Quote Originally Posted by SDaemon View Post
Except the situations are not the same. If Sphene had stopped her mad plans to destroy all life everywhere to power her Endless with souls and talked with us, then a peaceful resolution could probably have been found. The people of the Source had 0 aggressive plans towards her or her people. She declared our annihilation and we answered by defending ourselves. On the other hand, if we refused to defend ourselves and journey to Sphene's world then not only would the Source have been destroyed and their souls harvested but eventually all life would potentially have been consumed to fuel the Endless. This isn't a case where both sides wished to destroy the other, instead one side wished to destroy the other and one side chose to defend themselves.
she did try to peacefully resolve the issue, albeit briefly, and double albeit not in the most effective way

she asked wuk lamat (and by extension, us) to become alexandrian citizens, which would have resolved the issue without mass destruction, because a continent worth of natural death supplies far more 'empty souls' than just the kingdom of alexandria. obviously this isn't a rational or good solution, but it was a passive one

i also disagree that we just "chose to defend ourselves" by erasing an entire kingdom of people.

imo we overcorrected, because nothing was stopping us from going straight to sphene at the meso terminal and confronting her. we didn't have to turn everything off before hand, and the reason we DID do that ended up being completely irrelevant and useless. we 'killed' her people in an effort to demoralize her and it didn't. she wasn't even aware of it (frankly this is probably more 'oopsie' from the writers than it is something to dig into). hell, had we gone straight for the terminal she probably would've been far weaker an adversary

we could've just as easily "killed" sphene, taken the key, and left alexandria to naturally fade away, but instead we played God and sped up the process

do i personally think there's much of a difference? yes and no, but i'm just posturing on this side for the sake of discussion