End Dawntrail Spoilers: What is the difference between a regulator and giving blood?

[Serilyn]

As soon as soul transferring stuff is mentioned, Alisaie hates it. Wuk Lamat outright tells Sphene they should stop it (what happened to respecting others cultures and learning first?).

But thinking about it... The soul is extracted, wiped clean (which the game itself says is done in the aetherial sea too), and then popped into a regulator to save someone from death. When used I assume it then goes to the aetherial sea where it goes back into the normal cycle. So at most, you're simply delaying the rebirth of that soul for a little bit and giving the person who used it a bit longer.

Ignoring the souls they forcefully take (because when we're first told we 'don't know' that they're forcefully taking any as despite having seen it none of the characters are smart enough to put two and two together). The souls taken from their own citizens are voluntarily given. How is this different from someone giving blood to save anothers life? Or as giving blood doesn't kill you, how is this different from organ donation of say a heart from someone who died going to a person who needs it?

(For that matter, how do they have enough spare souls for everyone? If at the start they all had one extra soul each half of the population would need to have died... Let alone having more than one soul each which is implied by the fact that they can buy them. Did we skip the part of their history where they harvested the souls of all their neighbours? And they have such a shortage yet accepted the people who got stuck in the dome into their population instead of just harvesting them, that means they would have been using even more.

Also, if the Endless are just electronic versions of a souls memory, why do they need souls to power them? They're not alive, all they should need is electricity/power, not souls (if they need souls, that means they are alive in some way). Seems to make far more sense to me that they would need all the souls to keep their living population supplied as that seems like the most unsustainable part.

I'm also confused about the passage of time... Supposedly a few days passed from the dome popping up to us going in. This was 30 years inside the dome, so let's say 10 years per day. Otis says he's 400+ years old, which at a day per 10 years would be 40 days since presumably Sphene first died and the dome went up. Or just over a month ago on the source. But Kriles parents left her behind 20 years ago on the source which would be..... A very long time ago on the shard.)

[Syln]

Because we need to understand each other as long as the other follow my moral compass ! Crazy how it work ? :3

[Kozh]

I'm also confused about the passage of time... Supposedly a few days passed from the dome popping up to us going in. This was 30 years inside the dome, so let's say 10 years per day. Otis says he's 400+ years old, which at a day per 10 years would be 40 days since presumably Sphene first died and the dome went up. Or just over a month ago on the source. But Kriles parents left her behind 20 years ago on the source which would be..... A very long time ago on the shard.)

just chiming in for this (for now), but the passage of time between shards isn't fixed. The Exarch mentioned this back in ShB, that sometimes a day in Source can mean a year in Shard, or vice versa. It's also why in ShB the time speed between Source and First is roughly the same (the First is slightly faster).

[kaynide]

2 things:

1) When you give blood, your body can make more blood.

If a person is given a soul, it can’t return to the life stream to allow a new individual to be born. Unless souls are infinite, there will be a point where souls run out and new babies can’t be born. We can infer souls are not infinite because Sphene plans to harvest every last ounce of life-energy until there is none left, then move on to other shards. If it was sustainable to “harvest life force” in any way, the AI would have thought of making a gigantic fish farm or something.

2) The extraction process turns the persons memories into an endless.

They will live (essentially) in a never ending twilight zone of a theme park for eternity. That is not a peaceful exit, and it might even be desired for a short period, but all indication is that they are in a sort of purgatory.

[MangoSimulation]

They don't stop the practice at the end of the story. It can be assumed that they are using what remaining souls they have in storage and those that come from natural death. What did stop was sourcing those souls from other shards. Other than the endless, the cast is trying to respect that part of their culture.

[CuteBucket]

In the setting of FFXIV, souls are real, tangible things that are aetherically extremely dense. The reason that Solution 9 has so many extra souls (although there seem to be less and less by the time we get there, we see the shortage at the end of the 5th dungeon) is because of Sphene taking the souls of other shards. Some of these souls are that of the citizens of Alexandria who gave them up consensually at their death (or so we presume), but the excess are probably from other shards. By isolating themselves in the artificial Soul Washing Machine, the souls are not able to return to the aetherial sea to be reborn. They are now in a closed system and cannot be recovered. There was a part somewhere in Solution 9, I can't remember if it was MSQ or a side quest at this point, but I recall a mention about how the birthrate of the people of Alexandria is alarmingly low. The implication I got from this is that there aren't enough souls in the aetherial sea on their shard to allow them to give birth. And in the Arcadion Quests, WoL agrees to fight on the condition that the souls held by Arcadion are freed if they win. If using up a soul in the Regulator simply returned it to the Aetherial Sea, then while strange and unethical in some ways, it wouldn't be hurting the star. But what happens to a soul when its energy is used up by the regulator is unclear. If it simply returned to the aetherial sea, I don't think they would be having the birthrate issue, nor would WoL feel compelled to free the trapped souls in Arcadion.

So the reason that the soul system in Solution 9 is not like giving blood or donating organs is because 1) many of the souls were obtained without consent through violent acts, and 2) because it is damaging to the Aetherial Sea and throwing off the natural balance of life and death, which has real consequences in the world of Etheirys.

However I will say that I don't think the story did a very good job of explaining any of this, and this is me trying to make sense of what I can recall. The whole Soul Regulator thing seems like a mess lore-wise imo.

[aTanpopo]

Yeah I think the main issue isn't if the soul was taken consensually/"donated" like blood, its that in taking the soul to be used that way, it wont return to the aetherial sea and wont be "reborn" like everything else naturally should be.
Also it was probably only a preferable idea for people who were born alexandrians- people from the source who were brought into society when the dome appeared may not be so enthusiastic to think that they would never get to see family members from the outside again in the afterlife (and vice versa for those outside who may have family inside the dome). We see that in endwalker where in both the 89 dungeon and the normal raid, we interact with souls of people we know in the sea/see souls that still have a personality attached to them, so you could argue that when you die in the source, you would get to see people you loved again before you are eventually broken down and reborn into a new life. But the souls from regulators are cleaned in a sped-up version of the process a soul would go through during its time in the aetherial sea- even if they did return back to the sea upon use, its basically just in the state where its ready to be reborn again.

But with how poorly explained everything was, who knows, maybe everything dissipates and reforms when its released from Living Memory and the souls + memories just find each other again. Could be an interesting story point to bring up- how people don't fully understand what using a regulator actually does and how immortality could end up feeling like more of a curse than a blessing. I guess we will never know (unless they explain it Post MSQ).

[Kozh]

2 things:

1) When you give blood, your body can make more blood.

If a person is given a soul, it can’t return to the life stream to allow a new individual to be born. Unless souls are infinite, there will be a point where souls run out and new babies can’t be born. We can infer souls are not infinite because Sphene plans to harvest every last ounce of life-energy until there is none left, then move on to other shards. If it was sustainable to “harvest life force” in any way, the AI would have thought of making a gigantic fish farm or something.

2) The extraction process turns the persons memories into an endless.

They will live (essentially) in a never ending twilight zone of a theme park for eternity. That is not a peaceful exit, and it might even be desired for a short period, but all indication is that they are in a sort of purgatory.

1. Actually though, souls are infinite because the planet can just make a new one instead of recycling from the aetherial sea. For example, Alpha the chocobo. And also hermes/hythlodaeus said that the planet will imbue a creation magic creature with soul so long it "follow the law of nature". That said, the rate of which it create new soul probably is very slow.

2. While the regulator use soul aether (after it's purified from memory), I don't think they're perma destroyed since Erenville said that he will meet his mom again in the aetherial sea. Meanwhile Endless is powered up by living force (different thing than soul aether and memory aether), which can only be harvested from currently living beings. Why do they not use feral living force? idk. Maybe it will corrupt them the same as people being corrupted by using regulator filled with feral soul.

[Calysto]

Writters : "Well, ya got me. By all accounts, it doesn't make sense."

[Fynlar]

Souls aren't given willingly.

Wow, that sure was a hard topic to figure out.