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

[Aulainn]

You cant kill something that isnt alive.

They were the memories of the dead saved in a computer program. They killed other people to fuel their afterlife.

By your logic we should have let the Nazi's continue with their concentration camps to fuel their war machine.

This thread is ridiculous and an obvious troll job.

We had no problem bringing back a dead man who was our friend and transferring their memory into another body. All I ask is for the story to acknowledge the discrepancy in any way.

[MikkoAkure]

We had no problem bringing back a dead man who was our friend and transferring their memory into another body. All I ask is for the story to acknowledge the discrepancy in any way.

I wouldn't say its the same because it was a one-off thing where we transferred the soul of someone from the future back into to his own past self that froze himself in time in the exact same manner we restored the consciousnesses of the rest of the Scions who were in a coma. His existence is also self-sustaining since he's a normal person who requires normal food and without Crystal Tower corruption/interference will later die a natural death.

The Alexandrians in contrast decided to completely deny the normal process of life and death for an entire civilization by preventing souls from reaching the Lifestream and mechanically extracting memory from the soul to shove into a computer until the computer randomly decided they get to walk around Living Memory and then it stitches their memory aether to someone else's soul. It also required plundering the souls of other people against their will to perpetuate it. We could have found another power source but I personally find the entire idea utterly vile and in the meantime the residents would fade and warp the entire area like what happened to the Deadwalk.

[TaleraRistain]

The Alexandrians in contrast decided to completely deny the normal process of life and death for an entire civilization by preventing souls from reaching the Lifestream and mechanically extracting memory from the soul to shove into a computer until the computer randomly decided they get to walk around Living Memory and then it stitches their memory aether to someone else's soul. It also required plundering the souls of other people against their will to perpetuate it. We could have found another power source but I personally find the entire idea utterly vile and in the meantime the residents would fade and warp the entire area like what happened to the Deadwalk.

This is a key point and I think the story isn't really confirming or denying it enough except with Cahciua's comments about it. They were separating the soul and the memories from those who died. Their souls did not go with them into Living Memory. They were repackaged into soul cells for someone else to use. Their memory only went to Living Memory. But if we refer back to what we learned in Endwalker, souls and memories are connected. Even if the original soul was used up by someone else and went to the aetherial sea, the memory did not. And it begs the question of where the true soul of the person lies. That, and the IX influence of the expansion, is why I agree with you that the were being prevented from being reborn into new lives that could make new memories. We had to free them to be able to rejoin the natural cycle of life and death, just like the characters had to destroy the Iifa Tree in IX so Gaian souls could return to the crystal and be reborn.