Quote Originally Posted by Turtledeluxe View Post
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Being alive, or sentient, isn't limited to just "biological processes". At least not in a fantasy or sci-fi setting. And that's what we're talking about, we're obviously not talking about real life. It's one of the main philosophical questions and debates in most science fiction. One Dawntrail doesn't seem interested in approaching in any kind of interesting way, even though FFXIV did manage to do that before with the likes of Alpha/Omega, Gigi, and Ultima Thule. That is my main problem.

I agree that some dead people have still been shown to be sentient, mostly while they were still in the aetherial sea before their soul was fully cleansed and reincarnated. But the game has pretty much always treated messing with said aetherial sea, or at the very least the souls within it, as abhorrent because those souls are what people on the Source consider "life". It's why what happened during The Final Days is seen as extra awful because those souls aren't returned to the Aetherial Sea. Neither is Venat's for instance because her aether is completely used up. They are considered truly dead dead.

That's why I find it extra disappointing that the game doesn't treat Alexandria's belief that it is memories, not merely the soul, that makes one alive with the same kind of consideration. It would have made for an actual interesting story and philosophical question. But Dawntrail insists on remaining really shallow and just handwaving it all away (just as it did with previous big problems and ethical questions like in Mamook), making the whole section extra frustrating because we're forced to just swallow the lacklustre explanation that Cachiua (and thus the writers) give us.

And yes, if we were to consider the Endless sentient then it could easily be argued that Cachiua is a villain and the WoL is an accessory to genocide. Especially when her request to erase all Endless doesn't even make much sense when she later explains that shutting off Sphene's terminal would shut off all other terminals anyway. So why even make the request when it's seemingly inevitable when stopping Sphene?

But I'm pretty sure that's just another sign of the weak and unsubtle writing of this writing team. A particularly heavy-handed way to force in extra stakes and sacrifices without it necessarily making much sense (same reason why we can't just shut down the terminals without erasing the data). It's not unlike how the ending of Mass Effect 3 forced you to also kill all Geth and EDI if you wanted to kill the Reapers.

So it's obviously not the players who are unethical for doing what the video game tells us to do. It's the video game characters doing arguably unethical things in-universe that are waved away by weak excuses thanks to weak and shallow writing. Like the OP said: the writers wanted a certain result and they didn't really put much care or thought in how they were going to reach that result.