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.