Finished the MSQ - Feels bad, pushed to do evil [Spoilers inside]

If the Endless don't have souls then what is a soul? Cahciua seemed like she had emotions and thoughts, and was able to react and interact with everyone around her. Krile's parents were able to recognize Krile and enjoyed being with her and made new memories hanging out with her. Even if they "do not have souls" what does this mean?

And you can say they are being sustained by evil means, but they are not responsible for this. If you were only alive because a truly evil person was keeping you alive, does this justify killing you? The project certainly could not be continued, but whether or not it should have been shut down immediately is not black or white for me and I think it needed to be explored more.

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Originally Posted by Bunyon

"you aren't truly dead as long as you are remembered". [...]Then in the climax everyone just immediately agrees to wiping out this entire world made of people's memories because... Erenville's mom wants it?

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You didn't understand a single thing then. Endless didn't exist because others remembered them, but because of their own memories. Sphene couldn't let go of the actual people and used their memories to create them as AI.

And that was the whole point of letting go and YOU remembering others. As long as YOU remember them, they are not truly dead.

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Originally Posted by Galvuu

If one day we created a real thinking, feeling machine, you're the kind of person to try and deny it any human rights and delete it or enslave it. Like we didn't have a lot of sci-fi exploring this concept and how cruel that is)

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wtf are you going on about. you need to calm down you are putting way to much into this game. the implications that i think a genocidal AI who lives off the death of others is the same as a normal electrical AI who would live off of natural resources without the death of an entire world is insane.

omega was left alive because we stopped their whole plot to conquer the universe, it's the same with all of omega's creations, omega didn't live off the life of every being in the universe. if you want to chuck all AI together that's on you not me.

The last part so much. Lol

I highly doubt that most people will even recognise the intelligence and feelings of an Inanimate being, or even realize that they interact with one.

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So I finished the msq, The story was lackluster throughout the xPac but the ending just felt evil to me, the writers try and push their point of view that life should end no matter what, that the endless are not really alive, even though we see that they are, they can hear, feel and think, express emotion, be happy and sad, the WOL just committed a mass murder and we are suppose to feel ok with that?

This has forever tainted my view of the wol, my character is now evil.

From EW where we forgave a genocidal bird girl who killed who knows how many planets to DT where we become the mass murderer yourself what up square enix?

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They are collections of the memory aether of an individual manipulated by an overarching intelligence.
Once someone dies their corporeal aether alongside their soul's and memory's return to the cycle of the star to be eventually recreated. (EW lore with Montichaigne's lecture and the overal story.)
The intelligence acts as an artificial substitute to the lifestream that only mimics part of it's innerworking inefficiently.

This innefficiency led to the need to syphon more and more aether from other sources (other people, not signing up for it like with the invasion of tural and an eventual overall drain on the land) and the commodification of the people's soul as fuel to placate a living person's fear of mortality.

Now people are deprived of a chance at reincarnation and FORCED to live in a set artificial theme park forever albeit on a rotation as the intelligence decides which soul-memory gets a turn on the carousel.
These soul-memory manifestations are very much aware of their state, that they are dead and that where they are is their enclosure. One of the reason if not the main reason they appreciate it is because they've been synthesized by the intelligence at a specific point in their memory in which they were the happiest whilst synthesizing the adequate context for them to be content (the lovers, friends, family reunifications are not coincidences it is said, once the intelligence noticed that the memory of person B that knew person A arrived in the data base and the aether is sufficient, then it synthesises them at the specific point in their relationship that they'd better mesh together).
They are puppets in a puppet show content with their lot and that can't act decisively against the puppeteer that created them in the first place if they ever wanted to and they're aware of it; Cahciua needed help from living beings to be free, Constancy appreciated his current disposition but did not want it to be sustained by mass murder.

Also, I think there's a sort of misunderstanding.. The WoL does not KILL them they TURN OFF the terminal POWERING the aether pumped into the place which includes the soul-memory individuals. The things that would be *KILLING* them, them being MEMORIES, is SPHENE when she/it decides to ERASE data.

The thing that bugs me more is the fact I don't know if the whole commodification of people's soul is done away with at the end for Neo-Alexandrians, the hardware -tower- still seems functional and so does the *software* with the robot sentinels and everything.

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Originally Posted by Remilia_Nightfall

Hey, hey

What if this is a gigachad galaxybrain preamble to our WoL being the next holder of the Emet Selch position? Let's wait for the finger snapping and the hand waving.

This is all we can hope for now

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I wouldn't even be mad, if they did this. Lol

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Originally Posted by Bunyon

We spent so much time slowly learning about every culture in the first half of the expansion, with one of the most interesting concepts being "you aren't truly dead as long as you are remembered".

Then in the climax everyone just immediately agrees to wiping out this entire world made of people's memories because... Erenville's mom wants it? Can we spend some time discussing this? Can we go out the portal and ask Ysh if there's any alternative to doing this to stopping Sphene? Everyone just completely agrees this is the only way, despite then going around seeing that there are in fact people who are happy in this world. Are they alive? What is living exactly? Those would be interesting concepts to delve into. No? Okay, just wipe out the world, I guess.

...

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Yikes... where to start with this one. Uh... they're not living people? They don't have souls. The fact that not only did Cahciua ask this of us but Krile's parents were also in notion of agreement gave us the full idea that sustaining this world was not right. Living off the backs of people who were murdered just to entertain someone's dream is very pitiful and deranged. There's no way you're trying to entertain the idea that any of it was moral. Given that what was left of the Providence team was dead and the original Sphene wasn't even fully herself, but only just the memories, she had forcefully created a world to sustain people because she was programmed to do so, in protecting the Endless at all costs. And she continued to do so despite having the appearance and memories of Sphene. She was a slave to those urges.

When we first entered into the area, there was the introduction ceremony, which should have been a huge red flag in the "grace period" to adjust to suddenly living again. It seemed like they operated this procedure without the consent of those still living just because someone wanted to keep them alive. That's the most horrifying thing in all of this.

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Originally Posted by Shialan

You didn't understand a single thing then. Endless didn't exist because others remembered them, but because of their own memories. Sphene couldn't let go of the actual people and used their memories to create them as AI.

And that was the whole point of letting go and YOU remembering others. As long as YOU remember them, they are not truly dead.

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What constitutes something as being "alive" in XIV lore right now? Are the beings in the Ultima Thule alive? Are Omega and Alpha alive? Are primals alive? Memory seems to have been established, in the msq, as a real, physical entity, that we can see (visually, the orange orbs) and interact with (can be manipulated and stored in some capacity, not sure if physically or like energy, but matter and energy usually end up being the same if the world has any semblance of physics). The beings in the Ultima Thule are the result of Meteion's memories and Dynamis powering them up. Are those alive? Omega wasn't designed, as far as we know, with a soul. But, at some point in time, it started to think, and feel, and question its existence and its place in the cosmos. Is Omega alive? If you were to split a being's self by separating "memory" and "soul" and destroyed the memory part- is it alive? You're claiming the reverse is a categorical "no".

I'm not even saying the Endless were truly alive- I really do not know. The game sometimes says and acts like they're not, and sometimes it acts like they are. My sentiments are that it's a "maybe"- not that it mattered, I had to destroy them to save the Source. But I fail to see where the convincing evidence that they were not alive in any capacity is beyond "oh, we were told they were just AI, and AI can't be alive". A person isn't the prison of flesh, it's the electromagnetic pattern that forms their mind, in my view. And that electromagnetic pattern could, hypothetically, be stored in a machine.

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Originally Posted by Musashidon

wtf are you going on about. you need to calm down you are putting way to much into this game. the implications that i think a genocidal AI who lives off the death of others is the same as a normal electrical AI who would live off of natural resources without the death of an entire world is insane.

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You're conflating two things.
One is: "the endless' existence is incompatible with life on the Source and, therefore, they had to be destroyed to preserve the Source". Yes, correct. There's no argument there.
Then there's "the endless were not alive, so destroying them has no moral consequence". This is not evident. Maybe they weren't alive, and were just simulations. Maybe they were alive though. And the game doesn't seem to be showing me that they were lifeless, robotic AI, especially given how they diverge from their original settings on a whim. In fact, the story is better if there is a moral consequence to our choice. Was the WoL justified? Yes, it was for the survival of the Source. But doesn't make it less tragic. Unless, well, you posit that they weren't alive because "AI", which is where this started, isn't it? It doesn't even matter that they're AI, anyway. If a living army of aliens showed up and needed to exterminate life on the Source to sustain their existence, the WoL would still be justified in killing them as an act of self-preservation. That isn't even the point of the discussion.

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Originally Posted by Shialan

You didn't understand a single thing then. Endless didn't exist because others remembered them, but because of their own memories. Sphene couldn't let go of the actual people and used their memories to create them as AI.

And that was the whole point of letting go and YOU remembering others. As long as YOU remember them, they are not truly dead.

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There is no one left to remember all the people you wiped out. You may remember Krile's parents or Cahciua, but everyone else existed in a bubble in a dead reflection, and your group isn't the one that's going to "remember" all of those NPCs. If they were being sustained by their dead memories and you wiped all of those away, then how did you not truly kill them?

Also, what is there to "let go"? Krile's parents, who we never met? Wuk Lamat's nanny/mom who was already presumed dead? Erenville was the only one who had to let go, but his was the most fucked up because he was led around as if his mom wasn't dead and was forced to go along this circus of "lets be goofy before we kill your mom Erenville!" while he can't even hardly muster a single piece of dialog.

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Originally Posted by AlexisLestrange

Uh... they're not living people?

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What is living then? They can think, they can interact, they can feel and empathise. They can create new memories. Are they sustained by evil means? Yes. Are they innocent in this? Yes.

What nobody is addressing is that there was no attempt at a solution to help sustain the last remnants of the people of a dying world through non-evil means. Maybe it's impossible, but wasn't it worth at least thinking over instead of deciding in the first 5 mins of entering the zone?

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Originally Posted by AlexisLestrange

Yikes... where to start with this one. Uh... they're not living people? They don't have souls. The fact that not only did Cahciua ask this of us but Krile's parents were also in notion of agreement gave us the full idea that sustaining this world was not right. Living off the backs of people who were murdered just to entertain someone's dream is very pitiful and deranged. There's no way you're trying to entertain the idea that any of it was moral. Given that what was left of the Providence team was dead and the original Sphene wasn't even fully herself, but only just the memories, she had forcefully created a world to sustain people because she was programmed to do so, in protecting the Endless at all costs. And she continued to do so despite having the appearance and memories of Sphene. She was a slave to those urges.

When we first entered into the area, there was the introduction ceremony, which should have been a huge red flag in the "grace period" to adjust to suddenly living again. It seemed like they operated this procedure without the consent of those still living just because someone wanted to keep them alive. That's the most horrifying thing in all of this.

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No, the irony is that your perspective is literally that of the Ascians. People of the reflections (including the current source) are incomplete beings who are not truly alive, so they are not really worth preserving.

From our perspective, the Endless are not really alive and not worth preserving.

What we define as "alive" is just a label based on biased criteria that inevitably favours our pre-established position.

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Originally Posted by AlexisLestrange

This is virtue signalling at best. The Endless are just the memories of their former selves when they lived right before their true death. They were sustained not by magic, not by electricity, but by the souls of other living people who were murdered for the sake of this futile project to continue someone's folly of a dream, someone who was but just a mere fragment of their original self. There's no justification for continuing said project, it is incredibly morally wrong. All of that is playing God and goes against the true natural living order of things.

The Endless don't even have souls because they were extracted from them. That process, which created the Endless, took the memories, spliced them from its soul, and put the memories into these bodies, kinda like the Replicants from Nier Replicant. The argument about Otis... his soul and memories were not spliced when his soul was placed inside that relic of a machine. One could say he was still living, but only within that relic. The version of Otis we met in Living Memory was the one where his memories were duplicated at the point he initially died in his original body over 300-odd years ago from the point of Dawntrail's story. These two are not the same and were essentially co-existing in two different spaces. The only difference is, I would say that Relic Otis was the real Otis all along and the memories he retained in that mechanical body were not transferred (or rather could not be transferred) to the version of him in Living Memory.

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All of this. I'm surprised people are missing the actual parallel here. We are not like Emet-Selch in this scenario; Sphene is. Emet-Selch wanted to merge all of the reflections into the source to revive his people. Sphene wants to eat an entire reflection/the source to sustain the memory of her people. Both were planning to orchestrate the murder of an/all shards to preserve the past; both had also already done part of that. The theme of both characters was "the past at the cost of the future."

The Endless could not continue to live (at least as far as this expansion has gone so far) for the same reason we could not let Emet-Selch sacrifice yet more lives to Zodiark.

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Originally Posted by Folsom

All of this. I'm surprised people are missing the actual parallel here. We are not like Emet-Selch in this scenario; Sphene is. Emet-Selch wanted to merge all of the reflections into the source to revive his people. Sphene wants to eat an entire reflection/the source to sustain the memory of her people. Both were planning to orchestrate the murder of an/all shards to preserve the past; both had also already done part of that. The theme of both characters was "the past at the cost of the future."

The Endless could not continue to live (at least as far as this expansion has gone so far) for the same reason we could not let Emet-Selch sacrifice yet more lives to Zodiark.

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Not really tho. As someone else already stated, Emet Selch didn't just want to "preserve memory", or "preserve the past". Emet had a plan to make the Ascians Great Again and make them the FUTURE.

Emet had to lose, obviously, as it was a "us or them" situation, and it kinda was the whole plotline of the Ascians since 2.0.

Sphene's plan is myopic, in comparison. The parallel between us and Emet is not insomuch as the end goal, but rather as the mindset of considering another species as very easily wipable without remorse due to being effectively "inferior".

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Originally Posted by CottonC

One other issues is the timeflow difference that suggests Zoraal Ja after the attack on Tuliyollal waited for around 20 years before Wuk Lamat comes to him for their revenge plot.

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Why do you think this?

We were explicitly told that the timeflow differences synced when Heritage Found and Solution Nine connected with our reality.

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Originally Posted by Folsom

The Endless could not continue to live (at least as far as this expansion has gone so far) for the same reason we could not let Emet-Selch sacrifice yet more lives to Zodiark.

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I would have liked that this was explored more, and that it had been treated with the weight of wiping out the last remnants of a world to save your own. But instead I feel like everyone treated it like none of these people were alive despite them just looking and acting like regular people with feeling and memories. Everyone is just "Hurray we saved the world again".

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Originally Posted by Ilenya

Why do you think this?

We were explicitly told that the timeflow differences synced when Heritage Found and Solution Nine connected with our reality.

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Huh, we were? (I might have missed that though. I stopped reading properly at some point).

But didn't they technically connect with our reality as soon as the dome appeared in Tural? And yet, in the day or so it took us to get inside 30 years passed within the dome. Or did the sync (conveniently) happen after we had entered?

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Originally Posted by Loggos

Huh, we were? (I might have missed that though. I stopped reading properly at some point).

But didn't they technically connect with our reality as soon as the dome appeared in Tural? And yet, in the day or so it took us to get inside 30 years passed within the dome. Or did the sync (conveniently) happen after we had entered?

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I believe the sync likely happened when they decided to start the invasion. Perhaps they were able to control time syncing somehow with the interdimensional key? Otherwise they wouldn't have been able to leave the dome with those huge ships, since time would be going so differently between each side of the barrier as they crossed over. Might be one of those "don't think about it too hard" things.

Good point. I'd have to check.

It definitely happened, because outside SE requiring all locations to match time for non-lore reasons, we'd have issues with us being in there working with Koana for the second attack.

And let's not forget the living aether is required to give them bodies. But they can exist and interact in artificial bodies. So why did we not look for a way to save the data even if we obviously couldn't let them continue in the physical world by consuming people? There are three tiers here.

1. Stopping Sphene from killing more people.
2. Destroying the Unlost World.
3. Deleting the data of countless innocent people including the parents of half the people with us!

And no, deleting them doesn't return them to the cycle of life because it's their memories that are in the machine and the aetherial sea just washes away memories.

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Originally Posted by Galvuu

...
Maybe they were alive though. And the game doesn't seem to be showing me that they were lifeless, robotic AI, especially given how they diverge from their original settings on a whim. In fact, the story is better if there is a moral consequence to our choice. Was the WoL justified? Yes, it was for the survival of the Source. But doesn't make it less tragic.

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I mean, if there's anything to be learned from the Turing test and today's examples of AI - i.e. GPT-4o - it is that Artificial Intelligence is becoming uncannily close to presenting like that of a living human being. I agree to an extent that these AI with the make-up of memories from the formerly living are innocent in all of this, though it is quite the mockery that Sphene is sustaining this way of living in her own fairytale utopia she has enforced upon them since she was coded to do so. So yes, like others have said... it is a mercy that we go straight to shutting it down. There are so many red flags such as the introduction ceremony, a kid having seen the same show 30+ times, the food is tasteless, some of the Endless even trying to enjoy themselves because it makes the Queen happy. Living or not, in whatever way you want to see it, I think the WoL, Krile, G'raha Tia, and Erenville are all justified in shutting this down. Though yes I agree, it doesn't make the whole situation any less bittersweet. That's how SQE wanted us to see it. And to reiterate the point of this post, I don't think this makes our Warrior of Light evil. The longer the world existed, the more lives of Alexandrians and even those of the source would be taken.

As for the moral consequence to our choice, the whole beauty and liveliness of the area ceases to be, but all that remains is those of the Endless that still have one thing chaining them to existence, something that needs resolving. Personally, I think it would be a cool idea if we get an Alliance quest that revitalises the area to some extent, or perhaps just a small portion of it. However, the area of Living Memory changes forever more as a consequence of us shutting down the Meso towers.

The system of the Endless gave each individual not only their memories but agency to act as they desired (as evidenced by Cahciua). They could learn and had sapience, understanding their existence as Endless instead of actual living beings.

It's telling that we are giving more thought to the situation than the Scions did in the story. The story just doesn't want you to think about the consequences of what we're doing. We quickly rush to Sphene planning to escalate an invasion without ever even discussing the possibility of alternatives, despite having the combined knowledge of two shards, the Source and even alien races like the Ea and the Omicrons in Ultima Thule.

Was the system of the Endless sustainable? Definitely not. But we don't even wrestle with the morality of the problem, we don't try to find solutions. We just shut it down because from our point of view they are not alive.

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Originally Posted by Kaecilius

We just shut it down because from our point of view they are not alive.

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no we shut them down cause them living was killing all life in the world soon to be universe and multiverse. it had nothing to do with them being alive or not the game makes you want to feel sad for them and think about them, but the reality most people aren't sad because its double not real. one they are AI second this is a video game so there is no real attachment to anything that happens to begin with.

"Pushed to do evil"

You spent the last decade murdering Garlean conscripts that were forced to fight for the empire against their will but now you've had your moral awakening?

Alright.
https://cdn.betterttv.net/emote/5803...e35267/1x.webp

I feel like the really painful point still missing in this discussion, is that we happen to know some guys who are really good at putting minds stored as data into functioning bodies, which work without any need to leech life force. Compared to the Omicrons, Sphene is an absolute amateur who stumbled upon an extremely inefficient way of preserving the living memories of her people. If we wanted to be the good guys here, we'd have pointed out the Omicron tech and used it to end the Endless' dependence on other people's souls, aether, and those excessive amounts of energy they're using. Give them a permanent fully VR realm to exist in or something. But we didn't even think to bring it up, just as how we keep silent that our world has already found a way to cure the aetheric unbalance sickness afflicting the living Alexandrians.

We had every option to not let it end this way.

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Originally Posted by Bunyon

If the Endless don't have souls then what is a soul? Cahciua seemed like she had emotions and thoughts, and was able to react and interact with everyone around her. Krile's parents were able to recognize Krile and enjoyed being with her and made new memories hanging out with her. Even if they "do not have souls" what does this mean?

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Strictly speaking no they don't have a soul because in FF14 "soul" and "self" seem to be two different things even though for us in the real world it's often understood to be synonymous.
(I agree that the endless are "selves" btw.)

As far as I understand a soul is an actual "magic-physical" "object" (or entity) that is subjected to certain laws of (magical) nature.
It's a collection of special aether (life force or something else, but it's "something" - very helpful I know) that holds the "core identity" of a person. It also serves as an actual "magic-physical" core for the aether that composes your current reincarnation (your flesh, your memories, your powers etc.)
If I understand it correctly if your soul returns to the aetherial sea the aether that comprises your memories (since you've already left behind the aether of your corporal form) slowly washes away but the core remains.
To my knowledge the core itself can't dissipate. Then after some time this core attracts enough new aether so that you reincarnate as a new person in a different corporal shape. You don't retain your memories and your personality might be different in some aspects but a certain "true core identity" will be constant across all of your reincarnations (e.g., Fandaniel/Amos being a genius etc.).

So according to that logic it is probably possible to be a self without a soul in FF14, e.g. by extracting memories and infusing them with external life force to give them enough/the right power to reinstate their consciousness.


Now what confuses me is that

the soul and their life force seem to be two different components as well. Because on the one hand Alexandrians consume the life force of purified souls but Erenville also believes he'll see his mother in the aetherial sea (and I believe he was a mouthpiece of the writers in that moment because that scene was there to give us closure/a happy ending). So despite her soul's life force being consumed (and her memories being extracted) Cahciua's soul (the core that holds her true self) is still intact and inside the aetherial sea. (Technically this means that if Erenville's soul finds Cahciua's soul in the aetherial sea he can't tell her of all his travels because her memories had already been removed in S9 and she doesn't remember her old self and life. She isn't the reincarnation that was Cahciua anymore...)
Either way, perhaps if your life force is depleted, your "energy-less" soul with your core self remains and recharges in the aetherial sea, in addition to attracting new aether for reincarnation.
(But I'm really not sure. Feel free to correct me if you understand wth is actually going on here.)

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Originally Posted by DiaDeem

"Pushed to do evil"

You spent the last decade murdering Garlean conscripts that were force to fight for the empire against their will but now you've had your moral awakening?

Alright.

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And after that we also spent the last decade slowly understanding myriad cultures across Eorzea and trying to find unity across them so they can co-exist.

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Originally Posted by Musashidon

no we shut them down cause them living was killing all life in the world soon to be universe and multiverse.

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Questioning whether that's true in the first place is one of the things that we should have done and really didn't. We just accepted that the Endless were consuming all life, because Queen Sphene said so—but we are more powerful and resourceful than she could ever be, trapped in her little bubble! We have access to the stars! We defeated the Endsinger! If it is in fact the case that the Endless will keep consuming and killing forever, then yeah, it's necessary, but not a single character goes, "Wait, hold on, is that true? Why would that be true? What makes it be true? Can we change it? Can we reengineer it?" Not a single character suggests that this might be a solvable problem, even though we've already solved time travel and a lot of dimensional travel and we killed the personification of the concept of entropy. We have solved a lot of impossible problems before, and I'm not saying this one is also solvable, but someone should have at least suggested that it might have been, rather than just blindly accept Queen Sphene's and Cahciua's gospels that it definitely isn't without any further elaboration or detail or context.

Furthermore, even if it is the case that it's unsolvable, we should at least feel guilty and sad about it! "You needn't feel guilty" shouldn't absolve us of moral responsibility and of the weight of what we're doing. The characters don't grapple at all with the sorrow of killing so many innocents who through no fault of their own were consuming resources in a way that killed others.

Plus, the fact that the Endless consume that much energy in the first place was a choice that the writers made to justify the story they wanted to tell and then they wanted us to not look for the man behind the wizard, they wanted us to just accept that this cost was inevitable and not give us the option to look into it. This was a writing choice, and it was clumsy and made the story poorer. Just nod along and believe everything and do everything you're told and don't try to look for outside-the-box solution or feel any sorrow for the thousands you've consigned to oblivion.

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Originally Posted by DiaDeem

"Pushed to do evil"

You spent the last decade murdering Garlean conscripts that were force to fight for the empire against their will but now you've had your moral awakening?

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And that theme is explored in detail, actually! The story goes to great pains to humanise the Garleans and make us empathise with them and try to help them and to feel sorrow when we have to kill them anyway! The characters felt worse about the suffering of the nation that brought strife and ruin to their homelands than they felt about the innocents we were killing "in self-defence" through an accident of how reality is set up.

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Originally Posted by Musashidon

no we shut them down cause them living was killing all life in the world soon to be universe and multiverse. it had nothing to do with them being alive or not the game makes you want to feel sad for them and think about them, but the reality most people aren't sad because its double not real. one they are AI second this is a video game so there is no real attachment to anything that happens to begin with.

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Except it wasn't? They had been stuck in their shard for Hydaelyn knows how long. Their body count as far as we're aware are the 50 casualties in Tuliyollal. When the people of Yyasulani got stuck in the dome, Sphene didn't butcher them for souls, she welcomed them as citizens.

Yeah, things were about to get really bad, and that's why we had to stop Sphene, but we didn't even *try* to help her solve the energy problem or find a different medium/hardware to download the memories.

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Originally Posted by Annapaw

Yeah I completely agree with you, I no longer see my character as the Warrior of Light, those people seemed happy and fulfilled, what the difference between the Warrior of Light killing them with a bomb committing mass murder or turning off their life?[/B]

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I feel like you missed the part that they're facsimiles of the originals who lack souls or even much of their physical substance. Unlike the living beings made of dynamis at Ultima Thule, the Endless can't ever leave Living Memory and are sustained by the blood of innocents as Sphene is compelled to murder entire worlds to obtain the life force needed to sustain them? The Endless are highly accurate facsimiles, but at the same time they know they exist thanks to the untold deaths of others. That's why Cahciua asks you to shut the terminals down to help end this. To paraphrase her, "I don't want to exist because of the suffering of others."

We weren't really given the chance to think of alternatives. Granted, it's spelled out later that

they need life energy, not just aether, to exist, so finding a solution in a decent timeframe for a hard-pressed Sphene might not have happened. It's hard to tell, since Sphene kinda pushed the issue.

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Originally Posted by Kaecilius

Except it wasn't? They had been stuck in their shard for Hydaelyn knows how long. Their body count as far as we're aware are the 50 casualties in Tuliyollal. When the people of Yyasulani got stuck in the dome, Sphene didn't butcher them for souls, she welcomed them as citizens.

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The souls from the casualities were not nearly enough to sustain the system. When we enter the dome after the first attack Sphene explicitly tells us that the system is running out of power. She didn't kill the (comparably) few Turali villagers because she gave them the chance to become Alexandrians (she asks us too btw so she doesn't have to kill us) but she was always set on conquering and harvesting the rest of world via Zoraal Ja's army. I don't think she would have been able and willing to grant citizenship to many more people than she did when her home fused with Yyasulani because then she would be undermining her own energy source.

Her genociding us was always the plan to solve her energy problem. It was the reason she came to our world in the first place. She just had to change strategies when Zoraal Ja betrayed her.

I still agree with the criticism of the laziness of the writers to not even let us look for another option (and I also think it's incredibly silly that we can come up with all kinds of miracles but a civilisation so advanced they can recreate the lifestream can't cure an aether disease, when we solve this within a few quests...) but it also shouldn't be misrepresented who Sphene was. As I said before, consciously or not, she deemd her people so superior that (acc. to her) they did not just deserve happiness but were entitled to eternal life at the cost of other people. As a direct consequence, those people weren't even entitled to live one normal life if they could power her people's endlessness. She didn't settle for a finite life full of happiness. She was obsessed with immortality and it's that immortality that caused her energy problem.

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Originally Posted by Dikatis

I feel like you missed the part that they're facsimiles of the originals who lack souls or even much of their physical substance. Unlike the living beings made of dynamis at Ultima Thule, the Endless can't ever leave Living Memory and are sustained by the blood of innocents as Sphene is compelled to murder entire worlds to obtain the life force needed to sustain them? The Endless are highly accurate facsimiles, but at the same time they know they exist thanks to the untold deaths of others. That's why Cahciua asks you to shut the terminals down to help end this. To paraphrase her, "I don't want to exist because of the suffering of others."

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And yet they were clearly showing every sign of life except the ability to procreate. They continued to have motivations, interacted with us, formed new memories, experienced feelings. Not in a recorded memory way, but new ones. They are for all intents and purposes as sentient and cognizant of their fate and state of existence as any npcs we do consider alive.

They're differently alive, but is genocide okay in your book just because something doesn't fit our classification system? Maybe our classification system is wrong because we made it up at a time that we didn't know yet that this was even possible? This is a textbook Black Swan Event.

And as I've posted before -- we had options to sustain them in a different way that would have removed the *problem* of Sphene's relatively (compared to the Omicron) inefficient way of preserving minds as data, rather than exterminating the entire population that was suffering that problem.

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Originally Posted by Loggos

Her genociding us was always the plan to solve her energy problem even before she came to our world. She just had to change strategies when Zoraal Ja betrayed her.

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This is true, and I agree this was her plan. But the Scions are an element that can alter the plan, that's the frustrating part. They could offer her a wealth of knowledge she doesn't have as I mentioned before from allies in the First, the Thirteenth, and the alien races. And then she could reject the help anyway and force us to do what must be done, but we didn't even get to try. Thus, all the other constructs in Living Memory (that didn't have any say in this plan) must be erased whether they wanted it or not.

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Originally Posted by Kaecilius

Yeah, things were about to get really bad, and that's why we had to stop Sphene, but we didn't even *try* to help her solve the energy problem or find a different medium/hardware to download the memories.

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actually almost every scene with us discussing the future of her people was us literally going *there is another way* sphene herself decided death was the only option not us.

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Originally Posted by Dikatis

I feel like you missed the part that they're facsimiles of the originals who lack souls or even much of their physical substance.

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I'm not sure why I'm meant to care that they lack souls? What are souls for? Why do they matter? Why does being a "facsimile" and not having a "soul" make someone less important? Why does not having substance matter? If you want to argue that they aren't sapient that's a different story, and I think you'd have your work cut out for you there because the story goes to great pains to show us that they have every single feature a sapient being does, but being a facsimile or not having a soul seem completely irrelevant facts that should not affect whether an action is moral or not.

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Originally Posted by Dikatis

at the same time they know they exist thanks to the untold deaths of others

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They might, in the future, if nothing changes, exist thanks to the untold deaths of others, but right now it's been fifty of them tops. And it seems wild to me to imagine that this is a completely unsolvable problem, that we can't just shut the computers down but keep the memories there and then try to fix the problem later with better resources. It seems wild to me that we can't do the same thing Otis did and get them to live in a robot body without consuming tons of energy. It seems wild to me to just accept that this problem cannot be solved just because Queen Sphene and Cahciua says so.

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Originally Posted by Ilenya

We weren't really given the chance to think of alternatives. Granted, it's spelled out later that

they need life energy, not just aether, to exist, so finding a solution in a decent timeframe for a hard-pressed Sphene might not have happened. It's hard to tell, since Sphene kinda pushed the issue.

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The life energy is to construct physical bodies for them. They were able to exist on the servers for decades. That gives us hundreds of years to figure out a way for them to exist without making bodies out of other people's souls if we simply saved the data.

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Originally Posted by Kaecilius

This is true, and I agree this was her plan. But the Scions are an element that can alter the plan, that's the frustrating part. They could offer her a wealth of knowledge she doesn't have as I mentioned before from allies in the First, the Thirteenth, and the alien races. And then she could reject the help anyway and force us to do what must be done, but we didn't even get to try. Thus, all the other constructs in Living Memory (that didn't have any say in this plan) must be erased whether they wanted it or not.

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Yeah I completey agree with that sentiment. As I said, I think the writers' decision to conveniently "forget" all the solutions we could have offered is a terrible self-serving decision to make their plot "work" (although it clearly doesn't). Same goes for Alexandria itself. You can't tell me a nation that built an interdimensional gate so great Y'shtola could never even come close, that recreates the process of the aetherial sea, revives the bodies of their people, alters their memories and that has magic stone that can conveniently used for every- and anything...cannot cure a disease we cured in ShB without a lab?

I just mean to say, "canonically" (if we "accept" the story as it is told to us) then I think our WoL had no choice (bc Sphene would eat endless worlds for her immortality project). But of course it's only fair and right to question if the logic of the writers actually holds up (no).

They tried hard to be "philosophical" without understanding the implications of what they were writing and what we get is this mess.

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Originally Posted by Musashidon

actually almost every scene with us discussing the future of her people was us literally going *there is another way* sphene herself decided death was the only option not us.

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Sure, but in that case why not stop Sphene and then go "there is another way" to her subjects who would still be alive? There's no reason why Sphene being unreasonable should mean that we shouldn't try to solve the problem anyway, with or without her. Furthermore, we go "there must be another way" exactly once and then we don't suggest it, we don't brainstorm it, we don't talk about it. Cahciua and Sphene say there isn't and we go "oh. ok. guess there isn't, then, nvm."

Why don't we go "f*** that and f*** you, we'll stop you and save your Endless and have some ice cream while we're at it"?

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Originally Posted by pedromvilar

that we can't just shut the computers down but keep the memories there and then try to fix the problem later with better resources. It seems wild to me that we can't do the same thing Otis did and get them to live in a robot body without consuming tons of energy. It seems wild to me to just accept that this problem cannot be solved just because Queen Sphene and Cahciua says so.

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This is honestly my hope for the patches: That we shut down the system, but that the storage devices still hold the memories, and we can help them have another shot at an actual life outside of the Living Memory system. Bring in Garlean cloning to create FFIX Genomes if we must.

Do you know what sucks about all of this?
Wouldn't it be great if this intricate, philosophical discussion we're having in the forums had happened ingame?
Maybe if some highly intelligent scholars were there to offer different views and discuss a plan or the meaning of their existence, facing our previous knowledge and experiences, and this was exposed through msq :)
I find the themes that are supposedly tackled in this narrative to be more openly discussed in the forums than in the game. Great story :)