Why Erenville succeeded as a character where others did not

[LilimoLimomo]

Yeah, this notion that the Endless are somehow incomplete or lesser keeps coming up, but it just doesn't bear out in any context the game puts forward.

The game explicitly tells you multiple times that these are soulless digital creations. And I'll be the first to agree that it's bizarre that the writers chose to write it that way, given that for so much of the story you interact with the Endless as if they are people with hopes and dreams. But the text of the story outright states that they are fabrications.

[Cleretic]

The game explicitly tells you multiple times that these are soulless digital creations. And I'll be the first to agree that it's bizarre that the writers chose to write it that way, given that for so much of the story you interact with the Endless as if they are people with hopes and dreams. But the text of the story outright states that they are fabrications.

We met Namikka in both human and Endless form, we met Otis' soul separate from his Endless form. Were they somehow lesser to you? We met Cahciua before we knew she was an Endless, were you thinking of her as lesser back in Solution Nine?

The game is clear that they don't have souls, yes. But the game's also clear that having a soul doesn't really change much, and the story of Dawntrail is written consistent with that; they're not treated as lesser for not having a soul, just as other things we've met without souls weren't treated as lesser. Meteion didn't have a soul. Alpha didn't have a soul for most of its story. Do you describe them as lesser beings, did Alpha suddenly graduate to being any different in your eyes at the last minute?

[LilimoLimomo]

Meteion didn't have a soul.

If memory serves, they never explicitly specify whether Meteion has a soul or not. One of the meaningful bits of lore that is presented to us in Elpis is that the Ancients themselves don't determine which of their creations get souls; that what does and doesn't get a soul is a natural process that is out of their control. To me, that seemed like an important thread in Endwalker's narrative: that we as readers were supposed to not know whether Meteion had a soul or not, because lacking this information encourages us to grapple with the ramifications of soul-having and the extent to which it does or doesn't matter.

And I don't think it's a tangent to mention that all of the Ancients' creations — but especially Meteion — seemed to be written as the slightest twist on sci-fi stories that ask the question of "is this robot alive?"; with the twist being that in this world the Ancients are making their robots out of the same stuff we associate with biological entities. When Meteion's eyes glaze over, her personality retreats into the darkness, and diagnostic output starts pouring out of her mouth, it makes it clear that she's not just a little wing girl, but that she is a machine made out of flesh. But...couldn't we all legitimately be described as machines made out of flesh? This is one of the ideas I think Endwalker wants us to ponder.

did Alpha suddenly graduate to being any different in your eyes at the last minute?

The writers clearly thought this was a meaningful change, otherwise they wouldn't have put it in the story; they could have just left him soulless, which would have encouraged players whom had grown attached to Alpha to see past whether something does or doesn't have a soul when considering how "real" an entity is. But the writers instead chose a different path: Alpha was given a soul as a way to validate that he was "real". From a narrative perspective, Alpha gaining a soul supports the idea that having a soul matters in the lore of FF14. Of course, we know that two expansions later, the writing team would reconsider this line of thinking; so it goes with infinitely malleable fictions.

We met Namikka in both human and Endless form, we met Otis' soul separate from his Endless form. Were they somehow lesser to you? We met Cahciua before we knew she was an Endless, were you thinking of her as lesser back in Solution Nine?

What you're asking touches on numerous complex philosophical questions, which I'm going to for the sake of brevity oversimplify as: what stuff is alive? Doesn't necessarily have to be biological; as previously mentioned, there has been a lot of exploration of at what point we should consider robots to be alive and have things like moral rights and personhood.

There doesn't seem to be a clear answer to this question, but most people agree that at the very least, there's a dividing line somewhere. A rock isn't alive, but a person is. Okay, but is my watch alive? Is a Furby alive? Is a human-like robot alive? Where do those lines get drawn exactly? This is a complex topic, one that philosophers have outlined and debated without conclusion, one that science fiction has explored for decades, and one that there may not even be a definitive answer to.

In my own experience, I've seen world-building that convinced me that its robots were "just machines", and I've also seen world-building that convinced me that its robots were "alive". I've even seen world-building that contains both. Based on the way they're described in the game, I personally don't interpret the Endless as being alive. They are digital copies of dead people, and the way they are described in the text read to me as uploading all of your personality traits and memories to ChatGPT and then letting it simulate you. And personally, I don't consider that to be alive.

There absolutely would have been ways for the writers to write the Endless that would have convinced me they were alive, as that's something that plenty of stories have done. But in this case, it didn't even feel ambiguous to me, it just felt like a clear "no".

[Layte_Aeon]

The Endless are people, in the same way that ghosts are people. Just like ghosts, they are DEAD people. The dead is the important bit. And for them to maintain their existence they require the death of the living. Sacrificing the living for the dead has been rather consistently treated as a bad thing.

[PorxiesRCute]

The Endless are people, in the same way that ghosts are people. Just like ghosts, they are DEAD people. The dead is the important bit. And for them to maintain their existence they require the death of the living. Sacrificing the living for the dead has been rather consistently treated as a bad thing.

Even living people require the sacrifice of other living beings to keep existing. It's called eating.

[Kuroka]

they're not treated as lesser for not having a soul, just as other things we've met without souls weren't treated as lesser. Meteion didn't have a soul. Alpha didn't have a soul for most of its story. Do you describe them as lesser beings, did Alpha suddenly graduate to being any different in your eyes at the last minute?

Also Athena's creation in the Pandemonium finale, she used fragments and memories with "empty" souls to recreate ppl we know, which besides being powerless (by her design) were just like the real deal.

MY question would be, whats the difference? why does Eternal memory use up souls, while those constructs seemed to be fine until their creator died and their power was used up?

We just dived a bit into the whole soul & memory stuff and now we got.. that lol

[Iscah]

We met Namikka in both human and Endless form, we met Otis' soul separate from his Endless form. Were they somehow lesser to you? We met Cahciua before we knew she was an Endless, were you thinking of her as lesser back in Solution Nine?

Well... yes?

Not Cahciua, because we met her before we knew what was going on and had no reason to not regard her as a living person (or suspected possibly dead person in possession of soul and memory).

But finding Namikka's Endless self isn't exactly an argument in favour of these being real people fully engaged in the world around them. She's trapped in a memory, panicked that she can't find the "little girl" she's been charged with looking after, despite that girl not existing in Living Memory at all.

And Otis – we already met Otis, saw him die, and can reason that this is an incomplete copy of the real person from an earlier stage in his life. We can engage with him like a real person when he's speaking to us, but a chatbot does that too.

I think the underlying reason [for Erenville's accent] actually stems from exactly what I said in the first reply, to bring things back to the topic: they weren't writing him for Dawntrail in Endwalker. They didn't write him or cast him knowing he'd be from Tural (in fact, a few of us noticed his Endwalker short story was edited after publishing to remove a mention of his name origin that doesn't line up with Dawntrail). And then naturally we get into a weird situation where the English localization specifically has been painted into a corner, because only English gave him a noticeably different accent.

The far simpler solution would be to give all of the Shetona that standard Viera accent, just like Lyna has it despite being raised in a culture with a predominantly different accent. Erenville, even if not originally planned to be Shetona, is still the first Shetona character in the game and so should be a reference point for what follows.

There are a number of locations specified as being in "the Shetona language" so it's not a stretch for them to have a different accent to the other cultures if they're intended to have a different language. Accents in FFXIV have been race-based for such a long time that it's bizarre they've chosen this moment to decide that everyone from the same location gets the same accent even if it messes with an existing character fitting into his own culture.

Or at minimum, give Cahciua that accent and imply that she's Othardian Viera originally.

[Rosenstrauch]

Call me crazy, but I think inconveniencing the pedants on the official forums is a little less problematic than pigeonholing an entire culture taking direct inspiration from Native American civilizations into having fake Icelandic accents just because the first of their kind was introduced with one in a manner that is now retroactively erroneous.

[Cleretic]

MY question would be, whats the difference? why does Eternal memory use up souls, while those constructs seemed to be fine until their creator died and their power was used up?

Permit me an 'Um Actually' here, but the Endless don't consume souls, they consume life force, which is a different thing (and was stated more clearly in Japanese but they are at least consistent about what terms are used where). That's a thing that can only come from living people, so it's not much of a difference, but it does mean that the Endless aren't powered by souls, that's not part of their system; the souls go to the regulators.

But yeah, you're right: Anabaseios Erich and Lahabrea are pretty much exactly as 'fake' as Living Memory Namikka and Otis. And yet we never threw stones at Anabaseios' story for that, and the story itself treated both instances exactly the same: as people, not as some frankensteined non-person. If we trust the story to be right about itself, and to be teaching us the right way to read it, then we should take it as the story does: that they're people, deserving of all the respect and dignities of people, regardless of whatever intangible element they do or don't have.

The far simpler solution would be to give all of the Shetona that standard Viera accent, just like Lyna has it despite being raised in a culture with a predominantly different accent. Erenville, even if not originally planned to be Shetona, is still the first Shetona character in the game and so should be a reference point for what follows.

There are a number of locations specified as being in "the Shetona language" so it's not a stretch for them to have a different accent to the other cultures if they're intended to have a different language. Accents in FFXIV have been race-based for such a long time that it's bizarre they've chosen this moment to decide that everyone from the same location gets the same accent even if it messes with an existing character fitting into his own culture.

Or at minimum, give Cahciua that accent and imply that she's Othardian Viera originally.

And see, that would just leave us with a different question of 'why is every viera Icelandic, even the Turalian ones'. Even I'd find that a harder buy than 'Erenville's adopted an accent for long enough to not drop it around his mom'.

[Iscah]

Anabaseios Erich and Lahabrea are pretty much exactly as 'fake' as Living Memory Namikka and Otis. And yet we never threw stones at Anabaseios' story for that, and the story itself treated both instances exactly the same: as people, not as some frankensteined non-person.

That's not how I recall it. We were fully aware that we were only dealing with imperfect copies of those people, woven from memories without the original soul, and it felt strange even then.

They, too, were aware that they were not really their original selves and are happy to fade away when their task is done.

The only real difference is that they only exist within the aetherial sea and apparently do not require life force to physically manifest there.

And see, that would just leave us with a different question of 'why is every viera Icelandic, even the Turalian ones'. Even I'd find that a harder buy than 'Erenville's adopted an accent for long enough to not drop it around his mom'.

As I said, that's already a question – the Othardian Viera, the Viis, even Lyna raised by the English-accented Exarch, all have that accent across dimensions.

The prospect of Erenville adopting an accent so perfectly and irreversibly (and apparently only in a few years) seems weirder, especially when Erenville's accent is a genuine one from the voice actor. I'd find it easier to accept if the actor was putting it on to begin with.