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

People who say the Endless are just computer programs don't seem to remember that one of the computer programs had the agency to escape back to the "real" world through a robot and actively planned, initiated, and acted on bringing about the closure of Living Memory.

They used far more of their free will than most of us ever will in our own lives IRL.

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Originally Posted by Valcarde

For all the folks who say 'Ohhh, we have to be evil and kill these people', I ask:

Did you forget what's required for these facsimiles to continue to exist? They are immortal technologically sourced aetheric vampires literally consuming the souls of others just to exist. Their very existence is not only an affront to the cycle of life but a parasitic and destructive one as well, requiring consumption of Spoken souls just to continue their ersatz lives. So long as the Endless existed, the consumption would get worse and worse and more people would need to die to keep them in their hard light hologram state.

It was not a genocide, it was a mercy.

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"It was not a genocide, it was a mercy." - pretty sure Emet said this on the people of eorzea, the fact that the writers dont see that is hilarious.
Again, it's just a story, they could have written a better solution, they choose not to so they can drive in their view point that all life should die.

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Originally Posted by Valcarde

For all the folks who say 'Ohhh, we have to be evil and kill these people', I ask:

Did you forget what's required for these facsimiles to continue to exist? They are immortal technologically sourced aetheric vampires literally consuming the souls of others just to exist. Their very existence is not only an affront to the cycle of life but a parasitic and destructive one as well, requiring consumption of Spoken souls just to continue their ersatz lives. So long as the Endless existed, the consumption would get worse and worse and more people would need to die to keep them in their hard light hologram state.

It was not a genocide, it was a mercy.

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Yeah this often being disregarded bugs me in this discussion. I think it's just as simplistic to say "we are evil now" as it is to say "everything that happened was totally fine".
I agree that the way the erasure of the endless was handled by SE was terrible, with their insistence to paint everything as happy and wholesome until we suddenly pull the plug. Then off to the next happy zone, and pull the plug etc. And their attempt at pseudo-philosophic moralising about life and death was just an embarassing failure.

I also agree that the endless seem to be actual sentient beings.
But I think it's also important to consider the other side:

Sphene (the program, not talking about the real person) needs the energy of an entire reflection to feed her system. This energy will be used up too at some point so she'll need the energy of another reflection/world/planet to recharge the cloud. Perhaps even more than one world because by the time energy runs out again her digital afterlife probably houses even more endless than before.
She is absolutely prepared to continuously wipe out world after world for her afterlife.
It's not easy and heroic to calculate lives against one another but given the dimensions we are talking about it seems unspeakably cruel towards all the worlds and the life they house that would fall victim to Sphene. The lives lost by not taking down the cloud would vastly exceed the lives saved within the cloud.
Of course this is still a moral dilemma and it should have been treated as such (or just not been tackled at all - if you can't write heavy stuff, then don't do it, otherwise this is what you get).

(Copypasting this from another thread bc I’m to lazy to write it again with slightly different words, sorry. Orz)
I think it's also worth pointing out that Sphene’s endeavours do not actually save all of her people. Her mortal people don't rely on killing other worlds. She wouldn't have to do any of that for them. (Yes, there are problems her mortal people face like the sickness but you do not need to grant them an endless life to solve this. Those are two separate goals of hers.)

Sphene is zealous in her belief that her people deserve to live forever (and happily as that) as memories in her virtual afterlife and also that it is perfectly acceptable that it happens at the cost of other lives.
You can’t even call her belief entitled anymore. It is a full-blown superiority complex to believe your people deserve eternity and others should die for it, even if she doesn’t want to admit it to herself.

She can tell herself it is necessary all she wants but as a matter of fact, it is not. Eternal life is not a necessity for her people to be happy. You can also live a happy life if your time is limited.
The problem is that she cannot accept the mortality of her people and that is the key of the issue.

Of course there is the question of "was there really no other way" and I agree that it was incredibly lazy and stupid writing on SE’s parts to just conveniently forget all the solutions we could have offered. It makes me mad too.
But if we (begrudgingly) accept the premise of the story that it's not possible then I think ending the cloud was our only option.

All in all though I think SE shouldn't have tried to tackle this story at all. They were clearly unable to write it.
It would probably have been better if being in the cloud was objectively bad for the endless (something something memories being alive and separated from your soul is bad and will destroy you in the long run, this is why they need to move on to the aethrial sea to be saved something something).
Or if they were just lifeless simulations created by Sphene to build her own perfect fake refuge of memories. But nobody in there would actually be alive. (But then the whole Cahciua plot wouldn't have worked.)

While I know the characters in the game might not know virtual worlds are a thing, I know virtual worlds are a thing. While giving them physical bodies in an actual place required life energy, how much power would it have taken to keep the servers running and let them live in a virtual world instead? Solves both problems without us deleting everyone's mommy. Are you telling me these people figured out a way to make their own aetherial sea, but none of them could invent VR? Seriously? There could even be a way for the living to visit the virtual world and spend time with their loved ones. And given memories just wash away in the aetherial sea, uploading them instead doesn't actually hurt the cycle of life the way giving them physical bodies hurt the cycle of life. Also, couldn't the data been transferred to the bots which would allow them to interact in our world the way Sphene did? I feel like we should have tried literally anything before shrugging and hitting DELETE ALL.

ETA: It also bothers me how we're cheerfully touring the place as we murder all these people.

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Originally Posted by AnotherHighlander

People who say the Endless are just computer programs don't seem to remember that one of the computer programs had the agency to escape back to the "real" world through a robot and actively planned, initiated, and acted on bringing about the closure of Living Memory.

They used far more of their free will than most of us ever will in our own lives IRL.

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Well there is also the case that not every endless even wanted to be endless. If looking at the cinematic where Wu's nanny(whatever was her name. I was always bad with names) smiled when the archive shut down. I somehow doubt that she wanted this "existance" and I think some other endless might share in that sentiment. It gives even more power to the argument that the living memory was nothing more than meant for Sphen because she "couldn't let go".

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Originally Posted by Revash

Well there is also the case that not every endless even wanted to be endless. If looking at the cinematic where Wu's nanny(whatever was her name. I was always bad with names) smiled when the archive shut down. I somehow doubt that she wanted this "existance" and I think some other endless might share in that sentiment. It gives even more power to the argument that the living memory was nothing more than meant for Sphen because she "couldn't let go".

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She had the option not to wear the device recording her memory if she didn't want to be Endless. She was smiling because she was looking at her daughter who she loved. Shame she never gets to do that again cause we couldn't even consider a way of saving data beyond the insane people-eater plan first devised. Not like the Scions are a bunch of scholars and scie...oh wait...

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Originally Posted by Revash

Well there is also the case that not every endless even wanted to be endless. If looking at the cinematic where Wu's nanny(whatever was her name. I was always bad with names) smiled when the archive shut down. I somehow doubt that she wanted this "existance" and I think some other endless might share in that sentiment. It gives even more power to the argument that the living memory was nothing more than meant for Sphen because she "couldn't let go".

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I don't disagree, my point is moreso that I don't think justifying shutting down Living Memory because they are just computer programs isn't a good argument. They are as sentient as we are from what the story shows.

To justify shutting down Living Memory you would need to go with a different argument, and the one that the story offers (it's unnatural) is incredibly unsatisfying IMHO.

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Originally Posted by Valcarde

For all the folks who say 'Ohhh, we have to be evil and kill these people', I ask:

Did you forget what's required for these facsimiles to continue to exist? They are immortal technologically sourced aetheric vampires literally consuming the souls of others just to exist. Their very existence is not only an affront to the cycle of life but a parasitic and destructive one as well, requiring consumption of Spoken souls just to continue their ersatz lives. So long as the Endless existed, the consumption would get worse and worse and more people would need to die to keep them in their hard light hologram state.

It was not a genocide, it was a mercy.

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They absolutely had to be stopped- it was a "us or them" situation, and killing them all to save the Source is justified.
The problem is how this is presented ingame, and you actually touch on the dissonance yourself with your post.
These entities are shown to be sapient and feeling and creative. They do things spontaneously, they love, they have regrets and dreams, they're very much self-aware. You explore this in the quests in the area and the game seems to be showing me that while the circumstances of their creation and the medium that holds their minds/selves is different from mine, they are capable of thought and feeling all the same.
It's therefore tragic that their survival requires my death. I wanted to see more conflict about this, more despair, more vainly trying to attempt ten things to avoid this outcome before finally bringing the axe over their napes down. I wanted to see the WoL and the scions feeling conflicted and heartbroken over this- and maybe this is a thread that can be followed up on in later patches. In that moment, the WoL could maybe really feel like they were wearing Emet's skin, and understand the gravity of the action. But this is merely brushed aside.

I also don't like the "aether vampire is bad" angle. All non-plant life requires death to sustain itself in-lore. Even a grazer will kill plants for sustenance. I am obviously not suggesting there's anything morally wrong with eating vegetables. The point that I'm making is that what you need to consume to survive matters a lot. If a creature needs to eat carrots and another needs to consume dogs, I can see someone being squeamish at the latter and ignoring the former. Here, we have an extreme version of this- they need to eat us, with the aggravating factor that they have no natural population control (for better or worse, people die in Eytheris all the time, otherwise resource exhaustion might become a bigger problem than it is already). Therefore, the real issue is that our existences are incompatible. That's why we need to kill all of those thinking, feeling creatures. That's why it's tragic. I definitely did not see it as a "mercy". I saw it as a tragic fight for survival by two inherently incompatible life forms. We were justified in our actions, but we killed living, thinking things all the same. That wears you down, emotionally. Or it should... but DT being DT, this is going to be forgotten, if I had to put money on it.

guys we were just suppose to let sphene end the multiverse didn't you know the end of us was the good act.

on a more serious note sure we could have gotten a perfect ending where we magically figure out some out of world way to keep everyone and noone dies but that wasn't the point of sphene or her world it was to show we have to move on and let the past go death is part of life and holding on to it for ever will only cause more pain and turmoil.

on a less serious note AI are not real no matter how hard you try the people we met weren't the originals they were fakes. heck the story even tells you how that sphene had no memories cause they were lost and was just given her zealous love of her people and the task of keeping them alive eternally.

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Originally Posted by Musashidon

guys we were just suppose to let sphene end the multiverse didn't you know the end of us was the good act.

on a more serious note sure we could have gotten a perfect ending where we magically figure out some out of world way to keep everyone and noone dies but that wasn't the point of sphene or her world it was to show we have to move on and let the past go death is part of life and holding on to it for ever will only cause more pain and turmoil.

on a less serious note AI are not real no matter how hard you try the people we met weren't the originals they were fakes. heck the story even tells you how that sphene had no memories cause they were lost and was just given her zealous love of her people and the task of keeping them alive eternally.

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AI is not real ? you and all humans are AI, our brain is just a computer running on electricity that is powered by a biological engine, it is not a matter of if AI is alive it a matter of at what point is becomes alive, I dont know where the line IS but I do think that having feelings, memories, senses, self awareness and agency is well above what you would consider most "real" animals to be.
The "AI" that are the endless are very much real.