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

[Jojoya]

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. But I also haven't done most of the side quests there so maybe there is someone like that.

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.

[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.

[Jojoya]

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.

Correct. We met him and he died before she did. We never met her but he acknowledges that she had no memory of him after his death during her life. The computer running Living Memory would have had to restore her memories of him for their meeting there (the memories the living have of the newly departed presumably being uploaded into the "cloud" when the other person died), and Cahciua even tells us that the computer was know to manipulate what memories the Endless have access to.

Again, there's some really bad writing going on and some of it is at odds with things that were explained in prior expansions. Trying to nitpick philosophical points is rather useless when it's a fictional story and the writers are the ones that control what is going on.

The writers created the Endless as computer facsimiles of dead people based on the memories stripped from their souls and so that's all they are. The intended moral appears to be "it is wrong to kill the living for the sake of those already dead", which does more or less align with one of the morals at the core of the Hydaelyn/Zodiark story.

It doesn't matter how much players wants to convince themselves the Endless are living beings. The writers have told us that they are not and it is the writers that have created the Endless.

G'raha and Krile both exclaimed that the Alexandrians were performing the same exact process with souls that the planet itself does with the aetherial sea. If that was the case, why didn't the Alexandrians just tap into their own aetherial sea and just keep cycling souls like the planet already does? Nothing is actually being expended, just cycled. But I guess we overlook massive lore contradictions and plot holes like that

Except the Aetherial Sea uses the "recycled" soul to create a new person. We also know that there's a process that can create new souls though we have no idea how that happens or if the Aetherial Sea is involved.

The Alexandrians use it to either revive a dead person or or preserve someone's memory. There definitely are souls expended when there is no new life created. We get no explanation for what happens to the portion of the soul expended for either of those purposes.

This reminds me of another question I had doing MSQ. Why are resonators are only to revive those who die in accidents and not those who die of illness/old age? How do the bodies of those revived apparently get instantly healed of all wounds? Their bodies should be in the same state as they were at time of death, causing them to die again almost instantly since it is only the soul being restored, not the body replaced.

More bad writing unless it eventually gets revealed that no one in Alexandria is alive and they're all dead facsimiles whether they know it or not.