Questionable ethics - Living Memory

[TheMightyMollusk]

I think Emet-Selch would've absolutely shut down Living Memory.

Yeah, but to him, it would've been because they were just another bunch of sundered nobodies. If he doesn't even consider us alive, he wouldn't even blink at turning off a computer.

Alternately, he would've turned it off because stealing and using up the life force of another reflection would've been counter to the whole point of a Rejoining. They can't merge souls back together if they've been spent.

[Dorito_Burrito]

Yeah, but to him, it would've been because they were just another bunch of sundered nobodies. If he doesn't even consider us alive, he wouldn't even blink at turning off a computer.

Alternately, he would've turned it off because stealing and using up the life force of another reflection would've been counter to the whole point of a Rejoining. They can't merge souls back together if they've been spent.

I'd argue he would've done it pre-Ascian days too, seeing it as anathema against the sanctity of souls and the Lifestream.

[Lady_Silvermoon]

*snip*

Just to clarify, maintaining the Endless doesn't require the destruction of souls. Nothing the Alexandrians are doing is destroying souls. I'm pretty sure the characters would have had a far different reaction if that were the case. What the Endless require is for people to die. They are using the corporeal aether to give people bodies. Basically somebody dies and they make ten Endless out of the corporeal aether of that one person. They are effectively, sundered Sundered. Which is dumb. If you want to live forever, creating something MORE fragile is stupid. Had they done what every other species interested in immortality had done and created something hardier, like a machine form or an incorporeal form, then this issue would be entirely avoidable.

And I don't think it's morally wrong to want to be immortal. I think it's wrong to steal other people's corporeal aether in order to do it, but that's not a necessary part of being immortal. Preservation scientists were just bad at their job.

Anyone who wants to argue that it's wrong to want to be immortal due to it being a violation of the natural order, I remind you, nature doesn't have a plan. It just is and we go against what is every time we chop down a tree to build a house. And the Sundered lifespan is not the natural lifespan given to the people of Etheirys by nature, the short lifespan of the Sundered is by design of a person. She altered the entire species in a way she thought best, so why can't those who have been altered attempt to alter themselves in a way they feel works best for them? They should be able to do what they want with their corporeal aether and their souls. The problem comes in when they are trying to do what they want with our aether.

But the Endless aren't trying to steal our aether. Not even Sphene. We're being attacked by a bad line of code. This was a problem better solved with a good programmer than an axe.

And if anyone wants to argue it has to be resolved with an axe cause that's how the game works. Well, the writers knew how the game works, so maybe the shouldn't have made the final antagonists innocent people living in a themepark. What they "antagonized" were the characters' sensibilities. And it's not okay to wipe people out just because they've gone against the natural order, which isn't even the original natural order, it's only what's natural from their experience.

They wanted to set up a situation where we HAD to sacrifice the innocent to save ourselves, but they botched it so bad that we didn't sacrifice them because we HAD to but because the characters were biased against them.

[MikkoAkure]

Just to clarify, maintaining the Endless doesn't require the destruction of souls. Nothing the Alexandrians are doing is destroying souls. I'm pretty sure the characters would have had a far different reaction if that were the case. What the Endless require is for people to die. They are using the corporeal aether to give people bodies. Basically somebody dies and they make ten Endless out of the corporeal aether of that one person.

Souls are not corporeal aether. I'm not sure where you're getting that from unless you misread previous explanations in the game.

The aether which imbues us with life can be categorized into three forms. Two are of the incorporeal sort, the soul and the memory.

They do not run on corporeal aether, that is the normal, mundane aether literally everything else in the setting runs off of. If they did then the whole situation would be easy. Part of the reason the situation with Living Memory is what it is, is because it's supposed to be a giant callback to FF9, but even then in this setting we have no other comparison to what the Alexandrians were accomplishing other than what little we know about necromantic magic so we have no reason to doubt living, incorporeal aether is required.

Also, the logs in the Everkeep state that the bodies are disposed of and it's our bodies that comprise corporeal aether. I'm not entirely convinced the Endless are wholly corporeal either since they are able to teleport around Living Memory at will without an aetheryte.

Even per Sharlayans, the Endless would be considered ghosts.

Every living being is comprised of corporeal aether of the flesh, incorporeal aether of the soul, and the aetherial residue of their memories. Were one to be possessed of only corporeal aether, they would be but a walking corpse. Conversely, entities comprised of only incorporeal aether are referred to in layman’s terms as ghosts. In either case, they may also retain some of their residual memories. Of course, a ghost that possesses residual memories could likely recall its past and retain self-awareness.

The Endless are dead. They are not "new life" they are a prolonged death. Not allowing aether back to the lifestream harms the star and the whole situation of having the dead running forever around a place that's falling apart and full of monsters is gross. By the definition above, and by what Montichaigne mentions later comparing memories to ink and the soul as paper, the Endless are just residue written onto someone else's soul. I couldn't shut it down fast enough.

Anyone who wants to argue that it's wrong to want to be immortal due to it being a violation of the natural order, I remind you, nature doesn't have a plan.

Half of all villains in fantasy media are trying to be immortal. Are you saying they're all right? Or is Seymour from FFX in the right for trying to make all of Spira undead like him?

I guess this is the fundamental part of where you and I disagree because I don't think anyone should live forever to begin with, and this setting in particular has already stated multiple times that doing so is detriment to the star they live on. What we do with the Endless is justified by the simple fact that they're already dead. We're returning the stolen souls back to the normal cycle and the dead will reincarnate as is intended for all life.


By the way, I have no idea where you're getting your calculations about "10-1" from either unless you made that up.

[Lady_Silvermoon]

Souls are not corporeal aether. I'm not sure where you're getting that from unless you misread previous explanations in the game.

Correct. Souls are not corporeal aether. That's why I clarified that the Endless, cannot and do not run off souls. They run off life force, which is corporeal aether. From the souls entry in our codex:


People conflate and confuse what people with the regulators are doing and what's happening in Living Memory. But the people of Living Memory are not memory aether grafted onto souls as that would be ghosts and they could have just been that in the first place, be much sturdier for it and not needed any resources to maintain it. All you'd have to do is keep them from going to the aetherial sea and they would have continued on forever. Even a city of ghosts would have been a less stupid plan. But the memory aether is removed from the soul and sent to Living Memory, while the soul is packaged into a soul cell and sent to the lower levels for distribution to living citizens. So if what she needed was souls, extracting memories from them and sending them to the other place makes no sense. She's making their physical bodies out of the stuff physical bodies are made out of. If she was making them physical bodies out of souls, well souls are eternal. She could have just left them on their original souls and none of this would have been necessary.

Half of all villains in fantasy media are trying to be immortal. Are you saying they're all right? Or is Seymour from FFX in the right for trying to make all of Spira undead like him?

Usually when villains attempt to make themselves immortal, the villainy comes in the method, not the desire. Are the Ea evil? They were just minding their eternal business, chilling as blobs when the depression bird hit. And my highest moral value is self-determination, so Seymour attempting to make everyone undead violates that as does "releasing" a bunch of people without their consent, as does holding them without their consent. But given you don't end up in Living Memory without wearing a regulator, I assume the vast majority of people did consent to end up there, but we conveniently only speak to the handful who didn't want to be there. And just so you know, if I had found a way to preserve them, I still would have added a self-release option so that no one was stuck in Living Memory who didn't want to be there.

[Lady_Silvermoon]

I guess this is the fundamental part of where you and I disagree because I don't think anyone should live forever to begin with, and this setting in particular has already stated multiple times that doing so is detriment to the star they live on. What we do with the Endless is justified by the simple fact that they're already dead. We're returning the stolen souls back to the normal cycle and the dead will reincarnate as is intended for all life.

By their current methods, yes. But plenty of species in the FF14 universe have implored far less stupid methods to do what they are trying to do. Memory aether is washed away in the aetherial sea, I don't see anything wrong with preserving something the universe tosses in the bin anyway. The issue was their method of preservation. There are no souls in Living Memory. The souls are sent down to the living Alexandrians. Sometimes the English translation uses "souls" to mean people, which might cause confusion. But we saw the process. If there were souls in Living Memory, there would be no problems cause ghosts can go on forever. We did not release those people's soul to reincarnate. We released their minds into oblivion.

By the way, I have no idea where you're getting your calculations about "10-1" from either unless you made that up.

Yes. I made up a number in an attempt to express that they are a diluted form of what makes up the physical bodies of the sundered. I know this because Sphene was able to get by for years on the life force of people dying naturally in her own society, so if the Endless weren't diluted that wouldn't have been possible. It could have been 100 Endless for every 1 person's corporeal aether or 1000 Endless for every one person's corporeal aether. The point is they are mind and diluted body while spirit is in a vending machine downstairs. And if each Endless needed all of a person's corporeal aether, then they'd have just been bodysnatchers, which would have also made them less fragile than they currently are.

[MikkoAkure]

Correct. Souls are not corporeal aether. That's why I clarified that the Endless, cannot and do not run off souls. They run off life force, which is corporeal aether. From the souls entry in our codex:


People conflate and confuse what people with the regulators are doing and what's happening in Living Memory. But the people of Living Memory are not memory aether grafted onto souls as that would be ghosts and they could have just been that in the first place, be much sturdier for it and not needed any resources to maintain it. All you'd have to do is keep them from going to the aetherial sea and they would have continued on forever. Even a city of ghosts would have been a less stupid plan. But the memory aether is removed from the soul and sent to Living Memory, while the soul is packaged into a soul cell and sent to the lower levels for distribution to living citizens. So if what she needed was souls, extracting memories from them and sending them to the other place makes no sense. She's making their physical bodies out of the stuff physical bodies are made out of. If she was making them physical bodies out of souls, well souls are eternal. She could have just left them on their original souls and none of this would have been necessary.

Then isn't that even worse? Without souls, they're less than ghosts, they're just aetherial residue or to use Montichaigne's analogy, just floating ink that used to be written to a page and now has to be constantly maintained through sucking out life aether. This makes the Endless no different than the shades of Amaurot or even familiars like a carbuncle. They're just recreations that only resemble life. I had thought the users referring to them as chat bots were going a bit too far but it seems that's exactly what they are. They're simulacra devoid of the actual pieces that make something alive and without a supply of life force they become monsters.

I saw someone say that this whole thing is much clearer in Japanese. I wonder if there's some sort of translation difference here with what's going on and if the English community are the only ones who keep on saying the Endless were "genocided".

[jameseoakes]

Then isn't that even worse? Without souls, they're less than ghosts, they're just aetherial residue or to use Montichaigne's analogy, just floating ink that used to be written to a page and now has to be constantly maintained through sucking out life aether. This makes the Endless no different than the shades of Amaurot or even familiars like a carbuncle. They're just recreations that only resemble life. I had thought the users referring to them as chat bots were going a bit too far but it seems that's exactly what they are. They're simulacra devoid of the actual pieces that make something alive and without a supply of life force they become monsters.

I saw someone say that this whole thing is much clearer in Japanese. I wonder if there's some sort of translation difference here with what's going on and if the English community are the only ones who keep on saying the Endless were "genocided".

The endless are far more 'alive' than the shades of Amaurot which the game makes the ponit of explaining outside Hyth that they only follow a fairly narrow understanding and get confused when trying to engage them on topics outside what they're there to do but then the Amaurot in Shadowbringers is meant to feel fake. The endless feel alive and seem to have will and motivation.

If the game wanted them to feel fake it did a bad job of making them feel that way. why did I help someone find the engagement ring they had for the love of there life only less than an hour later condemon them to oblivion. The game doesn't seem to know what it wants this to be and it feels evil to out of hand do what we are doing.

[Lady_Silvermoon]

*snip*

My favorite part is that you realize their are plenty of stories that contradict your point, but you dismiss them as simply being wrong. To that I say...

Nuh-uh.

Vampires throughout fiction have represented desire, power, disease, alienation, mental illness, addiction and much, much more. The monster vampire is only one use for them among hundreds. And every living being lives at the expense of other living beings. Life if brutal and harsh. You and I are the most dangerous predators on the planet. And while all life feeds on life, as intelligent creatures we do try to carve out an exemption for things like ourselves. So the question is were the Endless people and they were and they made it several hundred years feeding off the aether of those who died of natural causes. It seems given what there were there were a multitude of ways to change their dietary needs (or eliminate them completely) that we didn't bother to explore because it was time for a trial.

*snip*

If you presented me with just the facts on paper, I would assume your assessment of what they are is entirely correct. The problem is, I played DT. Up until DT, I would have assumed the "spark of life" was part of the soul. But DT is an expansion where souls are coins and everything that makes a person a person seems to be part of their memory aether. The shades in Amaurot are not self-aware, except for maybe Hythlo's and I would object to destroying Hytho's shade for being "twisted and unnatural." That shade has done us quite a few solids and isn't hurting anyone.

The people in Living Memory are very much self-aware. They aren't just running off a script. They have thoughts, they have opinions, they can get bored, they can lead a rebellion orchestrating their own destruction out of prejudice. They are feeling, thinking people by every metric of measurement I'm aware of. There are so many instances in Living Memory that debunk the theory they are just the most convincing bots ever created from literally viewing Otis's thoughts thus KNOWING he has thoughts to the tour guide approaching us and assuring us that everything should feel the same as when we were alive. If everyone is being controlled by a system, he should be aware we're not on it, and why would the system be assuring itself it feels the same. Heck, why would a system of bots be sitting around interacting with other bots for all eternity anyway? Without the Endless being sentient, Living Memory makes no sense.

I'm fairly confident the writers didn't fully consider what they did here and wrote the Endless as 100% convincing people in order to get some tears out of players when they later off everyone's mom. But from what I can see in DT, your mind is with your memory aether, not your soul.

[Ayche]

My favorite part is that you realize their are plenty of stories that contradict your point, but you dismiss them as simply being wrong. To that I say...

Nuh-uh.

Vampires throughout fiction have represented desire, power, disease, alienation, mental illness, addiction and much, much more. The monster vampire is only one use for them among hundreds. And every living being lives at the expense of other living beings. Life if brutal and harsh. You and I are the most dangerous predators on the planet. And while all life feeds on life, as intelligent creatures we do try to carve out an exemption for things like ourselves. So the question is were the Endless people and they were and they made it several hundred years feeding off the aether of those who died of natural causes. It seems given what there were there were a multitude of ways to change their dietary needs (or eliminate them completely) that we didn't bother to explore because it was time for a trial.

I was not born yesterday, I know there are many subversions and twists on the vampire concept, and they are not all valid to begin with. You really want to push this idea that the writers did you an injustice by putting their foot down that the Endless can only be fueled by the death of the living, like they reject your weird moral quandary that maybe 3 AAA batteries might had been enough actually. The message was not "The endless had a flawed energy production!", that would be utterly asinine way to take the story. Get real.