Questionable ethics - Living Memory

[Galvuu]

snip.

You kind of touch on the problem yourself. All these stories are meant to take place in the same universe, which should have a consistent set of laws/rules. Even if you want to approach a different theme or subject matter, as you're working in a per-established universe, you're constrained (or, well, you should be) to the previously established rules.
Otherwise you get some of the laziest writing where anything goes. The story isn't divorced from the mechanics of the world it takes part- yes, it's fiction, you have liberty to set the rules, but that doesn't equate to being able to change those rules, once established, to whatever you want arbitrarily. Or rather, technically you can do that, it just leads to a bunch of inconsistencies and bad writing.
Which really is the problem, isn't it? Yes, sure, you can make a new story in XIV where the element of Darkness is now shown to be that of stasis instead of Light, or where the Sundering actually created 37 shards and we just didn't know, or where there were actually 11 moons in the world, or where souls don't reincarnate, or where you can defeat primals by throwing a banana at them because banana-aether is primal-destroying and the Heart of Sabik was a banana all along. You definitely can write all of that to drive a specific point- but that's just shoddy writing that retroactively undermines all the previous work and established lore/world-building.
If this is truly the way XIV wants to go, just ignore the lore/world-building. Just stop wasting time with Encyclopedia Eorzeas and trying to make a logical framework of things because nothing matters. It can be retconned or changed at the whim of any random future author to fit whatever nonsense message they have in their minds.
I find this to be appalling, but maybe people like it. Still doesn't change the fact it will raise a lot of questions.

snip.

If I read then the argument that the Ultima Thule beings aren't live can certainly be made. Which is probably why you immediately deflected it "those are ok because they're not hurting anyone!". The beings in Ultima Thule are either alive, or are not. Same for the Endless. I'm not pretending to have a definitive answer based on what the game has shown throughout the entirety of its lore/writing across all expansions, because the game changes its mind when its convenient. I dunno why you keep mentioning the "defy Sphene" thing. I've been saying every time, we were justified in destroying the Endless- I'm not arguing we shouldn't have done that. I'm wondering if we destroyed something that was somewhat alive, or not, or somewhat in-between. But yes, read, because what's written doesn't somewhat contradict what was written before. Maybe in 8.0 there are new not-Endless who don't need souls but are the same in every other way and the game goes "these things are alive!" (like they did with Omega/Alpha/Ultima Thule/etc) and then they retroactively become alive. Until 9.0 needs them to retro-retroactively become not-alive for some reason.