Dawntrail's Final Zones destroy everything the story has built.

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Originally Posted by MarianneviBrittania

All this stuff seems rather simple to me. One way or another, we wiped out an entire people. Or their remnants, anyway. So essentially as far as I'm concerned all those here in this thread arguing over 'having no choice' but to end the Endless are merely coming up with further and further desperate justifications for a slaughter. A fictional one, lest you accuse me of insinuating anything untowards about people's actual morals or some such thing. But a slaughter nonetheless. I dunno about any of y'all but I'll always be rendered uncomfortable with needing to kill off an entire people no matter the reasons, all the moreso when the game insists it had to be done.

There is always a choice. Always. All else is mere justification and excuses. Merely the individual who did indeed make their choice retroactively self-justifying to assuage their own guilty conscience.

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You cant kill something that isnt alive.

They were the memories of the dead saved in a computer program. They killed other people to fuel their afterlife.

By your logic we should have let the Nazi's continue with their concentration camps to fuel their war machine.

This thread is ridiculous and an obvious troll job.

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Originally Posted by Lady_Silvermoon

The issue they were running into with the Endless was that they were attempting to maintain every person that ever existed for thousands of years, from their medieval age to their cybertech age, that's why some people are dressed like Ye Olden Days while others are dressed cyberpunkish.

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Still, this does not make sense, unless they lose souls when person with regulator dies.

Unlike in Hindu/Buddhism concept of reincarnation, where ego is an illusion therefore there are no discrete souls, souls in FFXIV are discrete. Therefore for population growth to be possible completely new souls should be generated somehow.

So if person with regulator dies, +1 soul goes into circulation, -1 is taken to regenerate except in case of natural death like with Namika, where we have -1 to use for Endless.

The balance is 0. Where are Alexandrians losing souls? To me it looks like the powerups and backups. This is what we need to get rid off, not Endless.

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Originally Posted by Somnolence

Still, this does not make sense, unless they lose souls when person with regulator dies.

Unlike in Hindu/Buddhism concept of reincarnation, where ego is an illusion therefore there are no discrete souls, souls in FFXIV are discrete. Therefore for population growth to be possible completely new souls should be generated somehow.

So if person with regulator dies, +1 soul goes into circulation, -1 is taken to regenerate except in case of natural death like with Namika, where we have -1 to use for Endless.

The balance is 0. Where are Alexandrians losing souls? To me it looks like the powerups and backups. This is what we need to get rid off, not Endless.

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I assume they are losing souls by using them as 1 up mushrooms to give people extra lives. Not sure if the story ever said if that consumes the soul or not but I assume it would.

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Originally Posted by MarianneviBrittania

All this stuff seems rather simple to me. One way or another, we wiped out an entire people. Or their remnants, anyway. So essentially as far as I'm concerned all those here in this thread arguing over 'having no choice' but to end the Endless are merely coming up with further and further desperate justifications for a slaughter. A fictional one, lest you accuse me of insinuating anything untowards about people's actual morals or some such thing. But a slaughter nonetheless. I dunno about any of y'all but I'll always be rendered uncomfortable with needing to kill off an entire people no matter the reasons, all the moreso when the game insists it had to be done.

There is always a choice. Always. All else is mere justification and excuses. Merely the individual who did indeed make their choice retroactively self-justifying to assuage their own guilty conscience.

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We didn't wipe out an entire people. The people live on in HF and S9.

What we did is shut down a computer that was powered by death. We saved lives, we did not take them. We're allowing those of HF and S9 to retain memories of their loved ones going forward instead of continuing to have them forcibly erased.

It's scary how some of you see that as a bad thing. Do you really value AI such as ChatGPT more than you value other living people?

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Originally Posted by Aulainn

Sphene was perfectly fine and accepting of people who did not want to wear the regulator, there is no indication Namikka was against wearing it and everyone was aware of what it did and was doing.

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Agreeing to wearing the regulator to save yourself from accidental death, though, doesn't mean you also agreed to becoming an eternal after you passed away from natural causes. It's entirely possible that someone might say they'd like that extra assurance that if they died in the course of their job that they'd still be enabled to come home at night to their family, but who didn't want to persist after their natural end.

This is an area where the story seems to be lacking as we don't know what level of decision making the people were given in their own afterlife.

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Originally Posted by Jojoya

We didn't wipe out an entire people. The people live on in HF and S9.

What we did is shut down a computer that was powered by death. We saved lives, we did not take them. We're allowing those of HF and S9 to retain memories of their loved ones going forward instead of continuing to have them forcibly erased.

It's scary how some of you see that as a bad thing. Do you really value AI such as ChatGPT more than you value other living people?

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I think in a better written story the moral implications of AI having literal souls might be more apparent. As you've stated, yeah, I don't think saving ChatGPT would be worth even a single human life, but it's also not approaching what they've attempted to depict in the story. As such, I don't think it's unreasonable to reject or at the very least hesitate about ending a man-made facsimile of life.

Like, we normally feel conflicted about killing humans, but less so about animals, less so about certain animals like insects, less so about fungi and plants. It's not really a cut and dry 'here is the point at which ending life is okay' for society at large (maybe individuals have their sticking points), and exploration of that is (or should be) compelling.

Like you point out, the story made it so obviously a case of an evil machine that has done harm and was ready to do more harm to other dimensions. Yet, STILL people are given pause about the conclusion I think helps me ground my opinion on this that it's not so outlandish.

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Originally Posted by Jojoya

We didn't wipe out an entire people. The people live on in HF and S9.

What we did is shut down a computer that was powered by death. We saved lives, we did not take them. We're allowing those of HF and S9 to retain memories of their loved ones going forward instead of continuing to have them forcibly erased.

It's scary how some of you see that as a bad thing. Do you really value AI such as ChatGPT more than you value other living people?

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That's what I got from it too - it was costing worlds of energy to maintain a chatroom where twitter bots could have endless conversations with each other. We killed that, not people. The people had already died a long time ago.

What my bf and I were discussing the whole time that I think would have lent a lot more urgency and weight to Sphene's cause is if she HAD to maintain this system.

Not as some bizarre "this is how we remember them (by forgetting them)" philosophy but if Alexandria's disasters and their calamity had cut them off from the aetherial sea within their bubble and the only way to preserve any part of her people was to house them in this structure in perpetuity, because otherwise they would cease to exist entirely once they died - a slow burn final days.

But in the end it was much less grey than I was expecting.

New scenario writers performed a character assassination 101 on pretty much every character they borrowed or introduced themselves, including our WoL, which is quite an achievement. I get that people are trying to cope with it by hanging on the threads writers randomly threw at them or even creating their own. But honestly, it’s just an abysmally incompetent writing which you can see from a mile a way.
A pathetic state this game reached.

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Originally Posted by MarianneviBrittania

All this stuff seems rather simple to me. One way or another, we wiped out an entire people. Or their remnants, anyway. So essentially as far as I'm concerned all those here in this thread arguing over 'having no choice' but to end the Endless are merely coming up with further and further desperate justifications for a slaughter. A fictional one, lest you accuse me of insinuating anything untowards about people's actual morals or some such thing. But a slaughter nonetheless. I dunno about any of y'all but I'll always be rendered uncomfortable with needing to kill off an entire people no matter the reasons, all the moreso when the game insists it had to be done.

There is always a choice. Always. All else is mere justification and excuses. Merely the individual who did indeed make their choice retroactively self-justifying to assuage their own guilty conscience.

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As other have stated, they are still allowing Solution 9 and HF to continue repurposing the souls of others and, according to Sphene, these are her people too.

What Sphene was doing (and her people) was no different than what Meteion did in EW. She has stated she wants to harvest souls and that is her purpose. And that one guy who lost his job because of her? She tells him "QQ more" and to pull himself up by his boot straps LOL. She just cares so much about her people, right? But again, the reality is the only reason they are letting S9 and HF continue is to introduce Beastmaster. I'm sure of it since they felt the need to demonstrate the use of beast souls to fight. Our characters say we don't think this is right, but then at the end it's allowed to continue? It's so disappointing that they did this story and allowed these people to continue just to introduce another meme job. Since I know it's not deeper than that to the writers, I can't take it seriously at all.

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Originally Posted by Gortys

What Sphene was doing (and her people) was no different than what Meteion did in EW. She has stated she wants to harvest souls and that is her purpose. And that one guy who lost his job because of her? She tells him "QQ more" and to pull himself up by his boot straps LOL. She just cares so much about her people, right?

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She cares about preserving them, but doesn't care whether it is in HF, S9 or Living Memory. They are all the same to her.