Questionable ethics - Living Memory

[MikkoAkure]

Just to clarify, maintaining the Endless doesn't require the destruction of souls. Nothing the Alexandrians are doing is destroying souls. I'm pretty sure the characters would have had a far different reaction if that were the case. What the Endless require is for people to die. They are using the corporeal aether to give people bodies. Basically somebody dies and they make ten Endless out of the corporeal aether of that one person.

Souls are not corporeal aether. I'm not sure where you're getting that from unless you misread previous explanations in the game.

The aether which imbues us with life can be categorized into three forms. Two are of the incorporeal sort, the soul and the memory.

They do not run on corporeal aether, that is the normal, mundane aether literally everything else in the setting runs off of. If they did then the whole situation would be easy. Part of the reason the situation with Living Memory is what it is, is because it's supposed to be a giant callback to FF9, but even then in this setting we have no other comparison to what the Alexandrians were accomplishing other than what little we know about necromantic magic so we have no reason to doubt living, incorporeal aether is required.

Also, the logs in the Everkeep state that the bodies are disposed of and it's our bodies that comprise corporeal aether. I'm not entirely convinced the Endless are wholly corporeal either since they are able to teleport around Living Memory at will without an aetheryte.

Even per Sharlayans, the Endless would be considered ghosts.

Every living being is comprised of corporeal aether of the flesh, incorporeal aether of the soul, and the aetherial residue of their memories. Were one to be possessed of only corporeal aether, they would be but a walking corpse. Conversely, entities comprised of only incorporeal aether are referred to in layman’s terms as ghosts. In either case, they may also retain some of their residual memories. Of course, a ghost that possesses residual memories could likely recall its past and retain self-awareness.

The Endless are dead. They are not "new life" they are a prolonged death. Not allowing aether back to the lifestream harms the star and the whole situation of having the dead running forever around a place that's falling apart and full of monsters is gross. By the definition above, and by what Montichaigne mentions later comparing memories to ink and the soul as paper, the Endless are just residue written onto someone else's soul. I couldn't shut it down fast enough.

Anyone who wants to argue that it's wrong to want to be immortal due to it being a violation of the natural order, I remind you, nature doesn't have a plan.

Half of all villains in fantasy media are trying to be immortal. Are you saying they're all right? Or is Seymour from FFX in the right for trying to make all of Spira undead like him?

I guess this is the fundamental part of where you and I disagree because I don't think anyone should live forever to begin with, and this setting in particular has already stated multiple times that doing so is detriment to the star they live on. What we do with the Endless is justified by the simple fact that they're already dead. We're returning the stolen souls back to the normal cycle and the dead will reincarnate as is intended for all life.


By the way, I have no idea where you're getting your calculations about "10-1" from either unless you made that up.

[Lady_Silvermoon]

Souls are not corporeal aether. I'm not sure where you're getting that from unless you misread previous explanations in the game.

Correct. Souls are not corporeal aether. That's why I clarified that the Endless, cannot and do not run off souls. They run off life force, which is corporeal aether. From the souls entry in our codex:


People conflate and confuse what people with the regulators are doing and what's happening in Living Memory. But the people of Living Memory are not memory aether grafted onto souls as that would be ghosts and they could have just been that in the first place, be much sturdier for it and not needed any resources to maintain it. All you'd have to do is keep them from going to the aetherial sea and they would have continued on forever. Even a city of ghosts would have been a less stupid plan. But the memory aether is removed from the soul and sent to Living Memory, while the soul is packaged into a soul cell and sent to the lower levels for distribution to living citizens. So if what she needed was souls, extracting memories from them and sending them to the other place makes no sense. She's making their physical bodies out of the stuff physical bodies are made out of. If she was making them physical bodies out of souls, well souls are eternal. She could have just left them on their original souls and none of this would have been necessary.

Half of all villains in fantasy media are trying to be immortal. Are you saying they're all right? Or is Seymour from FFX in the right for trying to make all of Spira undead like him?

Usually when villains attempt to make themselves immortal, the villainy comes in the method, not the desire. Are the Ea evil? They were just minding their eternal business, chilling as blobs when the depression bird hit. And my highest moral value is self-determination, so Seymour attempting to make everyone undead violates that as does "releasing" a bunch of people without their consent, as does holding them without their consent. But given you don't end up in Living Memory without wearing a regulator, I assume the vast majority of people did consent to end up there, but we conveniently only speak to the handful who didn't want to be there. And just so you know, if I had found a way to preserve them, I still would have added a self-release option so that no one was stuck in Living Memory who didn't want to be there.

[Lady_Silvermoon]

I guess this is the fundamental part of where you and I disagree because I don't think anyone should live forever to begin with, and this setting in particular has already stated multiple times that doing so is detriment to the star they live on. What we do with the Endless is justified by the simple fact that they're already dead. We're returning the stolen souls back to the normal cycle and the dead will reincarnate as is intended for all life.

By their current methods, yes. But plenty of species in the FF14 universe have implored far less stupid methods to do what they are trying to do. Memory aether is washed away in the aetherial sea, I don't see anything wrong with preserving something the universe tosses in the bin anyway. The issue was their method of preservation. There are no souls in Living Memory. The souls are sent down to the living Alexandrians. Sometimes the English translation uses "souls" to mean people, which might cause confusion. But we saw the process. If there were souls in Living Memory, there would be no problems cause ghosts can go on forever. We did not release those people's soul to reincarnate. We released their minds into oblivion.

By the way, I have no idea where you're getting your calculations about "10-1" from either unless you made that up.

Yes. I made up a number in an attempt to express that they are a diluted form of what makes up the physical bodies of the sundered. I know this because Sphene was able to get by for years on the life force of people dying naturally in her own society, so if the Endless weren't diluted that wouldn't have been possible. It could have been 100 Endless for every 1 person's corporeal aether or 1000 Endless for every one person's corporeal aether. The point is they are mind and diluted body while spirit is in a vending machine downstairs. And if each Endless needed all of a person's corporeal aether, then they'd have just been bodysnatchers, which would have also made them less fragile than they currently are.

[EchoingPulse]

I'm starting to lose the plot of Silvermoon's arguments. Either they're defending the dead memory ghosts or trying to justify their existance?

[Lady_Silvermoon]

I'm starting to lose the plot of Silvermoon's arguments. Either they're defending the dead memory ghosts or trying to justify their existance?

I'm defending the dead memory ghosts by justifying their right to an afterlife of their choosing. After all, the reason they are exterminated with extreme prejudice is due to philosophical denial of their right to exist. Some might argue it was in self-defense, but the Endless have no ability nor inclination to harm us, it's the program that wishes to harm us.

You're pointing out they're dead to dehumanize them much as the story tries to do, however, we give more self-determination to our own dead (which is why you need either the permission of the person when they were living or the permission of the family to harvest organs) than the characters give those in Living Memory and they can voice their desires, create art, fall in love, construct plans...that's a whole lot of personhood to erase from existence on the grounds one person in the party finds them morally objectionable.

When Krile's parents ask if they are about to be deleted, the first thing Krile says is, "Perhaps there is another way," which meant our characters wiped out countless people based off convictions that aren't even their own.

This thread is about the Questionable Ethics of Living Memory and I've been laying out why someone being dead does not give you the right to do whatever you want with their memory aether. The same way someone being dead in our society doesn't give you the right to whatever you want with their corpse. Consent matters and the Endless are sentient beings capable of consenting and objecting to the things done to them.

[Ayche]

Surely hating on undead is one of the most common stances in fiction. Zombies, ghosts and vampires that prey on the living for sustenance are the most basic narrative vehicles there is, it is very very normal to oppose them. Only twist Dawntrail takes is that they make the undead appear nice and harmless on the surface and the system does the harm.

[Mortex]

Just to clarify, maintaining the Endless doesn\\'t require the destruction of souls. Nothing the Alexandrians are doing is destroying souls. I\\'m pretty sure the characters would have had a far different reaction if that were the case. What the Endless require is for people to die. They are using the corporeal aether to give people bodies. Basically somebody dies and they make ten Endless out of the corporeal aether of that one person. They are effectively, sundered Sundered. Which is dumb. If you want to live forever, creating something MORE fragile is stupid. Had they done what every other species interested in immortality had done and created something hardier, like a machine form or an incorporeal form, then this issue would be entirely avoidable.

And I don\\'t think it\\'s morally wrong to want to be immortal. I think it\\'s wrong to steal other people\\'s corporeal aether in order to do it, but that\\'s not a necessary part of being immortal. Preservation scientists were just bad at their job.

Anyone who wants to argue that it\\'s wrong to want to be immortal due to it being a violation of the natural order, I remind you, nature doesn\\'t have a plan. It just is and we go against what is every time we chop down a tree to build a house. And the Sundered lifespan is not the natural lifespan given to the people of Etheirys by nature, the short lifespan of the Sundered is by design of a person. She altered the entire species in a way she thought best, so why can\\'t those who have been altered attempt to alter themselves in a way they feel works best for them? They should be able to do what they want with their corporeal aether and their souls. The problem comes in when they are trying to do what they want with our aether.

But the Endless aren\\'t trying to steal our aether. Not even Sphene. We\\'re being attacked by a bad line of code. This was a problem better solved with a good programmer than an axe.

And if anyone wants to argue it has to be resolved with an axe cause that\\'s how the game works. Well, the writers knew how the game works, so maybe the shouldn\\'t have made the final antagonists innocent people living in a themepark.

Don’t forget they already had a machine form prototype in the form of robo otis but they did consider a version that has all the memories and can live with minimal help for over 200 years and could be upgraded a bad prototype version. Plus the inconsistency of needing to kill robo Otis off so there wouldn’t be a problem when facing endless Otis (also he dies while saving not even the queen but a drone, so completely pointless death)

[Cenobia]

FFXIV: "Yes, these people are lingering memories given form by Dynamis, but they're sentient, therefore should be considered real people worth helping.
Also FFXIV, somehow: "Yeah just delete all of these perfectly recorded memories that can experience existence again by being given bodies through aether lmao, they're not real anyway, none of them will even complain."

It's just bad writing, period. Hiroi did not play the game he's "writing"(ruining) for, and it shows.

[Lady_Silvermoon]

Surely hating on undead is one of the most common stances in fiction. Zombies, ghosts and vampires that prey on the living for sustenance are the most basic narrative vehicles there is, it is very very normal to oppose them. Only twist Dawntrail takes is that they make the undead appear nice and harmless on the surface and the system does the harm.

Up until the attack on Tuliyollal, the Endless ran off the life force of those who died of natural causes who had opted into their system by wearing a regulator. Their leaders killed 51 people. In return we wiped out their entire Endless population. If they are vampires, they are vampires in a universe where Tru Blood exists and we didn't stake them because they were actively attempting to drink our blood, we staked them because vampires are gross. We even knew wiping them out wouldn't stop Sphene from attempting to drain the Source because she still had the Meso Terminal. We seriously did it because they are "twisted and unnatural."

Don’t forget they already had a machine form prototype in the form of robo otis but they did consider a version that has all the memories and can live with minimal help for over 200 years and could be upgraded a bad prototype version. Plus the inconsistency of needing to kill robo Otis off so there wouldn’t be a problem when facing endless Otis (also he dies while saving not even the queen but a drone, so completely pointless death)

I mentioned that here in my dissertation on why Alexandrians are the dumbest advanced society ever created that they had already come up with a sustainable way of achieving their goals and abandoned it for a stupid way that would eventually destroy the universe.

FFXIV: "Yes, these people are lingering memories given form by Dynamis, but they're sentient, therefore should be considered real people worth helping.
Also FFXIV, somehow: "Yeah just delete all of these perfectly recorded memories that can experience existence again by being given bodies through aether lmao, they're not real anyway, none of them will even complain."

It's just bad writing, period. Hiroi did not play the game he's "writing"(ruining) for, and it shows.

And I love being lectured on the importance of accepting death when I'm standing next to the guy who rewrote time because he couldn't accept the WoL's death... And I'd just like to remind everyone after the Exarch (who has lived for CENTURIES) died, we stuck his memories and soul in a crystal and jammed them into his younger self (hopefully with his younger self having consented to it and we didn't just shove them in there while he was sleep). But when it's not Grandpa SimpCat we're "violating the natural cycle."

[Ayche]

Up until the attack on Tuliyollal, the Endless ran off the life force of those who died of natural causes who had opted into their system by wearing a regulator. Their leaders killed 51 people. In return we wiped out their entire Endless population. If they are vampires, they are vampires in a universe where Tru Blood exists and we didn't stake them because they were actively attempting to drink our blood, we staked them because vampires are gross. We even knew wiping them out wouldn't stop Sphene from attempting to drain the Source because she still had the Meso Terminal. We seriously did it because they are "twisted and unnatural."

I think you have lost the plot. Like you can be unsatisfied with the delivery of the story, but the moral of the story is rock solid. They ARE twisted and unnatural, the dead do not come before the living. The point of vampires is that they are ... vampires. They are undead that live at the expense of the true living, they die without the blood of the innocent. Trying to solve vampires with fake blood, animal blood or blood donations is missing the point of vampires, they are a story device. It is wrong to live at the expense of others. This is like one of the most common plot points there are.