Quote Originally Posted by Lady_Silvermoon View Post
Either these were people and wiping them out should have been treated with way more gravity or they were nothing and all the time effort we put towards appeasing them made no sense. Both can't be true at the same time.
This. This is my main take away about Living memory, and something I put in another thread about this topic (I can't keep track of them all). My point in making the whole "Are they alive or not?" checklist was that it doesn't really matter, because the heart of the issue is that the writers couldn't decide if the Endless were real people or not. If you believe the Endless are real people, then the way they are treated by the narrative is terrible and doesn't engage at all with the moral quandaries of the subject. If you believe the Endless are not real people, then all of our faffing around in Living Memory to try and appease AI ghosts is a pointless waste of time that doesn't serve the narrative at all. By either interpretation, the writing and narrative failed. That is the real problem at the heart of Living Memory, not whether the Endless are alive, dead, real, fake, people, or not people. No matter how you interpret it, it still sucks and is still bad writing at its core.