Omicrons and The Endless (Do Endless Dream of Electric Sheep?)

[LuciferMournstar]

I love it when people say: "We could've taken the Endless to Ultima Thule."

NO, WE CAN'T. THOSE PEOPLE CAN'T LEAVE LIVING MEMORY. HOW DO YOU PLAN TO TAKE A PEOPLE WHO *CANNOT* MOVE FROM LIVING MEMORY, TO THE FAR END OF THE UNIVERSE, AND HOPE THAT DYNAMIS, AN UNEXPLORED MAGICKS, CAN KEEP THEM ALIVE?

They LITERALLY HAVE A DEVICE THAT MERGES ALTERNATE DEMENSIONS. Who says we have to take the people from Living Memory to Dynamis. How about use magics to transport Living Memory (the actual place) to Ultima Thule? I mean seriously, they have a fucking atherythe we can just... teleport to now. It's better than just saying "Fuck it, just kill em."

[LuciferMournstar]

Repeat after me:

The Endless do not exist.

The Endless do not exist.

The Endless do not exist.

The Endless do not exist.

The Endless do not exist.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Fictional creations created for the purposes of a fictional story are not alive. We are simply watching the story the writer(s) wanted to tell even if our character avatars seem to give us a more personal role. Whether those creations are alive, dead, inanimate, imaginary, simulations or anything else is up to the writer(s). There is no moral onus on us.

Please help yourselves. You're taking this way too seriously.

Turn off your ChatGPU waifus, go outside and interact with the real world for a change. Can it be scary? Sure. Is there a chance you will be hurt? Yes.

There's way more to living than clinging only to your happiest memories and ignoring everything else.

Careful with that Edge, you might cut yourself.

[WeakestZenosEnjoyer]

They LITERALLY HAVE A DEVICE THAT MERGES ALTERNATE DEMENSIONS. Who says we have to take the people from Living Memory to Dynamis. How about use magics to transport Living Memory (the actual place) to Ultima Thule? I mean seriously, they have a fucking atherythe we can just... teleport to now. It's better than just saying "Fuck it, just kill em."

We certainly didn't have it and Sphene is literally an AI that's incapable of considering alternative solutions, not as an Endless but as the Eternal Queen.

We can't transport the terminals via aetheryte either, they only work for objects that fit comfortably on your person. We didn't have time for the logistics of transporting massive monoliths to the edge of the universe. It would've been cool to at least be able to bring it up though.

[Rowde]

Ah yes, we didn't have time to consider alternative solutions to the endless or discuss the moral implications of what we were about to do.

Proceeds to take time out to have a "non-snack" then perform "enjoyment" to save the feelings of the "non-people" who we are going to turn off anyway... seems kind of weird to worry about their feelings when they are going to be feeling much anything soon!
Proceeds to take time out to find a ring so a "non-person" can propose to their "non-fiancée" so they can finally experience the happiness of being together that they weren't able to experience in their first lives... right before turning them off and denying them that happiness for good.
Proceeds to go on a gondola right with catboi
Proceeds to perform a play in costume and having memorized at least the structure of a scene for a bunch of "non-children" to make them feel some happiness and enjoyment... right before turning them off and denying them that happiness for good.
Proceeds to get ice cream for friendo so they can get over the awkwardness of talking to their "non-parents", whom we can't trust their authenticity since they're part of the system, and also don't forget we established with catboi that the food here has no flavor... so what is friendo enjoying?
Proceeds to go on a guided tour to learn about the history and culture of the ppl here... right before turning them off for good.
Proceeds to go on capybara ride with bunboi and "not-mom"
Proceeds to have a heartfelt send off for "not-mom", who is part of the system so we can't trust her authenticity...

BUT CLEARLY, there was no time to consider alternative solutions to the endless or discuss the moral implications of what we were about to do.

[MikkoAkure]

BUT CLEARLY, there was no time to consider alternative solutions to the endless or discuss the moral implications of what we were about to do.

Not sure what kind of solution we could have cooked up in just an afternoon. All of the scions are personally aware with how the lifestream cycle works and probably wouldn’t support keeping them around anyway.

The aether has to come from somewhere and the Everkeep with its electrope is probably the most powerful and efficient power source in the entire world and that’s apparently not enough to power the Endless. There’s no place else in the world that uses so much power even discounting anything to do with souls. You expect a handful of people to suddenly think of a way to generate more power than has ever been conceived in just an afternoon?


As far as dynamis goes, Ultima Thule isn’t a power station. You can’t just pull up with your city of the living dead and say “fill her up!” and magically expect it to fulfill any and all future plot by just existing. The beings there were pulled out of nothing by Meteion’s observations and pure dynamis or by Stigma-4 copying her work out of the Dead Ends. I don’t think that translates to suddenly being able to grant dynamis bodies to hundreds of thousands of dead people made of aether that just showed up one day. Especially since the only person who was even capable of moving the city was belligerent and refused to talk to us before we killed her.

[Rowde]

In the same span of quests we also organized all of Eorzea to reconfigure a spaceship for faster than light interstellar space travel when most of the people helping had no idea what any of those concepts were.

It's crazy what we can accomplish in an afternoon when we reach out to the multitude of allies we've made over the years for assistance rather than taking matters into our own hands based on the words of a single individual who again, is an unreliable narrator at best since they are part of the very system supposedly filled with "non-people" only presenting the best versions of themselves.

[ElHeggunte]

BUT CLEARLY, there was no time to consider alternative solutions to the endless or discuss the moral implications of what we were about to do.

That’s a bit of a cooked take. Having time for one thing doesn’t mean you also have time for another longer thing.

We were on the clock. The very first thing we did upon arriving was trying to reason with Sphene and try to convince her to seek a peaceful solution. She told us to kick rocks before starting the timer. We didn’t have a choice but to shut down the terminals. Having a little spare time to do silly little tasks along the way (and to give Krile and Erenville closure) doesn’t somehow translate to having the time to not only figure out a way to “save” the Endless, but to also convince Sphene to go along with the plan.

And some of the characters did voice the opinion that it didn’t feel right to just erase them, but again—no real choice in the matter.

[MikkoAkure]

In the same span of quests we also organized all of Eorzea to reconfigure a spaceship for faster than light interstellar space travel when most of the people helping had no idea what any of those concepts were.

It's crazy what we can accomplish in an afternoon when we reach out to the multitude of allies we've made over the years for assistance rather than taking matters into our own hands based on the words of a single individual who again, is an unreliable narrator at best since they are part of the very system supposedly filled with "non-people" only presenting the best versions of themselves.

That was a case of us already having a spaceship present for us to use that just had to be reconfigured to get us to a destination that we already knew where it was. All the work was also handled by the actual scientists and engineers who made it who were the best in the world.

The Endless power supply issue requires the main characters that happened to be present getting together in an afternoon to make a plan to somehow power hundreds of thousands of people that the people who created them couldn’t figure out in 400 years with their own much higher levels of technology and understanding. We would also require the help of the being who outright refused us and was in the process of getting ready to kill us and everyone so we didn’t exactly have all the time in the world and I don’t know how that was all supposed to go down.

The only realistic plan that was presented to us was to shut it all down and all parties present accepted it. WoL wasn’t the end of the line and we had 2 experts in aetherology with us. The only other thing I can think of would be to teleport the crystal tower to Living Memory but that required 200 years and generations of scientists to figure out.

We had no time to “gather all our allies and put our minds together”. We accepted the loss of the Endless and had just enough time to get to know them since not even the living Alexandrians did so that we can remember them when we shut it off.

[Boblawblah]

Sometimes I wonder what people honestly want from these discussions. Do they expect the devs to go "Oh yea, you're right, we're going to rewrite that part, and make it so the endless live, and also, we're going to preach about how bad Venat is, and how we're making the player do bad stuff"?

Because with how heated these arguments get, you'd thing it's a serious issue.

That, or people just like arguing on the internet, and anonymity lends itself to exaggeration/aggressive comments, there's that too I suppose.

[OdinelStarrei]

Sometimes I wonder what people honestly want from these discussions. Do they expect the devs to go "Oh yea, you're right, we're going to rewrite that part, and make it so the endless live, and also, we're going to preach about how bad Venat is, and how we're making the player do bad stuff"?

Because with how heated these arguments get, you'd thing it's a serious issue.

That, or people just like arguing on the internet, and anonymity lends itself to exaggeration/aggressive comments, there's that too I suppose.

There are two ways I was interpreting this comment.

1. "Don't think about product, just consume." Which is reductive, and I doubt that was the intent, trying to not see the absolute worst in other people for a change.

2. "People care too much, and that's bad." Which, you know, valid. I think you should consider not just what we have on the surface, but what happens when the potentiality of a plot arc reaches it's terminus. To abridge a really, really subjective topic, once a writer has written something into the canon (In this case, DT, in previous cases, the sundering), those outcomes are now fixed without substantial retcons to the canon. This is a problem for some outlooks on things like perspective, morals, or congruence with a player's character and the player themselves. Before, people could cope that there were not fixed answers and the taste of not knowing was far more palatable than the answer that was provided for some. Once the infinite possibilities for such a long-term plot had collapsed into a single fact, there was always going to be division, and for better or worse, people put themselves into the plot as a self-insert. I can't really fault anyone for that.

This is why people get so insanely mad when someone says "The Endless are not alive." because that's what the story is telling us in plain text in the moment, but not what the story is showing us, presumably for the intent of drawing out emotions from the audience over the situation. The discrepancy grows more severe the more sympathetic one is towards non-traditional definitions of things such as sentience or actualization, which can come from previous examples in XIV itself (specifically auspices come to mind) or from other works, such as Soma or Signalis. It's like...narrative cognitive dissonance, and some people are way, way more susceptible to that kind of double-logic, to the point where the entire plot fails to maintain a suspension of disbelief for the intent of storytelling, and then becomes less of a fun ride and more of a tedious, arguably frustrating waffle. This varies per person. If the argument then becomes, "It's not real, so who cares, it's just a story." I mean, people care about what they care about. Can't really blame them if they spend 300+ hours getting to that point at a bare minimum in order to even discuss the plot details properly.