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

[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?

[LylyAmery]

I don't get why everyone is obsessed with calling them a "facsimile" of life just because they need things killed for them to live, we kill things to stay alive, we have to eat after all. Even if they aren't continuous with the people who once lived, they still live. Given that the game gives us no humane alternative whatsoever it makes perfect sense we would defend ourselves in a dog-eat-dog world, it doesn't make the tragedy of the Endless any less tragic.

The attempts to reduce them to being subhuman are constantly thwarted by the emotions and new experiences they have on a daily basis. It's the same logic the Ascians use to justify their own genocide of us to bring about their civilization once more. Cahciua carried out a sophisticated plan to see about her demise and felt every feeling her organic predecessor would have felt, and somehow to us she is supposed to be subhuman? What separates us from the Ancients who clung so desperately from life is the fact we're willing to recognize the hypocrisy of life and perpetuate ourselves, not try to diminish those we had to fell to keep going. After all, if we were made to feel pathos for every cow, every pig, every chicken, and every pest animal that infests our crop we kill on a daily basis we'd feel pretty awful all of the time, but it's part of being alive that other things cannot live concurrently with us.

However, with these dormant beings left behind in memory, that stay sustained purely on discontent alone, and monsters generated from nowhere... Is there not a hope for these people through whatever energy is spontaneously manifesting all of these things that 100% need energy to exist? I find it worrisome we never explored what mechanism creates these things because refusing to explore every alternative down-the-line would actually reflect terribly on our WoL. Now that the urgency is gone, and all these people are preserved in dormant circuitry I hope we take some care to them in the patch quests, perhaps there is another way.

[Jojoya]

I don't get why everyone is obsessed with calling them a "facsimile" of life just because they need things killed for them to live, we kill things to stay alive, we have to eat after all. Even if they aren't continuous with the people who once lived, they still live. Given that the game gives us no humane alternative whatsoever it makes perfect sense we would defend ourselves in a dog-eat-dog world, it doesn't make the tragedy of the Endless any less tragic.

Do you completely cease to exist in every way when there's a power outage where you are?

Do you have something selectively controlling what memories you have access to and which you don't?

Do you lack a soul?

The attempts to reduce them to being subhuman are constantly thwarted by the emotions and new experiences they have on a daily basis.

What emotions? Go watch The Stepford Wives (the original from the 70s, not the remake). The Endless are just like those title characters except they don't even have a physical form, only a virtual avatar.

What new daily experiences? There was nothing new for them to experience between the time the living were banned from entering LM to when we arrived even when the computer decided it was their turn to be reconstructed again for a short while.

The Endless are as much alive to the FFXIV universe as the Scions are alive in our real world. They're constructed by a computer when someone turns on their PC or console and decide to play the game. They only have the experiences that are programmed for them to experience, only feel the emotions they are programmed to feel. They cease to exist when the game stops playing.

There was tragedy there all right but it wasn't the Endless. The tragedy was the living left without the memories of their loved ones who had died because someone in a distant past decided they shouldn't have access to those memories. Those loved ones were truly forgotten by those capable of remembering.

[LylyAmery]

Do you completely cease to exist in every way when there's a power outage where you are?

Do you have something selectively controlling what memories you have access to and which you don't?

Do you lack a soul?

I do cease to exist if I run out of energy, I die, it's pretty simple.

I do have something selectively controlling what memories I have access to and don't, my subconscious. Just because you can be influenced doesn't mean you aren't real, if someone took a knife to someone's brain, they could most certainly change them, but they would still be alive (barring overzealous slicing).

I do lack a soul because souls, to my knowledge, can't be proven to exist. Sure they exist in the FFXIV world, but even then, why do we endow that half of a living being with any more significance than the other.

Cahciua's existence and actions are in tension with the entire second half of what you said.

[Lersayil]

snip

As much as I agree, I doubt there was a reasonable way to keep the Endless around long term without undermining the writers other pet theme they like pushing: that the endless circle of life and death is a good thing, we shouldn't aspire to break from it, and we shouldn't be sticking around too long or cling to the past either.

If we managed to keep them running on an alternate power source, it would mean that the world now has a self contained, visitable, fully functioning, (semi)eternal, happy afterlife you can opt into at will. I doubt the writers could handle that magnitude of a world changing event in the story well.

No, the Endless probably had to go sooner or later if they wanted to stick to their themes. They should've just... handled it better. Like a lot better.

[Magikazam]

As much as I agree, I doubt there was a reasonable way to keep the Endless around long term.

Agreed. The issue is just as you say, they tackled it badly. It just come as we need to get rid of them cause they are problematic. Will it true, it fail to explore the fact that these being could be considered ''alive'' despite being fantasy world AI. It come off bad since we had an xpac where we shame a certain Ascian who want to kill lesser form of life to save his own people.

without undermining the writers other pet theme they like pushing: that the endless circle of life and death is a good thing, we shouldn't aspire to break from it, and we shouldn't be sticking around too long or cling to the past either.

That kinda weird and go against existing lore too. Immortal being exist, Primal are eternal and can even be summoned back to life if they die, Dragon are immortal. Ancient decided when they ''joined the stars''. Zenos and that one fishmen in leviathan questline can use their Echo to litteraly body swap and cheat dead. In our fight against the former, we even use dynamis and echo to powerup and heal fatal injuries.