/trial bosses somehow. Less painful deaths involved for everyone else though, hopefully.
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May 11, 2022 09:10
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Nessus posted:It would have cost the Ascians zero gil to have, at any time, stopped completely; even to set themselves up as interdimensional philosopher-kings.
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May 11, 2022 09:35
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The best analogous situation i could think of is imagine a family member was in an accident and when they woke up they had amnesia and a new personality. The doctors tell you they have a week to live, and they can perform surgery to prevent them from dying and it will also restore their original memory and personality, and as their next of kin they want you to decide what to do. If your stance is that ending a current conscious existence is always wrong then agreeing to the surgery would be morally wrong, but in that circumstance i think a lot of people would agree to it. I think that works for Hades's perspective. The sundered people are only there due to an incident that harmed the original people, their lives are fleeting compared to the original person, and restoring them to their original selves involves prematurely ending that fleeting existence. Dwesa posted:They were to some degree enthralled by Zodiark, so they probably couldn't completely stop and ignore their goal of restoring Zodiark. Endwalker forgot to resolve the primal situation so they added the very cool development that tempering was just a prank the ascians played on the beast tribes where they taught them summoning wrong and they knew how to do it properly. So he wasn't enthralled at all.
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May 11, 2022 11:08
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CJ posted:Endwalker forgot to resolve the primal situation so they added the very cool development that tempering was just a prank the ascians played on the beast tribes where they taught them summoning wrong and they knew how to do it properly. So he wasn't enthralled at all. I think a lot of people misunderstood that bit, because while yes, Livingway says that a "normal" Summoning doesn't "naturally" include tempering, she also mentions that something on the scale of Zodiark could, even without intending to, give "a little tug." People take that at face value, but they shouldn't, because it was said by Livingway, whose introductory scene has her go "Whelp, Zodark's dead, that sucks." and who during the credits goes, "Oh, you guys weren't crying because your friend died? Cool." Everything she says is an extreme understatement, and there's no reason to believe that "a little tug" is not the same, and that Zodiark did, in fact, temper the Ascians that summoned it. Especially in conjunction with the memory crystals we find during 5.3 MSQ, one of which is from an Ancient who actively describes that he was feeling himself being tempered. Zodiark tempered them.
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May 11, 2022 11:13
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Yeah a "little tug" on the very fabric of your being is absolutely a tempering.
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May 11, 2022 11:26
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Reminder that tempering is basically your aether getting corrupted and aligned to an elemental leaning instead of the normal balance. Sin Eaters and Voidsent are pretty much tempered like the Drowned. Given the scale of Zodiark and the fact the Convocation explicitly says in their memories they can feel their very being changed the Ascians were 100% tempered. On how much level were they compelled to do poo poo that's another story, but probably not much since they would have become more monstrous in that case (unless Ancient powers let them keep their form).
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May 11, 2022 12:06
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GiantRockFromSpace posted:(unless Ancient powers let them keep their form). That's not impossible considering they could change their form at will.
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May 11, 2022 12:29
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Miftan posted:That's not impossible considering they could change their form at will. Some could, Hythlodaeus notably cannot for example. Also yeah, even if summoning Zodiark didn't particularly temper the Convocation (which it absolutely did do) he's a giant aether manipulation device, he could have tempered them later just as easily as he was controlling all the aether of the planet to protect it from the Endsinger's song. Tempering doesn't need you to summon a primal wrong, it needs the primal to modify your aether. The trick the Ascians did was insert a need for a desire to convert people to your faith into the primal summoning method they taught people, which meant the primal wants to convert people to worshipping it (tempering them) and immediately does so to their summoners.
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May 11, 2022 12:48
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