Problematic notion about Zone 5 & 6 story bits.

[MikkoAkure]

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.

Up until now, I was under the impression that when a soul is used as fuel, one of two things can happen:

- In Zodiark's case, the souls were still kept intact somehow and a promise to return them was made later. This could be how Alexandrian soul use works since we see souls leave Zoraal Ja after his demise. But if this were the case, then the souls that were forcefully taken by Tuliyollal citizens or from inhabitants in Yyasulani that were used for the Endless are now stuck on a separate reflection and will never reincarnate on their home plane of existence.

- But then there's Hydaelyn's case, where the souls were used up as fuel utterly and completely. Pieces of them were able to somewhat reconstruct personalities of 13 of Her friends, but mostly it seems that everyone was converted to pure aether. The way the Alexandrians refer to souls as fuel and the living will just use them up willy nilly makes me feel like this scenario could also be the case. It could be that all the souls of all the Alexandrians since Sphene has been running things have been ruined to the point they cannot reincarnate and the energy provided by their souls' aether was converted to other means and is completely unrecoverable. The Endless left behind in the Rift when Dreamborough and other districts were accidentally separated off in Sphene's first failed fusion show that the Endless need a constant supply of aether or else they turn into monsters. I don't think that would happen if they just needed 1 soul at a time.


Either of these options has disturbing consequences when you think about them.

It's also disturbing that people who paid close attention to the story still think that ending this necromancy was a bad thing and would even go so far as to call it "genocide". If anything Alexandria got off EXTREMELY leniently with seemingly no reparations paid for forcefully fusing their reality into our own, destroying an entire region of country of Tural and absorbing its population into its own, and then deliberately attacking civilians and launching a surprise war in an attempt to empower their dead. People seem to be laser-focused on "self-aware consciousnesses" without thinking of the context they exist in or the ramifications. Players can mow down legions worth of unwilling Garlean conscripts with their conscience clean, but pulling the plug on a bunch of glorified zombies is bad because the story made you dance for them in a bunny outfit.

In ARR we have to put down Lady Amandine for killing others to keep up her undeath. Is this not the same thing? She was self-aware. As are other ashkin we kill whether or not they're monstrous like Lorelei or human-looking like Edda.

[DreadCrow]

...cropped because of limited text...

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.

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.

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.

[Cleretic]

By one Endless. That's the thing. More of the Endless should have been aware of our plan and should have been telling us to go for it.

As I said before: This is how the game does this sort of discussion, all the time. It's neither feasible in story economy, nor honestly all that interesting, to depict an entire society's feelings on itself in a story that's not about just that and nothing else. So, instead of doing that, we see it reflected in one person; in this case, Cahciua. She's in much the same position as the Chais in Eulmore; we don't expect the entire society of Eulmore to go through the process of change and growth on screen, we see the Chais do it and then accept that everyone else did more or less the same.

Living Memory actually is like that, especially if you do the post-shutdown quests (the aether current quests should be enough, but the one that hit like a truck for me was the Yesterland yellow quest). The people of Living Memory know what they are, they know what the cost is, and they accept that it had to stop; they were just a little too wrapped up in their own happiness to really act on it. If I thought we were getting a significant amount more quests in Living Memory, I'd suspect that to almost be by design, and the sign of a nefarious hand behind the scenes; keep the Endless happy and short-sighted, and they never think about the injustices they're built on.

[Kirutsuki]

It's also disturbing that people who paid close attention to the story still think that ending this necromancy was a bad thing and would even go so far as to call it "genocide". If anything Alexandria got off EXTREMELY leniently with seemingly no reparations paid for forcefully fusing their reality into our own, destroying an entire region of country of Tural and absorbing its population into its own, and then deliberately attacking civilians and launching a surprise war in an attempt to empower their dead. People seem to be laser-focused on "self-aware consciousnesses" without thinking of the context they exist in or the ramifications. Players can mow down legions worth of unwilling Garlean conscripts with their conscience clean, but pulling the plug on a bunch of glorified zombies is bad because the story made you dance for them in a bunny outfit.

In ARR we have to put down Lady Amandine for killing others to keep up her undeath. Is this not the same thing? She was self-aware. As are other ashkin we kill whether or not they're monstrous like Lorelei or human-looking like Edda.

Again, what Sphene was doing was wrong. No denying that, invading another shard, stealing peoples souls and sustaining Living Memory with their deaths.
No-one really is denying that. There is however a difference between innocent people and guilty ones. Sphene's people in the Living memory were innocent to whatever she was doing.
Heck even the invading force into Tuliyollal was all Sphene, none of the Alexandrians had anything to do with it.

You can argue back and forths about what the memories are, yes at the end of the day they are not quite their original selves, but I honestly believe its not up to us to judge if they are real or just ghosts in a machine.
It's up to them, had they had the chance to prove they are something more than memories.. what then?

We are willing to mow down Garleans because the game clearly shows and states multiple times that Garleans are raised with extreme prejudice towards the free folk to the point where they literally would have killed us instead.
All of them would have, without hesitation. Not just because their leader said so, but because they were raised to hate magic wielders and their yolk. And even non combatant folk would rather kill themselves than associate with Eorzeans.

If it was so that the memories in Living Memory were ok with sustaining their own lives and were rooting for Sphene's plan to invade other reflections we would be in agreement, but that's not the case.

But ultimately I think I will just have to accept what the game is telling me instead of trying to insert something of my own into it. The game clearly states and wants the players to know that these are pure memories and there's
no wrongdoing in shutting them down even if I myself do think there is quite a bit wrong in acting as the executioner without fully understanding what you are shutting down.

[Kirutsuki]

As I said before: This is how the game does this sort of discussion, all the time. It's neither feasible in story economy, nor honestly all that interesting, to depict an entire society's feelings on itself in a story that's not about just that and nothing else. So, instead of doing that, we see it reflected in one person; in this case, Cahciua. She's in much the same position as the Chais in Eulmore; we don't expect the entire society of Eulmore to go through the process of change and growth on screen, we see the Chais do it and then accept that everyone else did more or less the same.

See for me it just doesn't entirely work that Cahciua is the one to be in the position of the broader society. She has been in Alexandria for 30 years.
She's also a viera who's lifespan is ~400-500 years. and it has been only 3 years since Erenville left from Tural to Sharlyan. So that means Erenvilles mom and mentor must have been really old already before she got swooped into the dome. In that sense I can give her the benefit of the doubt that she must have some wisdom with her age. But she's only known the Alexandrian way for 30 years.

Couldn't there been someone who's actually Alexandrian to guide us along with Cahciua? I'm not entirely certain of the timeline of how long it has been that this system has been online, but we do know that it the lightning storms BEGAN 8 centuries ago and Electrope was discovered 4 centuries after that. So vaguely speaking I would say Living memory's system came online 100-300years ago. Which means theres atleast someone more suited to talk about the Alexandrians than Cahciua.

Or is it because she was such a rebel of the system and the only one who ventured outside of it that she became their spokesperson?

There's just alot here that's sortof unanswered fully and kind of has a taste of a rushed ending.

[Cleretic]

Or is it because she was such a rebel of the system and the only one who ventured outside of it that she became their spokesperson?

It's because she's the one we know. Or perhaps more accurately, the one that knows us; Namikka and Otis are somewhat blind to the situation they're in at first, and Krile's parents we only knew at a distance, but Cahciua's someone we had a pre-existing relationship with that still holds. It's the same reason our Ala Mhigo stories are all focused on Lyse, Raubahn and Arenvald; even when other characters are the 'core' of the story, they're our primary contact.

But also, you're forgetting that Cahciua isn't the only character. Sure, she's the primary contact, but Namikka, Otis and Krile's parents are there and talk to us about all this. Cahciua is not the only voice in this, she's just the one that guides us. In fact, if your argument is that Cahciua is too new to the party herself, that should be enough for you, because we also hear from the absolute oldest Endless that there is. And he's okay with what we're doing, once he learns what it actually entails.

If Cahciua isn't enough, then maybe Cahciua and Otis is enough. And if it's not, maybe your problem lies elsewhere.

[Iscah]

See for me it just doesn't entirely work that Cahciua is the one to be in the position of the broader society. She has been in Alexandria for 30 years.
She's also a viera who's lifespan is ~400-500 years. and it has been only 3 years since Erenville left from Tural to Sharlyan. So that means Erenvilles mom and mentor must have been really old already before she got swooped into the dome.

Viera lifespan is more like 200 years, but in any case since we're not told how she died, we don't know if she actually did live that long overall. That said, we can assume she was at least around 100 since she travelled with Gulool Ja Ja eighty years ago.

I don't think that inherently undermines her ability to have an informed opinion on the Alexandrian mindset, though. Thirty years is almost half a human lifetime. It's a long time to describe as "only".

[Alenore]

Viera lifespan is more like 200 years

Much more than that. Almet says to Urianger that Viis can easily live to see "3 of your elven lifetimes". Elezen live ~120 years, so that'd bring Vieras to a minimum of 360-400.

[MikkoAkure]

Again, what Sphene was doing was wrong. No denying that, invading another shard, stealing peoples souls and sustaining Living Memory with their deaths.
No-one really is denying that. There is however a difference between innocent people and guilty ones. Sphene's people in the Living memory were innocent to whatever she was doing.
Heck even the invading force into Tuliyollal was all Sphene, none of the Alexandrians had anything to do with it.

In the real world, even if you personally didn't do anything wrong, if you lose a war your country will typically pay some sort of consequences, especially if they were the aggressors.

You can argue back and forths about what the memories are, yes at the end of the day they are not quite their original selves, but I honestly believe its not up to us to judge if they are real or just ghosts in a machine.
It's up to them, had they had the chance to prove they are something more than memories.. what then?

It doesn't matter whether or not they can prove themselves to be more than memories. They are the product of an institutionalized necromantic ritual involving separating the soul and memories from a corpse after death to preserve an endless undeath and their existence is just wrong. It perverts the cycle of life and death. Even animals were being sent to be killed and have their souls extracted. Would you feel the same about them if instead of science and cyberpunk and clean-looking Endless it was more like Palace of the Dead or Tam-Tara and the Endless had the same personalities but looked rotten? Just look at the Deadwalk where Endless have ran out of aether and turned into monsters. That's the outcome if we just let everything be and didn't turn them off.

We are willing to mow down Garleans because the game clearly shows and states multiple times that Garleans are raised with extreme prejudice towards the free folk to the point where they literally would have killed us instead.
All of them would have, without hesitation. Not just because their leader said so, but because they were raised to hate magic wielders and their yolk. And even non combatant folk would rather kill themselves than associate with Eorzeans.

I was specifically talking about the conscripts. The pure-blood Garleans are one thing, but the Ilsabardian and Othardian conscripts who were pulled into the army against their will are another. We kill Lupin outside Ala Mhigo who just wanted to go home but were forced to fight.

[Alleo]

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.

And at the end keeping them "alive" would have just postponed their destruction anyway, since there is no unlimited power source for them. So bascially its just: End them now when the sacrificies are still low or end them when everyone else in the universe is death on top.

4.) Emet Selch was a racist.

While you are right, that Emet Selch thought we really weren't alive, it was because he thought we were inferior. His whole talk about how we're "insects" mirrored similar views that people have used to justify genocide in real life. Since even if our souls were less dense than his, we still had souls. We were still alive based on all definitions of life, in universe.

Being tempered aside I think he also wanted to believe that we are inferior because it would make it easier to just destroy all these shards and cause all these conflicts on the source. It would be a bit strange for him to sire children with people from the source if he truly believed us to be not alive.

Anyway the Ascians have always planned to sacrifice the remaining people on the source after everything is fully rejoined so genocide was always on the menu.

In the end the NPCs in living memories are bascially stuck in a neverending dream, where most cant even leave the zone they are assigned to and have to live through the same stuff again and again. One of the children even says that he has seen that performance 50 times and that it bores him. A lot of the stuff is also not working anymore and a lot of the memories are stored because they are missing the energy to keep them out the whole time. So these people are bascially at the whim of the system and can be locked away for decades/centuries and they know all of this and still dont really care. They are not angry about it. Just as not a single one react in any way when the world around them starts to turn off. For the whole times the only ones truly feeling at least a bit alive where the ones we had a personal connection to. And even those where all like: Yeah please delete us. Even Otis, who swore to protect his country.