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

[Nadda]

I think I was sad because I figured we'd be able to save the zone with dynamis that you know more bountiful power source that is based off vibes that we learned about last expansion.
But it never came into play even once.

It is true none the less that the people we saw weren't actually people but their memories given aetherial form.

By releasing them from this purgatory no matter how splendid it is - by shutting it off they return to the aetherial sea ensuring that countless more millions don't have to be sacrificed in the name of assimilation to sustain their half lives.

But I was not at all happy basically destroying peoples version of heaven.

[Embran]

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.

I mean -- is your argument that it could have been executed and written better? Because that's totally valid.

But if the argument is that it's the same as what's going on with Ultima Thule and the Cafe at the End of the Universe, you're just conveniently ignoring facts and what *actually* happened in the MSQ in favor of what you *wanted* to happen.

Please don't make me defend the writing lol. I did not like it, and I think it could have been better. But I'm also not going to let my distaste for the MSQ blur the facts for the sake of a better argument.

[Soxxx]

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.

I feel like things are a little bit different between the two situations... My idea with the Endless is that we could have just killed Sphene and let the Endless use up their last supply of souls (No idea if it actually works like that but it wasn't even considered...). With the ancients, a huge amount of them were going to be involved in actively sacrificing new life to regain what they lost, and very little could have been done to dissuade them. It wasn't just one person doing wrong, it was a huge number of them, and by nature they fundamentally couldn't accept their new reality. Overall I think it's complicated, but I think the Sundering was morally gray but justified, but killing the Endless as I perceived the situation was wrong.

...Now, we if we needed to kill the Endless in order to get to Sphene or weaken Sphene to defeat her, or if it was confirmed 100% without a doubt that they absolutely didn't have souls and were empty husks emulating the memories of people, or they were all going to be involved in "harvesting" more souls, then I think it would have probably been a little more justified as a necessary evil. But the question of how involved the actual soul is in their existence is still very dubious, and we very clearly did not need to kill any of them to stop Sphene at all. (Cahciua's original reason for the plan was to take away Sphene's entire reason for gathering new souls. We didn't even mention what we did to her and beat her up anyway.)

[duckorz]

I mean -- is your argument that it could have been executed and written better? Because that's totally valid.

But if the argument is that it's the same as what's going on with Ultima Thule and the Cafe at the End of the Universe, you're just conveniently ignoring facts and what *actually* happened in the MSQ in favor of what you *wanted* to happen.

Please don't make me defend the writing lol. I did not like it, and I think it could have been better. But I'm also not going to let my distaste for the MSQ blur the facts for the sake of a better argument.

My argument is mostly that what the characters state their beliefs on this matter ethically, that unnatural life that doesnt have a soul doesn't have a right to exist (regardless of whether or not its taking up aether - this is frequently not evoked when characters are arguing for their nonexistence), is completely antithetical to the point made in Omega, Shadowbringers, Endwalker and the EW Beast Tribes. This should not be the reason being invoked constantly as to why we should shut them off:



We are not meant to die. That's an unfortunate and inevitable consequence of living. Venat's point wasn't that suffering was good and necessary, and that we were meant to die at the end of our lives, it's that suffering and death were unavoidable, and that life was worth it anyway, and that we should always pursue living one more day if we can.

So, yeah, I did want something different to happen in the MSQ, because what actually happened made literally no sense. It was not only nonsensical and broke my suspension of disbelief, it also violated one of the core ideals of the games writing prior - that all life is valuable and worth understanding and preserving, no matter its nature or the circumstances behind its existence. That we cannot just look down on other forms of apparent life as "lesser" or "not really truly alive." I'm not just going to accept the order of events and the way the characters dealt with them because thats what the writer wrote. I think what the writer wrote was bad.

Living memory is not a bad idea for a zone. It should have just been entirely focused on the idea of unsustainable consumption. It's so obviously designed to be an idyllic freezing of a bygone age that cannot be preserved without imposing suffering on others to preserve it. It's clearly meant to be criticizing nostalgic conservatism, right. Instead, the writer somehow missed the obvious point of what the last zone should have actually been critiquing, with its adjacency to S9's consumerist soul-sucking dystopia, and its overly-nostalgia-reliant structure and visuals and premise, and decided to make a wrongheaded point about the necessary inevitability of death and the ontological worthlessness of unnatural life.

[Boblawblah]

My argument is mostly that what the characters state their beliefs on this matter ethically, that unnatural life that doesnt have a soul doesn't have a right to exist (regardless of whether or not its taking up aether - this is frequently not evoked when characters are arguing for their nonexistence), is completely antithetical to the point made in Omega, Shadowbringers, Endwalker and the EW Beast Tribes. This should not be the reason being invoked constantly as to why we should shut them off:



We are not meant to die. That's an unfortunate and inevitable consequence of living. Venat's point wasn't that suffering was good and necessary, and that we were meant to die at the end of our lives, it's that suffering and death were unavoidable, and that life was worth it anyway, and that we should always pursue living one more day if we can.

So, yeah, I did want something different to happen in the MSQ, because what actually happened made literally no sense. It was not only nonsensical and broke my suspension of disbelief, it also violated one of the core ideals of the games writing prior. I'm not just going to accept the order of events and the way the characters dealt with them because thats what the writer wrote. I think what the writer wrote was bad.

Living memory is not a bad idea for a zone. It should have just been entirely focused on the idea of unsustainable consumption. Instead, the writer somehow missed the obvious point of what the last zone should have actually been critiquing, with its adjacency to S9's consumerist soul-sucking dystopia, and its overly-nostalgia-reliant structure and visuals and premise, and decided to make a wrongheaded point about the necessary inevitability of death and the ontological worthlessness of unnatural life.

I think you've probably put more thought into this than the writers have. I wouldn't dwell on it so much if I were you, you'll just frustrate yourself.

[duckorz]

I think you've probably put more thought into this than the writers have. I wouldn't dwell on it so much if I were you, you'll just frustrate yourself.

It's too late for that, this has been my life for the past 5 days. Please save me.

[Boblawblah]

It's too late for that, this has been my life for the past 5 days. Please save me.

Let it go, it's going to be worse before it gets better. In fact, I wouldn't ever expect Shadowbringers level of story again.

[Embran]

My argument is mostly that what the characters state their beliefs on this matter ethically, that unnatural life that doesnt have a soul doesn't have a right to exist (regardless of whether or not its taking up aether - this is frequently not evoked when characters are arguing for their nonexistence), is completely antithetical to the point made in Omega, Shadowbringers, Endwalker and the EW Beast Tribes. This should not be the reason being invoked constantly as to why we should shut them off:



We are not meant to die. That's an unfortunate and inevitable consequence of living. Venat's point wasn't that suffering was good and necessary, and that we were meant to die at the end of our lives, it's that suffering and death were unavoidable, and that life was worth it anyway, and that we should always pursue living one more day if we can.

So, yeah, I did want something different to happen in the MSQ, because what actually happened made literally no sense. It was not only nonsensical and broke my suspension of disbelief, it also violated one of the core ideals of the games writing prior.

Living memory is not a bad idea for a zone. It should have just been entirely focused on the idea of unsustainable consumption. Instead, the writer somehow missed the obvious point of what the last zone should have actually been critiquing, with its adjacency to S9's consumerist soul-sucking dystopia, and its overly-nostalgia-reliant structure and visuals and premise, and decided to make a wrongheaded point about the necessary inevitability of death and the ontological worthlessness of unnatural life.

I really don't know how this flies in opposition to previous expansions or what Ishikawa wrote in to Endwalker, though. I mean -- the tagline for the game is "thou must live, die and know."

When civilizations across the cosmos tried to live forever, Meteion found that they fell in to apathy, sorrow, and longed for death. The folly of the Ancients was that they clinged to everything and refused to let go.

I think people are conflating the ideas of "should artificial life be allowed to exist" with "should something be allowed to exist forever" -- in this, I think that the story wasn't handled as gracefully as it could, probably because it tried to answer the first question through the lens of artificial life while not exploring the story's actually morals and merrits well enough in the short time we were given with the themes of Living Memory.

But this checks out with the rest of XIV's stories and themes, for me. We aren't meant to live forever. But I think you -- and some others, it seems? -- are conflating an eternal existence with an artificial one. The points made by Omega and the Cafe at the End of the Universe and Alpha is that the circumstances of your creation don't matter, but you still have to come to and end, eventually.

[Lersayil]

It's too late for that, this has been my life for the past 5 days. Please save me.

Can relate... Ra'la come and take us into your gentle golden embrace!

[duckorz]

When civilizations across the cosmos tried to live forever, Meteion found that they fell in to apathy, sorrow, and longed for death.

This is what the beast tribe quests in ultima thule I posted screenshots of addressed directly, though? That was not the end of their stories. This was Meteion, the hyper-depressed suicidal villain, and notably biased source, talking about the problem that she directly caused. We deal with the fallout of that in those quests and end up saying that, actually, life is good, and that longing for death is bad, and that even though these beings in Ultima Thule are "just" the memories of bygone civilizations, they're still just as "alive" as we are in this new existence and should go on living as they are.