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

[Post]

Yes, Hydaelyn did genocide and the worst part is that you can only sort of vaguely express discontent in the 6.1 Omega EW retrospective side quest

[Lersayil]

If you feel shutting off the terminals was murder and akin to what the Ascians did, do you also think the Sundering was wrong?

Curious if people are consistent on this across the board.

Yup, absolutely. In the end I was less sour about it, because it wasn't our group doing it, we had the wibbly wobbly, timey wimey thing going on, and the writing was overall better. Also the story didn't end on that note unlike DT. But yeah. Mostly the same deal.

[duckorz]

[Boblawblah]

If you feel shutting off the terminals was murder and akin to what the Ascians did, do you also think the Sundering was wrong?

Curious if people are consistent on this across the board.

Shutting off the terminals wasn't remotely bad and the sundering was great.

If that's genocide, then I'm okay with being a mass murderer.

[Titor]

100% I think hydaelyn is evil. The people did not want to be sundered, but she made that decision almost entirely on her own without factoring in other wants.

I was also unsatisfied with how we treated the memory people. Especially after the lessons and story we had in ultima Thule.

[Embran]

This seems pretty damning until you stop conveniently forgetting that people have to die and be sacrificed for the Endless to keep existing.

[Dorito_Burrito]

No way... Zodiark Trance 2?

[MikkoAkure]

100% I think hydaelyn is evil. The people did not want to be sundered, but she made that decision almost entirely on her own without factoring in other wants.

I was also unsatisfied with how we treated the memory people. Especially after the lessons and story we had in ultima Thule.

According to the Lore book, her followers knew about the Sundering and they numbered too many for the Convocation to ignore. It's even mentioned that people wanted rid of creation magic and opposed the Convocation.

Also the difference here is that Sphene is Emet-lite and they both want to keep spending souls on their own precious chosen. It makes absolutely no sense to keep a machine running that runs on living aether just to keep simulations of people "living" endlessly in their perpetual heaven when it's been hammered into our heads repeatedly that the natural cycle is to return to the lifestream to be reincarnated.

[IvoryHawk]

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?

And we'll soon most likely be killing more since the raid series (at least from that one NPC that was begging for more souls) is about desperate people that don't feel safe with having little to no souls left in their brain chip and will do anything to gain more.

[duckorz]

This seems pretty damning until you stop conveniently forgetting that people have to die and be sacrificed for the Endless to keep living.

That's a Thermian argument, though. That's what Cachuia tells us to be the case (and tells us that no, we cant look for an alternate solution, its literally impossible, dont even try, and also dont feel guilty about killing us, because we dont really exist), but we can't take for granted that
1) This is actually the case, that nothing can be done and theres no solution
2) It had to be written this way
This is a work of fiction. The writers chose to write it this way. These events did not actually happen, they were invented by a writer that wanted to impress a certain point about life and death, and contrived the story to fit that point.

For one, they don't need aether. We know this because, according to the story, numerous of the Endless aren't even being rendered or are taking up aether because of the existant aether shortage. The memories require no aether to be stored, just to have physical form. Why do we need to wipe out their memories to turn off their physical forms? This makes literally no sense. Just let the aether run out and let their memories stay passively stored on the server while we look for a solution in the patch quests or something. This is not a hard problem to solve.

In any case, the real violation isn't a plot-based one, but an ideological/ethical one. If what you say is true, and the *real* problem was, indeed, their unsustainable consumption of aether, then that's what the characters should have impressed as the real issue - not the fact that they were "unnatural beings that needed to die like everything else." The characters should not have just been saying that these weren't real beings with real thoughts, and that we should feel no guilt for killing them, since they didn't really exist. That notion goes directly against what I posted. If this is the line of rhetoric we're accepting, then Emet was right, and we should have let him kill us, and we should have let all of the beings in Ultima Thule die off, too. Omega and Alpha shouldn't be considered as alive, either. This mistaken ideal directly undermines like, everything Ishikawa has ever written regarding this subject. If we have to shut them off, it should at least be something we do with a heavy heart and feel a ton of guilt for.