Quote Originally Posted by Eyrilona View Post
I see this thread is still stuck in an endless back and forth between the people who insist that the Endless were not alive because the writers tell us so, and the people who say the writers messed up and what we are told clearly doesn't match what we are shown.

These two groups will never be able to convince the other, because they are not at the same meta level of discussion.

The former builds its arguments from within the confines of what the writers claimed our options were.

The latter point out that the writers could have written anything, and just did a bad job at this plot line because those needn't have been our only options, and shouldn't have, given what we carry over from previous expansions that really should have come up.
I don't think it's that simple. I would personally argue that the writers actually very explicitly tell us that the Endless are alive. At least, they do state that they're made up of memories and souls. We're given Otis as an example of the first experimental Endless who carries soul aether around with him, and Cahciua directly states that she may be composed of aether from someone from the attacks on the city, directly insinuating that she's made up of a soul to at least some extent, and that it isn't just something being consumed, but rather it's a part of her actual composition. The only distinction with them that's made clear is that the Endless are unnatural and that they lack bodies.

Personally, I would consider something made up of memories and a soul to be living.

And to be completely honest, I actually think it's totally moot argument either way. Even if they weren't living, I still don't see why we had to shut them all down. To my knowledge, the only thing we needed to kill was Sphene since she's the one that wanted to kill people. Cahciua states the reason for us to erase the Endless was to take away Sphene's reason for fighting in the first place, her people. However, we fail to mention that to her at all nor does she ever wind up acknowledging that her people are all gone, and we just kill her anyway, and erasing the Endless was totally unnecessary to get to her in the first place.

So... Moral quandaries aside, erasing the Endless is also just a total waste of six hours besides lore and plot that feels unjustified and out of place unless you're totally on board with everything exactly the way the writer intended. Overall, the whole problem would've been fixed if they had someone else read through the writing that bothered to ask these questions so we could get more clarification where it was clearly needed.