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

[Loggos]

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.

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.

[Eyrilona]

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."

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.

[Kaecilius]

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.

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.

[Musashidon]

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.

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.

[pedromvilar]

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

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.

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

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.

[Lady_Silvermoon]

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.

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.

[Loggos]

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.

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.

[pedromvilar]

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.

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"?

[Kaecilius]

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.

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.

[Galvuu]

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