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

[Kaecilius]

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.

I think that this is the crux of the issue for a lot of us. There is a concept worthy of discussion here, but everything gets jammed into the last zone and mostly ignored and handwaved away to make room to the recurrent theme of letting go of the past without looking at the implications of our actions.

[Embran]

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.

Longing for death is bad.

But so is clinging to life.

The whole point is that when it's time to go, it's time to go. Ultima Thule doesn't make an effort to say "hey, living forever is cool and valid, actually," it's saying that there IS meaning out there, and life IS worth living, and you CAN find that meaning for yourself.

The *problems* Meteion found were real. The conclusion she arrived at was not.

[Tethan]

If the point of this, the theme if you will, is about letting go and accepting death, and the Endless are just hollow reflections of long dead people, then why not portray them as such?

Imagine it went like this instead:

You arrive and it's all beautiful and nice and everyone is friendly, just as in game now.
But slowly you begin to notice things are off. Events repeat themselves, people behave strangely. You meet Krile's parents, but they cannot perceive her as a grown adult, to them she is still an infant.
You realize they are just a recording, forever on repeat, perfectly preserved in memory, but unable to grow, change, live.

Of course, this scenario doesn't work with Erenville's mom, but whatever, everything needs a rewrite to work anyway. This would get the message across and STILL BE SAD IF DONE CORRECTLY.

I have personally seems several family members succumb to dementia and alzheimers, it is the most horrific thing you can imagine. To see your loved ones still around but merely hollow shells of themselves, alive, technically, but not really there. What they do with the endless is the opposite. They are happy and in their prime and by all metrics we can account for, truly alive.

The way they went about this is ALL wrong. As everything else. I certainly won't waste more energy on this travesty of a plot. Those are my thoughts.

[DreadCrow]

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.

You're forgetting something very important.

For the Endless to exist, someone else needs to die.

The residences of Ultima Thule don't need have other people die in order to stay alive. Neither do Alpha and Omega. And the entire reason Emet Selch was wrong was not because he wanted to bring back his loved ones... It was because his whole method of doing that was genocide on a cosmic level.

[duckorz]

You're forgetting something very important.

For the Endless to exist, someone else needs to die.

The residences of Ultima Thule don't need have other people die in order to stay alive. Neither do Alpha and Omega. And the entire reason Emet Selch was wrong was not because he wanted to bring back his loved ones... It was because his whole method of doing that was genocide on a cosmic level.

Again, that's what's (ostensibly) necessary for them to *physically* exist, it's stated by the text itself that their memories are still stored in Living Memory even when no aether is being used to render them as living people. That's why there are a ton of Endless "waiting" to get their bodies. Why did those Endless need to be shut off when they weren't taking up any aether?

(This entire theme is also very confusing when we just did all of the stuff with Zero and the transactional nature of aether and how consuming stuff like plants/animals/apples/meat is just like the voidsents method of exchanging corporeal aether; I'm not entirely sure why they needed to contrive the fact that it needed to be the aether of living people to sustain the Endless. Whats the point of all the stuff with Zero if we're just going to say that only using the aether of living human beings is bad and that all other modes of of this dynamic are fine. Even just thematically it would have given me more to think about to have it call into question the ethics of our own consumption and our own preservation at the cost of other forms of life and other cultures, but yeah. This is a pretty complicated moral and ethical issue that the MSQ explicitly insisted we weren't supposed to think about)

[Bright-Flower]

The system had to be shut down to stop Sphene from devouring world after world to keep these soulless memories running in her digital afterlife. Sphene's plan was not only evil but unsustainable anyway. Living Memory was a mistake and one we had to destroy in order to stop her.

[Soxxx]

The system had to be shut down to stop Sphene from devouring world after world to keep these soulless memories running in her digital afterlife. Sphene's plan was not only evil but unsustainable anyway. Living Memory was a mistake and one we had to destroy in order to stop her.

The big issue I had is that I don't really understand why the system had to be shut down. Cahciua tells us that we're shutting them down so that Sphene no longer has a reason/motivation to collect new souls for her people, and will therefore lose the will to fight. However, after shutting them all down, we don't ever tell Sphene about what we did at all nor does she ever indicate having knowledge of all of her people being erased, so... Why did the system actually have to be shut down? From my perspective, I would have liked to simply leave the Endless alive to run down their existing supply of souls until they run out, and I feel like we could have just gone directly to Sphene to fight her like we wound up doing anyway. I'm not sure if I missed something, if you happen to have any additional info.

[Kaecilius]

But slowly you begin to notice things are off. Events repeat themselves, people behave strangely.

This would have been ideal in my opinion. Drive home the point that these are not real people, they cannot grow, they don't even understand what they are doing, they are just doing it. The problem is that you can't have Cahciua if you do this.

[SDaemon]

The system had to be shut down to stop Sphene from devouring world after world to keep these soulless memories running in her digital afterlife. Sphene's plan was not only evil but unsustainable anyway. Living Memory was a mistake and one we had to destroy in order to stop her.

For real. Living Memory was completely unsustainable and eventually Sphene would run out of worlds to massacre to keep her memory archives running and they'd shut down on their own. It just so happens that Sphene's target to eradicate life to sustain her memories was our world and we're fighting back. Had Sphene been willing to take any of the chances offered to her to find another way, perhaps a different outcome could have been found.

[duckorz]

The big issue I had is that I don't really understand why the system had to be shut down. Cahciua tells us that we're shutting them down so that Sphene no longer has a reason/motivation to collect new souls for her people, and will therefore lose the will to fight. However, after shutting them all down, we don't ever tell Sphene about what we did at all nor does she ever indicate having knowledge of all of her people being erased, so... Why did the system actually have to be shut down? From my perspective, I would have liked to simply leave the Endless alive to run down their existing supply of souls until they run out, and I feel like we could have just gone directly to Sphene to fight her like we wound up doing anyway. I'm not sure if I missed something, if you happen to have any additional info.

I think it would have been way more poignant too for them to have to contend with their inevitable mortality after we cut off the supply of new souls to keep them going, letting them die off gradually. They would have had to choose which new memories they wanted to make with their limited time left, had to figure out how to get over their past and move on to rest in peace, and would have had to learn to let go, themselves. Funnily enough, there are yellow quests that deal with this, so it's not like EVERYONE in the writers room didn't foresee this being an issue.

Again, I'm fine with Living Memory being shut down. People are right - it was unsustainable and required the suffering of the living to preserve itself. That's why like, the evil organization behind it is called "Preservation". My problem is that characters do not make this argument when shutting them down. They sidestep the meat of the matter entirely; they just say that we shouldn't feel any guilt at all for turning the TV off and getting rid of entities that don't really exist or aren't really alive anyway. Why shouldn't we feel emotionally rocky about doing this? The music seems to want me to feel melancholic and sad. The theme of "letting go of the inevitably mortal" should make me feel sad. Why are all the characters telling me I shouldn't feel sad? Why undermine your own emotional messaging?

Most of all - the game, after telling me I shouldn't feel any guilt or attachment at all for these non-living; the entire emotional climax of the narrative rests with the narrative asking us to care about... Sphene...? Not only an Endless, but also an AI Endless thats programmed to not have her own agency...? This is the writer trying to have their cake and eat it too. Why would I care about Sphene at all if you just spent this entire last zone telling me I shouldn't care?