Problematic notion about Zone 5 & 6 story bits.

[Lurina]

The whole scenario surrounding the Endless just felt cartoonish to me. Why does the game feel the need to remind you that what you're doing is morally okay and that they're not "real" every five minutes? Why doesn't even a single one of them express reservations or objections to being deleted? We're obviously supposed to see them as people from all the heartfelt parental goodbyes and and the fact that Sphene and Cahciua have their own objectives and agency, but they don't act like people, they act like props engineered to deliver the theme. It feels like the game is terrified of making the player feel at all uncomfortable or complicated about what they're doing, and it saps all pathos from the situation. What could have been a painfully bittersweet sequence where we have to do something the game admitted was complicated to save the people we love ended up feeling uncomfortable and emptily sentimental. It was weird.

[Bright-Flower]

I don't think the Emet comparison really holds water. If you look at it on a surface level sure you can seen parallels but that requires looking at the differing circumstances between sundered life and living memory.

When doing the side quests, even these people we interact with that don't want to go yet feel like lost souls, ghosts clinging to some unfinished business and peacefully passing on once we resolve it for them. I know they aren't actually ghosts but that's what they feel like in how they act and speak. Ghosts that just need a final act of kindness to move on.

Even Otis, who swore to protect his country.

For Otis this is probably made much easier because his country still exists. Living Memory is not the nation and people of alexandria. It's just the uploaded memories of the dead. The people are still alive and well, and with their land fused onto the Source and with the potential to even leave the bubble if they want, and not being held to task for what happened with Sphene and Zarool Ja, all in all have it pretty good right now.

[Alenore]

what do you mean mix? (The entire process is that the Alexandrians use the regulators and the weapons to extract the entirety of the soul, put it in a blender, extract the memory and have that memory eventually go to the cloud for storage and eventually into Living memory while the soul is stored separately for usage with the regulators. And when a person with a regulator dies of old age, it's soul is processed the same way.)

But yea someone did mention that if the memory is kept in Living memory, that the soul would stay in a limbo until they can reconnect again. But I'm unsure if that's true.
It makes sense, but it isn't really stated directly to be the case.

And someone else mentioned that because they are just memories they don't go to the aetherial sea if they are erased as an endless, because it's just lines of code, so the soul has already gone it's merry way.

This is what I mean that the story should really try to explain what the actual is going on here.

Y'shtola, I think, says they just recreated what the Aetherial Sea does, but save the memories. When you die, your soul goes to the sea, memories are washed away, and the purified soul chill around until it's assigned (how, why, when, we don't know) to a new body.

Second Stage: Separation
Mixed aether is put through the aetheric separator and divided into its soul and memory components. Soul aether is then conveyed to upper Origenics for final processing, and memory aether to the Meso Terminal (route and location classified).

Nothing stops them from releasing the souls instead of processing them into soul cells. The memories are saved in Meso Terminal, and souls sent to Origenics. Remove the origenics part, souls go for reincarnation, poof.

Who said they soul is in a limbo? In game, or was it somebody on the internet? I don't remember anybody saying that during the story but I may have missed it.

Also, Endless obviously don't go to the aetherial sea, they're memories. Souls go to the sea, memories are just discarded.

[Alenore]

There's a lot I wanted to say but can't because of the text limit and rather than post like three different posts in response, I'll sum it up...

You're still forgetting one very important thing. The Endless themselves say they are not alive. The Scions were initially apprehensive but they were told they were just digitalized memories given form, but not living creatures.

We have no reason to believe that this was a lie.

You can edit your post to bypass the 3000 characters limit.

Wuk Lamat: It is wrong to sacrifice others to sustain the Endless. This, I firmly believe. But talking to you now, you seem as real as any of us. And if you need an answer right away, I don't know if I can give it. Is there a reason we must act so soon?
Cahciua: Because, as you've just said, it's wrong to sacrifice others to sustain us. Remember, we need life force - other forms of aether don't cut it.
.....
.....
Erenville: But does this need to be done now? Can't we stop Sphene first, and then take it from there?
Cahciua: It's precisely in order to stop Sphene that it must be done now. Her own memories are stored within the Meso Terminal, which stands at the heart of Living Memory. As you would expect, the terminal's defenses are extremely tight. But it has moments of vulnerability, such as when it has just finished calculations, which we can exploit to shut it down from within. Whilewe wait for that opening, we erase the Endless. Once we are gone, Sphene will no longer have a reason to plunder aether from other worlds.

Cahciua doesn't deny they have their own existence, albeit at the cost of others.
Also, the whole point of erasing Endless was to make Sphene realize she didn't have to plunder other worlds. Didn't really work, right? What was it all for?

Krile: There's sense in your strategy, and in reoslving to stop Sphene, we had anticipated that it might come to this. But to actually talk about erasing the Endless... is difficult.
Cahciua: You needn't feel any guilt. No matter how lifelike we may seem, we Endless are but facsimiles crafted from memories. Besides, stopping Sphene requires that you shut down the Meso Terminal, which sustains all of us. Sooner or later, it will need to be done. If we are to be erased, then let it be before more people come to harm. Living, breathing people with futures they deserve to experience.

What difference with the recreations in Ultima Thule? We try to make them move on, we build a café there, and we've seen it even led to new life.
I don't even get the second half, since stopping Sphene requires shutting down the Meso Terminal before she manages to fusion and so harvest souls. There's no point shutting them down here and there, but I digress.


Now, you say Endless themselves say they're not living. That's true for Cahciua, who's from the Source, and Krile's parents (who wanted to erase themselves before their knowledge could be used). However, let's see what other Endless think when we approach them:

Genial Endless: I couldn't be more grateful for the chance to spend these blessed little moments together again. I have no more regrets. Whether Her Majesty's plan succeeds or no, I can rest with peace in my heart.
Milalla: I'm so glad we can be together again...
Hyune: I want to stay forever like that...
Petra: A most wondrous thing has happened─my mother was recently reunited with a good friend of hers. I imagine they're doing their best to make up for lost time, speaking of all that has happened since last they met.
Sapphire: But the Endless have greatly diminished, the buildings in the distance have grown dark... What will come next, I wonder?
Hyune: I wouldn't trade these quiet moments for anything.
Floating Milalla: This is the life...
Mozeo: I'll not deny my work as a courier was fulfilling, but look around. We have everything we could ever want here.
Euclase: I myself have been reincarnated three times now (note the "reincarnated")
Euclase again: ...The're a part of me that wonders if this is wrong. Not that I expect us to exist forever, even in this form. But to be with the one I love once again and make her happy, However wrong this world may be, I have nothing but gratitude for Queen Sphene.
Otis: Be at ease, one and all. So long as I, Ser Otis, live and breathe, no citizen shall come to harm!

They clearly sound like people who think they're not living, right? I mean, it's literally in the name of the place. LIVING Memory. They acknoewledge they died, were reincarnated, and live a new life there. And even if some npc do say they don't want to live at the depend of others, others like Euclase are fine with it even if it's wrong, and others don't even give it a thought because they enjoy themselves here. Multiple of them use the word "live".

Meanwhile, the text of the game specifically states that Emet's view on the worthiness of our life was wrong and that the Sundered had every right to life.

The text written from the perspective of Eorzean, yes. If that subject was so easy to figure out, there wouldn't have been pages upon pages of debate about Venat and Emet in this forum.

Don't get me wrong; parts of that story certainly had problems. It felt like it was a bit too heavy of an anti-AI allegory even deal with the whole sustainability problem... But people are flat out ignoring the text and trying to read things into it.

Are we to ignore every NPC who have no problem being in living memory and enjoy their new life? Alexandrian who say those taken to the cloud are there to live forever?
Which again, isn't "living" by Eorzean standards. But Alexandrian think it is.

[Cleretic]

Also, the whole point of erasing Endless was to make Sphene realize she didn't have to plunder other worlds. Didn't really work, right? What was it all for?

It also had the effect of messing with Living Memory's process queue, creating the gap that we later use to get into the Terminal to deal with her ourselves. That part did work.

What also happened was the element Wuk Lamat added to the whole process: actually talking to and learning about the Endless, to ensure that they didn't go silently. Remember, Living Memory created the deep irony where nobody could remember them, despite Alexandria having the belief that people live as long as they're remembered; without Wuk Lamat's willingness to talk to everyone, they would just be... gone. By Alexandria's own beliefs, Living Memory's denizens would be deader than dead.

Speaking of, I wonder if you actually did learn about those people.

Are we to ignore every NPC who have no problem being in living memory and enjoy their new life? Alexandrian who say those taken to the cloud are there to live forever?
Which again, isn't "living" by Eorzean standards. But Alexandrian think it is.

Because if you listened to all of those NPCs as you claim to, you'd know that they all generally accept what has to happen, or in the case of sidequests, already has. They know they were running on overtime, and when that final bell rang, most of them just wanted someone to say goodbye to.

You're actually falling, perhaps even worse, into exactly the thing you're accusing DreadCrow of. You claim she's ignoring 'every NPC who has no problem with being in Living Memory', but I think you're ignoring or dismissing every NPC who agrees that it has to go. And that's a bigger list, of more prominent characters; why does Euclase outclass Cahciua, Otis, Krile's parents, and every NPC given their own sidequest to you?

[Turnintino]

The whole scenario surrounding the Endless just felt cartoonish to me. Why does the game feel the need to remind you that what you're doing is morally okay and that they're not "real" every five minutes? Why doesn't even a single one of them express reservations or objections to being deleted? We're obviously supposed to see them as people from all the heartfelt parental goodbyes and and the fact that Sphene and Cahciua have their own objectives and agency, but they don't act like people, they act like props engineered to deliver the theme. It feels like the game is terrified of making the player feel at all uncomfortable or complicated about what they're doing, and it saps all pathos from the situation. What could have been a painfully bittersweet sequence where we have to do something the game admitted was complicated to save the people we love ended up feeling uncomfortable and emptily sentimental. It was weird.

It's possible that they were actively trying to avoid the current popular discourse around it, but it's also possible that they just didn't think a more nuanced story would so neatly fit into just a zone and a half -- but still felt it was a story they wanted to tell anyway. Probably a little of both, if I were to guess.

I agree that a little more time and space given for this narrative to breathe couldn't have hurt it, but it is what it is in the end. I'm more confused (and this is a tangential response to other posts I've seen, not you, for the record), given that what we got is so heavy-handed, that the discourse is so much about the so-called moral quandary of the central conflict, and not more about its lack of nuance. Not to say that I haven't seen a lot of the latter too, but so much more of the conversation is hung up on arguing whether or not it was a genocide, or simply whether or not it was wrong. And I would never tell someone they're wrong for how a story makes them feel, but the answer to that particular question, dictated by the facts as presented to us by the text (and the subtext, for that matter, as little of it there was room for), is actually very cut and dry.

... But maybe that just proves the writing somehow wasn't heavy-handed enough lol. Certainly not for the most illiterate among us.

[Cleretic]

I agree that a little more time and space given for this narrative to breathe couldn't have hurt it, but it is what it is in the end. I'm more confused (and this is a tangential response to other posts I've seen, not you, for the record), given that what we got is so heavy-handed, that the discourse is so much about the so-called moral quandary of the central conflict, and not more about its lack of nuance.

Honestly, I'm not surprised, because I've seen this before: when a story gives the audience a morally ambiguous act, some amount of people reflexively respond with trying to reduce the ambiguity. Because if you somehow declare a moral right and wrong answer, then you don't have to think about the difficult subjects that a morally ambiguous question is trying to get you to think about. How people do that takes different forms; some people throw out evidence that's uncomfortable, some people create new evidence that makes their preferred side the best one, either by elevating it or attacking others. If the choice is binary, some try to invent a third option. Some people try to reject the question itself, either by proving it wrong or dismissing it outright. I'd argue that these responses say just as much about someone as if they actually engage with the subject on its own terms, but if they themselves are refusing to engage then those responses are missing their target audience.

We saw a lot of this back with the Zodiark and Hydaelyn situation; in comparison this is actually way more relaxed.

[Lyth]

I really didn't feel emotionally invested in this part of the story. With Emet and Amaurot, you could feel his investment in the conflict even when you were at odds with his beliefs. With Sphene, it just felt disconnected. I thought that her moment with Robot Otis in S9 was compelling, because she had just reconnected with someone precious to her briefly only to lose him again permanently, his machine model being an early precursor of the Endless. The execution felt slightly off, but I felt that Hiroi was on to something there.

But then we encounter Otis again in LM and Sphene has no involvement with his story. These are all her 'precious subjects', yet there's no reaction as Lamaty'i and company run around freeing up disk space on LM's cloud storage. I wasn't left with the feeling that Sphene knew who any of these people actually were, or that she even recognized that she was losing them. Her complete absence throughout the zone makes her feel indifferent to the whole thing.

I understand what they were doing on a conceptual level, and they could have easily made this area heart-wrenching if we saw Sphene's connection to the zones that we were shutting down. But the execution was just so insipid that I just couldn't feel any stake in the matter. We just followed around and watched as the lights went out in an abandoned theme park.

[Lurina]

It's possible that they were actively trying to avoid the current popular discourse around it, but it's also possible that they just didn't think a more nuanced story would so neatly fit into just a zone and a half -- but still felt it was a story they wanted to tell anyway. Probably a little of both, if I were to guess.

I agree that a little more time and space given for this narrative to breathe couldn't have hurt it, but it is what it is in the end. I'm more confused (and this is a tangential response to other posts I've seen, not you, for the record), given that what we got is so heavy-handed, that the discourse is so much about the so-called moral quandary of the central conflict, and not more about its lack of nuance. Not to say that I haven't seen a lot of the latter too, but so much more of the conversation is hung up on arguing whether or not it was a genocide, or simply whether or not it was wrong. And I would never tell someone they're wrong for how a story makes them feel, but the answer to that particular question, dictated by the facts as presented to us by the text (and the subtext, for that matter, as little of it there was room for), is actually very cut and dry.

People get worked up about this sort of thing when the tone of the story differs wildly from the actual events, because it turns an in-universe discomfort into an out-of-game discomfort where you can't help but wonder about the intentions of the writer. If they wanted to avoid discourse, the solution wasn't to try and sand every hard edge off the scenario until it all felt strange and artificial, but to embrace and display self-awareness about the weight of the situation and its complexity. Living Memory raises questions it seems completely uninterested in engaging with. What constitutes a person? Is it ever okay to kill the innocent for the greater good, and can someone who does so really be considered a hero, even if it is? Is there some inherent value to "natural life", or is the amount of people who are happy all that matters? When is it appropriate to fight for someone to the absolute bitter end, and when is it appropriate to grieve and let them go?

Dawntrail feels incurious about all of these, either assuming an answer without exploration or not bothering to answer at all. All depth is stripped away in service of being able to end on an upbeat tone and a simple message about being willing to pass things on to the next generation. I feel patronized.

At its core it's the same problem as the Sundering plot in Endwalker - a potentially powerful story is so undermined by its unwillingness to seriously confront the player or its own ideas in any way that it becomes a cheap tearjerker that's uncomfortable when you give it critical thought. But unlike Endwalker, which only felt frustratingly incomplete in its introspection, its so excessive in doing this that the situation loses any sense of reality and becomes hard to take seriously at all. The fact that they keep returning to this kind of story (right down to the Amaurot-esque imagery of Living Memory and the final dungeon where you run through the memories of a dying civilization...) while seemingly having nothing new to say is just dire.

I really didn't feel emotionally invested in this part of the story. With Emet and Amaurot, you could feel his investment in the conflict even when you were at odds with his beliefs. With Sphene, it just felt disconnected. I thought that her moment with Robot Otis in S9 was compelling, because she had just reconnected with someone precious to her briefly only to lose him again permanently, his machine model being an early precursor of the Endless. The execution felt slightly off, but I felt that Hiroi was on to something there.

But then we encounter Otis again in LM and Sphene has no involvement with his story. These are all her 'precious subjects', yet there's no reaction as Lamaty'i and company run around freeing up disk space on LM's cloud storage. I wasn't left with the feeling that Sphene knew who any of these people actually were, or that she even recognized that she was losing them. Her complete absence throughout the zone makes her feel indifferent to the whole thing.

I understand what they were doing on a conceptual level, and they could have easily made this area heart-wrenching if we saw Sphene's connection to the zones that we were shutting down. But the execution was just so insipid that I just couldn't feel any stake in the matter. We just followed around and watched as the lights went out in an abandoned theme park.

I agree. Sphene being so completely cut off from the situation was a major part of what made it feel so empty. There's no serious pushback on the Endless at all, neither in an emotional or intellectual sense, and you're left feeling like even the story itself doesn't care.

[Kirutsuki]

I really didn't feel emotionally invested in this part of the story. With Emet and Amaurot, you could feel his investment in the conflict even when you were at odds with his beliefs. With Sphene, it just felt disconnected. I thought that her moment with Robot Otis in S9 was compelling, because she had just reconnected with someone precious to her briefly only to lose him again permanently, his machine model being an early precursor of the Endless. The execution felt slightly off, but I felt that Hiroi was on to something there.

But then we encounter Otis again in LM and Sphene has no involvement with his story. These are all her 'precious subjects', yet there's no reaction as Lamaty'i and company run around freeing up disk space on LM's cloud storage. I wasn't left with the feeling that Sphene knew who any of these people actually were, or that she even recognized that she was losing them. Her complete absence throughout the zone makes her feel indifferent to the whole thing.

I understand what they were doing on a conceptual level, and they could have easily made this area heart-wrenching if we saw Sphene's connection to the zones that we were shutting down. But the execution was just so insipid that I just couldn't feel any stake in the matter. We just followed around and watched as the lights went out in an abandoned theme park.

This I agree with, and it has to do with all these characters being relatively new to us, yet we somehow make really deep connections with them for no apparent reason.
Like us calling Wuk Lamat; "lamatyi'i" or whatever felt a bit off, but atleast there we had gone to an actual journey with her alone and seen her growth. But with Sphene, Otis and many others in the 2nd portion we spend so little time to actually grow a connection to any of them, to have some form of emotional response when we need to shut them down.

And ofcourse Sphene's complete disconnection from the arc in the story felt odd.

But that's not really the point in this topic, more about the philosophical and ethical issue the game presents to us. The moral quandrary regardless of if you knew these people or not.