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

[Aurumis]

While people have brought up Emet.

It's not us that did what Emet did. It was Sphene effectively repeating what Emet wanted to do to us, but with a much worse and less sustainable result.

It's not even the same. One thing is wanting to make the world as how it was instead of having 14 reflections (and also it's people being torn in 14 different soul fragments and pieces) into what they trully are. We fusing with Ardbert and the other reflections should be the final destination of the story or the world now that Meteion is not going to destroy everything, but well, that's not going to happen. The thing is, we aren't dead, we are separated into many other beings, the world too. It's state right now it's artificial, no matter how much you want to defend it, it was done because there was none other solution and Hydaelyn just tried some way of salvation, but it's still artificial. The endless are just dead people made into AI using souls as fuel and interrupting the cycle of life.

[TheMightyMollusk]

The Endless prolong their lives by capturing souls, separating their memories into storage (if the person had a regulator; if not, sucks for them, I guess), and then pasting another person's memories over the blanked soul, with no more thought to it than I would have wiping an SD card. And it's shown among the people in the Outskirts and the Alexandrians in Solution 9 that they know all about it, they just don't care much. At best, they're parasitic; their existence cannot continue without consuming every other living thing they come across. At worst, they're complicit in multiple genocides with a queen who fully intends to commit more.

Sphene was kinda giving me vibes of the Reapers from Mass Effect. Partly because hopping into a new drone body every time she used up her last one evoked Harbinger, but also because she's controlled by an AI following a poorly-thought-out command just like the Catalyst. Sphene's program is a little more focused ("Preserve Alexandria at any cost" over "Preserve life at any cost"), but the result is similar. People are harvested, their minds are uploaded, and their substance (bodies for the Reapers, souls for Sphene) are used to fuel the cycle to continue doing it again and again. It's technically following the goal, "preserving" them by storing them in a computer network, but in the worst possible way.

So no, I don't particularly feel it was an evil deed to shut it down. Because the cycle would not have ended any other way. The fact that we pulled the trigger rather than kicking it down to the next world to do it (hey, Refusal ending!), doesn't change the fact that it was unsustainable.

[VoidsentStatus]

We also have not met a technological civilisation that wanted to keep all their dead alive for all eternity, so no, we haven't met a civilisation that could do it no problems.

Actually we have. Lore Encyclopedia vol3 from Meteia's travels across the great expanse.

"The Ea are believed to have once been organic creatures composed of aether like any other, though information concerning this earlier stoage of their existence is limited. Having achieved the pinnacle of technological advancement, they possessed the secrets of biological immortaility."

"Without flesh, the Ea do not require food, per se, instead consuming pure aether to prevent senescence."

The Ea's however, weren't concerned with limited supplies of aether to deal with their immortality, but instead were concerned with the expanse of the universe ending in a giant freezed state. The implication being that they found an infinite resource for the creation of aether.

We also have:

The Omicrons: "over time, they rebuilt and replaced portions of themselves and converted their very consciousness into data that could be transmitted and preserved."

The Nibirun: "After obtaining the key to immortality, however, the molding of subsequent generations lost all meaning. ----At last, they devoted themselves to the creation of a perfect world to suit the perfect people they had become. And when they invariably succeeded, they discovered they had naught else to strive for. Without cause for sorrow or frustration, they were bereft of joy. To what end did they linger, undying, in a universe that was destined for oblivion?"

Before various expansions, we didn't have knowledge of time travel, memory altering, swapping, and now we have aether/soul/memory extraction/purification, which is a step toward what other civilizations have achieved before which seems to be a state of infinite existence/resources. Monkey wrenches in terms of what's possible or known get introduced regularly so to say that a solution isn't possible factually is incorrect.

[Mikey_R]

Actually we have. Lore Encyclopedia vol3 from Meteia's travels across the great expanse.

...

You missed the important bit there. The Dead. None of those civilisations wanted to preserve the dead, they just made themselves, the living, immortal.

[VoidsentStatus]

You missed the important bit there. The Dead. None of those civilisations wanted to preserve the dead, they just made themselves, the living, immortal.

The issue is you have to define the dead to begin with. If existence is tied to memory like the story does, noone is technically dead in a traditional sense. Their existence is just scattered/diluted beyond consciousness, but not technically gone. There's not going to be a technical difference between me taking the memories of a "dead body" and "creating a new person" vs. having the same memories of a "living body" shifted into a new shell repeatedly. Death is only a concept in so far as we consider that to be the ending of someone's existence. When we say "someone died and came back", it's misleading because proper death is a term that there is no coming back from. We don't call sleeping death, we don't call being unconscious death, we don't call the heart stopping alone death, we don't even consider when the brain doesn't have activity anymore to be death fully. Either the person you and the other are referring to is called "dead" and all of these immortal societies are people dying and being reborn after the current shell's aether is gone, or all of them are never classified as dead to begin with.

[Sephi_Ravour]

.... and the reactions of the characters left a bitter taste for a lot of us. It may have just been muddled writing, where what they say doesn't seem to match what we see.

This is the whole crux of this dilemma. The Endless are indistinguishable from "real" npcs, the way they are written and portrayed. They show emotions, feelings, dreams the same way as any other npc. If the writters wanted to portray them just as computer programs, they should have added more clear differences in their behaviour.

[TheMightyMollusk]

This is the whole crux of this dilemma. The Endless are indistinguishable from "real" npcs, the way they are written and portrayed. They show emotions, feelings, dreams the same way as any other npc. If the writters wanted to portray them just as computer programs, they should have added more clear differences in their behaviour.

Why? We had all the context we needed to know what was going on by that point. Making them more obviously fake would've been throwing water on a river.

[Arzalis]

So no, I don't particularly feel it was an evil deed to shut it down. Because the cycle would not have ended any other way. The fact that we pulled the trigger rather than kicking it down to the next world to do it (hey, Refusal ending!), doesn't change the fact that it was unsustainable.

This is like saying "Everyone will die eventually, so murder is fine."

I do agree it was unsustainable, but it wasn't the individual people who were going around finding people to hunt down and live off of. They actually didn't do anything wrong. You can stop the system itself without directly ending the existence of everyone currently inside it. Maybe that leads to them eventually dying off, maybe another solution can be found. It doesn't matter now because we literally shut the door permanently.

I don't believe it's a hard concept to understand stopping Sphene from harming other worlds, but letting the Endless exist as they are. They're literally harmless without Sphene and/or the dimensional fusion device.

[SirShady]

Why? We had all the context we needed to know what was going on by that point. Making them more obviously fake would've been throwing water on a river.

Yes, a 5 minute conversation with the one Endless who escaped the system with her emotions and memories in tact telling us they don't have the capacity to feel sadness or have painful memories was all the convincing I needed to delete them all.

Bad writing.

[TheMightyMollusk]

This is like saying "Everyone will die eventually, so murder is fine."

No. It's like saying "Genocide to keep a few people alive is wrong, especially when the genocide has to constantly be repeated."

I do agree it was unsustainable, but it wasn't the individual people who were going around finding people to hunt down and live off of. They actually didn't do anything wrong. You can stop the system itself without directly ending the existence of everyone currently inside it.

So.....because the queen was the one doing all the genocides, it was okay for everyone else to consume the life energy of other reflections?