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

[Galvuu]

I really don't know how this flies in opposition to previous expansions or what Ishikawa wrote in to Endwalker, though. I mean -- the tagline for the game is "thou must live, die and know."

When civilizations across the cosmos tried to live forever, Meteion found that they fell in to apathy, sorrow, and longed for death. The folly of the Ancients was that they clinged to everything and refused to let go.
(...)

But this checks out with the rest of XIV's stories and themes, for me. We aren't meant to live forever. But I think you -- and some others, it seems? -- are conflating an eternal existence with an artificial one. The points made by Omega and the Cafe at the End of the Universe and Alpha is that the circumstances of your creation don't matter, but you still have to come to and end, eventually.

Isn't it heavily implied that Meteion herself, who was already succumbing to existential dread and despair, caused those very civilizations to descend to nihilistic madness due to her influence through Dynamis?
Like, some of those worlds existed in a state of immortal post-scarcity and enlightenment for an undisclosed amount of time... and suddenly went into a suicidal spiral once she showed up to pose her questions.
Surely an intelligent race that's defeated their own mortality and existed for centuries, if not longer, has pondered the meaning of life and their place in the cosmos a few times, no?
I thought the point that was being made here is that the Meteia and their song were now a universal threat that literally invited these nihilistic thoughts and suicidal urges on any civilization, no matter how enlightened and advanced- hence the threat of the Final Days.
(Just commenting on this particular point, I thought this was a popular interpretation of that whole ordeal)

[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.

[Jojoya]

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."

Except the Endless aren't a form of life. They are a computer simulation, nothing more. They are ChatGPT given a visible avatar based on their "source" code that influences what they say. The original people they replicate are long since dead, with their souls captured for use to either sustain the simulation or revive someone newly dead.

It's weird how all of you are totally ignoring what happens to the original living person's soul and showing no outrage about that while you cling to a computer simulation.

[VoidsentStatus]

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.

Yes and no. If I was to assume that aether was limited in supply in the world (which I'm now doubting due to a few lore reasons), then the state of Alexandria is the state of what the world would be if we didn't have Calamity's wiping off populations and delaying the process. Our world functions under the concept that there's the aether that's currently present in all living beings etc., and then some secondary storage of "travelling aether" in the lifestream that hasn't been used yet. That being said, if you were to multiply all human, animal, and plant life infinitely, you would run out of aether that is available in a given area. We already do, but would be even more heavily incentivized to start "stealing" aether from animals and plants to dilute their population numbers relative to our own, but would run into an issue of running out of food and then having to resort to killing each other. The idea that another living creature is entitled to a life/their aether is a human made idea for a "us vs. them" classification of what sacrifices are fine and what aren't. The fruition of this conflict is stated in the past for Alexandria where they reached the point of fighting for electrope resources. They just switched from having to fight for electrope to having to fight for aether. We're just on vacation at the moment enjoying the luxury because our population hasn't expanded enough to see these problems yet. The void is another example of a shard that had ran out of resources that needed to escape.

We aren't saving ourselves and other worlds, we're just having a fight that we're destined to have early. Which then goes to say, in the future, any shard that runs out of resources that has to travel and consume from another, we will have to put down as well until we are the only shard left. So either we lock into a genocide of all the shards, the same as the ascians, and get nothing for it (unlike them), we get every shard to lay down and die willingly without conflict and let our species go extinct and start over the evolutionary process, or we commit to find a way to produce infinite aether or something similar that would've stopped us from having to kill the Endless in the first place.

P.S. - Reminder that this is Hydaelin's fault for even making a shard vs shard conflict possibility a thing.

[Feronar]

The Endless are basically glorified AI bots in a Star Trek holodeck, along with exibortitant power/aether demands. They are not truly living beings, as they have no souls, as explained in Heritage Found and Origenics.

It's a bit like those companies that are trying to figure out how to upload a deceased person's personality to an AI chatbot, but on steroids. It's not real, it has no soul, you would be talking to a crude facsimile of that person.

[DaveFishnomer]

The Endless are basically glorified AI bots in a Star Trek holodeck, along with exibortitant power/aether demands. They are not truly living beings, as they have no souls, you would know that if you paid attention in Heritage Found and Origenics.

It's a bit like those companies that are trying to figure out how to upload a deceased person's personality to an AI chatbot, but on steroids. It's not real, it has no soul, you would be talking to a crude facsimile of that person.

You accuse me of not reading the story while not reading any of the points I made, you logic is flawed and your understanding of the story is even more flawed, why even comment if you don't bother reading?

btw I spent 5 days on the msq alone, took my sweet ass time, reading every inch of it, if anyone did not bother "reading the story" it is you if you belive they are just "glorified AI"

[Astronema]

I felt like a sith warrior in swtor choosing the darkside options to max my alignment points.

[Conando]

The whole point is they were basically just AI made up of the memories of the dead. They weren't really the dead and were screwing up the life cycle due to their energy being the souls of the living.

[Conando]

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

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.

That's not why we turned off Living Memory. Cahcuia flat out explained that as long as Living Memory was functioning it was sucking the world dry. We turned it off then killed Sphene's AI so she couldn't turn it back on.

[Carin-Eri]

I actually respect the analogy that the writers were perhaps trying to put across here: by all accounts it feels like an equivalent of how the final moments of 'cancelled' MMO must feel right before the servers are shut down for the last time. And a little reminder that nothing lasts forever.