Dawntrail's Final Zones destroy everything the story has built.

[Palladiamors]

Because it's not life support? It's a bunch of memories stuffed into a .exe and given an algorithm to make it act like the person the memories are based off of. The moral quandary is that it's powered by the souls of ACTUAL living people and not by AAs.

I swear, some of you allow yourselves to be emotionally manipulated so easily

[SirShady]

Nobody can really win with the way this story was shoddily written. For the record, I am of the opinion that the Endless are, or at least could become, sentient living beings. Even if their memories and emotions were being overwritten by the Meso Terminal, what makes us think that there's no possibility of changing that?

Cahciua certainly seems to have all her memories and emotions in tact, and actively makes the decision to somehow (never explained) operate a machine in our reflection. She makes the conscious decision to shut down the Endless, which makes no sense seeing as she herself is the most sentient out of all of them.

The point is, whether you think the Endless are alive or not doesn't really matter. They clearly had the capacity to be more than just AI, but the writers are uncreative hacks who don't know how to write deep meaningful plot points.

[Granyala]

It would’ve actually made more sense if we met her dead but with no recollection of memories, since then culling the alexandrians would be like putting your pet down for mercy. There’s a lot of ways they could’ve wrote that arc better

I have no clue what you want to say but what the writers did here actually makes sense:

We see Namikka dying of old age (natural cause) and taken away.

Later we learn that the souls of people that die that way get extracted and processed to become fuel for the technology,
while their memories end up in a databank (cloud).

Then we visit the holodeck where said memory imprints continue to "live" as interactive programs.

[Palladiamors]

So why didn't we offer a less evil alternative solution to Sphene and the Endless' dilemma, instead of jumping straight to murder? Golbez' plan was arguably quite sinister and immoral indeed, and yet we did not hasten to stick a sword in his gullet for it. No, instead we offered him a 'third way' that proved to be quite anime indeed. I've still yet to hear a reason why this story that so much resembles other tales we've witnessed prior (the Void Arc, the Ultima Thule Allies quests, Shadowbringers itself) is so devoid of the WoL's prior displayed empathy. Dawntrail's ending honestly made me feel like my WoL was a psychopath.

At what point did Sphene give us time for that? What we did was NOT evil, we released souls of the dead back into the Lifestream so they could no longer be used as batteries for a bunch of echoes of the past. Ya'll got a real twisted sense of morality if you think not allowing actual souls to power fake people is evil.

[Palladiamors]

Nobody can really win with the way this story was shoddily written. For the record, I am of the opinion that the Endless are, or at least could become, sentient living beings. Even if their memories and emotions were being overwritten by the Meso Terminal, what makes us think that there's no possibility of changing that?

Cahciua certainly seems to have all her memories and emotions in tact, and actively makes the decision to somehow (never explained) operate a machine in our reflection. She makes the conscious decision to shut down the Endless, which makes no sense seeing as she herself is the most sentient out of all of them.

The point is, whether you think the Endless are alive or not doesn't really matter. They clearly had the capacity to be more than just AI, but the writers are uncreative hacks who don't know how to write deep meaningful plot points.

They didn't, though. Sphene proves that when she has to literally delete herself in order to do something against her programing. The only way they charge is if they are changed. They are nothing more than the echoes of the dead, forced to forevermore pantomime the people the memories belonged to.

[Supersnow845]

They didn't, though. Sphene proves that when she has to literally delete herself in order to do something against her programing. The only way they charge is if they are changed. They are nothing more than the echoes of the dead, forced to forevermore pantomime the people the memories belonged to.

Except the “important” endless all stand in opposition to this

Cahciua as was explained still has memories and doesn’t want to be an endless stuck in living memory. Namikka was happy to be turned off but also incredibly grateful that being in living memory allowed her to finally have some closure with Wuk lamat after she got trapped in the dome. Otis is genuinely interested in the future beyond where his knowledge ends after he is reconstructed into an endless and krile’s parents both appreciated being able to see their daughter but also didn’t want their knowledge to be used for Ill

None of them were ghosts pantomiming the living incarnation they were sapient beings with thoughts and feelings. Sure the background endless played like NPC’s but I mean that’s the same of even living NPC’s. Every named endless acts fully like a real human does, expressing all emotions and not just enforced happiness by the system

But at the end of the day I agree with shady, the writing just isn’t good and it creates these problems

[SirShady]

They didn't, though. Sphene proves that when she has to literally delete herself in order to do something against her programing. The only way they charge is if they are changed. They are nothing more than the echoes of the dead, forced to forevermore pantomime the people the memories belonged to.

The fact that Sphene can make the decision to go against her programming at all shows she's more than just an AI. She's also clearly a separate entity from the normal Endless tasked with managing and sustaining them.

And that still doesn't change the fact that Cahciua clearly has her memories and emotions in tact as an Endless. Even if you're correct, the story is contradicting itself.

Like I said, nobody can win, because the writers are crap.

[Granyala]

The fact that Sphene can make the decision to go against her programming at all shows she's more than just an AI.

Sphene: yes. She has administrative privileges after all.
The other endless do not have such freedoms.

Even Cahciua doesn't. The only thing she really did was hijack one of the monitor trashmobs to communicate with the outside world. At that point, she is the only Endless except from Sphene that even gets any sort of data from outside the system.

[SirShady]

Sphene: yes. She has administrative privileges after all.
The other endless do not have such freedoms.

Even Cahciua doesn't. The only thing she really did was hijack one of the monitor trashmobs to communicate with the outside world. At that point, she is the only Endless except from Sphene that even gets any sort of data from outside the system.

Cahciua feels sadness, seemingly has all her memories in tact, and comes to the conclusion that the Endless should be deleted. These are things that directly contradict what we're told about the Endless being these perfectly content facsimiles. She even makes the decision to go out and explore the outside world before she even explores the fauna section of Living Memory, for whatever reason.

Like I said, nobody can win. It's clear we're putting way more thought into this than the writers ever did. It really doesn't matter. I'm gonna save myself the headache and leave it at this...

Dawntrail's writing is crap.

[Argasun]

It really bothers me to consider that Emet-Selch and the Unsundered would just let this go? They're cannibalizing and burning through the very souls they're trying to save. And I'm to think they couldn't do anything because of a key that was previously stored in a vault? I dunno.

Also the arguments here are so funny because it proves the story is plainly convoluted.