Questionable ethics - Living Memory

[Dorito_Burrito]

Read the terminals in Origenics and tell me that what Alexandria is doing is really okay.

[MikkoAkure]

The Sundered are not a natural creation. They are the mutilated bits of another species. Given your view here, I have to wonder if you agree with Emet-Selch about the rejoinings. After all, Ancients are the natural evolution of humanity in the FF14 universe.

The Sundered at least are still alive.

The Endless are a bunch of collected dead people. They had lives, they died, and instead of being reincarnated they're removed from the natural cycle and uploaded to a cloud server that randomly decides when to manifest them into a dilapidated purgatory until the end of time (or the terminals) by stitching their memories onto someone else's soul.

Again, if the Endless were collected while they were actually alive and the state of being Endless was a natural continued state of life and done to evade some sort of calamity, I'd feel a little different about the whole thing. Or if like the Sundering, it had been done widespread against an entire people but they still managed to continue actual mundane living after that. But it's not any of that. Their memory aether is collected postmortem. These people are ghosts. They're not a "new version of life", they HAD lives.

[Lady_Silvermoon]

Read the terminals in Origenics and tell me that what Alexandria is doing is really okay.

It depends on which thing you mean. Recreating the process of the aetherial sea? That's fine. That doesn't actually hurt anyone or anything. What these people want to do with their own souls in the privacy of their own silo is none of my business. Some people think that they are draining resources from the star like FF7, but there is no indication of that, looks like they are only delaying the return of souls to the aetherial sea with the regulator system, not preventing them.

Attempting to cheat death? Regardless of what the game says about it, I think it's perfectly fine to search for ways to avoid dying. The cycle of life and death is treated as sacred by the game (unless the WoL dies, then we invent time travel) but it's not really sacred, it's just the way things work ever since Venat shattered the planet. If someone subs you to 100 year lifespan against your will and you're not cool with 100 year lifespan, I believe you should be able to unsub because I value freedom of choice.

Experimenting on prisoners? Definitely bad. They shouldn't have done that.

Setting up a system that requires an ever increasing number of people to die to maintain? Both stupid and bad. We could have connected them with at least three different races who'd figured out less stupid ways to be immortal, but that's not even necessary because they figured out how to put souls in memories into mechanical bodies before they figured out how to make Endless, so they moved from a method that gave people mobility and didn't destroy all life in the universe to a method that left them stuck in one location and would eventually destroy all life in the universe. They could have slapped some regulators on the service bots and they would have been good to go, no genocides necessary...

Murdering people for their lifeforce? That's bad. You shouldn't do that.

Deleting memories of the dead? More a bad idea than an immoral one given the regulator system is opt-in, people willingly signed up for it, so once again falls under not really my business.

Wiping out an entire population because you deem them unnatural and subhuman? Evil. Definitely evil. Oh wait...that was us.

[Lady_Silvermoon]

The Sundered at least are still alive.

The Endless are a bunch of collected dead people. They had lives, they died, and instead of being reincarnated they're removed from the natural cycle and uploaded to a cloud server that randomly decides when to manifest them into a dilapidated purgatory until the end of time (or the terminals) by stitching their memories onto someone else's soul.

Again, if the Endless were collected while they were actually alive and the state of being Endless was a natural continued state of life and done to evade some sort of calamity, I'd feel a little different about the whole thing. Or if like the Sundering, it had been done widespread against an entire people but they still managed to continue actual mundane living after that. But it's not any of that. Their memory aether is collected postmortem. These people are ghosts. They're not a "new version of life", they HAD lives.

I also do not believe we have the right to wipe out the spirits in the aetherial sea, do you? I agree they are not alive, but I don't think being dead erases personhood and then gives me the right to do with the dead whatever I want. Alive or dead, they were sentient beings whose existence we were ending. I don't really have a "you had your chance" policy when it comes to wiping out societies.

[MikkoAkure]

I also do not believe we have the right to wipe out the spirits in the aetherial sea, do you? I agree they are not alive, but I don't think being dead erases personhood and then gives me the right to do with the dead whatever I want. Alive or dead, they were sentient beings whose existence we were ending. I don't really have a "you had your chance" policy when it comes to wiping out societies.

We have a right to delete the Endless because that was part of stopping Sphene who planned to kill everyone on the Source and eventually all the Reflections in order to power them. If she had her way, eventually the only people left would be Endless and then they'd slowly run out of souls to use and we'd be back to where we were before. The fact that they're dead and already lived just makes it "easier" to let us end this farce and allow them to peacefully pass on.

The people we fight in the Aitascope if that's what you're referring to are already fragmented souls who have partially merged with the Aetherial Sea itself. The deceased antagonists there are only able to maintain any sort of sense of self because they're angry and want to kill us. Defeating angry fragments of souls in the Lifestream if anything only speeds up the natural process of fully returning to it and ALL people who return to the Aetherial Sea are supposed to have their personhoods erased. That's literally the entire point.

[Themarvin]

Living Memory is AI that has gone bad, it depicts the real world and how it could become...

[Lady_Silvermoon]

We have a right to delete the Endless because that was part of stopping Sphene who planned to kill everyone on the Source and eventually all the Reflections in order to power them.

Deleting them all is one possible solution to stopping an AI from wiping out all life in the universe to obey it's poorly programmed directive...or...we could have tried reprogramming it. *shrugs* But that would have probably cut into our ice cream eating and boat riding time. Sure, wiping out every Garlean would have solved a lot of problems for us too, but for some reason we never brought up any Final Solutions when it came to them. Wonder why?

The fact that they're dead and already lived just makes it "easier" to let us end this farce and allow them to peacefully pass on.

It's beyond that. We're told they are unnatural and we should feel no guilt in wiping them out. But the characters do feel guilt. They feel guilt and shame when Krile's parents ask are we about to erase them. The characters know they are doing something wrong, you can see it on their faces regardless of what Cahcuia tells them to view it in order to get it done. Krile even suggests "finding another way" when faced with the possibility of her parents begging her for their lives. Good thing like everyone else's mommy they were perfectly cool with being deleted, they even WANTED to be deleted. *whew* Might have had to face the gravity of what was being done.

Did they peacefully pass on? Memories are washed away in the aetherial sea. It's the soul that's eternal. From my best understanding, we sent those people to oblivion. The guy who waited centuries to be with the love of his life? Welp, hope he made the best of those five minutes before we erased the both of them from existence because their existence was worth less than those the program might hurt in an attempt to preserve them.

Defeating angry fragments of souls in the Lifestream if anything only speeds up the natural process of fully returning to it and ALL people who return to the Aetherial Sea are supposed to have their personhoods erased. That's literally the entire point.

Everyone on Etheirys (barring accident or murder) is supposed to die when they want to, but a single individual decided we'd be tougher if we died sooner, more often and more horrifically. The Sundered life is not a natural state. It was a state decided not by a god, but a retired politician. Soo...maybe we shouldn't use that as the metric for when it's good and right to wipe people from existence. Maybe we shouldn't wipe people from existence unless absolutely necessary to save ourselves and that wasn't absolutely necessary. That was Plan A.

[AnotherPerson]

We have a right to delete the Endless because that was part of stopping Sphene who planned to kill everyone on the Source and eventually all the Reflections in order to power them. If she had her way, eventually the only people left would be Endless and then they'd slowly run out of souls to use and we'd be back to where we were before. The fact that they're dead and already lived just makes it "easier" to let us end this farce and allow them to peacefully pass on.

The people we fight in the Aitascope if that's what you're referring to are already fragmented souls who have partially merged with the Aetherial Sea itself. The deceased antagonists there are only able to maintain any sort of sense of self because they're angry and want to kill us. Defeating angry fragments of souls in the Lifestream if anything only speeds up the natural process of fully returning to it and ALL people who return to the Aetherial Sea are supposed to have their personhoods erased. That's literally the entire point.

We don't have a right. We have a compelling reason to get rid of things that stand in our way, but not a right.
Civilian causality in war is never a "right".

Plus, you don't own those lives. DRK storyline really does wonders in this regard. You may see yourself as 'morally right to remove the Heavensward'. Then you see the consequences of your actions later on in the storyline, and you live with them. No one truly wins in war. There's only losers and casualties. A real shame there's no more job quests.

[MikkoAkure]

snip

The Garleans are actual living people in an actual functioning society. The Endless are dead people prevented from reincarnating by stealing the souls of others to maintain a boring existence in a broken down Disneyland because their dead queen is too scared to just let people die naturally.

They're still innocent of what they are and what happens to maintain them since they can't control that and that's part of what makes the situation tragic, but Sphene has no right to people's souls and after absconding with the key there was only so much that could have been done. We have a right to defend ourselves and our world and that involved shutting down the terminals. If you believe that we were just going to let it happen because it's too morally dubious then I don't know what to say. If hacking into her terminal and reprogramming her to not be a terrible person was an actual possibility it would have come up. We already tried to talk her down and negotiate which may have led to something, but she refused. But hey, we might get round 2 since her special regulator is still around.

You keep trying to bring Venat back into this, but she didn't make the decision unilaterally. The game itself mentions there were others and then EE3 goes into even more detail about how other Ancients were anti-Convocation and others as well who blamed creation magic for the Final Days and wanted it removed. Her faction was fully aware of the Sundering and what would happen. And she was also right. The Convocation's plan would just delay the inevitable. We could argue all day about what could have happened but there's absolutely no way to know whether any of that would have worked and we know that her plan was the one that actually worked in the end and Emet-Selch admitted it.

The game also goes along with ending the Endless as the correct choice and no other possibilities existed at the time we did it. The writers are the ones who invented the whole plot and the framework it's all taking place in and would know better if there was another way than random people on the forums including myself. In the end, if the game you're playing continuously makes decisions in the story that go against what you believe should happen, then sticking around is probably going to cause you more frustration than satisfaction anyway.

[Lady_Silvermoon]

*snip*

Attempting literally anything before going straight to erase the subhumans from their fragmented and meaningless existence would have been better. I'm not even saying it had to work. But that it was plan A and that it was plan A BECAUSE we deemed them inferior is so Ascian it's not even funny. They should have given the WoL an Emet-Selch costume instead of a bunny costume because we were doing a mighty fine impression of him in Living Memory.

I keep bringing up Venat because an appeal to nature is what's being used to justify the callous actions taken against the Endless. They are unnatural, therefore it's okay for plan A to be wipe them all out. We'll the Sundered are unnatural too, so why can't Emet-Selch's plan A be to wipe us all out? BTW, that's rhetorical because I'm sure you'll draw some arbitrary line between us and the Endless that makes it more okay to kill them, but the Unsundered can draw just as many arbitrary lines between themselves and the Sundered. If it's wrong to kill the Sundered because they are sentient beings, then it's wrong to kill the Endless for the same reason.

As for why I don't just quit, well I'll played this game for the past 10 years, I played through the story for the first time a year ago. I very much enjoyed Shadowbringers, but after that it did get kinda weird and preachy about how some groups of people just HAVE to be wiped out. And yeah, not really enjoying that that very odd moral they keep doubling down on and I do wish they'd stop. And had I known the quality of the DT story, I would have gone back to scene skipping like I had the prior 9 years. But I thought what were the chances we'd end up wiping out another group of innocent people. I'm sure it'll be fineeee...

Definitely egg on my face with that one.

Also, can you provide somewhere it says that anyone on Venat's faction was aware she intended to rip every man, woman and child into 14 pieces and were totally on-board with that? Because I've never seen that anywhere, including EE3. It sounds like she galvanized them on the premise of stopping the third sacrifice, which what's the point if the third sacrifice is gonna get shredded along with everything and everyone else? The Watcher makes it sound like not only was she incredibly vague with her plans, she gutted chunks of his and the Twelves' memories to make sure the Sundered world was shaped by her influence and hers alone.