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

[Granyala]

Cahciua feels sadness, seemingly has all her memories in tact, and comes to the conclusion that the Endless should be deleted.

Yeah she is definitely the odd one out, I give you that. What I also find odd is that apparently there is no actual supervision by the Meso terminal. I mean it would be trivial to monitor the thoughts of the Endless programs and identify Cahciua as a threat to the system.

It seems like people want a reason to justify culling the Endless. Killing Sphene is easy since she’s the one in charge of harvesting souls. However, reading these replies, I guess people wanted the endless to just wither away once they run out of aether.

I don't think we as players, or the Scions or Wuk actually want that. It was stated multiple times that erasing the Endless was HARD and PAINFUL.

The fact is though: whether we erase them now or whether we just eliminate Sphene and let them run out of energy, the result would be the same either way.

In many respects, us deleting the unsuspecting populace before they know what happens is much more merciful than killing their leader and then letting the system run until it starts to break down, spreading panic, the feeling of being abandoned etc.

[Turtledeluxe]

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.

Players putting more thought into the finer details and consistency of the narrative is a tale as old as the time I started the game. There are too many writers of too many talent levels and specializations to seriously expect something perfectly consistent or always compelling.

[Granyala]

Players putting more thought into the finer details and consistency of the narrative is a tale as old as the time I started the game. There are too many writers of too many talent levels and specializations to seriously expect something perfectly consistent or always compelling.

Not just the case in games I'm afraid.
Think too much about any story, and you WILL find inconsistencies and plot holes.

Humans are imperfect beings, as such our creations will also be imperfect.

That being said: DT's story does have some pretty bloody big and gaping holes.

[Nadda]

That said, how on Earth did anyone at Square think it's even remotely plausible for the characters to just go out and pull the plug on the life support of an entire race of people? This level of genocide is simply disgusting. And why? Because 2 or 3 Endless wanted to die? Setting aside the moral debate of assisted euthanasia, the vast majority of Endless never agreed to this, or even knew it was happening.

"We don't think the Endless are alive, so we aren't guilty of murder." That was Emet-Selch's entire argument for commuting mass genocide. Just two expansions ago, we vehemently opposed this line of thinking and condemned it.

Sphene was the threat and the problem. The Endless posed no threat whatsoever to the people of the Source and Reflections. More than that, they weren't even truly "endless". They were being sustained on a reservoir of aether - one that we were specifically told is running out. Why didn't we simply let the Endless live and die of "old age", when their aether ran out????? This whole section of the game made no sense and was simply uncomfortable to play through.

I'll try to elucidate the situation.

Firstly let me agree I did not like having to "pull the plug"

I did not like that other "endless" didn't get to choose. Or at most elect themselves to return to the Aetherial Sea similar to how the Ancients did.

The whole time I thought well... if Aether cannot sustain the endless then why not use Dynamis? The more plentiful energy source that's fueled by vibes seemed to be what Living Memory was all about was good vibes.

With that out of the way.

The Unlost City - Living Memory - The Golden City.

It's an elaborate purgatory. Not individuals themselves but the reconstituted forms of stored memories. (Same reason we can't taste this realms version of Food - because it's not food, it's synthetic imaginary food it only tastes like what those people would remember Ice Cream or Popcorn taste like and it'll only be their most fondest memory of that experience it offers no nutritional value)

in a sense, it is an Anti-Aetherial Sea.

When something dies it is supposed to return to the Aetherial Sea to be redistributed in that world to maintain a balance. The land itself FEEDS on Aether to sustain actual real life. This is one of the reasons why we stopped primal summoning for example because Primals drain our stars life energy.

In order to sustain these half-lives the Endless have put a tax on their reflection causing them to have to attempt to assimilate worlds to acquire "more aether" so they can keep this going.

These memories of the long deceased have been dead for some for hundreds of years. They've been "living" off borrowed time at the cost of the Star itself.

In order for Living Memory to continue would have been the result of countless genocides in a scale akin to a rejoining.

The situations these Endless were put in was a cruel coping mechanism for death to spare them of the great suffrage the peoples of Alexandria endured in their war torn past.

By Pulling the plug, we release that remaining aether of their manifested memories back to their full souls revitalizing and saving the Star. Both our Source and this reflection.

[SirShady]

Players putting more thought into the finer details and consistency of the narrative is a tale as old as the time I started the game. There are too many writers of too many talent levels and specializations to seriously expect something perfectly consistent or always compelling.

This is true, but I've come to expect better from FFXIV. I had problems in Endwalker with how the WoL had no choice but to idolize Venat even if we disagree with how she went about The Final Days and genociding her own people. This is on a whole other level though.

These are very basic questions the writers should be asking themselves during the writing process. How do we show that the Endless are just facsimiles? How can we be sure the story is having the intended emotional affect on the player? Are we leaving this part open to interpretation? I wish the answer to that last question was "yes", but sadly the Disney music at the end suggests otherwise. And there's tons of this present throughout all of Dawntrail. It's clear they just didn't care and figured, "Eh, play whatever music fits the intention and then we won't have to actually put work into the writing."

[SirShady]

Yeah she is definitely the odd one out, I give you that. What I also find odd is that apparently there is no actual supervision by the Meso terminal. I mean it would be trivial to monitor the thoughts of the Endless programs and identify Cahciua as a threat to the system.

Yeah, the rules are never made clear. Why does Sphene have to delete her personality in order to kill people to maintain the Endless? Why is she allowed to do this in the first place? Why does Cahciua operate differently from all the other Endless? Why doesn't she act characteristically with the person she's based on? Why is she allowed out of Living Memory? How does she manage to control a robot outside of Living Memory? So many questions that will more than likely never be answered.

[Granyala]

Yeah, the rules are never made clear. Why does Sphene have to delete her personality in order to kill people to maintain the Endless? Why is she allowed to do this in the first place? Why does Cahciua operate differently from all the other Endless? Why doesn't she act characteristically with the person she's based on? Why is she allowed out of Living Memory? How does she manage to control a robot outside of Living Memory? So many questions that will more than likely never be answered.

At least Sphene is easy to explain: She is an amalgam of an AI designed to keep the Endless alive at all costs and her old personality.
After Zoraal-Ja's demise she has full administrative power, all remaining checks have been removed.

Eventually the softness of the personality conflicted with the primary directive of the AI, the AI seized control and deleted the personality.

As for Cahciua: it's a mystery how she got into Living Memory.
Supposedly, the rebel gang doesn't wear regulators at all, so it's kinda puzzling how she ended up being an Endless in the first place unless the Alexandrians store all memories of the dying, whether they wore regulators during their life or not. Still, Shetona are long lived, so 30yrs is not long enough for her to die of old age. If she died in an accident / fight, she must have been super lucky that the Alexandrians were still able to digi-nab her memories.

Why she is allowed to act this way? The answer to that is simple and a bit mind boggling in it's banality: Because the system has not been designed with internal security risks in mind. The Alexandrians could not conceive of a memory altered "always happy" Endless deliberately wanting to end it all and shut down the system, so they never bothered to guard it.

Energy and signals flow freely between Living Memory and the Source (Sphene clearly uses that to communicate and appear to their people), so communication via robo-derp is easy once Cahciua learned how to control one. The bots are still there after we shut down the zone, so they are actual objects with independent power sources, rather than Mirages.

It also stands to reason that they are also built in Everkeep, so Cahciua only needed to learn how to hack one and could then do so with one that is outside of Living Memory, eliminating the problem of getting a physical object out w/o having access to the portal.

[Karkarov]

The "endless" are just AI recreations of people based on what a computer thinks was their happiest moment after analyzing their memory data. They are already dead, they are not people, everything they experience is artificial, fake, programmed by a computer, and you are blatantly told they have no souls. Even Sphene (if you listen to what you are being told and pay attention) is just a AI copy of a dead person who has had her "prime directive" hard coded into her. Even she has no choice in anything she does, her programming forces her to prioritize keeping the endless online.

You didn't "genocide" anyone, you turned off a server.

[sindriiisgaming]

Not really? We're you reading the Cs? In order to sustain those phantom abominations people In other shards would have had to die. So it needed to be destroyed. The recreation of otis was what did it for me. I knew that place was aweful as soon as I saw him

[sindriiisgaming]

none of them were ghosts pantomiming the living incarnation they were sapient beings with thoughts and feelings.

No dude. They were ai. They were programed to think and act the way there past self did. But they're about as much people as chat gpt is