Problematic notion about Zone 5 & 6 story bits.

[Alenore]

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.

This isn't the first time a calamity happened and almost destroyed the world. In fact, Midgardsormr seems to consider there's hope since he wakes up and try to fix things after he went back in time.
G'raha left a world ravaged by Black Rose for another ravaged by light. There were living being in both world, both were following a near extinction event. Couldn't they try to fix what happened in their world, instead of dooming them all to probable oblivion?

But I understand the key of that sentence is "at least as he understood it". Which is my point, in fact. For Sphene, the Endless have as much right existing as her other subjects, and being saved in the cloud is just another step in their lives.
So we take the decision to shut them down, because her conception of what is alive is different to ours and we consider she's wrong.
Sphene is actually fully aware she's dooming other civilizations to save the Endless who will disappear if she can't find the aether to sustain them, just like G'raha is aware his timeline is probably doomed if he actually manages to save us / prevent the calamity. She doesn't see a choice, and only the grim necessity of killing people to save hers.

As I said in my post, they're only dead with the Source definition of the word, but are actually living forever in the Alexandrian definition.

About the Endless they're okay being shut down, except Cahciua and Krile's parent, I remember a few mentioning it, but I wonder if they realize it's permanent and they'll just fade away.
We're told we're erasing them (Krile's parents were looking for a way to erase themselves), but they seem to just think it's another cycle and they'll be recreated at a future time. But I guess it's still unclear if we just turned them off or if everything in the terminals is gone

[17cupsofcoffee]

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 was also a little fuzzy on this, but a post I saw on Reddit made a really good observation: the term that they commonly use to describe the energy used to sustain the Endless in English is 'life force', but in Japanese they use 'seimei-ryoku', which is the same term that was previously translated as 'corporeal aether' (the type that sustains your physical presence, seperate from your soul - it gets spent by exerting yourself, is replenished via eating/drinking, and without it you'd become a ghost). 'Life force' seems just be what non-scholarly people call the same concept, from what I can gather.

So I think that Sphene's plan was basically to turn the physical bodies of the entire population of the Source into a giant aether bonfire to power the Endless (and then possibly convert the leftover souls into cells + Endless, which would require more life force, which would require absorbing more reflections, etc...). Grim!

[Alenore]

I was also a little fuzzy on this, but a post I saw on Reddit made a really good observation: the term that they commonly use to describe the energy used to sustain the Endless in English is 'life force', but in Japanese they use 'seimei-ryoku', which is the same term that was previously translated as 'corporeal aether' (the type that sustains your physical presence, seperate from your soul - it gets spent by exerting yourself, is replenished via eating/drinking, and without it you'd become a ghost). 'Life force' seems just be what non-scholarly people call the same concept, from what I can gather.

So I think that Sphene's plan was basically to turn the physical bodies of the entire population of the Source into a giant aether bonfire to power the Endless (and then possibly convert the leftover souls into cells + Endless, which would require more life force, which would require absorbing more reflections, etc...). Grim!

Thanks for the information!
Though I'm still even more puzzled as to why it's so special you can't find it anywhere else, when we can create clones, summon living beings and that puppet who stole aether from a corpse left that corpse behind. Voidsent replenish their body aether by consuming other aether directly, like when Zero just turns that apple to aether.

[17cupsofcoffee]

Thanks for the information!
Though I'm still even more puzzled as to why it's so special you can't find it anywhere else, when we can create clones, summon living beings and that puppet who stole aether from a corpse left that corpse behind. Voidsent replenish their body aether by consuming other aether directly, like when Zero just turns that apple to aether.

I think it's less that the aether is special, and more the sheer amount of it that Sphene wanted/needed. Aether can't be created from nothing - when someone casts a spell or summons something, they're either using up their own aether (which makes them tired/hungry) or the aether of the surrounding environment (which messes up said environment if done to excess, as see in the Sixth Umbral Calamity). When they consume food (whether it's in the normal way or... whatever the heck Zero does), they're taking the aether of that food to replenish theirs.

It seems like Living Memory has hit the point where it demands more aether than the natural cycle can provide (probably not helped by the fact that the entire living population of Alexandria got teleported into the Source), and so the only way to keep things running is to get more from somewhere else.

[Alenore]

I think it's less that the aether is special, and more the sheer amount of it that Sphene wanted/needed. Aether can't be created from nothing - when someone casts a spell or summons something, they're using up their aether to do so (which is why people feel tired/hungry afterwards), and when they consume food (whether it's in the normal way or... whatever the heck Zero does), they're taking the aether of that food to replenish theirs.

It seems like Living Memory has hit the point where it demands more aether than the natural cycle can provide (probably not helped by the fact that the entire living population of Alexandria got teleported into the Source), and so the only way to keep things running is to get more from somewhere else.

I suppose it's more "anima" (the aether we use for teleports and such) more than "corporeal aether" as in someone's physical body, I suppose.
Actually I think Anima was described as life-force in 1.0, so that would track.

[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.

[Iscah]

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.

Indeed, but another aspect is that it's not simply an isolated question of whether to destroy it because its existence is "wrong", but whether it deserves to exist at the expense of the living.

Essentially, it's a variation of the "trolley problem", and if we do choose to sacrifice the living to keep the lights on in Living Memory then they're still only going to last until the battery runs out.

[Kirutsuki]

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?

I do agree on those points. I would have hoped that Cahciua more firmently states that this is actually something she's discussed with all the residents and that it's ok to shut them down. But from what we see is people who really are enjoying their lives and we are just inserting our own beliefs onto them. Yes it's a difficult decision, yes Sphene has delivered and ultimatum, we have to do this. But I was firmently hoping atleast someone, either Erenville or G'raha Tia who is somewhat of an expert on dimensional things would at bare minimum entertain an alternative option or suggest somehting else. And I get there ISN'T an alternative option, Krile's parents and Cahciua say this, but I would still hope G'raha at the ery least try and find a solution. He quite literally had no purpose being with us.

To answer the question it's not that those who fall through the cracks would find themselves surrounded by people who have connections no. There should be almost equal amount of people who had connections and those that didn't and the people who didn't might find new found love or hope as a memory with a person who also didn't find connections in their lives. It's not that the system ONLY brings in people who made connections, the system just connects those who were connected already in life. I don't think there's a priority system more than there is just a long line of people who have died. We do see soul containers, but not really how the memories are managed and if it's just the order of which the people have died and become memories?

[Cleretic]

Indeed, but another aspect is that it's not simply an isolated question of whether to destroy it because its existence is "wrong", but whether it deserves to exist at the expense of the living.

Essentially, it's a variation of the "trolley problem", and if we do choose to sacrifice the living to keep the lights on in Living Memory then they're still only going to last until the battery runs out.

Agreed; I believe both of those statements, but I don't believe the second one just because because I believe the first.

If Sphene wasn't pulling the knives out, and Cahciua wasn't giving Endless approval for what we have to do, we'd have sort of a 'SeaWorld orca program' problem: the act of making it was wrong and horrible, but once it existed it would then be even worse to just kill it. (And yes, I am proud of finding a theme park metaphor for Living Memory.) It's Sphene and Cahciua that make the road we land on okay, or at least justified, not the existence of Living Memory itself.

EDIT:

I do agree on those points. I would have hoped that Cahciua more firmently states that this is actually something she's discussed with all the residents and that it's ok to shut them down. But from what we see is people who really are enjoying their lives and we are just inserting our own beliefs onto them. Yes it's a difficult decision, yes Sphene has delivered and ultimatum, we have to do this. But I was firmently hoping atleast someone, either Erenville or G'raha Tia who is somewhat of an expert on dimensional things would at bare minimum entertain an alternative option or suggest somehting else. And I get there ISN'T an alternative option, Krile's parents and Cahciua say this, but I would still hope G'raha at the ery least try and find a solution. He quite literally had no purpose being with us.

I get the want for a counter-voice in something like this; it can be hard to believe an argument you only hear one side of. It's why I think Fandaniel (both Amon and Hermes) is the saving grace of Emet-Selch's story, because his very existence poking holes in it lets me believe that the Ancients were actually real.

But I also don't know if it would necessarily help here; the story of Living Memory is ultimately the one of us having to put an end to the Endless. A third option doesn't help that; it weakens it, as it either becomes something we could just not do, or something we could have averted.

[Kirutsuki]

You're conflating two separate things here.

Yea I had more to say to that point, but I kind of realized that it would deviate from the point too much.
But what you gotta understand is that Cahciua is from the source, so ofcourse she thinks it's natural for the dead to go the the lifestream.
But that isn't necessarily what the Alexandrians believe, we barely know what the Alexandrians think of the system in the first place.