The missing mood in the existential horror of the last zone of the game (spoilers)

[pedromvilar]

There's another post about how bad this expansion's story is here, and I'm not going to rehash the stuff that's said there. I agree with a lot/most of it.

However, it doesn't touch upon the point that I disliked the most, which made me so violently angry it's making me consider stopping playing altogether, namely that we killed thousands of innocents and no one batted an eye.

I want to open this by saying that I don't think that that particular part of the story as it stands is necessarily one that shouldn't be told, or is bad. Rather, my main complaint is about the writing, and most of all about the treatment of these themes by the narrative and the characters. I'm going to go through points in a conceptual way, rather than chronological.

Buckle up, 'cause it's going to be long.

1. Being dead doesn't mean not being a person
The biggest problem I had with this entire section is encapsulated in a deep rejection of something Cahciua says, a rejection that I feel the story agrees with me on—but not the characters. She says:

Cahciua: You needn't feel any guilt. No matter how lifelike we may seem, we Endless are but facsimiles crafted from memories.

This doesn't mean anything. We are being told that we shouldn't care about ending these people because they are "facsimiles", a word which means "an exact copy". Setting aside whether they are copies (more on that later), why would that mean we shouldn't care about them? Why would that mean we shouldn't feel guilty?

Cahciua is a person. She may also be a copy of a different person that existed, I don't know, but being a copy doesn't make her less of a person. She made plans to resist the Queen, she loves her child, she feels joy and sorrow and embarrassment and fear and pain. Attaching a little abstract "facsimile" tag to all of her experiences doesn't make them any less real, any less meaningful, any less important.

Furthermore, the narrative agrees. The entire exploration section in the last zone involves us getting to know the Endless, individually, and seeing them be happy and have their lives. Some of them say they're fine moving on, but one of the first Endless we talk to in these quests was about to go propose to his girlfriend. He didn't sound like he wanted to move on. He didn't feel like his life should end. And we went and killed him anyway.

I really don't understand this. I don't understand why we're not meant to feel guilty for killing these people. I don't understand why the story feels like if it says they're "facsimiles" that suddenly makes it okay that that guy isn't going to get married to his girlfriend.

[pedromvilar]

Why am I not meant to feel horror at this? Why am I meant to be sad about losing Cahciua, but think it must be done anyway? I cried a lot harder when I killed that guy than when I killed Cahciua. She clearly felt like she should die; he evinced no such beliefs.

I can't overstate how upsetting that was to me. We were being asked to kill thousands of people, and then being asked to not feel guilty about it. We were being told they didn't matter because they were "facsimiles", and then being introduced to them individually and seeing them feel joy and live good, happy, fulfilling lives. We have a scene in which we eat popcorn that seemed to serve no function other than to tell us that these people were living something less than a full life, but we were being told that they enjoyed it. We were being told that their feelings matter less or are less real, and then we were being told to set up beautiful waterworks displays to bring them joy or to play with children while dressed up as bunnies.

This does not add up! This does not make sense! If the story wants me to not feel guilty about killing these people then it shouldn't go through entire sections showing me how actually they all have every single property that makes a person matter—except, it seems, having a "soul", which for some reason is more important than feelings and desires and beliefs and thoughts.

2. Copies?
So, they're "facsimiles"—that is, exact copies of people. Except we're told that the memories of the dead were extracted from the soul, not copied. And the soul, itself, does not seem to have any relationship with the original person. In fact, the only time a soul seems to be anything other than a special kind of aether is when the memory extraction process fails. When a soul isn't "sufficiently pure".

And this isn't new, either. In Endwalker we're told that souls that go into the aetherial sea lose most of their memories, except a few very important ones which get etched in indelibly. So what are souls for? What is the point of them?

This is extra vexing when you think about copies of the same person in different shards. Take Gerolt/Grenoldt/Genolt, who are basically just palette swaps of each other, presumably because they are fragments of the same soul, and contrast them with Ardbert. Ardbert's relationship to us, the WoL, is meant to be the same kind of relationship that Gerolt had with Grenoldt, and yet Ardbert's personality doesn't necessarily have anything to do with ours! Or his race and gender! My WoL is an au ra!

[pedromvilar]

Or think about Hermes/Fandaniel. Are we meant to think that his current incarnation is like he is because he just went crazy, but fundamentally he's the same person? That seems insane to me! Modern Fandaniel and original Hermes have completely different personalities! And that is, actually, what you'd expect if there was little to no meaning to a "soul" other than, I guess, a carrier of (some very few) memories and a special kind of energy (more on this later).

So Cahciua's soul doesn't have her memories anymore. Cahciua's soul isn't Cahciua anymore. And we don't even know that it wasn't consumed by someone else so they'd come back to life. She isn't a facsimile because she isn't a copy! She's the real deal! It's her own, original memories that are right there!

But the narrative is incredibly inconsistent about them. Some of the Endless seem to think that they will "move on", and Erenville himself seems to think that he'll meet up with his mother in the aetherial sea. Even assuming that she hasn't reincarnated by then—Erenville is a viera, he'll live to see 300, maybe 400, who knows what'll happen in that time—in what way will her soul be her? Her memories, her original memories, which were physically extracted from her soul, got wiped by us! We killed her and every other Endless deader than we had ever killed anyone before! Other people we've killed have gone to the aetherial sea; the Endless won't. Everything that made them people is gone.

And, sure, maybe you want to claim that when you wipe the HD the memories somehow, magically, find their ways in the aetherial sea, even though they're not attached to a soul, even though the soul might not even be there yet? But if you do that, that'll be you claiming this, not the narrative, because the narrative just blithely ignores it and doesn't even notice the contradiction.

3. Why not defy fate and thwart nature?
Why do we just go with it? Why do we accept that we have to go through with it, that there's nothing else we can do, when no one so much as mentions any alternatives? We're allowed to say, in one cutscene option, "There must be another way," and when Cahciua says that there isn't we're meant to just nod along and move on.

Why? There are other planets in the universe, some of which were killed by the Endsinger and therefore have unused lifeforce lying around not incarnating not doing anything. We don't know for a fact that we can't convert other forms of aether into it—in fact, we must be able to do that somehow, otherwise food would be useless and healing ineffectual (more on this later). And if that doesn't work, why can't we try something else?

[pedromvilar]

Why don't we try anything else? Why don't we suggest anything else? Why does G'raha Tia, who used to be Crystal Exarch, who crossed time and universe to undo fate, who is a genius and a scholar and who has a long history of going against nature, say:

G'raha Tia: Twelve forfend... They've recreated the process by which souls are broken down in the aetherial sea...

Why is this bad? Why is perfectly mimicking something that happens anyway a bad thing? This is like saying that striking a match is bad because it's recreating the process by which things catch fire in the real world. If it isn't bad when the aetherial sea does it, why is it bad when we do it?

And actually, how does any of that square with Koana's arc in the first half of the story? Why are we meant to believe that this is a bad thing to do? The story wants us to believe that using ingenuity and technology to do things we couldn't do before is bad, right after spending a huge amount of time examining how it's good actually and when paired with understanding and compassion can bring us further. Hell, medicine exists. Every time we heal someone, give them medicine, perform life-saving surgery on them, we are going against the natural order, we are extending people's lives from what they would naturally be. We use technology to defy nature all the time, that's what technology is, but we're meant to think this is bad, somehow?

None of the characters bring up alternatives. None of the characters suggest the possibility that there could be something they could do. None of the characters offer anything more than a token "There must be another way!" which is immediately shut down with a contentless "There isn't." without exploring why there isn't one, what was tried.

And none of the characters think this is horrible. No one thinks it is an unjust tragedy that all of these people are going to die and there's nothing we can do about it. Even assuming that all of these objections are addressed, even assuming that somehow, in this entire universe, with the joint efforts of peoples from all over this world and other worlds, it will be forever impossible, why does no one think this is awful?

But it's fine for Cahciua to be in the aetherial sea, of course. Extending her life on this planet, making her live forever here, in an artificial afterlife, is bad, but it's fine if she goes to the proper (tedious, boring, empty) afterlife and spends however long there until Erenville joins her. It's only us trying to improve on that that's bad, because it goes against nature or something.

[pedromvilar]

4. The nonsensical energy requirements
Next up: we're meant to believe that keeping the Endless alive consumes a lot of "lifeforce" which other people were using.

Before anything else, what the hell is this "lifeforce"? Is it souls? The closest thing I can think of is souls, I don't think the aether of the living has ever been mentioned to be any different than the aether of inanimate objects. The closest we've got is some side stories on the Lodestone from Shadowbringers in which we're told that souls are the only thing the Ancients couldn't create.

(And also, why do souls matter, again? Meteion seemed perfectly lovely without one.)

But most importantly: why? Why does keeping the Endless alive consume this lifeforce? What's so special about the Endless that makes them need to consume lifeforce which isn't true of mortals? Mortals don't eat lifeforce, they eat food, and use that to nourish their life's energy. And mortals don't eat through their lifeforce, do they? And viera live to see over 300 years old, why is it fine for them to live that long but not the other races? What about Otis? He was doing fine in his little robot body, and we're not shown anything that suggests that he wouldn't have been fine with some more maintenance in his body and perhaps a backup of his soul and memories just like the first time he died. So we already have a solution to the energy requirements, just store each individual's soul alongside their memories.

And, once again, why do we just blithely accept it? Why do we hear the Queen and Cahciua say that keeping the Endless alive consumes lifeforce and are meant to nod along and say of course? Why does no one question this? Why is this true, how is this true, is there a way to make it not be true?

The closest we get to an answer to that is mentions to the "cycle of rebirth" but obviously that is bull. Cycles of rebirth are mathematically untenable unless you want to claim to me that the population of Etheirys has been at replacement forever and will never grow past replacement. And I just don't think that is at all consistent with what we're shown! I don't think the total number of souls on this planet is constant! It seems to me that the total population on Etheirys (including all sapient races, Matanga and Mamool Ja and...) is higher than it was at the time of the Ancients! Clearly this "lifeforce" thing isn't finite, it's being generated somehow, somewhere, at some point.

And if it's not, f***, man, let's make more Meteia. Let's make more vessels without souls and imprint people's memories in those. What do souls even matter anyway?

There is no backing to any of this. There is no exploration of why any of this is true, no explanation. The story is trying to rely on background assumptions that I just do not share and that have not been supported by the worldbuilding so far.

[pedromvilar]

5. Grand Arguments are not good for characters
I feel like the main reason Shadowbringers worked and was as successful as it was is that Shadowbringers is a story about people, it's trying to explore the characters as individuals in the face of the horrors surrounding them. We got to empathise with them because they had depth, they had interiority, they had personality. Humans love that! We love reading stories about people, where we can relate to them as people, where we can see their flaws and contradictions, where we can see them succeed and fail on their own merits and act for their own reasons.

This expansion, on the other hand, is extremely moralistic. It's not trying to be a story about the characters, it's trying to be a story about imperialism and the difficulties of ruling and then a story about grief and having to let go.

Now, to get this out of the way: it's bad at doing that. It's really, really bad at doing that. The reason, in real life, here on Earth, that we should let go of the people we lose is that we lost them. If we had a way to keep them, then we shouldn't let go of them, actually. If you want to write a story that's about having to let go, don't write one in which you're killing the people you're meant to be "letting go". They're still right here. We don't need to let go of people who are still right here, this is like saying, "oh, grandpa is 65 now, we should let go of him". If you want a story to be an allegory, you need to make sure your allegory doesn't get completely destroyed by the object-level facts you decided to depict in the story.

But more than that, in trying to be an allegory, the story murders the characters. They are no longer individuals, they are vectors for their arguments. You get Wuk Lamat and G'raha Tia and Erenville and Krile all saying the exact same things—after a token show of reluctance, here and there—with zero nuance and zero disagreement and zero context from their own personalities and beliefs. There is no struggle between them, because for this story, they're not people, they're storytelling devices. They are tools to convey the aesop.

Except that they're characters, too! We like them! We've met them! They have (or had) personalities and quirks! Krile wasn't sassy even once in this whole story! Where's the Krile that messed with Estinien that one time, pretending to have an Echo vision about him, to convince him to join the Scions? Where's the Krile that pushed Thancred's buttons to figure out how he felt about Minfilia? She's dead and gone, and a demon of some kind is possessing her body and using her as another way for the story to tell the player its argument.

[pedromvilar]

So it's jarring and extremely uncomfortable and creepy. These characters aren't meant to be arguments, and honestly, hilariously, that made me feel like they're deader than the Endless. The level of interiority and depth and complexity that the Endless showed us when we were getting to know them was immensely more fleshed out than what any of the characters coming with us got. If you asked me who was more alive in this story between G'raha Tia and that one guy from that one quest who wanted to propose to his girlfriend I'd say it's that guy without blinking.

Furthermore, the narrative doesn't have time to actually develop its argument. There could maybe have been a version of this story that made sense and felt satisfying and not horrible, but it would need a lot more time spent on it—and so, it probably shouldn't have been in this expansion. Or maybe it should have developed into the post-expansion patches. Or, hell, even just developed prior to level 99! Trying to squeeze a whole aesop about having to let go of the people you lost in such a clunky and clumsy way in a single zone at max level is bad writing!

Conclusion
I really, really disliked this story. I was extremely disappointed in it, and extra disappointed in it for coming after an expansion that was imo doing okay. Not amazing or anything, but the first half of it came together neatly, it felt alright (with a lot of caveats). Now I don't know what to do with the fact that my character just murdered thousands of innocent people in cold blood and doesn't even feel bad about it and all of his friends think it was fine and don't see any reason why this would be an issue.

I feel... used.

[ElysiumDragon]

That's... kinda the whole point.

You're meant to feel conflicted, because it's fundamentally a bad situation for everyone involved. You know it can't last forever, but it still hurts, because even though those selfsame Endless find closure and accept their fate, you're still the one sending them to oblivion, even if that oblivion is requested by them.

It's why the story focuses on creating closure for the characters in your group and for the Endless you meet (seriously, do the sidequests in Living Memory), and why it's heavily emphasised that the system in charge of Living Memory deliberately creates these reunions.

The thing is, these people are dead. They're little more than the memories of the departed as digital replicas, and using unsustainable quantities of aether to sustain the illusion. It was always going to end eventually, be it at our hand, or once Sphene ran out of worlds to harvest aether from.

I won't deny it was emotionally rough, though. I cried several times, for what it's worth.

[Basteala]

I respectfully but emphatically disagree. The whole point of this is that you're doing what's necessary to save your world, and the souls of the living. Yes it's true that the ones you're erasing are little more than coded memories, but feeling so lifelike to the point that it even gives some of your friends closure...it's not supposed to be comfortable. Honestly, the fact that we know that Sphene's reality isn't sustainable makes it a grim mercy killing...imagine if it was sustainable, and you were essentially stopping genocide by committing it. We got off easy.

And like Elysium said, it's supposed to hurt. If you're not comfortable or conflicted, that means the story is doing its job.

[Espon]

They're basically NPCs in a real world. They may seem to have feeling and emotions, but that's only because they were created to act that way. These people have long since died and what you see is an artificial being that Sphene recreated from their memories. It'd be different if the Endless didn't need the souls of the living as a power source and they could just continue on existing, but that's not the case. Sphene already attacked Tuliyollal in order to sustain the Endless, and she was willing to do it again unless we put a stop to it and she was not willing to negotiate due to the fact that she too is an Endless designed to act in such a matter.

It's why Erenville had such difficulty emotionally throughout the zone. He knew his mother was dead, and no matter how real Cahciua seemed to be, it was not her and when he finally came to terms with it he was able to let go and move on.