Finished the MSQ - Feels bad, pushed to do evil [Spoilers inside]

[Tethan]

Isn't the problem that they have like.. a billion themes in one zone/plot?

It's about the nature of being alive!

It's about accepting death!

It's about unsustainable consumption!

It's about family!

It's about uhhh... peace? War? Accepting others? Listening? Not listening? Hear? Feel? Think? Wuk... Lamat.... is the best. yes i was wrong imsosorry

I am losing my mind. I am off, done for today.

[Roda]

Of course, this scenario doesn't work with Erenville's mom, but whatever, everything needs a rewrite to work anyway. This would get the message across and STILL BE SAD IF DONE CORRECTLY.

Hell you could make it work with his mom not being dead and instead his dad was the endless husk. She's still a part of oblivion and has to help him through both meeting his father for the first time and to help him process that it's still not his dad and that he has to let that missed connection go.

[Barachim]

Late to the discussion, but I don't see how our choice was evil. The Endless were literally living on borrowed time. To continue to exist as they are, they require specific Aether. Living Aether. That source is finite. Sphene could have prolonged the inevitable by another several hundred or thousand more years, but it would eventually all end, once she depleted all available reflections of their Aether. That means billions of deaths, just so she could keep the memories of people alive who had long since departed.

We made the only logical and available choice.

[Zaniel]

YMMV but I just chose to look at it like this: Normally when we kill something that is harbouring captured souls we get the "souls are now freed" scene with them departing, like with Zoraal Ja or Pandemonium 9 raid and others throughout the course of the overall game. With the Endless we just get an electrical short circuit and no soul when they puff out, it's sort of a gameplay thing to reinforce what a number of the NPCs say, ie they aren't alive, they don't have souls, they are just software facsimiles running inside a digital themepark. It's just closing a chat window with ChatGPT, it might SEEM real during a conversation but it's just a complex algorithm and they aren't even self aware, they just put up an exceptional Turing Test. I mean we had a huge portion of Shadowbringers with us having to be very specific about retaining ALL the elements of a person, both memory and aether-soul, without both, they really aren't a person anymore.

As some others have said, the main problem is that there was no/minimal discussion or intellectualisation or emotional dealing done with the concept during the MSQ, it was just a speedrun with everyone nodding.

EDIT: A big difference between Living Memory and Ultima Thule was that in Ultima we start out saying "they are just ghosts" but afterwards, especially after the tribal quest we sort of come to the conclusion that somehow due to the unique nature of UT and Dynamis that somehow these copied memories or ghosts have miraculously started to truly exist again, maybe even having souls again. It's not super locked down but its a lot more dealt with than it is in Digital Disneyland.

[Lady_Silvermoon]

You're forgetting something very important.

For the Endless to exist, someone else needs to die.

The residences of Ultima Thule don't need have other people die in order to stay alive. Neither do Alpha and Omega. And the entire reason Emet Selch was wrong was not because he wanted to bring back his loved ones... It was because his whole method of doing that was genocide on a cosmic level.

But we offer to help her find another way to sustain them which means we believe there is an alternative method AND that we should help her find it. The only reason there is a boss fight is because she turns down our help, even though she was willing to work with Zoraal Ja for 30 years, she couldn't give us 30 minutes when it seems the Endless can be stored on the servers indefinitely, so there is no reason for her sudden impatience. The writers know this, and so they throw in some garbage about her being controlled by the program which people cling to like their lives depend on it, but no other resident, especially Cahciua shows any indication of being controlled. People say these are only hollow imitations, but Erenville attests that the person we're speaking with seems to be his mother in every conceivable way. She even found a way to escape the Matrix and run a rebellion on the Source. That was by any metric a person, and releasing her aether was the destruction of a person. And while she may have wanted that, did they all want that? Did the guy who wanted to finally marry his love want to be released right then? And given they were memory aether separated from a soul by artificial means, we don't even know if they get to hang around in the aetherial sea watching things unfold. We may have totally and completely ended their existence without a second thought and no chance of any kind of reincarnation because if Origenics didn't wash away memories more effectively than the aetherial sea then people's personalities would constantly change as they burn through souls.

And keep in mind, the Sundered are made up of shredded pieces of Ancient, their existence is also bought with blood. To erase them all without the slightest attempt to preserve them makes us no different than Ascians. "Inferior forms of life, needs us to survive, kill them all."

[Bright-Flower]

Sphene ultimately gives us no choice in the matter. She refuses to listen to reason. And whether that is good writing or not, it doesn't give our characters much option. Either leave her be and let her single mindedly consume the souls of other worlds to fuel her unsustainable afterlife or shut it down and stop her from harvesting other worlds and civilizations to keep it going. Sphene is basically Wuk Lamat's 'I will defend my peoples happiness' motivation taken to extremes where she will commit atrocities upon others to carry it out, and intentionally decides her gentle/kind nature is a hindrance to that and is off to delete it. So once that memory deletion is over the Queen Eternal would only be LESS OPEN to arguments to stop doing it.

All while HER PEOPLE AND CIVILIZATION ARE ALIVE AND WELL IN SOLUTION 9 AND HERITAGE FOUND. Her civilization and people are not in danger of being destroyed, just this digital afterlife theme park she's constructed. They're even anchored onto the Source now and can travel through the bubble.

[Loggos]

And keep in mind, the Sundered are made up of shredded pieces of Ancient, their existence is also bought with blood. To erase them all without the slightest attempt to preserve them makes us no different than Ascians. "Inferior forms of life, needs us to survive, kill them all."

Those scenarios are not the same. The reason we need to erase the endless is because they keep buying their lives with blood (or Sphene AI does for them). They need to consume other worlds' life force endlessly to continue their existence.
The sundering was a (terrible) one-time act but the resulting sundered life doesn't need to perpetually vampirise other life forms' life force to keep existing. The blood price was paid in the past (and the sundering was committed by Venat, not by the not-yet-existing, resulting sundered life forms) so there is no logical reason to retroactively punish the sundered. As terrible as it was for the Ancients, the circumstances that ended their civilisation do not justify Emet's/the Ascians' actions or world view that sundered beings are lesser.

But the endless are threatening our survival in the present, i.e., they are about to destroy people that are currently still alive (vs. Emet wanting to bring back his dead civilisation). Plus, they are threatening the survival of infinite other worlds in the future, as well, because their existence is built on an inherently perpetually vampiristic system that can never be satisfied. Once it runs out of energy somebody new has to die.

Killing the endless is a terrible act we have to commit to save ourselves and all the other worlds that would fall victim to Sphene in the future.

This does not apply to the sundered.

We can debate the logic of SE's conclusion that there was no other way and their incompetence at handling the themes they have chosen but canonically at that point in the game we had no choice. I'm critical of that canon too. I think it's bad writing. But in the end it is (terrible garbage) canon and in that context we had no other option.

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Edit for clarification: The reason why I think this is canon/we couldn't do anything else is because I believe Sphene is too far gone already (not just in the last zone - though in addition I agree that the time limit we had there would have made any alternative impossible).
Obviously this is open to interpreation and I don't think people who view it differently are wrong.
I think this is just one of the points that are (unintentionally) left unanswered by the MSQ.

But imo, she is already willing to destroy a stream of worlds when she first sets foot in Tural (that's literally the reason why she came here), not for her living people but exclusively for the endless in her digital afterlife.
As many have pointed out before her actual people do not need her conquering and harvesting the life force of other planets to exist. Even though she does spend time with them and tries to improve their lives she also has, in some way, completely lost sight of her living people because she is hell-bent on believing that their true happiness lies in Living Memory anyways.

To me this shows that she is already a fanatic when she arrives in our world. Due to this being her plan/mindset from the get go I don't interpet her moments where she wants to talk to us (e.g., during the Solution 9 tour) as actual possibilities for her to change course (esp. since she is already a program) and more as conflicting emotions of sadness and guilt by an entity who vehemently believes there is no other way.
Imo her view of reality has already been completely warped and the idea that her dead people take precedence over everything else is (in my understanding) the root cause of all her actions.

[Ozmandis]

Nonetheless, I'm glad the thousand years old dillemma of knowing if something is alive has been answered thanks to FFXIV players.

[Lady_Silvermoon]

*snip*

The thing is, if we believed that was the only solution then we wouldn't have offered to help her find another. And the shards can be rejoined. The Ancients could be restored except that we're currently using their parts. Personally, I'm not down for returning them, but I can still understand why the Ascians decided to play repo man. And that's exactly how we acted. No effort to find any way of sustaining them that wasn't harmful to us. We just declared them malformed creatures and hit delete when the only thing that kept us from trying to help them was their leader wouldn't cooperate.

The Endless aren't about to destroy people. If they were, sure is weird how we're putting on plays for them and buying them ice cream. No, Sphene was about to destroy the Source for them, the same way Varis was willing to drop a moon on us for Garlemald but I doubt anyone would advocate wiping out the Garleans so he'd have no one to fight for.

Again, your insistence that the only way these people can be sustained is through death flies in the face of our offer to help her find alternative means. That offer means the Scions believe there are alternative means and the universe has other immortal beings that don't require life force to exist.

If killing the Endless was a terrible act we had to do to save ourselves, why did we go on boat rides? Eat popcorn? Visit a museum in the middle of these grave and terrible acts? Also the hope was she'd stop if we took them all out as she wouldn't have anyone to provide aether to, but she didn't stop, we had to kill her to stop her, so deleting the Endless was pointless. We could have left them as is and they would have remained in the system if something destroyed them, giving us all the time in the world to find a way to preserve the ones that wanted to be preserved, even if they weren't people (which I don't believe), we casually deleted swaths of their history and culture in expansion that espoused the importance of working together for a brighter future and appreciating one another's culture. Oh, the irony. We even deleted a museum with information on our own history that's not known on the Source. The last zone is embarrassing.

It doesn't matter how far gone Sphene is because we beat her to death just like we beat everything else to death. We've gone to the edge of the Universe and punched despair in the face, deleting the Endless in no way impacted our fight with Sphene. Either we punched her to death or she was gonna drain the Source anyway. Erasing the Endless had no impact on the outcome. We thought it might dissuade her, but it did not. And imagine erasing an entire people and their history on the grounds that it might discourage their leader. Yikes.

[MikkoAkure]

If killing the Endless was a terrible act we had to do to save ourselves, why did we go on boat rides? Eat popcorn? Visit a museum in the middle of these grave and terrible acts? Also the hope was she'd stop if we took them all out as she wouldn't have anyone to provide aether to, but she didn't stop, we had to kill her to stop her, so deleting the Endless was pointless. We could have left them as is and they would have remained in the system if something destroyed them, giving us all the time in the world to find a way to preserve the ones that wanted to be preserved, even if they weren't people (which I don't believe), we casually deleted swaths of their history and culture in expansion that espoused the importance of working together for a brighter future and appreciating one another's culture. Oh, the irony. We even deleted a museum with information on our own history that's not known on the Source. The last zone is embarrassing.

The whole point was to understand the people before we shut it down.

I still don't understand why you believe that having an entire population of dead people just hanging around doing nothing is a good idea. Alexandria still has a population of living people but you are so tied up in being upset over us turning off the city's graveyard. They are not "an entire people", they are the dead memories of previously living people given a facsimile of life. They have already lived and are now overstaying their welcome and going against the laws of nature at the cost of the lives of the living. The culture, the people, the history is still there, alive, and thriving. We just cut the gross codependency their AI leader had with their people, not letting each other go. The dead of Alexandria need to return to the Lifestream to be reincarnated and reenter the cycle to be a part of the world again. They don't need this half-existence and after centuries it feels like it would become more like hell than heaven.

After the MSQ, even Constancy disagrees with the methods to perpetuate his existence and we find out exactly what happens to Endless bereft of aether in that same quest: their memories pollute the area and it becomes overcome with monsters. The areas we have access to in Living Memory that weren't already lost already showed extreme signs of degradation and fiends were rampant. All of the areas were just facades with the curtain pulled back to show empty nothingness just beyond the alleyways.

Also, considering that books from the library just fell to the floor when their owners poofed and the conservation land still exists, the objects inside of the museum would as well. Oblivion mentions making forays into Living Memory to learn more about that reflection and their past. Did you do the subsequent quests?