Questionable ethics - Living Memory

[CVXIV]

How would G'raha Tia know any more about how electrope works than say Sphene or any of the researchers? We just recently learned about it even existing.

Not only that, but isn't there a shortage of the material to begin with? The whole war between Lindblum and Alexandria?

Is it because of the method using white auracite and his blood, which was done by Beq Lugg on the first?

I don't really understand the line of questioning, given the events that transpired during the story. Changing that one part doesn't change everything else that happens, from the already existing shortage of both souls to create new endless and of electrope. On top of that, Sphene outwardly refusing to cooperate and double down on her goal to slaughter everyone.

It's an artificial aetherial sea and we returned the people who died back to the real one so they can be reborn. Souls in ff14 are weird, and we don't fully understand how they work.

[Lady_Silvermoon]

*snip*

Thank you for answering my question. You and I are actually in the same place when it comes to "plan of action." I just feel like the story skips over step 1: Attempt to resolve the issue peacefully due to a stated disgust factor. They are twisted and unnatural and I take issue with that. It wasn't that we tried for a peaceful solution and failed, we didn't bother with a peaceful solution because we deemed them an inferior form of life, not worth the trouble. And I found that messed up.

*snip*

My question wasn't because I believed that was something that could happen or should happen, my question was to see if she was okay with killing them due to self-defense or the disgust factor the game actually gives as our reason for ending them. After all, I don't usually stop for ice cream when acting in self-defense. Our attack on the populace was preemptive in order to destabilize their leadership. After all, deleting the Endless in no way changed what happened next. Sphene was still talking to them as she fought us which means she didn't even notice they were gone.

As for how could a person with connections to people with knowledge of Allag, Sharlayan, Omicron and future technology possibly solve a problem the Alexandrians couldn't solve? Well, the Alexandrians were idiots. They got conquered by a lizard with a pointy stick. And if you try to argue that no, she made an alliance with the lizard with pointy stick. Well, she gave him complete and sole control of her military, so...still an idiot. It's actually less tragic if he'd simply managed to conquer them. We also defeated their super advanced military in like an afternoon...

They created a Living Memory so no one would ever have to experience loss again, but instead of letting people visit their dead loved ones, they instead kept them completely separate and just deleted the memory of the dead loved ones. Even if you're as a fragile as an empty egg and can't handle the slightest bit off loss, these two systems are redundant. Either keep everyone alive OR make everyone forget their dead. But they do both, because they are dumb.

Alexandrians have the ability to put souls and memories in machines. They have a way to keeping a soul and memory with the machine in the case of the machine's destruction with regulators. They have a way of projecting a person's appearance over them machine. And given what she says about older models not having regulators that means they've already installed regulators on newer models. And they came up with that FIRST. Which means they had a way of preserving people that didn't require life force and allowed complete freedom of movement instead of being stuck in one location, and they went with a dumber plan that would eventually end all life in the universe instead.

[Lady_Silvermoon]

They also have VR, which living people can enter, like we did to fight Sphene and I'm assuming their VR can run on electric and doesn't need to run on human souls, so even allowing the Endless to exist in VR given 90% of them are stuck on servers anyway due to the aether shortage would have been a better idea than murdering everyone until the universe runs out of people.

So yes, I do think the combined knowledge of all the people who owe the WoL a favor could have solved Sphene's problem, because Alexandrians are the dumbest scifi civilization I've ever seen. They don't even password protect the terminals which anyone can walk up to and wipe out a swath of their populace and there was a time when the living were in Living Memory, what if some kid walked up and accidentally took out the Aero terminal? The ziplines had more security than the terminals keeping everyone up and about.

Even Sphene admits that we possess new knowledge that might be able to solve her problem in a less stupid way. It's just that Zoraal Ja offed a bunch of her people and so she had an influx of dead coming in and needed life force NOW. But even if we could just shut down the programmed imperatives controlling her, I think even that would have given us the time to solve Preservation being the worst programmers and dumbest designers in history.

And if it didn't and it did come down to a fight to the death which in turn caused all the servers to go down, at least we tried. Because that's what heroes do. They at least TRY not to wipe out entire civilian populations.

[Arzalis]

I couldn't agree with that last paragraph more.

We didn't even try to look into other alternatives or dig deeper into what was going on. We destroyed an entire civilization because we decided they were lesser than us and couldn't be bothered to do anything else. That's just not how heroes act.

Sphene had to be stopped, but there was actually nothing preventing us from stopping her and then taking the time to look into the situation. The game is pretty explicit that the deletion wasn't actually necessary in any way. We did it because we had nothing else to do while we waited to access Sphene. If that led to the Endless being wiped out, then it's a matter of survival and an understandable tragedy. But we actually took the most callous, uncaring approach to it all.

[EchoingPulse]

I couldn't agree with that last paragraph more.

We didn't even try to look into other alternatives or dig deeper into what was going on. We destroyed an entire civilization because we decided they were lesser than us and couldn't be bothered to do anything else. That's just not how heroes act.

Sphene had to be stopped, but there was actually nothing preventing us from stopping her and then taking the time to look into the situation. The game is pretty explicit that the deletion wasn't actually necessary in any way. We did it because we had nothing else to do while we waited to access Sphene. If that led to the Endless being wiped out, then it's a matter of survival and an understandable tragedy. But we actually took the most callous, uncaring approach to it all.

It's not that we didn't try to find alternatives. The writers didn't want us to look for other options; they gave us only one side of the story and nothing else, even if you ignore everything Cahcuia says. The story is very explicit in that the Endless NEED living aether to sustain the Endless. When we go there, we are told that the reason so few are around is because the aether levels are low.

Remember what the Watcher said in Endwalker.
"Whatever fate befalls the Source. Her reflections will share." If the Source blows up, every reflection, including Living memory blows up. Something absolutely needed to be done before they drained the Source of all its aether.

[DreadCrow]

We didn't even try to look into other alternatives or dig deeper into what was going on. We destroyed an entire civilization because we decided they were lesser than us and couldn't be bothered to do anything else. That's just not how heroes act.

We destroyed an entire "civilization" because that civilization was ruled by an AI that's goal was "protect her people" by any means necessary and the said AI decided that the best way to do that is literally consume the souls of every living thing across time and space and decided that because its original plan to use a conqueror to take over the whole world and do it slowly went to hell that it needs to hasten the process.

To me, preventing the death of all life is exactly what heroes do. Especially when a member of the the said civilization says "dude, we're just ChatGPT bots, don't worry". People get so caught up on Emet's comment that he doesn't think we're really alive, when they here someone else say it, they think of him... Even if , you know, different context.

[Dorito_Burrito]

We destroyed an entire "civilization" because that civilization was ruled by an AI that's goal was "protect her people" by any means necessary and the said AI decided that the best way to do that is literally consume the souls of every living thing across time and space and decided that because its original plan to use a conqueror to take over the whole world and do it slowly went to hell that it needs to hasten the process.

To me, preventing the death of all life is exactly what heroes do. Especially when a member of the the said civilization says "dude, we're just ChatGPT bots, don't worry". People get so caught up on Emet's comment that he doesn't think we're really alive, when they here someone else say it, they think of him... Even if , you know, different context.

I think Emet-Selch would've absolutely shut down Living Memory.

[TheMightyMollusk]

I think Emet-Selch would've absolutely shut down Living Memory.

Yeah, but to him, it would've been because they were just another bunch of sundered nobodies. If he doesn't even consider us alive, he wouldn't even blink at turning off a computer.

Alternately, he would've turned it off because stealing and using up the life force of another reflection would've been counter to the whole point of a Rejoining. They can't merge souls back together if they've been spent.

[Jojoya]

I think Emet-Selch would've absolutely shut down Living Memory.

I think Emet and the other Ascians were responsible for Living Memory. I think Preservation was their experiment group for finding a new way to recreate those they had lost. Emet had already told us they had no hesitation when it came to using our aether to restore their dead.

Once the system was perfected to their satisfaction, they would have removed the test subject memories of the Alexandrian people and replaced them with the memories of the Ancients that were sacrificed to Zodiark or lost in the Sundering. The memory crystals we found then passed onto Elidibus as he died (except for Azem's) may not have been the only ones in existence. The appearance of Living Memory would have changed to reflect Amaurot, Elpis and other places of the pre-Sundering world.

[Lady_Silvermoon]

*snip*

Given your wording at the beginning, I assumed you recognized the people we attacked and the entity intent on harming us were not the same. We wiped out the Endless because a rogue AI wanted to destroy all life. The Endless have neither the ability, nor the inclination to do us harm.

That's why no argument can be made that we destroyed them to protect ourselves. They didn't have the capability to harm us. We destroyed them, because Cahcuia assured us they were disgusting. Twisted and unnatural. Something you can wipe out without feeling the least bit of guilt.

Even the argument that the AI will stop trying to save people if we leave it no one to save is immediately undercut by there still being people left on the last terminal, so wiping out the Endless while we wait for her to finish reformatting in no way, shape or form aids us in preventing the AI from draining the Source.

Emet-Selch is okay with killing the Sundered because he sees us as inferior and unnatural as Cahcuia sees the Endless. The context is different as while we are made up of the parts of his people, so there is no way he can get them back without destroying us, I can think of half a dozen ways both the Endless and the Source can get what they want without doing harm to each other because the dilemma is so poorly written and contrived. It'd be like if a society designed their pizza ovens to run off human souls and are arguing they are gonna all starve if they don't take our souls to get their pizza ovens up and running again and you're listening to this and thinking, I know of at least six different societies off the top of my head who have solved this problem already. Give me an hour and I can pop over to Ultima Thul and bring back an Omicron who can 3D print you a pizza oven that runs off electric and not human souls. And Emetion is like, "Nope, nope, nope. This is an unresolvable conflict where two groups must battle, just like in Shadowbringers. Remember Shadowbringers?" I don't recall slaughtering the Eulmoreans to demoralize Vauthry in Shadowbringers... We took care not to harm them even as they were brainwashed into attacking us. Now we just wipe out kids as they play for being "twisted and unnatural."

I'll point out one more time, the way the last zone is written, we do not wipe out these people for being a direct threat to us. They aren't. We wipe them out for being inferior.

*snip*

There would be no reason for it in the pre-Ascian days because Ancients were able to live for as long as they wanted to. Living Memory exists BECAUSE of the Sundering. And remember, he recommends we go there, so he knows about it. But I'm sure from his perspective there isn't much difference between a Sundered and an Endless. We're all just mangled bits of Ancient.