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

[Arzalis]

So instead we should've left them to suffer and starve to death? The entire system was designed to steal life energy to feed the Endless, and they were already failing due to low energy. The whole system would've collapsed anyway. If anything, if one considers them alive, shutting them down was a mercy. That's literally the entire point of Cahciua's actions.



What hole, exactly? It's made pretty clear that the Endless are not alive in any meaningful sense of the word. They exist, but they don't grow or change or do much of anything outside of their programming, when they're allowed to manifest at all because of the energy crisis. Cahciua and Krile's parents straight out say it, and even Sphene says she's a program with the real queen's memories, not the real queen.

On the topic of us deleting them being a "mercy", that simply wasn't our choice to make. We asked like three people out of potentially thousands or more. Outside of one potential dialog option that gets glossed over, no one even really questions it.

To address the other points:

For one: you've now completely changed arguments. You were basically claiming they were evil and deserved to be deleted. Now you're saying they weren't alive anyway, so it doesn't matter.

Two: The game itself says you're wrong here. The whole point of the shades in the capstone quest for the EW societies is that they are, in fact, alive. Their existence is different, but they are no less deserving of it than anything or anyone else. The Endless are essentially the same (not that these writers knew about or considered that quest) to the point I struggle to see much difference. In the context of that questline, what we're doing at the end of DT seems downright cruel.

Three: If we take both of your arguments as you've presented them, you're contradicting yourself now. You were essentially trying to make the argument that all the Endless are evil for being complicit in genocide, but if they aren't alive, they aren't capable of making choices based on morality. You need to explain how something can simultaneously not be alive and also be evil and/or make any moral judgements.

You shifting arguments here has kinda hurt your point because you can't really claim both.