Problematic notion about Zone 5 & 6 story bits.

[PorxiesRCute]

1.) The nature of life in the universe.

For something in the world of Final Fantasy XIV to be alive, it has to have three things; a body, a mind, and a soul. This isn't an opinion; it's a scientific fact. This is why ashkin (undead) aren't alive; zombies and skeletons have bodies but no souls, while ghosts are souls with no bodies. Since Endless lack true bodies and souls, Endless are not alive. Hell, we're told as much. By the Endless.

By one Endless. That's the thing. More of the Endless should have been aware of our plan and should have been telling us to go for it.

3.) The Endless are essentially ghosts with questionable sentience, let alone sapience.

As mentioned above, with ashkin, the Endless are ONLY memory. No body, non soul. Basically, digital ghosts. When you shut down the terminals, you're flat out told that some will remain behind if they have "unfinished business". And while some of those that remain do seem to realize other people have disappeared, they seem unaware that the world around them has changed to a shade of grey.

And what about Cahciua and Krile's parents? They're every bit as sentient as any main character.

The background NPCs are less developed because they're background NPCs.

4.) Our actions are defined, in game, as a tragedy, but really the ONLY choice.

We're not doing what we're doing out of malice. We're doing what we're doing because it's the only thing we can do, in order to shave our world and other worlds, because the Endless are unsustainable. If we didn't do something, everyone in the Source would die, as a sacrifice to keep around the memory of the dead. And eventually, it would spread into other sources... And eventually, in time, still fail, since their isn't enough energy in the universe to keep the machine running indefinitely. So in time, a countless number of lives will be lost and everything still ends the same.

Our actions are defined in game as a tragedy because the pretty landscape is going away and because the memories of the Endless are being erased, but it's okay because we'll remember them, which is exactly the same thing as digital recreations of them walking around and being aware of their surroundings.

I agree it was a tragedy and it was unsustainable, but the devs wrote a story where our only option was to mass-delete a society of people who appear to be completely self-aware. That's messed up.

[MikkoAkure]

By one Endless. That's the thing. More of the Endless should have been aware of our plan and should have been telling us to go for it.

They seemed apathetic to the whole thing. We weren't being sneaky, we shut them off one terminal at a time and no one lifted a finger. One NPC you can talk to even says he's aware of Sphene's plan and doesn't care whether she succeeds or fails. Constancy himself says that he doesn't agree that his existence should continue at the cost of others' souls.

I agree it was a tragedy and it was unsustainable, but the devs wrote a story where our only option was to mass-delete a society of people who appear to be completely self-aware. That's messed up.

The existence they had was more of a dream than actually being alive. They had every whim catered to them and even "serendipitous" encounters were rigged by the terminals. They were taken in and out of consciousness at random because only 1/10th of the population could exist at the same time. The place they "lived" in was run down for some time and just behind the facades the place was filled with fiends.

The whole thing was made by a people who were so upset about losing their young princess that they turned her into a program, who in turn was so protective over her people that she boxed their dead up into a computer and erased their memories from the living because she couldn't let go and her and her people became codependent on each other. And then to keep those memories of dead people dreaming along in a dilapidated Disneyland, she needs to harvest the souls of the living from other civilizations and whole worlds.

Now that's what's messed up.

[Iscah]

Yea I had more to say to that point, but I kind of realized that it would deviate from the point too much.
But what you gotta understand is that Cahciua is from the source, so ofcourse she thinks it's natural for the dead to go the the lifestream.
But that isn't necessarily what the Alexandrians believe, we barely know what the Alexandrians think of the system in the first place.

I could argue that the Aetherial Sea is just a different version of Living Memory, they just operate differently with different sets of beliefs.

Again, you're blurring concepts. It is unarguably natural for a soul to go to the aetherial sea upon the death of the body, in the same way that it's natural for gravity to make a dropped object fall or for heat to evaporate water. There is no cultural belief that can change these things from being how the world works.

I think it's significant that this specific argument is the one put to someone who works with the natural world and understands that natural flow of life and death in everything.

By contrast, the Alexandrian think it's culturally normal to artificially interfere with the natural behaviour of souls. That does not in any way make it natural for them, and their artificial soul-management system is not equatable to the natural process that the system is designed to keep souls out of.

The only viable solution is so obvious that it would be disingenuous to truly refer to this as any kind of trolley problem; you have a society made entirely of computer simulations on one track, and every life throughout the universe on the other. Which track should you switch the trolley onto? If we truly want to be ethical, there is a single right answer.

Isn't that the exact point of the trolley problem, though? Right now it is on a track that, if you do not interfere, will kill a large number of people. You can choose to do nothing or you can choose to save those people by choosing to instead kill/destroy an objectively "less bad" target on the other track.

Theoretically it's an easy choice, but it still involves you acting to cause what would in isolation be regarded as a tragedy.

[LilimoLimomo]

Isn't that the exact point of the trolley problem, though? Right now it is on a track that, if you do not interfere, will kill a large number of people. You can choose to do nothing or you can choose to save those people by choosing to instead kill/destroy an objectively "less bad" target on the other track.

Theoretically it's an easy choice, but it still involves you acting to cause what would in isolation be regarded as a tragedy.

That's fair, I was being a wee bit hyperbolic, wasn't I? ^^

[Alenore]

Again, you're blurring concepts. It is unarguably natural for a soul to go to the aetherial sea upon the death of the body, in the same way that it's natural for gravity to make a dropped object fall or for heat to evaporate water. There is no cultural belief that can change these things from being how the world works.

I think it's significant that this specific argument is the one put to someone who works with the natural world and understands that natural flow of life and death in everything.

By contrast, the Alexandrian think it's culturally normal to artificially interfere with the natural behaviour of souls. That does not in any way make it natural for them, and their artificial soul-management system is not equatable to the natural process that the system is designed to keep souls out of.

I'm not sure we should mix Living Memory itself and Alexandria use of souls. In theory, nothing would stop Alexandria from preserving memories, and send the souls their merry ways to the lifestream.

[Kirutsuki]

I'm not sure we should mix Living Memory itself and Alexandria use of souls. In theory, nothing would stop Alexandria from preserving memories, and send the souls their merry ways to the lifestream.

what do you mean mix? (The entire process is that the Alexandrians use the regulators and the weapons to extract the entirety of the soul, put it in a blender, extract the memory and have that memory eventually go to the cloud for storage and eventually into Living memory while the soul is stored separately for usage with the regulators. And when a person with a regulator dies of old age, it's soul is processed the same way.)

But yea someone did mention that if the memory is kept in Living memory, that the soul would stay in a limbo until they can reconnect again. But I'm unsure if that's true.
It makes sense, but it isn't really stated directly to be the case.

And someone else mentioned that because they are just memories they don't go to the aetherial sea if they are erased as an endless, because it's just lines of code, so the soul has already gone it's merry way.

This is what I mean that the story should really try to explain what the actual is going on here.

[MikkoAkure]

And someone else mentioned that because they are just memories they don't go to the aetherial sea if they are erased as an endless, because it's just lines of code, so the soul has already gone it's merry way.

Up until now, I was under the impression that when a soul is used as fuel, one of two things can happen:

- In Zodiark's case, the souls were still kept intact somehow and a promise to return them was made later. This could be how Alexandrian soul use works since we see souls leave Zoraal Ja after his demise. But if this were the case, then the souls that were forcefully taken by Tuliyollal citizens or from inhabitants in Yyasulani that were used for the Endless are now stuck on a separate reflection and will never reincarnate on their home plane of existence.

- But then there's Hydaelyn's case, where the souls were used up as fuel utterly and completely. Pieces of them were able to somewhat reconstruct personalities of 13 of Her friends, but mostly it seems that everyone was converted to pure aether. The way the Alexandrians refer to souls as fuel and the living will just use them up willy nilly makes me feel like this scenario could also be the case. It could be that all the souls of all the Alexandrians since Sphene has been running things have been ruined to the point they cannot reincarnate and the energy provided by their souls' aether was converted to other means and is completely unrecoverable. The Endless left behind in the Rift when Dreamborough and other districts were accidentally separated off in Sphene's first failed fusion show that the Endless need a constant supply of aether or else they turn into monsters. I don't think that would happen if they just needed 1 soul at a time.


Either of these options has disturbing consequences when you think about them.

It's also disturbing that people who paid close attention to the story still think that ending this necromancy was a bad thing and would even go so far as to call it "genocide". If anything Alexandria got off EXTREMELY leniently with seemingly no reparations paid for forcefully fusing their reality into our own, destroying an entire region of country of Tural and absorbing its population into its own, and then deliberately attacking civilians and launching a surprise war in an attempt to empower their dead. People seem to be laser-focused on "self-aware consciousnesses" without thinking of the context they exist in or the ramifications. Players can mow down legions worth of unwilling Garlean conscripts with their conscience clean, but pulling the plug on a bunch of glorified zombies is bad because the story made you dance for them in a bunny outfit.

In ARR we have to put down Lady Amandine for killing others to keep up her undeath. Is this not the same thing? She was self-aware. As are other ashkin we kill whether or not they're monstrous like Lorelei or human-looking like Edda.

[Kirutsuki]

It's also disturbing that people who paid close attention to the story still think that ending this necromancy was a bad thing and would even go so far as to call it "genocide". If anything Alexandria got off EXTREMELY leniently with seemingly no reparations paid for forcefully fusing their reality into our own, destroying an entire region of country of Tural and absorbing its population into its own, and then deliberately attacking civilians and launching a surprise war in an attempt to empower their dead. People seem to be laser-focused on "self-aware consciousnesses" without thinking of the context they exist in or the ramifications. Players can mow down legions worth of unwilling Garlean conscripts with their conscience clean, but pulling the plug on a bunch of glorified zombies is bad because the story made you dance for them in a bunny outfit.

In ARR we have to put down Lady Amandine for killing others to keep up her undeath. Is this not the same thing? She was self-aware. As are other ashkin we kill whether or not they're monstrous like Lorelei or human-looking like Edda.

Again, what Sphene was doing was wrong. No denying that, invading another shard, stealing peoples souls and sustaining Living Memory with their deaths.
No-one really is denying that. There is however a difference between innocent people and guilty ones. Sphene's people in the Living memory were innocent to whatever she was doing.
Heck even the invading force into Tuliyollal was all Sphene, none of the Alexandrians had anything to do with it.

You can argue back and forths about what the memories are, yes at the end of the day they are not quite their original selves, but I honestly believe its not up to us to judge if they are real or just ghosts in a machine.
It's up to them, had they had the chance to prove they are something more than memories.. what then?

We are willing to mow down Garleans because the game clearly shows and states multiple times that Garleans are raised with extreme prejudice towards the free folk to the point where they literally would have killed us instead.
All of them would have, without hesitation. Not just because their leader said so, but because they were raised to hate magic wielders and their yolk. And even non combatant folk would rather kill themselves than associate with Eorzeans.

If it was so that the memories in Living Memory were ok with sustaining their own lives and were rooting for Sphene's plan to invade other reflections we would be in agreement, but that's not the case.

But ultimately I think I will just have to accept what the game is telling me instead of trying to insert something of my own into it. The game clearly states and wants the players to know that these are pure memories and there's
no wrongdoing in shutting them down even if I myself do think there is quite a bit wrong in acting as the executioner without fully understanding what you are shutting down.

[Cleretic]

By one Endless. That's the thing. More of the Endless should have been aware of our plan and should have been telling us to go for it.

As I said before: This is how the game does this sort of discussion, all the time. It's neither feasible in story economy, nor honestly all that interesting, to depict an entire society's feelings on itself in a story that's not about just that and nothing else. So, instead of doing that, we see it reflected in one person; in this case, Cahciua. She's in much the same position as the Chais in Eulmore; we don't expect the entire society of Eulmore to go through the process of change and growth on screen, we see the Chais do it and then accept that everyone else did more or less the same.

Living Memory actually is like that, especially if you do the post-shutdown quests (the aether current quests should be enough, but the one that hit like a truck for me was the Yesterland yellow quest). The people of Living Memory know what they are, they know what the cost is, and they accept that it had to stop; they were just a little too wrapped up in their own happiness to really act on it. If I thought we were getting a significant amount more quests in Living Memory, I'd suspect that to almost be by design, and the sign of a nefarious hand behind the scenes; keep the Endless happy and short-sighted, and they never think about the injustices they're built on.

[Kirutsuki]

As I said before: This is how the game does this sort of discussion, all the time. It's neither feasible in story economy, nor honestly all that interesting, to depict an entire society's feelings on itself in a story that's not about just that and nothing else. So, instead of doing that, we see it reflected in one person; in this case, Cahciua. She's in much the same position as the Chais in Eulmore; we don't expect the entire society of Eulmore to go through the process of change and growth on screen, we see the Chais do it and then accept that everyone else did more or less the same.

See for me it just doesn't entirely work that Cahciua is the one to be in the position of the broader society. She has been in Alexandria for 30 years.
She's also a viera who's lifespan is ~400-500 years. and it has been only 3 years since Erenville left from Tural to Sharlyan. So that means Erenvilles mom and mentor must have been really old already before she got swooped into the dome. In that sense I can give her the benefit of the doubt that she must have some wisdom with her age. But she's only known the Alexandrian way for 30 years.

Couldn't there been someone who's actually Alexandrian to guide us along with Cahciua? I'm not entirely certain of the timeline of how long it has been that this system has been online, but we do know that it the lightning storms BEGAN 8 centuries ago and Electrope was discovered 4 centuries after that. So vaguely speaking I would say Living memory's system came online 100-300years ago. Which means theres atleast someone more suited to talk about the Alexandrians than Cahciua.

Or is it because she was such a rebel of the system and the only one who ventured outside of it that she became their spokesperson?

There's just alot here that's sortof unanswered fully and kind of has a taste of a rushed ending.