Problematic notion about Zone 5 & 6 story bits.

[Kirutsuki]

Ok, I will start this by saying that I liked Dawntrail story bits. Especially the beginning portion was really carefully crafted, but as the story progressed I started to notice some incredibly agonizing parts about characters I thought I knew and the story.

I wrote 40 pages of notes going through the story, so I really tried to understand what was going on. And a lot of it is about the latter portion due to the complicated nature of what's going on, so sit tight as I try to break this down and tell you why this is problematic by nature. Heavy spoilers ahead:

So first I will highlight the problem and we go about it by breaking it down why it's quite literally the dumbest piece of fictions.

Essentially the crew that joins the WoL into the Unlost World; Erenville, Wuk Lamat, G'raha Tia, Krile cause a genocide just because of their beliefs of what is "correct".

Now I have to explain why this is so and it isn't going to be simple, but bare with me.

From the very start when we learn about the "regulator" devices there is apprehension among the crew in Heritage Found that this is a bit abnormal to take a soul of a person and divide it into a soul and a memory, after which the soul goes through a purifying process to be used as a supplemental soul for the living.

Alisaie stating that this is highly unnatural and doesn't like it. Souls being used as commodity instead of it naturally going to the Aetherial Sea where it slowly fades into oblivion.

The thing that the crew from here on keep mentioning is that people are remembered by others as they die and that THAT'S how it SHOULD be. And there is very little in terms of trying to understand this new reflections beliefs. Even if they too know about the Aetherial Sea and how it functions.

So there is a direct conflict here immediately from the crew that something isn't right about this. And yes the Preservation in Solution Nine was doing experiments with souls, injecting them into beasts and creatures, but this again is never explained to the minute detail on how purified these souls are, cause if they are just blank soul energy, there is no inherit wrong doing even if you put that soul into a beasts body. (As far as we know)

"We are more than our memories" I hear everyone scream. Yes, even I believe that every human is more than their memories, but I'm not going to push that onto others as the truth. It would be incredibly naive of me to do that, as if I knew any better?
Especially onto people who have different belief systems they've lived by for hundreds of years.

1/5

[Kirutsuki]

So, we move on to Living Memory the zone and Cahciua is there as our guide after Sphene gives us the ultimatum that interdimensional fusion is going to happen and she stripped all memory of-- let's say emotional side.

And Cahciua states to us that all who live here are Endless, meaning they have died and are only the memory portion of the soul. She says that in order for Sphene to sustain this system she needs vast amounts of energy from living beings from other reflections and Cahciua is wholly against the idea of someone else losing their lives for her to stay living as a memory, as an Endless. This I agree with as I don't think anyone would want this, but things are about to get so screwed up here.....

Cahciua is only speaking about herself, her experience. She never actually states that everyone in this place is of the same mind. And despite what we see in-game, there must be thousands if not millions of people here as Endless. All with their own hopes & dreams.

And what we see as we explore are people incredibly happy, they know they are endless and while they might not know what sustains them, they have been given a chance at happiness they might not have achieved in life.

This brought in mind one of my favorite episodes in Star Trek Generations, where an Android called Data with a full functioning A.I is brought to a trial about whether or not Data is a person with his own consciousness or a product that corporations can use for manufacturing copies off of. The resolution of that boils down to a simple fact that we as humans do not know the full extent of the consciousness of an android and as such we cannot treat them as objects or products.

The same applies here with these memories, or these Endless. We do not fully understand their consciousness or self-awareness to judge if they truly are the people they used to be in their corporeal forms, or are they something else. Obviously the game hints that they are something entirely different because it has to, because apparently our crew is so set on their ways that this soul extraction thing is so wrong in so many levels that something has to be done.

But the weirdest thing: they don't actually try to find any other solution to this other than listen to Chaciua because apparently she speaks for all the people in Living Memory. A person we barely know and a person Erenville barely talks to.

(And in comes Wuk Lamat who just a week ago barely knew her own people outside the capital, just swoops in and knows exactly what to do... Right? Right.)

2/5

[Kirutsuki]

So back to the point, we travel in Living memory and we meet some friendly faces here and there and we understand a bit about the area and it's people. All of them seem just fine and happy. Some meeting their loved ones again and Chaciua is quick to point out that the system does that from backed up memories to rejoin people long lost to each other, as if that's a bad thing... (There is the notion that the system erases certain memories of a someone who is to be rejoined with someone. Like the example of the husband and wife who got rejoined. The man states that she never re-married in her life, but there might be some shenanigans going there that she actually did)

Either way we eventually meet Krile's parents, and this is where it gets incredibly stupid. Even more than it already is. Krile literally asks her parents why they sent her to the source along with the earring. And the answer is that it was their HOPE that they would see Krile again as Endless once they died. And that hope, that gift was given to them. And it is understandable that after meeting Krile, they (her parents) would be ok to move on to the Aetherial Sea. Fine enough. But that doesn't really mean it's ok for us to just tell everyone to actually die, does it? Well apparently it does because memories are just memories, even though Krile just had the most amazing, but awkward as heck time with her parents.

And all this time Erenville has been silent, and my hopes for Erenville to actually speak up and say how actually insane all of this is and he does. But that's not the reason. Erenville snaps because he's sad and plays the victim card as Chaciua askes the group to fulfill her last dream. Erenville says no, but not because it's really selfish for Chaciua to get to have a fulfilling final moment when she herself is literally forcing all of us to put all these Endless in their eternal slumber without warning. No. Erenville is just sad because she's about to die and he doesn't want to see her happy or whatever.

So, we do the thing, Erenville's mom is now dead and Erenville tries to convince himself that yea it's just a memory and that the memories we remember are better than the memories that actually speak to us or whatever I don't know. At this point I kind of lost it.

But I held on hope, why? Because at the very beginning when the "regulator" machines are explained, it was clearly stated that Sphene did not force people to use these. So there was always a choice. To either go to the Aetherial sea and into oblivion, or use a regulator and live a long life and when you eventually died you would become a memory in Living Memory, just like Namikka did.

3/5

[Kirutsuki]

So I was hoping that because it was always a choice to become Endless that we would at the very least entertain the notion of another solution, like, I dunno. Telling Sphene to stop using the regulators to fill the servers with dead people. Or actually let people choose to move on from being an Endless and into the Aetherial Sea so there's more room in Living Memory.

And I get that we were kind of in a hurry to solve this problem because of Sphene's ultimatum. She was already doing the calculations, but at the same time Cahciua states we should be ok for a "random period of time" so it really didn't even feel like we were in some massive hurry. For all we knew the calculations could have taken weeks.

Now let's crush this idea that this soul separation thing is wrong entirely. That memories should only live in other people;

The reflection where Alexandria resides, the "Unlost World" had a Calamity so severe there was nothing they could do to save their people. This Calamity was started by a literal weapon of mass destruction by the neighboring country; Lindblum. It wasn't a natural cause. Yes their world was ravaged by lightning, but it was not on a level of a Calamity until the nuke was deployed.

And what does Cahciua say to Erenville?

"Everything that lives must one day die, and that which has died isn't meant to return. This is only natural"

There was nothing natural about the calamity that happened. It was cause by a weapon of mass destruction.

So what exactly is the problem if you give people a choice? There is nothing inherently wrong in this system they have set-up. People of Alexandria know that once a person dies of natural causes they go to the cloud and become memories. Sphene tells them that death is not the end.

They know that the regulators use the souls of the passed to sustain their life in the possible chance they die, and when they finally die of old age it's now somehow wrong to be an endless? (Ignoring what Spene is doing with reflections and aether to sustain them)

Let me be clear, what Sphene is doing IS wrong, her method of sustaining the system is wrong. But so is our approach to fixing it. We literally solve a massive problem in our own star about a bird crying at the edge of the universe, but we can't solve how to make it so that the Hard Drive Space in a server doesn't lose power?

C'mon.

4/5

[Kirutsuki]

And I get that remembering people is a direct nudge towards the fact that Emet-Selch asks us to remember them, the ancients etc. And there is novelty in that, and truth. People are remembered by others. But what about the people who aren't?

What about the people who don't get to make friends in their lives, they don't get to make connections when they were alive? The people who's whole family died? Who didn't find happiness? Who are they remembered by? For those people a system that let's them have a resemblance of life beyond death might be a blessing they need.

And it's incredibly wrong for us to judge that as something unnatural or wrong, especially when their entire civilization was faced with certain doom.

Maybe, maybe I'm overlooking something incredibly simple. But to me, this ending was just stupid and the only way to make it make sense is to say that we were in a rush and just had to literally send thousands if not millions of people to the Aetherial Sea.

Hydaelyn would literally groan in her grave.

I just felt so miserable every time Wuk Lamat or someone else, especially if it was G'raha or Krile saying this system is somehow unnatural or a perversion of their beliefs. I never took them as people who held so fast on the idea that all people should just go to the Aetherial Sea without having a stopping point at a gas station.

I get that the Endless are literally endless, that they NEVER move on. But the solution to that is to just tell the people and try to make Sphene to tell the truth about the system to her subjects. But no, I guess we kill Sphene instead and I guess she forgot to make backups just in case.

5/5

[Cleretic]

I don't especially want to argue with you on this, in part because I think you're saying something both broadly true and writer-intended, and arguments that wheel out the G word often get pretty ugly and emotionally-charged, but there's a few other things to keep in mind here.

1. This was depicted as a heavy choice. It's depicted as the heavy choice, in fact, damn near the first thing we knew about this story was that the development team were saying 7.0 would have us make a difficult choice. This isn't just the story waving off a horrible thing that happened; you are supposed to feel this way, at least in part.

2. It's also essentially our only choice. There's no soft and happy third option, no middle road not taken. It boils down to an 'us or them' situation--and a very tangible 'us or them' at that, we've been very directly told by several people that Sphene's going to try to kill us all so they can keep going.

3. The call for what happens is from inside the house, so to speak; it's not Wuk Lamat that says this has to happen, it's not Zoraal Ja who only thinks about solving problems through bloodshed, it's not even our usual 'emotionally detached advisor' types like Y'shtola or Urianger: it's Cahciua, one of the Endless. That essentially makes this less murder, and more assisted suicide; and yes, on an objective reality level that wouldn't necessarily change anything, but FFXIV's story is ultimately very character-driven and emotionally-driven; we frequently have one or two people stand in for a whole community (my favorite example is 'Estinien is Ishgard'), and if there's supposed to be dissent or opposition, that's also given embodied voice (best example there is probably Emet and Venat as the contrasted voices of the Ancients). There are no dissenting voices in Living Memory; there's only those corroborating it, either literally in the case of Krile's parents, or emotionally in Otis'.

Living Memory's tragedy is, in a strange way, one of their own making; they're a people who think being remembered is to be alive, who created a status quo where the dead aren't remembered. That certainly makes this sadder, but it doesn't cause the right solution to suddenly be to let Sphene win. The right answer is probably to completely shut down Origenics and the regulators, to change the status quo that makes Living Memory the tragedy it is. And I suspect that will be a core element of the Arcadion's whole story, albeit with a bit of an unorthodox backdrop of 'also we are terrible to athletes'.

EDIT: Also, I think it's interesting that you bring up people who 'fall through the cracks' of society, because I have the same questions but about Living Memory. Like, let's take your example of the lonely people; someone who didn't make connections, whose family died, or perhaps someone whose family even rejected them and never found a new one. We know that Living Memory prioritizes reconnections, lost loves and family, stuff like that, so... what does happen to someone who didn't have them? Are they dropped into Canal Town completely alone, surrounded by people who already know each other, like turning up to a reunion you aren't invited to? Or are they never brought back, eternally at the bottom of Living Memory's priority list because it's always going to be more important to reunite siblings, spouses and best friends?

And while I think this is ultimately a secondary element to things that shouldn't change the feelings about it, I don't think the terminals were wiped of their stored data, I think the terminals were just turned off. The fact that the various Living Memory sidequests have people still hanging around suggests to me that all the data's still in there, it's just mostly shut down with some subprocesses still spinning.

[Lurina]

EDIT: Also, I think it's interesting that you bring up people who 'fall through the cracks' of society, because I have the same questions but about Living Memory. Like, let's take your example of the lonely people; someone who didn't make connections, whose family died, or perhaps someone whose family even rejected them and never found a new one. We know that Living Memory prioritizes reconnections, lost loves and family, stuff like that, so... what does happen to someone who didn't have them? Are they dropped into Canal Town completely alone, surrounded by people who already know each other, like turning up to a reunion you aren't invited to? Or are they never brought back, eternally at the bottom of Living Memory's priority list because it's always going to be more important to reunite siblings, spouses and best friends?

They touch on this in the story. People who never found happiness or connection as adults end up as their child selves in Yesterland, since kids can be made happy even through simple pleasures and companionship. You see a lot of them on their own or only with other kids there.

[Cleretic]

They touch on this in the story. People who never found happiness or connection as adults end up as their child selves in Yesterland, since kids can be made happy even through simple pleasures and companionship. You see a lot of them on their own or only with other kids there.

Oh, I had that earmarked as a separate quietly depressing thing about Living Memory. When we're getting people for Otis' play in the MSQ, we see a kid who's playing at being a royal knight; I hate to say it, there is literally no positive reason for the happiest time in that person's life being when they were pretending to be a knight. Every possible explanation there gets really sad, really quickly.

[Alenore]

First, thanks for a well written post, based on facts and dialogues.
If you didn't know, you can circumvent the 3k character limit by editing a post

The thing that the crew from here on keep mentioning is that people are remembered by others as they die and that THAT'S how it SHOULD be. And there is very little in terms of trying to understand this new reflections beliefs. Even if they too know about the Aetherial Sea and how it functions.

I'm not sure we're told they know what the Aetherial Sea is, only that their memory extraction process is pretty similar to how it's done naturally.

And what does Cahciua say to Erenville?

"Everything that lives must one day die, and that which has died isn't meant to return. This is only natural"

This part especially annoyed me. Especially with G'raha next to us, who literally went back in time to save people he didn't want to die.

And I agree that we're shown to just shutdown what is a life support terminal for an entire race a few hours into realizing they even exist. We're told only "living aether" can sustain them. I suppose it's what we've seen the puppet steal from a corpse during Tural attack : there was 2 orbs of aether, one naturally being the soul, and I suppose the other being the aether needed to sustain the Endless.
But while I can understand souls being a problem to make from scratch due to complexity, natural law etc, I'm unclear what "Living Aether" even is when we can literally create life with creation magick, ie summoning.


I think one subject that I've seen rarely commented on, is how Alexandria and the Source view on what "life" is differ on a fundamental level.

The Ancients saw "souls" as being what makes something "alive" :

• The difference between Arcane entites and natural life was the presence of a soul ;
• They say things like "we'll meet in another life" to mean "when our soul reincarnate" ;
• Emet Selch doesn't mind killing sundered people because they're only shards of a soul, ergo not alive, ergo not murder ;
• The focus is always on "the soul" going back to the Aetherial sea to be "cleansed" of memories, or the life experience, as being natural ;
• I think the only moment someone shows fear of being erased is when Amon is defeated and he realizes HE will disappear ;
• Playing with souls was frowned upon as it was seen as an almost sacred part of existence ;
• Which is not to say memory manipulation was okay with them either, but mostly because it removed free will to that person.

The Scions point of view (and scholars I suppose)), is that both make someone alive. they take the Ancient view on souls being important, but add to it :

• "It's the sum of our experience" kind of arguments Scions love to throw around when cutscenes get philosophical ;
• the splitting of soul and memories for the Spirit Vessel in Shadowbringers. While natural, they've made a point explaining that's what made somebody what they are ;
• Alisaie revulse at using souls, a part of someone's self, as a resource ;
• How they don't consider "just memories" to be living beings. For them they're just shades, just like the recreations in Amaurot ;
• On the other end, the people in Ultima Thule were recreated with data on both their souls and memories thatwas in Meteion's cocoon. They're not pure memories. And we consider them as actual beings ;
• Memory alteration spells are banned or at the very least frowned upon: the Sharlayan imposed a ban on it, and the fact the Forum had to rely on it wasn't common knowledge ;
• The fact some people are against the use of regulators, not only because they use souls, but also because they don't want their memories altered.

But Alexandrian don't see it the same way. For them, "life" is "memories" :

• Souls are seen as a commodity: they appear out of nowhere and they found a use for it (disclaimer: a NPC says something along the lines of "some speculates our use of souls caused our birthrate to decline", which would tend to say there's a finite number of souls that can be generated at a time, and supply is lower than demand if you don't have the recycled souls with them) ;
• Memory preservation is shown as granting them eternal life ("Endless"), despite their souls obviously being used as fuel ;
• Sphene shows concern about her people's memories, but don't even blink about their souls ;
• The Regulator's whole point is to make sure your memories don't disappear when you die, at the cost of souls, and refresh those on your soul when it's diluted by the consumption of another ;
• While old Endless tech had a soul and a memory in the same body (Otis), they removed the soul component along the line.

It leads to a very different conception of what's "natural" and "good" to all of them:

• The Ancients didn't really care about death, for them it was more "going back to the lifestream and coming back some time after". In that regard, from their point of view, nothing ever really "died" because souls always came back at some point and memories were unimportant ;
• People on the Source have the view that since souls and memories are so intertwined in what makes somebody who they are, either you conserve your soul and memories intact and it's OK (Allagans, G'raha, etc), or you're dead. If any of them are destroyed, it's tantamount to murder ;
• The Alexandrian artifically created a society where the cycle of life and death didn't matter either, but unlike the Ancients, because memories always stayed safe. They have a revers-elifestream where the soul is discarded and memories can come back.

So they really have a different, and somewhat impossible to reconcile, view on the subject.
This difference explains a lot of how we act during the 97+ quests.

First, Zoraal Ja use of souls is seen as abhorent to us, but not because it'd deplete supplies for alexandrian. We compare this to voidsent, and soul manipulation is a big no no for us. Outside of getting revenge for Tural and preventing a war, we're motivated by stopping this practice.
Likewise, we only agree to have Endless made to help us in Arcadion, and then win the tournament, so that we can free all souls so they can go to their sweet afterlife.

When we reach Living Memory, while our character and companions understand they are recreations of real people, they're just that - recreation. They don't live, they're just simulacra of what they used to be. For them it's a cool concept, a nice theory, and a fun little mind experiment, but at no point do they think "they're living beings, so shutting them down is wrong".
This is also why Krile have seemingly no trouble letting go of her parents. And interestingly, while Erenville who is the less scholarly of the group has trouble letting go. He just sees her mom is going to disappear forever.


Now that it's out of the way, to your conclusion...

Maybe, maybe I'm overlooking something incredibly simple. But to me, this ending was just stupid and the only way to make it make sense is to say that we were in a rush and just had to literally send thousands if not millions of people to the Aetherial Sea.

Hydaelyn would literally groan in her grave.

I just felt so miserable every time Wuk Lamat or someone else, especially if it was G'raha or Krile saying this system is somehow unnatural or a perversion of their beliefs. I never took them as people who held so fast on the idea that all people should just go to the Aetherial Sea without having a stopping point at a gas station.

I get that the Endless are literally endless, that they NEVER move on. But the solution to that is to just tell the people and try to make Sphene to tell the truth about the system to her subjects. But no, I guess we kill Sphene instead and I guess she forgot to make backups just in case.

Shutting down the terminal don't send anybody to the aetherial sea, since their souls were already taken out of the natural cycle (which we intend to correct, if Arcadion is any indication). For the Scions, we're just doing the natural thing of letting dead people memories fade into oblivion, because due to their tech, it didn't happen naturally.

Their issue is not that people have a stopping point, it's that people died when their soul and memories were separated because that's what true death is for them.
So from their point of view, they didn't commit a genocide.
Just like Emet Selch didn't commit genocides when wiping reflections according to his understanding of what "life" is.
Or Venat when sundering the ancients, destroying all their memories and maiming their souls.


Some detail that won't make it any easier for you: people in Living Memory are not just the same static memories reincarnated again and again. As we see in multiple quests, they remember being reincarnated multiple times, experience new things, and the terminals know when a memory would benefit from being reincarnated (the person who marry their love interest from centuries ago).

[Iscah]

And what does Cahciua say to Erenville?

"Everything that lives must one day die, and that which has died isn't meant to return. This is only natural"

There was nothing natural about the calamity that happened. It was cause by a weapon of mass destruction.

You're conflating two separate things here.

The cause of the calamity – of anyone's death – is irrelevant. One way or another, people die, and when they do it is natural for their soul to return to the flow of the Lifestream.

Additionally, Living Memory isn't just some cosmic justice machine for those who suffered an unnatural death in the events that befell Alexandria – firstly, even if that was the original intent, they have long outlasted what years of life were lost to them, and secondly the place is a repository for all people who have died in Alexandria ever since. For these later additions, the use of regulators ensures that they do not die any kind of premature death, so they have already lived a full earthly life and are not owed more.

This part especially annoyed me. Especially with G'raha next to us, who literally went back in time to save people he didn't want to die.

There's a key difference between what G'raha did and what Sphene is trying to do: he is fully aware that the people he left behind are doomed and his only choice (at least as he understood it) was to leave them to their fate and do his best to save people that still could be saved.

Here, our choice is between prolonging the existence of these people who are so doomed they're already dead, and either actively asking to be turned off or completely unbothered by the prospect, versus the actual ongoing lives of everyone else in the universe. There's no real choice to be made, just a grim but necessary task before us.