Problematic notion about Zone 5 & 6 story bits.

[Cleretic]

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.

It's also worth, if we're bringing G'raha into this discussion, how G'raha actually feels about this. He got a whole scene focused on that, remember? I don't like G'raha at the best of times, but he did make a fairly relevant point here: that this isn't what people actually want when they say they want to see a departed loved one again. As nice as it would be to have one last moment with them, to say that thing he didn't say when they were alive, or to see them smile one last time, that's not actually what he wanted, that's just the soft platitude on top of the real wish: he wants them to have lived.

Living Memory isn't an embodiment of people's desires for the dead to live: it's a twisted caricature of them, a genie's corrupted wish for an afterlife to be real, paired with removing even people's ability to grieve enough to have those thoughts. It's not just G'raha's awareness of what price he had to pay to bring back the people he needed to see live that's different, or even the fact he actually succeeded: it's also the fact he was permitted the capacity to have those thoughts and feelings himself, enough to even know what he really wanted out of it.

But, of course, there's two separate questions floating around here, and not just two sides of the same one. 'It was wrong for Living Memory to exist' does not, inherently, also mean 'it was right to destroy Living Memory'. Those are two different discussions, albeit inextricably connected ones.