Questionable ethics - Living Memory

[Chiru_Kai]

The memories are not real people.
They're AI chatbots using your grandma's voice recordings.
And they require the power of souls from actual living people to power these AI chatbots.

Which, are not even used by the actual living people. Because somehow there is no hypocrisy in deleting someone's memories from your brain once they die. Even in this culture of "you don't truly die unless you're no longer remembered"?

"questionable ethics", yeah right.
Will you be the first to sacrifice yourself so someone else can listen to an AI interpretation of their dead grandma?

If they had this culture, this system, but it was stable and self-sustaining without the need to endlessly consume souls of the living to power this system, it would just be another culture. It's weird, but they can do whatever, it doesn't affect people outside of that culture.
... but the moment that they required the souls of the living and had to kill the living people from outside of their culture, and we had to make a hard call between the memories or the actual alive people across all shards + Source... is when they lost all sympathy and had to go.

[CVXIV]

I've seen this argument a lot in the last week or so, and I don't really understand how it is a moral dilemma. Could there have been an alternative solution? Perhaps, but we weren't afforded the time to deliberate and come up with one.

Not only this, but Sphene isn't innocent either, as she was complicit in the attack on Tuliyollal, which harvested souls, and not only that, she took over a large part of the land of Tural and essentially took its citizenry.

Many times, the party tried to reason with her and find an alternative, but she refused and maintained her objective of harvesting souls from other shards until nothing remained.

We had to make a choice, and we did.

[SDaemon]

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

We didn't erase an entire kingdom. We shut down the memory archive of Endless. The Alexandrians are moving forward and living their lives in Solution 9 and Heritage Found.

While I don't consider the memory constructs of Living Memory to be the true people, whose souls were robbed from them and used as fuel, that they are based on. I would argue shutting them down is a far better outcome then letting the place slowly run out of energy and turn off on its own, not that this was the WOL's purpose in doing so.

We didn't play God. Again, we took action to stop an entity that was unrelentingly going to destroy everything, including our world. The actions we took were described to us as being beneficial in hopefully not having to come to blows with Sphene at the critical moment. That just didn't end up being the case and we had to defeat Sphene regardless due to her programming. I might not agree with a kid like Gajool Ja ruling the Alexandrians, but now they have a chance to rebuild their lives in a way that won't destroy every other world in existence.

[Daralii]

If their guns and ships worked like you say, why did they use Hunters with Beast Souls and regulators to begin with? Why waste the precious souls needed to keep Living Memory going on Hunters, if they didn't need to? Electrope may work for a while outside in Tuliloyol, but it was specifically said it converts LIGHTNING energy and needs quite a bit. Plus, what would be the point of the continued use of Electrope, when it's no longer needed because the source isn't assailed by massive amounts of lightning energy? What purpose would regulators serve without souls? Absolutely none.

I admire your continued nativity, I'll give you that. You really do try to look on the bright side (no pun intended), but life and the world can be cruel.

From what I remember, the MCH fanny pack works by taking in the ambient aether and converting it to lightning, which is how they fabricate machines and turn guns into railguns. If the Alexandrians are willing to work with Skysteel or the Ironworks, they could probably preserve a small amount of their technology and culture after immigrating to the Source. The problem with this is that it's a complete retread of what happened to the Garleans, only the alternative to being assimilated is oblivion because Nero's group is already setting up shop on the moon.

[Turtledeluxe]

Stopped reading after genocide. We did not turn off the Meso Terminals in order to eliminate the Endless (it was ultimately to stop Sphene), and even if that was the goal, genocide is a word that exists for a reason. It's not just a word you use when a group of people die, or in this case, not people.

I have no idea what SE did to attract people who do this.

[Eraden]

Mao curious. Mao impression is that everything was simulation created by big gold blocky machine. Why nots just blow ups machine itself? Mao big fan of "kill its with fires".

[DrForester]

We turned off a holodeck.

[CerusSerenade]

Note 1: if Endless are your precious citizens, dear Sphene, why the heck didn't you try to protect them? Put at least some guards around monoliths, you know? Especially considering that you saw and knew that we, hostile forces, have arrived into Living Memory.

Why we do even have to erase them instead of just shutting the system down? We know that only 1/10 of Endless are online, so that means they can be kept archived offline for no or much less energy. We could just put them all offline temporarily, without erasing the data itself, and take any amount of time to search for the solution of their problem. If we could fetch huge amounts of aether from 1st to 13th, we have all chances to reconfigure Sphene's system somehow. Maybe feed it the souls of voisent, lol, since they all want to die anyway. Perfect combo.

Note 2: when the fight with Robo-Sphene starts and she talks again about protecting her precious Endless, why couldn't anyone tell her - sorry, lady, we just erased all of them, so you don't have the reason to fight anymore?

Now, one could counterargument that we are effectively at war with Sphene's nation and we make harsh decisions in extreme circumstances. But erasing Endless doesn't serve to diminish Sphene's battle power. We are just targeting civilians, which is a warcrime - at least from Sphene's point of view.

Summary. I have a feeling that thay wanted no matter to implement the art decision of shutting down the beatiful realm, because they knew it would have emotional impact. But in doing so, they hammered the whole plot logic into a very questionable, to say the least, writing.

What do you think?

1: They explicitly explained that while Sphene was preparing for Interdimensional Fusion they couldn't easily stop, let alone suspend the process. They also explain that shutting down the terminals is the same as erasing the Endless, and even if we didn't, shutting down the Meso terminal would have the same effect in the end. You weren't paying attention.

2: There were still those in the Meso Terminal and the living citizens in Solution Nine. She doesn't care about JUST the Endless, but ALL her citizens.

[AlysCamoa]

The amount of people claiming the Endless are at all equivalent to LLMs, that the Scions tried to meaningfully persuade Sphene away from her cause, or that we shut down the terminals for any purpose other than to destroy the Endless while ignoring Sphene really speaks to the amount of cutscene skipping this expansion encourages.

At the end of the day, we did do something horrible. We played out Emet's example of moral relativism to a T. In the scenario we were given by the story, there really was no other option: we're gaslit into going along with Cahciua's plan (and Wuk's general stupidity) instead of doing anything even slightly more intelligent, so turning off the terminals to save the souls of the star is our only choice. So be it. That doesn't mean the Scions shouldn't feel horrible about doing so. Yet somehow Erenville is the only one who offers any meaningful introspection about the gravity of this plan. The rest of the group leaves Living Memory as a dead husk while smiling and laughing on their way back to Tuliyollal while a Disney sing-along plays. That's absurd. It's a complete travesty of how they've characterized this group, even within the trainwreck of Dawntrail itself.

Hiroi thought he was a good enough writer to handle these themes. He absolutely was not, and should be sent to an even deeper pit in CBU3 than Oda was.

[CerusSerenade]

The amount of people claiming the Endless are at all equivalent to LLMs, that the Scions tried to meaningfully persuade Sphene away from her cause, or that we shut down the terminals for any purpose other than to destroy the Endless while ignoring Sphene really speaks to the amount of cutscene skipping this expansion encourages.

At the end of the day, we did do something horrible. We played out Emet's example of moral relativism to a T. In the scenario we were given by the story, there really was no other option: we're gaslit into going along with Cahciua's plan (and Wuk's general stupidity) instead of doing anything even slightly more intelligent, so turning off the terminals to save the souls of the star is our only choice. So be it. That doesn't mean the Scions shouldn't feel horrible about doing so. Yet somehow Erenville is the only one who offers any meaningful introspection about the gravity of this plan. The rest of the group leaves Living Memory as a dead husk while smiling and laughing on their way back to Tuliyollal while a Disney sing-along plays. That's absurd. It's a complete travesty of how they've characterized this group, even within the trainwreck of Dawntrail itself.

Hiroi thought he was a good enough writer to handle these themes. He absolutely was not, and should be sent to an even deeper pit in CBU3 than Oda was.

Drivel.

Sphene was the aggressor, explicitly saying she would become a devourer of worlds and kill all life on all the remaining shards just to extend the life of her people. The only way to stop her was to shut down the Meso Terminal, which would also terminate all the other Endless.

You're calling self-defense to genocide a crime.