Quote Originally Posted by AlexisLestrange View Post
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.
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.