Did I skip something in the MSQ? This part doesn't make any sense to me

[Puremallace]

1. Sphene is playing god editing peoples memories. If you listen to the guy in the first zone he tells you this is how he wished his love life had played out and not how it actually did in his real life. Also Sphene was actually kind and cool not some Skynet killer bot.

2. They make it clear that the aether being used to maintain the Endless some of it came from killing Wuk's people. They are vampires.

3. Why can they not just write it down? It would probably require more space than exist on the face of the Earth to write down all the little details contained in just one persons life. There is a reason she was trying to take over entire reflections just to maintain what you saw.

[All_Nonsense]

We literally spent hundreds of hours giving our "answer" in the first story arc: All life is valuable and deserves to live. We literally opposed the Ascians who were a "higher" form of life who did not see us as truly alive. So now we go somewhere and find a foreign and unrecognized form of life clinging on after their world was destroyed, and we.......kill them because we didn't see them as truly alive?

Emet Selch was right I guess. 10/10 writing. Lovely blemish.

[chizLemons]

It's badly written.

I can't think of anyone we meet in Living Memory that talks about someone who died before they did (with the exception of everyone knowing about Sphene). Every NPC I can remember meeting died first.

Whether or not you care about the Endless is personal to you. But the writers did go out of the way to keep stressing they are only facsimiles created by a computer and not the original living being and that none of them care that you're about to turn them off because they're not programmed to care about it.

I don't know if I misunderstood what you meant, but there was the couple during the gondola quest. The Elezen man tells us even though he died and the woman he loved forgot who he was, she never married anyone else, and felt a sense of loss. It's implied that she remembers him now, and we see them happy after he proposes to her on the bridge.

That is the only quest in Living Memory that I remember of that tries to dwelve a just little deeper in how they work - how it's very rare to have meaningful encounters there (even though Namikka died like 10 minutes ago and we meet her there so Wuk Lamat could have another moment), how the system is collapsing and not even 10% of all of the stored memories are present right now (even though Namikka...), and how he's been waiting for years to have this chance.

From the start with the Elezen, to the gondola musings of G'raha, this quest feels a bit different in how the rest of Living Memory was written. It makes you think about the system from the perspective of the Endless, and G'raha makes you think about our own feelings, if we would do the same in Sphene's place, and how we would feel as an Endless. It's like there was the intention to make us think about it and have a non black-or-white perspective...

...then immediately after, we go back to "let's meet them! But they're not really alive, so let's also kill them. They need souls and stuff, that's not sustainable. No, you don't get to think about it. Look, Wuk Lamat is happy playing with the Endless children!"

Before Living Memory, the game already talked about how it defined life, and Ultima Thule, and even some of the tempered plotline in 5.4, is proof that what makes us treat beings as alive is not just the simple combination of "souls and memories", it's consciousness, the sense of self. People in Living Memory can form new memories, can interact with the world (both inside AND outside) feel alive and have their own identities. These writers had a lot of trouble throught the entire MSQ to try to explain more midly difficult concepts, so they didn't even try, and tried to take attention away by deciding how we should feel about it depending on the scene, instead. "You should care about the endless when speaking with 0/3 locals, and during our tearjerker moments. But then don't care too much when we turn them off, they were just AI chatbots!)

[CVXIV]

snip

While not in Living Memory, there are two quests in particular that i think stand out to give us some insight to how it potentially works.

One is with the note, in that you help a woman with the issue she is facing regarding the farm.
In that note I believe it's revealed that the previous owner is the girl's mother, and while she might not recall anything about her she clearly still holds this deep admiration and sense of wanting to live up to the hope and expectation put upon her.

The other, which I think likely helps this idea further, is the one I briefly mentioned after the events of Solution 9's attack.
There you help an NPC discover why he had the sudden urge to take something from the body of another that passed away during it.
In the end it is revealed that the person who passed away is actually that NPC's father, and to me it shows that while the memories of the loved ones are taken to be stored, they still retain something of a deep connection for that person even if they don't understand why they feel the way that they do.

I also believe that when you die and your memories are uploaded to the cloud, you then "unlock" the forgotten memories you once had of the deceased loved ones so that you can meet them in this sort of afterlife. It fits in line with Alexandria's desire to spare its subjects the pain of loss and death.

[Daralii]

We literally spent hundreds of hours giving our "answer" in the first story arc: All life is valuable and deserves to live. We literally opposed the Ascians who were a "higher" form of life who did not see us as truly alive. So now we go somewhere and find a foreign and unrecognized form of life clinging on after their world was destroyed, and we.......kill them because we didn't see them as truly alive?

Emet Selch was right I guess. 10/10 writing. Lovely blemish.

"The ephemeral lives you exalt are pale imitations, utterly devoid of meaning" -the man who was apparently right according to Dawntrail

[BabySneed]

Anyone else notice Living Memory is basically just an inverted version of Ultima Thule? Like Ultima Thule starts dead and lifeless and despair and ends full of life and hope, whereas Living Memory starts full of life and potential for the future but ends dead and lifeless
Even the Endless are just a subversion of the Ultima Thule simulacrums; both are artificially created memory recreations of dead people, one of them was created to feed into despair yet becomes hopeful for the future and strives to live and move forward from their past tragedies, where the other was created to provide hope yet they accept that since they already died and have no place in the world they should have never been created at all and should have just stayed dead. The Endless sound more like what Meteion was trying to create than what she actually created

Going from the Omicron quests to Living Memory was one hell of a whiplash I tell you what

[Lady_Silvermoon]

I wasn't entirely certain which is why I had asked, so thank you for confirming it for me. I could've sworn that was the case but I didn't want to claim so without being sure.

Yeah I believe the intent was to create a twisted sort of way of the Yok Huy's teachings, given that they are referenced when we learn about living on through people's memories but the story does have a lot of holes in it which I hope gets addressed later on, given that the story has yet to be truly resolved.

I think if the Garleans had tried archon loaf they would have seen the errors of their ways.
Truly the pinnacle of the culinary art.

I'm pretty sure if the Garleans had tried archon loaf they would have dropped both moons on us. They would have gone full-Hermes. "If life is so precious, why do people eat archon loaf?"

I think the issue there is that the Last Dregs are optional content, and the MSQ has always avoided having any significant involvement of optional content getting included. For example, people have talked about Unukalhai not having any involvement with things related to the 13th (where he's from and tried to save), but he's part of an optional questline, so the MSQ writers can't assume players know who he is or his story, hence he's not part of anything involving Zero's storyline. Likewise, in ShB he gets minorly involved, but again only in optional content (completing all of the role quests).

The one time they decided that optional content was actually essential for the MSQ was the Crystal Tower series leading into ShB, and the result was making CT become mandatory. They'll only include in the MSQ things they can guarantee every player has already experienced.

The info you bring up from the Last Dregs is optional side content from EW, so whether each of us individually likes it or not, it won't be considered relevant when writing MSQ stories.

We're not saying side content needs to be in the MSQ, but the person writing it should know what happened in the side content and not directly contradict morals espoused in it and in Shadowbringers and in Endwalker. The hypocrisy of a group of people made up of the mutilated bits of another race to extend their existence wiping out people for being unnatural and inferior is mindblowing. Venat sundered the star so that humanity would not go gently into that good night. Then we look at people who altered themselves for the same reason with the same disgust and judgement with which Emet-Selch looked at us. And I know whoever wrote this is familiar with Shadowbringers because Sphene is Meteion saying Emet-Selch's lines. So how did they miss that the same argument we make against the Endless is the one Emet-Selch used to justify wiping us out.

They say we need to learn to let go of the past while they keep churning out worse and worse retellings of the same story.

[Striker44]

We literally spent hundreds of hours giving our "answer" in the first story arc: All life is valuable and deserves to live. We literally opposed the Ascians who were a "higher" form of life who did not see us as truly alive. So now we go somewhere and find a foreign and unrecognized form of life clinging on after their world was destroyed, and we.......kill them because we didn't see them as truly alive?

It's not an "unrecognized form of life"; it's literally straight-up explained as an AI simulation of what a person once was, only it requires actual aether to power it...aether that the Alexandrians' world had run out of, so now they're going around killing actual life to power the AI's. It's not a question of how we "see them" - it's literally killing real life to power AI simulations.

[Ilenya]

Honestly I feel like they just completely failed to convey the sense of emergency that really should have been there. The idea that Sphene wasn't willing to give us time to find a solution was fine, but we spend so long talking to people and not just rushing to stop Sphene it's like the writers forgot their own plot point.

The entire "We don't have time, we have to stop Sphene now!" only really felt like it came into play during the Alexandria dungeon, well after we shut everything down.

On the other hand, it would have felt honestly fitting if the people we interacted with (Wuk Lamat's mother figure, Otis, Krile's parents, Erenville's mom) were chosen to be there in the story specifically to slow us down, but the game never spells that one out, and not a one of them actually try to stop us in any meaningful capacity.

[sylphlands]

Dawntrail's writing is so terrible that it gaslights the player into thinking they're the one missing something. Unfortunately, it's just that bad. I can't believe this expansion got through a single editor (if it even had one, which I'm not convinced of).