Why Erenville succeeded as a character where others did not

[Dikatis]

That's true, but who counts as "others"? Who counts as having "lives"? FF14 constantly dismisses some lives while championing others, constantly demonstrates how it believes that some lives are worth more than others.

I never got this impression. The game makes no bones about how you sometimes have to defend your ideals and the people you love with violence. We had to kill Nidhogg and Thordan in order to prevent them from perpetuating the Dragonsong War and end the status quo that will keep the battle raging forever. But it never calls anyone more inherently worthy of living than the other. That's our central beef with the Ascians, who believe that the World Unsundered is more "worthy" of existing than the inhabitants of the Source and reflections when they both have a right to live. But the problem was that our survival is dependent on the ancients having lived their lives to the end. And thus, while the ancients are no less worthy of living, we fight the Ascians to defend our right to live as the people existing in the present.

We don't know why the eagle attacked, but it certainly wasn't for "territorial" reasons given that the Chirwargur were at the foot of the mountain and the eagle's nest was miles above. I don't understand why you would condemn Wuk Lamat for backing up her ideal of mutual coexistence and peace by defending people who'd be out to kill her from a beast that attacked them without warning. The eagle aimed to kill so we responded in kind as self-defense. We did not "value" the eagle's life as being somehow "lesser" than the Chirwargur's. But we're not going to roll over and let the eagle kill us because we also have a right to live and it's in our rights to defend ourselves. So your example is faulty.

To be clear, I'm not saying the authors are hypocrites; I'm saying that the authors clearly believe that different kinds of lives have different kinds of values. There's a difference between "being alive" and "being a person".

But at no point do the Scions consider the Endless "not people". By all accounts, the heroes treat the Endless as they were when they were alive. But the Endless themselves acknowledged that they've lived and died already. A significant number of them also show doubts about the system perpetuating their existence, since their continued lives require others to die in order to sustain their physical forms. If the Scions considered the Endless "not people", then they wouldn't have been broken up about it, as we see with Erenville's and Krile's reactions, in which they offer to look for another way without shutting down the terminals but are gently pushed along by Robor, Alayla, and Cahciua.

Sphene's plan was the harvest all life on the Source for the sake of keeping the Endless running. There was no dissuading her from this path, particularly after she formatted herself to remove her conscience and doubts in order to stay the course. The Endless have a right to live, but so do we. Choosing to let the Endless live means sacrificing all life on the Source, since Sphene will stop at nothing to keep them alive. And so we invoke our right to self-defense by shutting down the terminals. It's a messy situation that could have potentially been cleaned up if Sphene hadn't pushed so hard and had been more amenable to reason. But we didn't have another option given the remoteness of Living Memory and the astronomical costs required to keep it running as well as the deadline imposed by Sphene. It was never about "others" and "not valuing their lives", but about whether the living should have to give up their futures for the sake of those who've already lived theirs.

Choosing to revive the dead at the expense of the living is an unconscionable act and stepping aside was never going to be an option.

Anyways, this has nothing to do with the topic of the thread, which is about the usage of characters within the story rather than the moral conundrum presented by the Endless.