Dawntrail's Final Zones destroy everything the story has built.

[Arzalis]

No. It's like saying "Genocide to keep a few people alive is wrong, especially when the genocide has to constantly be repeated."



So.....because the queen was the one doing all the genocides, it was okay for everyone else to consume the life energy of other reflections?

Why does the life energy part have to continue? How would it even continue without Sphene? Literally no one else is capable of it and they were never the ones actively doing it.

It feels like you're refusing to engage with the whole premise of what people are saying because it leaves a hole in your logic.

[TheMightyMollusk]

Why does the life energy part have to continue? How would it even continue without Sphene? Literally no one else is capable of it and they were never the ones actively doing it.

So instead we should've left them to suffer and starve to death? The entire system was designed to steal life energy to feed the Endless, and they were already failing due to low energy. The whole system would've collapsed anyway. If anything, if one considers them alive, shutting them down was a mercy. That's literally the entire point of Cahciua's actions.

It feels like you're refusing to engage with the whole premise of what people are saying because it leaves a hole in your logic.

What hole, exactly? It's made pretty clear that the Endless are not alive in any meaningful sense of the word. They exist, but they don't grow or change or do much of anything outside of their programming, when they're allowed to manifest at all because of the energy crisis. Cahciua and Krile's parents straight out say it, and even Sphene says she's a program with the real queen's memories, not the real queen.

[Aurumis]

This is like saying "Everyone will die eventually, so murder is fine."

I do agree it was unsustainable, but it wasn't the individual people who were going around finding people to hunt down and live off of. They actually didn't do anything wrong. You can stop the system itself without directly ending the existence of everyone currently inside it. Maybe that leads to them eventually dying off, maybe another solution can be found. It doesn't matter now because we literally shut the door permanently.

I don't believe it's a hard concept to understand stopping Sphene from harming other worlds, but letting the Endless exist as they are. They're literally harmless without Sphene and/or the dimensional fusion device.

they ARE DEAD, they ARE ZOMBIES, they LIVED HIS LIVES AND DIED BY AGE, they used countless lives already to live to the fullest until they die of age, endless are not innocent, they are a product of not wanting them let go once their lives reached a natural ending

[VoidsentStatus]

This is the whole crux of this dilemma. The Endless are indistinguishable from "real" npcs, the way they are written and portrayed. They show emotions, feelings, dreams the same way as any other npc. If the writters wanted to portray them just as computer programs, they should have added more clear differences in their behaviour.

Tbh, this leans into the issue I have for when people don't consider Endless to be real because they don't have "soul aether", and all "soul ather" is is just life battery that gets recycled throughout the planet including to non-sentient things such as plants. The soul essence is not what makes us different than everything else that exists. It would be the same as saying I have a fake ps4 or a simulation of a ps4 just because I unplugged it from the wall. All the interaction functionality, my saved game data, friend list, etc. is still there. If you alter the memories of someone with existing tech, are they considered still alive? If you brainwash/control/manipulate someone's psychology and life behind the scenes, are they considered still alive? Because if the answer is no, hell, there are characters in the main story before Dawntrail that are dead technically.

Anyone who is Sundered has had their memory effectively wiped to a degree, and there are people that have been manipulated in the background by Ascians throughout their life and those that have been tempered by Primals. None of which we considered to be people who have died. Everyone doesn't remember the Final Days and the sacrifices that happened way back so what's the functional difference to wiping away the memory of other people who died in the past? Do we remember what it was like to be Sundered? Is that different than the memory of dying itself being erased? Is them not having taste or certain emotions different than illnesses/conditions that people can have naturally already?

I've seen posts talking about "well the Endless already lived their life" but that doesn't work because of how we talked to/about the Unsundered. We don't look at Elidibus, Emet, and the others and anytime they switch bodies you say "I killed you already, you already lived your life", "you're not Emet-Selch, you're just a simulation of him". The terminology was always them cheating death, and we never looked at them as AI/simulations/zombies.

Are people the same as what they were before those events happened? No, but we don't consider them dead just because they're in a scuffed mental state at the moment and they're not what they could've been. We never looked at what people "could've been" if the past didn't happen, we always fought for the freedom to decide/live going forward. If an Endless decides to live going forward without that computer dictating who they interact with and without their memories being erased, whatever negative psychological consequences could happen, let them deal with it. The Ascians clearly dealt with it for their purposes and goals, so I'm sure at least a minority would want to continue on especially research heavy people.

[Arzalis]

So instead we should've left them to suffer and starve to death? The entire system was designed to steal life energy to feed the Endless, and they were already failing due to low energy. The whole system would've collapsed anyway. If anything, if one considers them alive, shutting them down was a mercy. That's literally the entire point of Cahciua's actions.



What hole, exactly? It's made pretty clear that the Endless are not alive in any meaningful sense of the word. They exist, but they don't grow or change or do much of anything outside of their programming, when they're allowed to manifest at all because of the energy crisis. Cahciua and Krile's parents straight out say it, and even Sphene says she's a program with the real queen's memories, not the real queen.

On the topic of us deleting them being a "mercy", that simply wasn't our choice to make. We asked like three people out of potentially thousands or more. Outside of one potential dialog option that gets glossed over, no one even really questions it.

To address the other points:

For one: you've now completely changed arguments. You were basically claiming they were evil and deserved to be deleted. Now you're saying they weren't alive anyway, so it doesn't matter.

Two: The game itself says you're wrong here. The whole point of the shades in the capstone quest for the EW societies is that they are, in fact, alive. Their existence is different, but they are no less deserving of it than anything or anyone else. The Endless are essentially the same (not that these writers knew about or considered that quest) to the point I struggle to see much difference. In the context of that questline, what we're doing at the end of DT seems downright cruel.

Three: If we take both of your arguments as you've presented them, you're contradicting yourself now. You were essentially trying to make the argument that all the Endless are evil for being complicit in genocide, but if they aren't alive, they aren't capable of making choices based on morality. You need to explain how something can simultaneously not be alive and also be evil and/or make any moral judgements.

You shifting arguments here has kinda hurt your point because you can't really claim both.

[Somnolence]

The issue is you have to define the dead to begin with. If existence is tied to memory like the story does, noone is technically dead in a traditional sense. Their existence is just scattered/diluted beyond consciousness, but not technically gone. There's not going to be a technical difference between me taking the memories of a "dead body" and "creating a new person" vs. having the same memories of a "living body" shifted into a new shell repeatedly. Death is only a concept in so far as we consider that to be the ending of someone's existence. When we say "someone died and came back", it's misleading because proper death is a term that there is no coming back from. We don't call sleeping death, we don't call being unconscious death, we don't call the heart stopping alone death, we don't even consider when the brain doesn't have activity anymore to be death fully. Either the person you and the other are referring to is called "dead" and all of these immortal societies are people dying and being reborn after the current shell's aether is gone, or all of them are never classified as dead to begin with.

Once again to look back to some examples. Zenos died, then got back into another body and then back to his original body and only finally died because he wanted to. There were also ascians with raw souls without bodies, some of them likely lost them but sticked around without that much of impediment. After all, Nabriales could interact with physical world without issues.

So death is not caused by biological body dying, but by naked soul returning to aetherial sea as the process causes soul recycling, resulting in reincarnation. We know that ancients only died when they thought they have accomplished enough, since strong enough soul like theirs can stay outside aetherial sea indefinitely. This is true immortality (as opposed to agelessness).

[Somnolence]

The most confusing issue with Alexandria is not the memories, but souls.

We see that they have technology to capture souls.

What happens then when person with regulator "dies"?

Does:

1. The original soul goes back to aetherial sea? If so, they would run out of souls quickly and after the ending, leaving Solution 9 in current state with people still using regulators makes this very questionable morally.

2. Original soul is captured by regulator. But then, why fresh soul is needed? Why not use original soul and memories and put them back into the old body?

Why the process of separating soul from memories is done at all? To move "legally dead" to Endless area and use purified souls as spares?

Why not use original souls for Endless without memory purification?

If Endless don't need souls then the whole premise of the story is bogus, as this would result in surplus of souls.

[TaleraRistain]

The second half of this expansion is heavily based on IX. If you read the terminals in Origenics, Namikka's soul and memories are separated. Her soul is packaged to be used by someone else. Her memories are sent to the cloud. This to me was very similar to what the Iifa Tree is doing in IX by not allowing Gaian souls to return to the crystal and be reborn. Cahciua called their existence unnatural and if they can't return to the aetherial sea, then that would be the very definition of unnatural. Sphene meant well, but she had trapped her people.

Erenville mentions after the credits that he will have stories to tell his mother when they meet again in the aetherial sea. So since their soul aether was already consumed, that implies their memory aether can now go on to the aetherial sea and be reborn.

[TheMightyMollusk]

On the topic of us deleting them being a "mercy", that simply wasn't our choice to make. We asked like three people out of potentially thousands or more. Outside of one potential dialog option that gets glossed over, no one even really questions it.

In gameplay terms, it's simply not feasible to ask every single person, even among the, at most, hundred or so that were active in Living Memory. In story terms, we still had to deal with Sphene trying to initiate interdimensional fusion, so we didn't have time. (Yes, I know, the game's time scale moves as fast as we complete quests, not on any actual visible timer outside of instanced duties. Story-wise, though, we still had that timer, it just wasn't visible to us as players.)

To address the other points:

For one: you've now completely changed arguments. You were basically claiming they were evil and deserved to be deleted. Now you're saying they weren't alive anyway, so it doesn't matter.

No, my point has been the same either way; There was no other choice. If they're alive, they're complicit, because it's made clear they all knew they were consuming souls; if they're not alive, it doesn't matter. Trying to reframe my arguments doesn't actually change them.

Two: The game itself says you're wrong here. The whole point of the shades in the capstone quest for the EW societies is that they are, in fact, alive. Their existence is different, but they are no less deserving of it than anything or anyone else. The Endless are essentially the same (not that these writers knew about or considered that quest) to the point I struggle to see much difference. In the context of that questline, what we're doing at the end of DT seems downright cruel.

The difference is that the peoples in Ultima Thule aren't consuming other dimensions to sustain their existence. That's kind of a big deal.

Yes, the original Omicrons did conquer and assimilate other worlds, and they're all dead now. We could argue whether the recreated ones in UT deserved a second chance, but that seems like a separate discussion.

Three: If we take both of your arguments as you've presented them, you're contradicting yourself now. You were essentially trying to make the argument that all the Endless are evil for being complicit in genocide, but if they aren't alive, they aren't capable of making choices based on morality. You need to explain how something can simultaneously not be alive and also be evil and/or make any moral judgements.

You shifting arguments here has kinda hurt your point because you can't really claim both.

Again: If they're alive, they're complicit, and if they're not, they're parts of a genocidal machine. There was no shift.

[wereotter]

they ARE DEAD, they ARE ZOMBIES, they LIVED HIS LIVES AND DIED BY AGE, they used countless lives already to live to the fullest until they die of age, endless are not innocent, they are a product of not wanting them let go once their lives reached a natural ending

While I agree with your position, I do want to play devil's advocate a little and question if it was indeed them not wanting to let go

Given what we knew about Namika prior to her death, I didn't get the impression that she willingly decided to become an endless, and that Sphere made that decision on their behalf as part of her coding to protect and serve all her people, who she considered Namika to be one of.

So I also started to view this as. a mercy. How many of the endless lived full, happy lives, and made peace with their end that were afterwards forced to continue to live for eternity?