Questionable ethics - Living Memory

[celfhelp]

i think that was a big point of the entire zone/third act

we are doing the exact same thing sphene is trying to do, just from a different perspective; we 'killed' her and her world to save our own

but i think that was the beauty of it for me. it was two forces who didn't want to be opposing but simply had no choice because of the cards that had been dealt; their conflict was not malicious, it was just necessity, and the loser lost with grace and dignity (put up one hell of a fight too, given how many people i've watched get butchered in their first try of that trial. lmao)

to the point about sphene not protecting her citizens enough, i mean she did try, we just beat the defenses, plus Living Memory wouldn't have been accessible to us at all if it weren't for Krile's earring (which was snuck out) AND Galool Ja being present with us at the gate; sphene had no reason to expect visitors who weren't endless after she had the key, because even though the King's authority was handed over, there was no other key to grant access (to her knowledge)

no matter how much a ruler loves her people, sometimes you just lose. sometimes you're just not enough

i personally want them to explore this from OUR side next, but i don't know if they're ready to go down that road yet

[NegativeS]

However that misses the main point of my argument: evil or not, we simply don't have neither authority nor legitimacy nor right to do as we please in Sphene's kingdom. Even if existence of Endless is in the end harmful, as long as Sphene doesn't use outside souls for her system, we have no right to intervene. What we have is the right to stop her from threatening souls outside, by force if needed. Erasing Endless within their bubble, however, is an internal affair, a decision that must be done by local legitimate authority, not by us, a hostile outside force. And if we say that we allowed ourselves do to as we please in Sphene's realm because of situation in extremis, that makes us somewhat of a war criminals, since we were targeting civilians which has no direct effect on stopping Sphene here and now.

Whether or not we had the authority to do what we did, it was the only course of action we could have taken to prevent the destruction of our world and others.

Shutting down the Terminals before Meso was just a bid to try to disrupt Sphene's interdimensional merge and take her attention away from it, but we are told very explicitly that destroying Sphene would also destroy Living Memory. This is not the case of a feud between nations--dismantling a government does not immediately destroy the nation's citizens. In fact, there is no government. This is a rogue AI that has taken onto itself the responsibility of 'preserving' the memories of the departed, through any means necessary. Were this still an actual nation, they would likely have put in significant R&D to determine an alternative to eating living souls, to prevent exactly what happened to Sphene from happening. But she didn't, because her rigid AI didn't allow her to, so she found out what happens when you threaten a population with total annihilation on a whim.

The people of Alexandria do not seem to know that the Endless exist--only that the dying are taken away for end-of-life care, and that their memories of them are taken to be stored in the 'cloud' (Even in Orgenics, the location of the Meso Terminal is classified even to the people who work there). Ergo, the Endless did not ask to become part of this rogue AI's bid to preserve the departed.

[Nyxs]

The people of living memory are the equivalent of a gif on your computer. They arent alive. If them remaining animated means the end of actual lives then they have to go.

Think of it as they are a virus destroying things slowly. Do you let it do its thing or do you get rid of it to save everything you have?

[Wojnar]

As I wrote, most likely Endless are just glorified chatbots, so shutting them off is objectively not more evil than deleting a game from your PC.

I have huge issue with that. For example Erenville's mom. She claimed she wasn't alive, but she had consciousness. She was aware of what was happening, her own thought processes and her choices were autonomous. It was basically energy based life form, concept known for decades in scifi. Chat bots were in Amaurot.

[Sated]

Wasn't "Sphene" we met just a memory that misunderstood her original directive (or took it in a direction that was likely never intended)?

She was an invading ruler with an intent to either conquer or kill the people of Etheirys - it was never going to be a peaceful resolution. We handled that quite well, I think.

Not only that but it's not like we forced her people to stop consuming souls, either... they still do that. We didn't change their way of dying and living.
It's still brought up in quests that our WoL is making a personal choice to not use the soulconsuming tech.

[SDaemon]

we are doing the exact same thing sphene is trying to do, just from a different perspective; we 'killed' her and her world to save our own

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.

[Loggos]

You have Endless (basically vampires!) who need life force to sustain themselves? Why dont we see about whether or not we can just get them new bodies instead? Or perhaps we can just harvest the life force of clones? Its my understanding that the soul and life force are two distinct things. So the Alexandrians need life force? Can we supply it? I hear the Garleans are adept at cloning technologies. Is getting the endless new bodies for use or life force extraction a viable solution?

I honestly think that adding "life force" to the world building was one of their biggest mistakes because it's a contrived "I said so" point tagged onto the previously established canon about souls just to make their plot work at all costs, even though it doesn't enrich the lore by adding anything that was needed to fill lore gaps or that is truly interesting. Instead it just makes part of the worldbuilding that was already complete and worked perfectly well worse at best, and completely illogical at worst.
“Message” first, lore second.

Yap yap under the cut:

In EW and so forth we learned souls are a core (made from aether?) holding a person's "essence" or true self that seems to be pretty indestructible unless you are a Hydaelin-level primal (and even then the shards still contain a person's true essence).
Around that core is our physical body made of aether which we leave behind when we die, and our memory aether which stays with us when our souls enter the aetherial sea/life stream but which slowly fades away with time. After that happens we can be reborn.
We also sustain our mortal selves by consuming aether in the shape of food and we have seen Emet-Selch giving Y'shtola a new body after her soul is pulled from the aetherial sea by giving her a part of his aether (he does the same when we time travel to Elpis).
There is also the primal summoning which gives these entities physical, tangible forms/vessels in our mortal world.
So in all of these instances we are talking about normal aether as a force of life and we have seen instances of normal aether sustaining us (food, voidsent), healing us (magic) and even creating whole new bodies (Emet, primal summoning etc.).

And suddenly there is "life force".

It's very special aether that can't be (artificially) syntethised from food and it is indispensable for a tech that is basically an auto-resurrection device.
But it can only heal lethal physical injuries. It cannot prolong life (even though it is the most special life force that literally sits in our souls and that is a much, much bigger deal than normal aether) and it cannot heal sickness or natural causes of death (so if you die of heart failure as a child your heart cannot be repaired by life force but if a beast plays ping pong with you and smushes your heart that’s no problem! Somehow the “naturalness” cannot be circumvented because, well, because.).

So somehow, despite being so special, this "life force" seems a lot weaker than normal aether, which can theoretically do all those things mentioned above if you have enough of it.

(Granted you'd probably need Emet-Selch or primal-summoning levels of aether but it was still never classified as anything different than aether. You could perhaps still shoehorn life force into Emet's case, i.e. him not sharing his normal aether but his “life force”, but it seems contrived given that there are many other instances where aether from crystals, magic or food (see Zero) is perfectly fine for said purposes. And the aether from the aetherial sea from which our physical bodies are created has also never been described as anything other than … aether.)

But for some reason Alexandrians need this new energy that lies directly within the soul, which has never been an issue before, to heal a very narrow area of physiological problems and nothing else will do.
They can absolutely not synthesise this life force from food or normal aether/crystals even though they can transplant souls into robots and have mastered the art of recreating the soul cleansing process of the literal life stream.
In fact, they have been doing both things for centuries but for some reason their technical innovations regarding souls stopped right afterwards and that whole “sustaining bodies with normal aether” business has just been too complex for them for the last 400ish years. Can’t be helped. Because the writers said so. Lore and logic be damned.

At the same time though, life force can't really be a force that powers our physical body in a unique way (in a way consuming normal aether can't) because then it would be depleted when a person dies of natural causes. But evidently, when somebody dies it can be harvested for further use to grant another person a whole new life.
At the same time if placed in the right vessel, like a robot body à la Otis, a soul can theoretically exist forever and not run out of life force.
So it seems like there is a reverse relationship: it's not life force which holds our physical bodies together at the cost of consuming itself, it's our physical bodies which anchor our souls in this world and if we have immortal bodies our soul can stay in the mortal world forever.
Hence, it doesn't seem like there is any (significant amount of finite) life force being irrecoverably used up to nourish our bodies. We seem to purely sustain our mortal vessels by ordinary means and with ordinary aether (food, mechanical maintenance of robots, ceruleum? etc.)

Yet somehow, for Alexandrians life force and only life force is needed to heal their physical bodies after wrestling matches in the wild or in the colosseum.
Why? Don't ask.

Also, souls themselves still seem to survive the extraction of life force because we are made to believe Erenville will meet his mum's soul when he's dead. I believe he was a writer's mouth piece in that moment to give the audience some "closure"/reassurance
(The fact that her memories have already been washed away by Alexandria's procedures and her soul cannot remember him anymore, because only her freshly cleansed core ready for rebirth should remain at this point, seems to be forgotten by the writers though. Sorry, Erenville!)
We also see some souls escape Zoraal Ja when we defeat him. It could be those he hasn't consumed yet but since this happened after his big magical lizard transformation it looked more like the ones he had previously used to me.

So it seems like there is the metaphorical "life force" of our mortal body, our corporal aether, that degrades over time and then there is this other energy, actual life force, in our soul, but extracting that life force doesn't destroy the soul. So the soul is more of a shell/cointainer of the true self and can return to the aetherial sea even without life force.

So, what is it even for? It serves no purpose. Before its invention there was no physiological or soul-related function that was not properly explained by aether and that needed "life force" to be added to the lore to make sense.
The story wasn't able to properly sell us this change to the world building.

So in conclusion: Now we have life force which resides in souls, which is not like normal aether and can therefore absolutely not be synthesised by other means so Spehne AI HAS to harvest humans (she's so sad about it tho! ))): ), but when consumed heals aether-related problems, i.e., lethal injuries to our corporal vessel created from normal aether (even though life force doesn't actually seem to be responsible for keeping us alive) but not all problems, but consuming it also doesn't destroy the souls, so the soul (core of one's true self) and its life force, which is not (normal) aether, are two different things but are also not tied to our memory aether and our corporal aether.

I’m sorry but this addition was not needed. Life force didn’t make canon better, more complete, or answered any open questions. It was a mistake.
It serves no proper world building purpose and has only been created for a badly conceived plot that collapses under any scrutiny.

The problem is that it's now canon, even though it's not good canon. They added a new crucial component to the world building without thinking through what it should logically entail. But it is there, so now you constantly have to live with the cognitive dissonance of "it's an ingame "fact" but it also makes no sense".

[LuciferMournstar]

Indeed, there are lots of living Alexandrians, some with aether-imbalance disorders that aetheroligists on the Source are well-equipped to deal with. Now that Alexandria isn't waging a war to power their very pleasant and friendly soul-eating zombie collection, we can get to tending to the actually alive Alexandrians!

Yeah, Alexandria still exist in Heritage Found and Solution 9, but they are doomed for good now. We are going to wipe them out too. Their regulators no longer will have souls supplied to them, so everything in the "bubble" is doomed. Hunters in the bubble can no longer use souls, they will die trying to stop the monsters in that Lighting destroyed world. Which means eventually all of Heritage Found, Solution 9, and Living Memory will be overrun and uninhabitable. Also, we're going to put a stop to the use of Beast Souls. We're wiping out their entire culture, way of life, and any hope of continuing. They have one recourse : Abandon their culture, their home, and move to the source. Eletrope won't have use in the source without the abundance of Lightning Eather, so that'll be forgotten too.

There is no "happy ending" to this story. Alexandria is dying, and in about 100 years or so, will fade into obscurity and distant memory. If it takes even that long.

[Bright-Flower]

Yeah, Alexandria still exist in Heritage Found and Solution 9, but they are doomed for good now. We are going to wipe them out too. Their regulators no longer will have souls supplied to them, so everything in the "bubble" is doomed. Hunters in the bubble can no longer use souls, they will die trying to stop the monsters in that Lighting destroyed world. Which means eventually all of Heritage Found, Solution 9, and Living Memory will be overrun and uninhabitable. Also, we're going to put a stop to the use of Beast Souls. We're wiping out their entire culture, way of life, and any hope of continuing. They have one recourse : Abandon their culture, their home, and move to the source. Eletrope won't have use in the source without the abundance of Lightning Eather, so that'll be forgotten too.

There is no "happy ending" to this story. Alexandria is dying, and in about 100 years or so, will fade into obscurity and distant memory. If it takes even that long.

I think you're really overplaying the plight of the alexandrians. The msq patches may follow up on them, but they were left on a 'they can continue their way of life' note at the end of the MSQ. No indication that they'll have to abandon Solution 9 or Heritage Found. Also their guns and ships worked just fine when they left the barrier and attackd Tuliloyol so it seems like an assumption that electrope will have no use outside of Heritage Found.

Regulators are still being used. And while it's entirely possible that further story may have Alexandria abandon them altogether, there's no indication that we're forcing them to do so. And our only apsirations to free some souls are being plotted alongside citizens of Solution 9. There is no indication they're going to be forced to give up regulators.

Or that even if they did give up regulators, that would mean the complete destruction of their culture as if that's the only thing their culture has to offer.

You're projecting doom and gloom where it, as of right now, does not exist in the story.

[celfhelp]

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