Questionable ethics - Living Memory

[Jeeqbit]

Our actions in Living Memory seem morally wrong.
We don't hold any authority in Sphene's kingdom and don't have the right to wander around switching off parts of her realm as we please.

She doesn't have the right to wander into our realm and steal our souls. So we went and fought back. That's how wars work...

Besides, it was explained that all of them were originally from the Source. Thus, they are in fact under our jurisdiction.

Our jurisdiction because the Warrior of Light has effectively solidified their position as the most important person on the Source.

Why we do even have to erase them instead of just shutting the system down?

Because she was trying to use the archived data apparently, to create something awful. And she could have potentially tried to make the worst ones appear or something like that. Action needed to be relatively quick to prevent this sort of advantage.

when the fight with Robo-Sphene starts and she talks again about protecting her precious Endless, why couldn't anyone tell her - sorry, lady, we just erased all of them, so you don't have the reason to fight anymore?

I don't think this would have made a difference. It was clarified that this was not really sphene, but her essence. An essence that has a motive that the real version of her may have been more reasonable about. This was actually clarified. What this means is that no matter what you would say to her, she was not going to change course, because she is programmed to do this... even if she has nobody left to protect.

[Bright-Flower]

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."

You were saying that the Pelu Pelu are stand ins for jews, that the disease the giants encountered during their conquest was somehow a parallel to the Nazi invasion of Russia, and that Living Memory is saying white people are expendable because most npcs there are fair skinned, ignoring that that's just a general trend in the game at large for the more human races. And then here, you made ups tuff about how Alexandria is somehow doomed despite the MSQ not indicating this at all.

Yes, you are paranoid. Yes, you are reading too much into stuff.

[ArcaviusGreyashe]

Very well. Prove to me that you are not an AI, are alive, and have free will. I will be allowed to use all the arguments you yourself have used in this thread, against you.

To raise the stakes -- if you actually manage to find a way to prove these things, you can send a copy of your post to the Berggruen Institute because you'd have a really good chance at that $1.000.000 prize of theirs.

Y'all are still missing the point.

If your existence only depends on sucking other peoples' lives, destroying them from all planes of existence, slowly but endlessly voiding the aethereal sea, especially at a ratio of "a lot to expand your life a tiny bit more", it doesn't matter whether you are alive. You are a nuisance, and a greater evil to the world than people putting an end to your selfish existence.

Your whole argument may be interesting, but it's unrelated to the living memory ethics issue, really.

[Bright-Flower]

Y'all are still missing the point.

If your existence only depends on sucking other peoples' lives, destroying them from all planes of existence, slowly but endlessly voiding the aethereal sea, especially at a ratio of "a lot to expand your life a tiny bit more", it doesn't matter whether you are alive. You are a nuisance, and a greater evil to the world than people putting an end to your selfish existence.

Your whole argument may be interesting, but it's unrelated to the living memory ethics issue, really.

Exactly. Sphene is the poor man's emet-selch. Where as Emet could conceivably bring his old world and people back in some form at the expense of the current one, all Sphene could do is massacre innocents to keep her digital theme park afterlife running that much longer. Plundering other worlds for souls, because it requires souls and not just aether to power, and not stopping to think about the sustainability issue when she runs out of shards to steal from.

This is not a moral quandry with two valid outcomes, it's a bad situation where we have to do something unpleasant but completely necessary to stop Sphene from going to going to other shards and killing people to steal their souls for battery juice. All the while the number of endless to sustain only grows and grows and grows because she will not or can not let go.

[Karious]

Cahcuia is no different than Fandaniel when he said he wanted to die and take everyone with him. Selfish.

[TheMightyMollusk]

Cahcuia is no different than Fandaniel when he said he wanted to die and take everyone with him. Selfish.

"These people need to be stopped from stealing the souls of entire worlds" is equal to "I want to wipe out all life in the universe because reasons". Sure.

[Maalik]

Just from a gameplay and replayability level, it does kind of suck to take the coolest looking zone in the game and slowly shut it all down into a ghost town. I hope in a future patch they can figure out a way for us to turn it back on and make it all pretty again. I found myself getting pretty depressed at the end of the 6th zone. A dark allegory for our own society.

[AlysCamoa]

"These people need to be stopped from stealing the souls of entire worlds" is equal to "I want to wipe out all life in the universe because reasons". Sure.

“These people,” except none of them have any agency in the actions committed by their monarch, even if those actions are done to perpetuate their own lives. Remind me why we cared about anyone in Alexandria, again? Why we wasted time learning how they farm instead of just cutting our way through the city to reach Zoraal?
I know the writer said we don’t do these things because we’d rather put Tuliyollal- full of civilians who just suffered one sudden attack- at risk again. But I’m asking under your logic as you’ve just proposed it:If any action take against Alexandrians is justified by Sphene’s intentions, then why should we not kill our way to Zoraal, and then the Meso Terminal?

[anna-steele]

the whole zone is a giant bummer after the story is finished. plus where is it? isnt it supposed to be on the world ended by lightning. wheres all the lightning?

[Bright-Flower]

“These people,” except none of them have any agency in the actions committed by their monarch, even if those actions are done to perpetuate their own lives. Remind me why we cared about anyone in Alexandria, again? Why we wasted time learning how they farm instead of just cutting our way through the city to reach Zoraal?
I know the writer said we don’t do these things because we’d rather put Tuliyollal- full of civilians who just suffered one sudden attack- at risk again. But I’m asking under your logic as you’ve just proposed it:If any action take against Alexandrians is justified by Sphene’s intentions, then why should we not kill our way to Zoraal, and then the Meso Terminal?

For starters, the civilians in Heritage Found/S9 were not being kept alive by a machine that requires killing innocent people and harvesting their souls to survive.