Omicrons and The Endless (Do Endless Dream of Electric Sheep?)

[Tsumdere]

Even if we came to conclusion that they were alive, their existence posed an imminent threat to our existence. Their survival depended on our extinction. Faced with such a threat, whether they were alive or not becomes irrelevant, and the right thing to do was to shut them down because it ensures our survival, assuming there was no other solution.

I don't think there is many people saying that we should have let the Endless drain the entire universe of life. I really wish people would stop bringing up this point in an attempt to crush any discussion about how Living Memory was written.

What people are saying is that the plotline is messy, poorly explained, contradictory, and easily lends itself to feel more like murder and less like heart-wrenching survival because the characters didn't even try. We are told immediately that the Endless are not worthy of existence or consideration and we're not allowed to question that. Yet, as VoidsentStatus is pointing out with that dialogue, even the characters seem confused on the living/dead status of the Endless so the story can't even get it's own ducks in a row.

If a player believes they are alive or listens to NPCs that treat them as alive, then treating the Endless so flippantly feels very bad.
There is a night and day difference between turning off the Endless with no thought and then playing around in elephant costumes for two hours and turning off the Endless after failing to find a solution to coexistence. Both of these end the same, but the reception and emotional impact would have been much different.

WE DON'T KNOW and we can't know with the information we have because the story and setting is not very clear about its own internal logic! Wow! What an unsatisfying answer!

I'm pretty sure some Omicrons are explicitly stated to not have souls. Both Omega and Alpha didn't start with souls. Alpha gained a soul, but it's unclear if Omega gained one. I think he did. That means some Omicron are more alive than others if they haven't gone through self-actualization apparently.

Regardless of if the Omicron have souls or not, its funny that by the definition of life not even having a soul makes you fully alive in FFXIV. A sliding scale of aliveness is a wild concept and I wish they would have actually explored that instead of what they did.

[Nitelancer]

I don't think there is many people saying that we should have let the Endless drain the entire universe of life. I really wish people would stop bringing up this point in an attempt to crush any discussion about how Living Memory was written.

What people are saying is that the plotline is messy, poorly explained, contradictory, and easily lends itself to feel more like murder and less like heart-wrenching survival because the characters didn't even try. We are told immediately that the Endless are not worthy of existence or consideration and we're not allowed to question that. Yet, as VoidsentStatus is pointing out with that dialogue, even the characters seem confused on the living/dead status of the Endless so the story can't even get it's own ducks in a row.

If a player believes they are alive or listens to NPCs that treat them as alive, then treating the Endless so flippantly feels very bad.
There is a night and day difference between turning off the Endless with no thought and then playing around in elephant costumes for two hours and turning off the Endless after failing to find a solution to coexistence. Both of these end the same, but the reception and emotional impact would have been much different.



I'm pretty sure some Omicrons are explicitly stated to not have souls. Both Omega and Alpha didn't start with souls. Alpha gained a soul, but it's unclear if Omega gained one. I think he did. That means some Omicron are more alive than others if they haven't gone through self-actualization apparently.

Regardless of if the Omicron have souls or not, its funny that by the definition of life not even having a soul makes you fully alive in FFXIV. A sliding scale of aliveness is a wild concept and I wish they would have actually explored that instead of what they did.

I agree with you about the story. I didn't like it at all and found it extremely boring and unengaging. I think the whole thing should be retconned lol. But I didn't bring that point up to crush discussion about the quality of the writing. I was responding to points about whether the endless are alive and whether it was morally right to shut them down. I didn't feel that they were, and I personally didn't feel bad about it.

[Cach]

I don't think there is many people saying that we should have let the Endless drain the entire universe of life. I really wish people would stop bringing up this point in an attempt to crush any discussion about how Living Memory was written.

What people are saying is that the plotline is messy, poorly explained, contradictory, and easily lends itself to feel more like murder and less like heart-wrenching survival because the characters didn't even try. We are told immediately that the Endless are not worthy of existence or consideration and we're not allowed to question that. Yet, as VoidsentStatus is pointing out with that dialogue, even the characters seem confused on the living/dead status of the Endless so the story can't even get it's own ducks in a row.

If a player believes they are alive or listens to NPCs that treat them as alive, then treating the Endless so flippantly feels very bad.
There is a night and day difference between turning off the Endless with no thought and then playing around in elephant costumes for two hours and turning off the Endless after failing to find a solution to coexistence. Both of these end the same, but the reception and emotional impact would have been much different.

Very well put. Also I found it funny how your posts in this thread actually made other people wonder about what constitutes life.
You know... THE THING THE STORY SHOULD HAVE DONE.

[Somnolence]

What people are saying is that the plotline is messy, poorly explained, contradictory...

To me, Alexandrian lore does not neatly integrates with the rest of the game, because it is clearly a transplant from another Final Fantasy.

They tried to adapt this by making Alexandrians do the Aetherial Sea soul recycling technologically, but the souls in FFXIV do not work exactly in the same way.

Consider that the Ascians did not put ancient memories to some random strong souls; original souls were needed. The entire rejoining plan was about restoring souls of the ancients from disparate shards to complete state and then undoing reincarnation memory cleansing, in effect resurrecting them all. Because all ancient souls originally possessed echo, which made them immutable and able to exist without body (the whole plotline in needing to hit ascian souls with huge amount of aether or they would just escape)

Yet in Alexandria a person with regulator "dies", purified soul is put into his body (which for unexplained reasons repairs all damage to the body), memory is restored from backup and somehow this is the same person? What would happen if the previous soul would get to the Aethereal sea, would it enjoy seeing an impostor walking around in his body, pretending to be him?