Is this a plothole? Question about the Endless

[Loggos]

I just flat-out think it's a plot hole. The writers' entire approach to the lore regarding souls shows that they either don't really know or don't care how the in-universe rules of souls and rebirth worked up until Dawntrail.

In my opinion the addition of life force is the biggest problem because it's the factor on which the whole regulator and endless plot hinges in the first place, while complicating or straight-up contradicting established lore and logic.

Before DT there was corporal aether, memory aether and the core of your soul. The former two are all made from normal aether and yet it was a perfectly rounded, functional explanation for world's processes of life and death.
There was no big open question that needed to be answered with the addition with life force. It was tagged onto existing lore in the most contrived way and just screwed over what used to be well-functioning world building.
Hence, life force was never needed for world-building logic, and is only required for the endless/regulator plot because you can neither recycle the corporal aether nor the memory aether of dead people for the story the DT writers try to tell.

I've ranted quite a bit about life force here because it honestly bothers me so much.

And I completely agree on the Erenville part. He shouldn't be able to meet his mother in the aetherial sea because her soul has already been cleansed and only her being's true core remains.

But who knows, maybe they'll come up with another addition to the soul lore and memories never actually disappear/dissipate in the aetherial sea. They just get cut loose from their souls but still remain one coherent floating construct. So in the aetherial sea's abundant aether/life force/whatever I don't care anymore those memories might still be given shape kind of like natural endless so no life lived is ever truly lost.
(Which would mean Erenville would meet another endless version of his mother. Something something nickel, happened twice, something something.)
And who knows, maybe the memory constructs that are all rooted in one soul remain separate entities/people in the aetherial sea or perhaps they merge into one big coherent entity/person that has the memories and knowledge of all the lives lived by that respective soul.
So basically a proper afterlife for the specific person/iteration the soul existed as during one period in its rebirth cycle. Previously it sounded like the individual "life chapters" of a soul are irrevocably lost after detaching from their soul.
I wouldn't be surprised if they went into that direction to write themselves out of their corner.

[Basteala]

I'm going to go into a bit of FF14 metaphysics to try and explain this, and I hope I understood the question right else this might just be an interesting tirade xD

So the way soul, mind, and body seem to work: the soul is a being's power--it is the literal power of life that enables everything else to function as life as we know it. Elpis touches on this a little bit: that a being without a soul would be seriously limited in its ability to form complicated thoughts and beliefs. Likewise, Dawntrail makes it very clear that the quality of aether in a soul (or even the number of souls!) can drastically increase one's power--limited only by the body (I'm not going to get into Feral Souls right now, that's a whole different can of worms).

Think of the soul like a battery for the body, and a canvas for the mind. What the Endless do is take the etchings on the soul and preserves them. With this, the likeness of a person is infinitely maintained. However, these--essentially--serve merely as instructions. On their own, they're completely useless without a soul to provide that life force to keep the being alive. Theoretically, one soul should do the trick--after all, that's what happens naturally.

However, the Endless are truly that--Endless. And sundered souls are not. They don't have enough aether to be immortal like an ancient, and the only real solution is to get more. Without the power source of aether from souls stored (presumably) in these terminals, the memories cannot sustain themselves, no more than we can conjure a departed loved one into existence by remembering hard enough. We don't have that level of power.

I imagine what's happening is that the terminals are storing the soul aether harvested and the memories are imprinted onto them, like they would be on a natural soul, but on a far larger, multi soul scale. This is kind of touched on in one of the earlier quests, when with the either shortage, Endless had to exist on Living Memory in "shifts", taking turns, because there wasn't enough aether available to manifest them all.

As for Erenville seeing his mother again. This...is tricky. I always took this as an optimistic assumption, but all I can assume is that once released from the cycle, memories will return to the lifestream, same as souls. What we don't know is what happens to these individual memories, or if they will simply disperse, as even a natural soul tends to, eventually, be cleansed of most memories, and what's left is little more than faded marks on a reincarnated soul. For any of this to be true, though, the Terminals would almost have to act like RAM, where as soon as power is cut off from it, all the data is lost--and in this case, allegedly released. But this last part is all conjecture, right now. It's not explained in great detail compared to the rest.

[Basteala]

This is what I'm wondering as well and I have a feeling the answer is a very "have your cake and eat it, too" kind of thing. Endless are to be regarded as instances of the original person, that's something I think made clear in both the journals and dialogue. The question for me is what happens to the memory "data" accrued during time as an Endless? I am assuming it is etched into the memory aether, which then magnetically attracts back to the soul as you have suggested. That's the only way Erenville could meet his mother in the Aetherial sea. So it's like he will meet the original her included with the new Endless memories as well.

Could be. From what we've seen, memories themselves are aetheric alterations of the soul, which are often cleansed in the lifestream (but we have enough instances in role/side quests, and even MSQ to hint this cleansing is not absolute--sort of like a pencil eraser).

There's very strong implications in Pandaemonium's third wing that the process of a soul being cleansed is by no means fast (namely the first boss, where we have a soul of someone that's very obviously a black mage--the absolute latest that could date back is 100 years ago, with the early 6th Astral era or even the 5th being more likely).

I really should rewatch the cinematics with Lahabrea, Themis, and Ericthonos there, as how those memories endure and when and how they disperse could probably tell us a fair bit. As manifestations of memories they're at least close to what an Endless would have been on an aetheric level.

[seraseth]

Otis never made sense to me. The robot otis was their first experiment. His soul and memory were put into a robot as the first attempt at immortality. So by definition of being the first, the endless and living memory did not yet exist then.
And yet the living memory has a copy of his memory from a much earlier time.

He never mentioned the scientists hauling in his robot butt in to get a scan of his memories just for kicks later. And there would be no reason to make a copy either. If they wanted to 'upgrade' him to an endless and the new way of doing things, they'd just do their normal process and ditch the robot entirely.

Everything to do with souls, regulators, the endless and the last zone was plot-hole riddled nonsense they slapped together and tried to use contradictory parts to try get 'reactions' they wanted while ignoring the consequences/side effects they didn't like.

[Vyrerus]

Otis never made sense to me. The robot otis was their first experiment. His soul and memory were put into a robot as the first attempt at immortality. So by definition of being the first, the endless and living memory did not yet exist then.
And yet the living memory has a copy of his memory from a much earlier time.

He never mentioned the scientists hauling in his robot butt in to get a scan of his memories just for kicks later. And there would be no reason to make a copy either. If they wanted to 'upgrade' him to an endless and the new way of doing things, they'd just do their normal process and ditch the robot entirely.

Everything to do with souls, regulators, the endless and the last zone was plot-hole riddled nonsense they slapped together and tried to use contradictory parts to try get 'reactions' they wanted while ignoring the consequences/side effects they didn't like.

I think this is keeping it 100% and I agree

However, consider this:

The setting is no stranger to cleaving souls into multiple parts, and then going on to tell us that this is so-and-so's soul from 12000 years ago. He just had to reawaken to that part of himself etc. (Us as Azem, Amon as Hermes etc.)

It's entirely possible, given how surgical the Alexandrians were capable of being with the parts of a soul that they put half of Otis's soul into the robot and the other half into some sort of storage for future experiments. Half of you, is still you, afterall, no?

Then also keep in mind that the highest concentration of their experiment was to save the person as they were in life, i.e. to keep their identity safe and persisting.

As cheap as it was, I don't think two Otises is necessarily as damning to the plot as its been made out to be. Not when there's a soul storage that can store souls indefinitely until needed. Not when the technology seems to have no trouble with denser vs. less dense souls (shard souls vs. source souls).

Of course, this wasn't the angle the story took. Didn't even actually hint at it. It was just like BOOM! Otis #2. Maybe in Japanese there's a line that's missing in English about his robo body having an internal regulator that would at least send him to the cloud or some shit. Gotta have some uplink to Everkeep, what with Zoraal Ja being able to override his body as a mere robot.

[Raven2014]

Otis never made sense to me. The robot otis was their first experiment. His soul and memory were put into a robot as the first attempt at immortality. So by definition of being the first, the endless and living memory did not yet exist then.

That's why Otis is the biggest ... let's just say - problem - with the writing. Whatever that 'problem' is (bad writing, incosistent, plot hole) will change from PoV to PoV, but it is a problem. Just copy and pasted my take on this about a month ago about it:


If anyone still hold onto the idea the Endless should be treat as real people and what we did at the end has a case to be argue for genocide, I have one character would invalidate the validity: Otis.

First, the idea of digitalize human is not exactly a new or unexplored concept, but for the viewer/player to treat the projection as real people, the writing usually have to include some underwriting to make the memory unique in certain way. One that pop into my head right away is the anime Zegapain. Humanity got wiped out with a decease, and have to live inside virtual world. However, because it's a lot of data to replicate an authentic version, each person only have one copy stored in a quantum state. The data can be transfer between terminal, but it's always have to be the whole package. If the data is corrupted or damage, the "person" will suffer something akin to sickness. If its host terminal is destroyed, the data is gone forever - aka death.

Second, look at the fact that there are two Otis existing at the same time, for me basically render any argument that can be had about the Endless as real person moot. Because it shows that what we see is indeed, nothing more than data that can be procreate at will because they are not unique. Otherwise, if I kill one Otis it's the murder of one person, but if the system simulate 10 Otis, does that mean i committed murder ten times?

[Lady_Silvermoon]

That's why Otis is the biggest ... let's just say - problem - with the writing. Whatever that 'problem' is (bad writing, incosistent, plot hole) will change from PoV to PoV, but it is a problem. Just copy and pasted my take on this about a month ago about it:


If anyone still hold onto the idea the Endless should be treat as real people and what we did at the end has a case to be argue for genocide, I have one character would invalidate the validity: Otis.

First, the idea of digitalize human is not exactly a new or unexplored concept, but for the viewer/player to treat the projection as real people, the writing usually have to include some underwriting to make the memory unique in certain way. One that pop into my head right away is the anime Zegapain. Humanity got wiped out with a decease, and have to live inside virtual world. However, because it's a lot of data to replicate an authentic version, each person only have one copy stored in a quantum state. The data can be transfer between terminal, but it's always have to be the whole package. If the data is corrupted or damage, the "person" will suffer something akin to sickness. If its host terminal is destroyed, the data is gone forever - aka death.

Second, look at the fact that there are two Otis existing at the same time, for me basically render any argument that can be had about the Endless as real person moot. Because it shows that what we see is indeed, nothing more than data that can be procreate at will because they are not unique. Otherwise, if I kill one Otis it's the murder of one person, but if the system simulate 10 Otis, does that mean i committed murder ten times?

Otis is the only evidence that Cahcuia isn't just lying to us. Besides Otis and Erenville's comment, everything else points to us dissipating 1/3rd of what the FF14 universe considers a living person, and every argument that it's acceptable reminds us that we condemned the Ascians for doing the same to what they considered 1/14th of a living person.

The problem isn't that Otis exists. The problem is that Otis exists AND we're told this is the actual memory aether of the actual people and while those people are acting exactly the same way they did in life, downstairs souls are being used as currency, which brings into question if the thing in the vending machine downstairs Cahcuia or the thing gleeful to see her son after so long is Cahcuia. Most people would point to the squealing bunny woman as "the real" Cahcuia and not the white cube in someone's headgear. And that's a problem given what they are trying to sell us on.

[Raven2014]

snip

If you ask me WHICH version of the Endless presentation I prefer, than Mechanical Otis is far superior than the zone 6 Endless. But like I said, his existence kinda just invalidate all the sentimental strings that zone 6 tried to pull. It would also a real condominium for us because it's much easier to make the argument that mechanical Otis is a actual life form and not just a memory.


Now, if I'm going out my limb to give the writers the benefit of the doubt, there is an alternative way to interpret the Endless that is consistent with both of what Cahcuia trying to say, as well as the intention of the last zone. And that is it's based on 3 school of thought:


- First: believe in the after life. Proper burial, ceremonies, rite ...etc... Because the belief is this is the duty of the living, we're doing this so the dead can have a good afterlife, we're doing this to honor "them". And this can get really extreme, I know (poor) families that would get into debt in order to have a proper burial. The Endless could be a reflection of this mindset.

- Second: dead is dead, keep them in memory but the living move on. There is no after life, and all the expensive expectation are just social construct designed to exploit the living - aka the Grief industry. And this correlate to the unsustainable in maintaining the illusion paradise for the Endless at great cost to the living.

- Third: a mixed of the first two. They don't necessary believe in the afterlife, but they don't outright dismiss things like rites and ceremonies either. The difference between the first and third is instead of believing you're doing things for the death, you're doing for the shake of the living. It's not about science, logic or rationality. Human are emotional creatures, and we need closure. It's ok to do something and give it meaning as a way to cope, even if it's probably meaningless. And I think this is the quest line in Zone 6 is about. On the surface the narrative framed it as we're doing for the Endless, to pay them one last homemade. But it could be we (the party) doing it for themselves, so we don't feel bad when we shut them down. Krile's encounter with her parents isn't about her parents, they're already dead, the illusion is not real. But Krile herself desperately needed that encounter to find peace and closure.


So if you decide to look at this way ... most of the story points come together pretty well with very little inconsistency and contradiction. It's actually ... good writing, abeit the message is hidden bit ... too well. The inconsistency is not really inconsistency, rather just illustration of different view points of how the living perceive the death. But alas I don't know whether this is real intention of the writers, or I'm just reading into it a bit too much. I'll be honest, it's kinda hard to accept it's the former case because then you have to wonder: if this is the level of writing the team actually is actually capable of ... then what the hell happened in the first 5 zones?!?!