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

[Evergrey]

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?

The thing was, the evil bird girl didn't need to kill others to sustain herself.
So it was either to sacrifice "them" to let others live, or sacrifice ourselves and also all other life down the road to let "them" "live", untill all life is gone and they no longer can sustain themselves and in the end vanish.
I look at it as a "Lesser of two evils" situation.

[Xylira]

To be fair, the WoL isn't the one committing genocide. The proverbial blood is on Wuk Lamat's hands as she's the one that turns off the terminals.

[Manamaru]

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?

We would've been at odds with them either way. The story memories into something is one thing, gathering souls into a quantifiable and usable thing is a whole different story. Delaying their end with the tradeoff being having to end a different life-form's and extracting their soul for consumption. Not only were souls being made into a commodity that could be exchanged with currency, but also it would become a finite resource. They would either turn on themselves, or their paranoia for death would push them to invade other shards and the source to steal their souls.
We would've had to make this decision in the future anyways.

[GrizzlyTank]

I would really like that because technically we didn't wipe any of that data storage, did we? So in theory they can be revived at any point if we solve that problem later.
Though I don't think the writers would do it unfortunately. If we brought the very people back to life they spent a fair amount of time telling us are just facsimiles and should not exist after their natural death, then they'd immediately undermine their whole message of "moving on, letting go, it's only natural". It would be like an admission of how wrong they were just one/a few patches ago.

Depends if the storage is short or long term. But even then, if it's long term storage, there is the philosopical question if each iteration of a memory can be deemed as the same person or someone else. So even shutting it down temporarily would condemn every active iteration.

Though judging by the urgency from Schene, it was foolishly stored as short term meaning the memories were lost when the bank got shut down.

[Loggos]

We see from Ottis being alive in his robot body for centuries that something clearly might be done.

I think the problem with Otis is that he still has his original soul, i.e. the core of his "true self" to which his memories belong.

For some reason it seems like your memories need to belong to the right "core"/soul to be indefinitely powered by it.

If you could use any soul then the endless wouldn't have an energy problem because then you would just need as many souls as you have endless, tack their memories onto that soul and they'd be good forever.

But it seems like this is not possible. Instead they need to extract some special life force, that is not aether, from souls and only that life force can be used to sustain the endless, but also it is not enough to power them forever even though a single soul can power the existence of its person (and their memories) forever, as long as their body lives forever in the mortal realm (see Otis whose soul still seems to be fine and dandy after centuries thanks to his immortal robo vessel).

(I hate this whole concept so much. Make it make sense.)

Otis' existence is really annoying because Alexandrians had basically figured out a near perfect solution but went for the unsustainable one instead.

Transplanting souls into immortal bodies that seem to have reasonable and solvable energy demands, and that can live forever with good care (and might also be immune to thunder aether disease)? No, let's use the cloud that is an energy black hole....

Yes, the scions are idiots for not even considering any other solution. But the OG Alexandrians are at least equally as stupid.

[Fawkes]

Pushed to do evil? The last zone is pretty much a computer running on human lives.

And hadn't waifu Hal 2000 tried to rush a mass genocide to fuel itself we might have had time to make something more sustainable, least for those already added to the cloud.

It was funny how she said Robot Otis wasn't Endless because he was a human soul in a robot and the robot could break and he'd be dead and that can't happen to the Endless.

And then we turned off her computer.

[Eyrilona]

The thing was, the evil bird girl didn't need to kill others to sustain herself.
So it was either to sacrifice "them" to let others live, or sacrifice ourselves and also all other life down the road to let "them" "live", untill all life is gone and they no longer can sustain themselves and in the end vanish.
I look at it as a "Lesser of two evils" situation.

I do notice that all defenders of this course of events do so by taking the non-existence of alternatives for granted because Sphene and Cahciua say so. It should not have been. Omicron technology could have helped here. So many resources that our character should have at least been aware of that would have created options that neither Sphene nor Cahciua would even have known about. Tempering was incurable until we brought a way to do it back with us from the First. There was no permanent way to kill a Lightwarden on the First until we arrived bringing the Blessing of Light with us from the Source. Orthodox thought held that there was no hope in Ishgard to ever end the thousand-year Dragonsong War, until we came from the outside and tried something so outside the Ishgardian way of thinking that nobody had dared try it.

Our coming has always opened up new paths to better futures because ours has been the power to introduce new variables to stale equations.

Why is this suddenly the expansion in which we don't at least try to do what people claim can't be done, even though we know we have several pieces of quite relevant knowledge from outside the Sphene's little bubble?

[GrizzlyTank]

It was funny how she said Robot Otis wasn't Endless because he was a human soul in a robot and the robot could break and he'd be dead and that can't happen to the Endless.

And then we turned off her computer.

Should have developed some long term memory!

[Loggos]

Depends if the storage is ram or ssd. But even then, if it's long term storage, there is the philosopical question if each iteration of a memory can be deemed as the same person or someone else. So even shutting it down temporarily would condemn every active iteration.

Though judging by the urgency from Schene, it was foolishly stored as ram meaning the memories were lost when the bank got shut down.

Funnily enough, the endless are occasionally "turned off" inside the unlost world and they still consider themselves to be the same person (that doesn't mean they are right, but their perception is interesting).
They can get destroyed and have to be recreated. The guy with the ring tells us he has already been "reincarnated" (recreated by the system) 3 times but can't risk getting destroyed by the monster, that stole his ring, another time because recently there is so little energy that fewer and fewer endless get restored. That sounds to me as if they are stored long-term. So if we were to turn the power on again they would probably perceive themselves as the same person even though you could argue they are not.

[GrizzlyTank]

Funnily enough, the endless are occasionally "turned off" inside the unlost world and they still consider themselves to be the same person (that doesn't mean they are right, but their perception is interesting).
They can get destroyed and have to be recreated. The guy with the ring tells us he has already been "reincarnated" (recreated by the system) 3 times but can't risk getting destroyed by the monster that stole his ring because recently there is so little energy that fewer and fewer endless get restored. That sounds to me as if they are stored long-term. So if we were to turn the power on again they would probably perceive themselves as the same person even though you could argue they are not.

What i got from that conversation was that everyone are effectively stored in the ram, and that there were only power enough to project some of those same memories. Like how the computer can load an entire program into ram, but only really just uses a sliver of it for operations.