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

[LittleArrow]

I don't think you wanted to say Emet was right, don't worry (I didn't take the merit part as him being right, but I presented that badly myself, my apologies).

But I still disagree with the first part I quoted, namely that we are like Emet-Selch. I still think that it is Sphene who is like Emet and we are fully in the right to defend ourselves against her. Even more so since her artificial afterlife is built on the premise to kill whole worlds ruthlessly, so we are not just saving ourselves. We are inevitably also saving other reflections and planets.

I definitely see your point of view and I too think Sphene is like Emet, but I feel like we're both like Emet at this point even in self-defense lol. It's just BE EMET-SELCH DESTORY A WORLD FOR YOUR OWN! Lol, sorry, your opinion is very valid and I agree with many of your posts regarding the story.

[Bright-Flower]

I also feel like 'killing their world' is overselling it a bit. Their civilization is still going strong in Heritage Found. We had to shut down their digital afterlife, sure. But their culture, their people, are still alive.

[SDaemon]

I don't think I did a great job with explaining myself. I do not agree with Emet-selch. It was genocide. He was a monster, but one I think we could all understand to some degree and still disagree with. What I'm saying is, deleting the entire memory database as an answer does not sit well with me in the slightest and in actuality disgusts me. We could've found a different way or at least attempted to. That is where the writing is lacking, to even acknowledge what's going to happen to these memories after they're gone. They live in us? Right so that's bs. Memories live MAYBE 2 or 3 generations if you're lucky. Not to mention it's hogwash when we're standing in front of these people and then going to delete them.

Emet-selch was wrong, and I still feel we're wrong too.

Like, it's literally a villain arc. Suffering is bad so just kill everyone. You're going to kill our world so we kill yours first so you won't need to kill ours anymore. It's stupid. It's really really stupid.

We could have found a different way? Sphene refused repeatedly to even entertain the notion of a different way, despite pleas to do so. What solution would you offer to someone who refuses to accept any alternative no matter? Would you try and force this alternative on her and hope your attempts somehow reach a peaceful resolution before the countdown ends and your home is destroyed?

"You're going to kill our world so we kill yours first so you won't need to kill ours anymore." Are people no longer allowed to defend themselves from aggressors bent on your annihilation? Do we simply sit there waiting for death to come because otherwise we'll be villains?

[LittleArrow]

We could have found a different way? Sphene refused repeatedly to even entertain the notion of a different way, despite pleas to do so. What solution would you offer to someone who refuses to accept any alternative no matter? Would you try and force this alternative on her and hope your attempts somehow reach a peaceful resolution before the countdown ends and your home is destroyed?

"You're going to kill our world so we kill yours first so you won't need to kill ours anymore." Are people no longer allowed to defend themselves from aggressors bent on your annihilation? Do we simply sit there waiting for death to come because otherwise we'll be villains?

Agreed. That's why I said OR at least attempted to. Sphene needed to be put down. She's a monster. However so was Zenos and we still went in to help the Garleans (this isn't a one to one, but I'm just stating the mood regarding our WoL to our enemies and their people), we went into save the very beast tribes that vowed to destroy everything we loved with summoning - it didn't always work out and sometimes there wasn't another way, we just had to aoe'em down.

I'm saying, I wanted to try - not with Sphene not with reasoning b/c that was stupid. I wanted to try our way, contact Cid, bring in an atmos, shoot I don't anything - we apparently had enough time to bring in an entire building force for the train and walk around eating fake food in the end. I wish my WoL could've used that time to back up their memories, or find a way to route them to our lifestream, or just try before instantly accepting - yep to the deletion for you.

[Edit] I understand and agree with the counterarguments that we need to defend ourselves. Yes. Do that. I was saying that to myself too, but the WoL is different. They're a hero. They'll defend, fight, and kill to protect their world and even other worlds like in ShB. I'm saying, Emet was defending his world too. He had a way to bring back his friends, his life, and his society - he promised them he would. Emet was defending a dream he had for those he loved. It was wrong, and he himself stated he lost because he was trying to bring back something he'd lost while we were defending what we now have - he couldn't accept they lost (very waterdown explanation). I don't think it was right to delete them without trying to do something else. We could've failed and seen there's nothing we could do. I'm not saying we shouldn't defend ourselves. I'm saying the writing was bad and drove me nuts to not even try and show us how there is no other way besides a literal ticking timebomb... but with time to get to know people. (besides the Krile stuff... which should've been the main focus of the entire zone and more of the MSQ imo)

[SongOfTheWind]

I think people who are ok with it and not questioning the whole situation most likely didn’t play Nier games.

[Loggos]

One thing I just thought about regarding the aetherial sea and Erenville meeting his mother:

I think in theory it might be possible since the game said the Alexandrians were recreating the same process that occurs within the aetherial sea. This means, the souls in the natural afterlife get cleansed the same way. Yet we know, certain key characteristics still remain after this natural process. (Which is why the same person can be reborn, while being very different but also retaining certain core traits like Fandaniel.)

This opens up the possibility that the artificial cleansing process has the same effect and that it can’t remove those “core characteristics” either. Should those souls go back into the aetherial sea then they might be like any other naturally cleansed soul, thus remaining “the same person” but without memory.

Souls would therefore never be inherently “empty” or blank canvases but possess a “core identity”. Maybe this core identity is so deeply tucked away inside of it that it doesn’t interfere with a living being when consumed unlike memories do, which might be a lot more at the forefront of a soul.

Perhaps souls being consumed doesn’t destroy them but just “depletes” their energy, so they automatically go back into the aetherial sea where they are replenished. (If there is a cycle of energy then the life force consumed in the living world would not be lost but via various conversion steps find its way back into the aetherial sea.)

This is all speculative of course (esp. the last part) but I think the first part could still be somewhat implied by the lore.

[LittleArrow]

One thing I just thought about regarding the aetherial sea and Erenville meeting his mother:

I think in theory it might be possible since the game said the Alexandrians were recreating the same process that occurs within the aetherial sea. This means, the souls in the natural afterlife get cleansed the same way. Yet we know, certain key characteristics still remain after this natural process. (Which is why the same person can be reborn, while being very different but also retaining certain core traits like Fandaniel.)

This opens up the possibility that the artificial cleansing process has the same effect and that it can’t remove those “core characteristics” either. Should those souls go back into the aetherial sea then they might be like any other naturally cleansed soul, thus remaining “the same person” but without memory.

Souls would therefore never be inherently “empty” or blank canvases but possess a “core identity”. Maybe this core identity is so deeply tucked away inside of it that it doesn’t interfere with a living being when consumed unlike memories do, which might be a lot more at the forefront of a soul.

Perhaps souls being consumed doesn’t destroy them but just “depletes” their energy, so they automatically go back into the aetherial sea where they are replenished. (If there is a cycle of energy then the life force consumed in the living world would not be lost but via various conversion steps find its way back into the aetherial sea.)

This is all speculative of course (esp. the last part) but I think the first part could still be somewhat implied by the lore.

Speculative or not, it gives me some measure of resolution to the souls being totally used as fodder. I think another small detail that might support this idea of the souls just losing energy is the Zoraal Ja fight. After he died all the souls escaped from his body. I'm just hoping that despite the location, reflection or source, they'll eventually get pulled back into the natural order of things.

[Lersayil]

Thanks for more or less summing up my issues with the whole fiasco. Like sure, the whole "us or them" conflict feels extremely forced and arbitrary, but fine, we have to delete them.

The main issue is that copy or not, artificial or not, the Endless seem fully sapient. They think, reason, feel, plan, make decisions, form new memories, and we're shown no evidence during the story to the contrary. If anything, our interactions with them seem to confirm it. They seem alive in all but the biological sense. Deleting a whole city of them (and the rest in the storage) is basically genocide. If they (the writers) still wanted to go on with this line of thought, fine. But the tone afterwards should not at all be cheery. We should be mourning for them, and lament the choices we had to make. This is the kind of decision that should horrify and destroy any decent person, not to mention a hero.

Either that or they really shouldn't have made the Endless sapient. Or if they aren't meant to be, place more clues that they aren't. Its possible they aren't meant to be, but the clues (if there are any) really don't make it clear, and I'm not sure how that wouldn't bother the party present.

It's not even clear if they know the price of their continued existence. Hell, a good amount of them might've been persuaded to voluntarily end existing once they're fully informed.

[Mikey_R]

The main issue is that copy or not, artificial or not, the Endless seem fully sapient.

The issue here is the word 'seem'.

Yes, they 'seem' fully sapient, but are they really?

If I was to create an AI that gave responses based off of the memories of someone, t the point you couldn't tell they were an AI, would they be alive? I think most would say no.

However, give that AI a face and body and the chance to interact with other AIs to make things seem more natural, does this suddenly make them alive?

That is all living memory is, a giant computer that creates images of people based off of their memories. These AI can interact with each other and even us as they would when they were alive; but are they truly alive?

Even our relatively primitive AI can do these things, it can learn and adapt, now think far into the future at what it could achieve. So, I think the question should be, at what point could you consider an AI to be alive?

[Loggos]

Thanks for more or less summing up my issues with the whole fiasco. Like sure, the whole "us or them" conflict feels extremely forced and arbitrary, but fine, we have to delete them.

The main issue is that copy or not, artificial or not, the Endless seem fully sapient. They think, reason, feel, plan, make decisions, form new memories, and we're shown no evidence during the story to the contrary. If anything, our interactions with them seem to confirm it. They seem alive in all but the biological sense. Deleting a whole city of them (and the rest in the storage) is basically genocide. If they still wanted to go on with it, fine. But the tone afterwards should not at all be cheery. We should be mourning for them, and lament the choices we had to make. This is the kind of decision that should horrify and destroy any decent person, not to mention a hero.

Yeah the tone of the whole last zone's story threw me off so much. Interjecting those light-hearted segments, even trying to infuse the story with stupid comedy (the whole costume scene), giving you the feeling of a funny seasonal event quest... There was absolutely no gravity or looming sense of terror considering we were about to delete them. It had "let's have a picnic on a sunny day" kind of vibes as if we had forgotten what had just happened before and what was about to happen after. Jumping from shutting down a tower to this super light-hearted mood back to shutting down a tower... there was no logical continuity in their emotional storytelling, it was driving me insane.

Either that or they really shouldn't have made the Endless sapient. Or if they aren't meant to be, place more clues that they aren't. Its possible they aren't meant to be, but the clues (if there are any) really don't make it clear, and I'm not sure how that wouldn't bother the party present.

I completely agree. They should either have given us a clear reason why their current existence is not good for them, so us deleting them would actually liberate them, or make it so that they don't actually exist (I like Mickey_R's AI interpretation in that regard).

The whole "sapient without a soul" thing was confusing anyways. They have no soul but they clearly have a sense of self so...do you not need a soul to have a self? (Meteion says Hi I guess.) Is it "just" life force, like a special brand of aether that normal aether is converted into? But why can souls be reborn as the same person then? They clearly can't only be life force if there is some piece of core identity inherent to them. Or is it the memories in the aetherial sea that are a self but they get reduced/compressed to a "core" self that is then infused in any random ball of life force?

They could have worked with various ideas in a world were souls exist: For example by establishing the "magical law of nature" that memories can never be a full self without "life force" (whether it is because of the necessary core identity of a soul or because life force is Just That Special that a self (if we assume they are born from compressed memories) needs it).

It may not really make sense from our real point of view if you look at it through the lense that a "self" is just neurological "data processing" and as soon as you could simulate consciousness it would assumably have a self. But I think in a world of magic it's fair to create different forms of consciousness/existence and rules based on souls.

They could have said something like "when a self created through memories is separated from their soul, their true core/that super special life force that regulates a stable and coherent existence is missing. This will lead to some kind of deterioration process that will inevitably destroy them and be an experience more terrible than mortal death" or anything else along those lines.

Or they could have pulled an Amaurot 2.0, with the endless just being fabrications of Sphene who created her own perfect world, meaning they don't actually have a sense of self. (Now you could open up a whole can of worms whether Hythlodaeus in Amaurot was actually a sentient person, if he was able to help us and go against Emet, even though he was his very creation/fabrication... but perhaps that was just Emet's subconsciousness speaking.)

I think another small detail that might support this idea of the souls just losing energy is the Zoraal Ja fight. After he died all the souls escaped from his body.

That's a very good catch! You are right, the souls did stream out of him again. That gives me hope as well.