Questionable ethics - Living Memory

[Darnuss]

There's no moral ethics on this story because in reality nothing happens, for starters we are told by Cahciua before entering Solution 9 that the "people" here are basically replicas of their memories, and when one of them dies they go back to the cloud and everyone gets a reset. This could be a nice idea but Hiroi didn't know what to do with it, like none of the NPCs showed something any emotion or at least some interest to keep "living" even when you do the "quests" (The elezen looking for his ring) He would tell you that he knows he is dead, that he knows that people don't come back (when asked for his SO) because the server doesn't have enough aether/souls to recreate everyone, if you want the player to have a """""conflict""""" at least put a scene in which you have NPCs telling you "This might be an illusion, but i'm alive! Who are you to decide what is a living being? I don't want my home destroyed"

We had any of that? No, in fact when you are going to shut down the last tower Cahciua would drop casually "oh yeah, that's not the real Sphene. Its this program following her wishes" so again if the story doesn't care, why should the reader? The ideas were there but Daichi Hiroi never used anything that he establishes, the gondola scene was good but is there anything besides that? You have Graha telling you about "bring someone back" I mean that's interesting but the only NPC (The Elezen) with that story he's just "It's ok, i haven't manage to meet with my fiance due to the lack of bandwidth" there's no urgency, there's none "I WANT TO SEE HER AGAIN" there's no little quest to using the bandwidth you liberate after shutting down some towers so the server could "miraculously" bring her fiance back, so they have a reunion and you could have the "we are happy and alive" but no.

Some time one of the lobotomized scions would tell you "it's sad" so you feel something, i guess? The difference between Living Memory and Amaouroth it's that for the later we are seeing everything on Emet's side, he tried to bring back his colleagues and the guy is so jaded that he couldn't see anything beyond that. And of course we spent a lot of time with Emet to undersand something that the last 5 hrs of DT trying (and failing) to set up Meteon from Temu as this tragic villain, but she just doesn't work. The trial is cool tho.

Again, there's ideas in here but sadly the writers were way over their heads for this project, which is funny because everything could be stayed "low stakes" by only making a somewhat a war between Zoraal and Gulool ja (the proud son going mad and then corrupting himself looking for power) but no "world ending scenario" lol.

[Hyperia]

My issue is that the Endless are essentially AIs that are self aware, they can make decisions, they have feelings, they are intelligent. You could even consider them a race on their own, a cybernetic race.

Erasing them is no different than killing them. We should have shut down the system and placed them into stasis. How is this not genocide?

I am in agreement with others that I do not buy the whole “there not alive” argument. By shutting down and erasing everything, we are no different from the old Asians.

The old Azim would have been very against this…

[Eyrilona]

if the story doesn't care, why should the reader?

Yes, that is pretty much the argument why people are saying this is a badly written story. And then other people act as apologists for the story by making arguments that you can reduce to "the story never told us that the story was bad, so it isn't bad".

I can recognize that yes, by the internal logic of Dawntrail 95-100, this was the right course of action. But I can also recognize that any story that has this logic in it that contradicts the entire tradition of what the game has always been about, should have been stopped at quality assurance. For Dawntrail to be valid, all of ARR through EW and our character's involvement in it must not be. And people are taking offense with that.

[LuciferMournstar]

It does matter for the quality of the story. you know like, the thing the game is known for.




Biblical references are provocative now? You sure you ain't a fisher main? Cause that bait be looking juicy rn.

Oh they are fishing right now, hard. Obfuscate and redirect. The same old song and dance. Along with being called "alt-right", next they'll use the biblical reference of my name to say i'm some bigoted bible thumper who hates anything progressive. Not that thematically, it just works with the fact i'm an Au'Ra male and the horns. Do I like biblical references and such? Yeah, sure do. Though being agnostic personally, it's just a cool reference and looks neat.

[MikkoAkure]

The beings in Ultima Thule are either alive, or are not. Same for the Endless.

The beings of Ultima Thule are recreations based on Meteion’s observations. They are made out of gathered dynamis and probably have souls, due to Meteion also gathering the lifestreams of their worlds. That said, I wouldn’t really consider them “alive” in our traditional sense and I’m two steps away from calling the ghostbusters on them. Up until recently they were reenacting their final moments exactly like ghosts and now are more like “ghosts with a purpose making a ghost civilization”.


The Endless are literal ghosts. They are dead beings separated from their corporeal aether and made to manifest in the way they did in life, even being able to look younger or older at will. They’re also separated by their original souls and stitched on artificially to someone else’s, that may have been taken against their will. They lack two of their three original components that made them a whole person in life.

They are a purposefully made abomination of nature, created by someone who was pathologically jealous and refused to let go of her people at any cost, not even letting them know the peace of death and allowing them into the natural cycle to be reborn.

They are the product of an industrialized necromantic ritual to preserve the memories of the dead in a dilapidated Disneyland for solely Sphene’s benefit. They live like zoo animals in exhibits designed to keep them stimulated and the system even organizes “serendipitous” meetings based on all the people stored in the cloud, but after centuries they’re already bored.

Would you feel the same about all this if instead of shiny cyberpunk facilities making the undead it was all magic sigils and bloodstained keeps? We’ve been down this road before with other Ashkin like those in the Sirensong Sea. Do we need to leave those alone because they’re “new life”?


But the main difference between the two is context. Not everything has to be “it’s all ‘this’ or it’s not” and context is very important. While I don’t like the concept of the Ultima Thule beings, they were created externally by an outside force and had no say in it and are now moving on and making the best of it and if they die, they will return to their nearby livestreams to start over as is normal. New life has even arisen and the dragons and Ea(?) have produced children.

The Endless were created by a society with institutionalized necromancy as its core feature and completely removed themselves from the cycle of death and rebirth that depends on harvesting others for their leaky system.

Erasing them is no different than killing them. We should have shut down the system and placed them into stasis. How is this not genocide?

How? Who among the group even knows how to do that? If it were possible, it would've come up. You can't just say that the story is bad because they didn't do a situation that you just made up. We don't even know if they could've done that.

And it's not genocide, the people in the computer were already dead. Alexandria's society, culture, and people are still alive right there on the source and by any indication, are thriving. We shut off their graveyard that barely anyone even knows exists.

[Wired-Lain]

How? Who among the group even knows how to do that? If it were possible, it would've come up. You can't just say that the story is bad because they didn't do a situation that you just made up. We don't even know if they could've done that.

Exactly. We don't know. Because the question is never raised and no attempts are made. Hence the dissatisfaction.

There is a reason for that out of character shift and why we're "not supposed to think about it too much", but it's IRL politics. Last time I tried to explain that, all that happened was I got called paranoid and crazy. Let's just say, they want you to "just accept the message and let it happen."

? Don't lump me in with whatever you're alluding to here but wont expressly say.

[Astronis]

"Institutionalized necromancy" is such a great way to put it. I felt such utter revulsion going through Living Memory, making it look like an even faker version of the Fakest Place on Earth(TM) was a perfect move. I don't think the devs *could* have made it worse for me by having it all in blood rituals and whatnot. It was WORSE than blood rituals, because at least those are done by hand!

[Ardeth]

Sphene is wrong no matter how she or rather the AI version of her wants it's wrong. For various reasons. Killing innocent people is wrong. Using their life force is wrong. I happily switched off every one of them. It didn't matter how many times the story tried to guilt trip me into reconsidering that choice. I still made it on my own. And I would absolutely do it again.

A lot of people like to quote Emet to justify it, completely neglecting that in that moment, he was also wrong.

We did the right thing.

[Alaray]

You kind of touch on the problem yourself. All these stories are meant to take place in the same universe, which should have a consistent set of laws/rules. Even if you want to approach a different theme or subject matter, as you're working in a per-established universe, you're constrained (or, well, you should

What you describe, with details clashing diegetically, is inevitable (and to be fair, the potential discrepancy here isn't congruent to the over-exaggerated "what if" scenario). It's in almost every story you can pick up, every world ever imagined: nothing is perfectly consistent, there is always an inconsistency somewhere. It is what it is, and for all I know, the Ultima Thule shades have something different at their core, but I don't need to really care if that is true or not true to understand what the Living Memory story is trying to communicate.

A rose at the Edge of the Universe is still rooted in a different soil, than a rose bloomed in the Unlost World.

And, I enjoy the stories of loss, death, acceptance, that are told. I have my complaints, but I dunno, I felt it was really obvious we're just helping would-be ghosts move onwards. That we're turning off the lights to another haphazard, memory of the past made into a false eden to show it for the graveyard it is and to accept that fact and not to be mired in the infatuation of "eternity".

[OMGJesuis66]

It’s funny that you call other people speed-readers while ignoring the game’s lore yourself. Classic.
Suggestion for you: go read the Unending Codex entry on souls that got added this very patch.
Also, consider whether Cahciua telling us something- immediately after requesting we do a horrific action that would never otherwise be considered- means her words are objective truth in-universe, or her own biased outlook.

Unrelated to you, I had a real good laugh reading a reply that says Endless don’t respond to stimuli. That’s a good one, gamers. Almost as good as ‘they’re copies’ or ‘they’re chatGPT’.

The lore entry about souls, as stipulated by the very own game for years is that we have two manners os Aether.

Corporeal and Incorporeal. The Souls, being Incorporeal and a being composed only of Incorporeal (Case in question) ARE GHOSTS. The very own Unending Codex proves the person you are making fun of is right, the Endless are simple ghosts of passing people, and as much as you may claim it was a horrible action, it was not. They act accordingly with their memories, they are capable of storing new memories as Endless, but those do not develop them beyond what they are. Those 'dreams, hopes, and aspirations' are unresolved matters. To which, even the Unending Codex, states that Incorporeal beings cling to memory and emotions, having unresolved matters means they can turn into actual harmful beings (Hello, Deadwalk).

By shutting down this place, we are putting many ghosts to rest, it is a moral act to do. We also resolve matters of those unable to move on so they find comfort and feel capable of passing on and resting as we carry their legacy.