Summary
- An analysis of moral ambiguity in the Dawntrail expansion, highlighting parallels between the Ascian's plan and the Warrior of Light's actions.
- Questions about the ethical implications of deleting the Endless, challenging the player's perspective on heroism and villainy in the game's narrative.
- Are we the baddies?
We’re far enough out from 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Final Fantasy 14 Dawntrail’s launch that I feel I can tackle this subject. Ho♛wever, for those who have yet to complete the Main Scenario Quest, there are spoilers ahead. You’ve been warned.
Spoilers for Dawntrail’s Main Scenario Quest.
So, do you remember that Final Fantasy 14 character who decided a load of other characters—despite their appearance, personalities, and individual lives—weren’t really people because they were just mere shades of who that character deemed to be ‘real people’, and so had no qualms about killing them? No, I don’t mean Emet-Selch. I mean the Warr🎶i🍌or of Light.
Dawntrail Is Not Final Fantasy 14's Worst Expansion
Despite what the🐼 numbers say, Dawntrail isn’t the worst Final Fantasy XIV expans🦂ion.
I touched upon this briefly in a previous article, but Living Memory, the final area of Dawntrail, sees our Warrior of Light switching off terminals to delete the Endless, effectively killing them. For those unaware, the Endless are digital versions of people’s memories that have been backed up to the Cloud. They don’t really have souls, but they’re 🌞essentially copies of who they were; so when people die an unnatu♔ral death, they can return to life by way of their Regulators, which requires using other souls to work.
When people die a true death, either because they lack more souls to return to life or they die from old age, they become Endless, a physical manifestation of their digital backup൲ that doesn’t require food or water but can go on living as they did in their prime in Living Memory. There, they exist in a physical space, living a life equal or better to what they experienced before, buil൩ding relationships with others and getting a second chance at life and love. The problem with the existence of the Endless is that it requires aether, which must be harvested from living people. Effectively, others have to die so that the Endless can continue existing.
Dawntrail ensures this is a morally grey topic for players by throwing in characters we or our allies care about into the mix of Endless, making pressing that delete button all the more difficult. Ultimately and inevitably, we power down Living Memory and the Endless who live there cease to be. But don’t worry, we can tell ourselves 🦄it’s okay because they weren’t really living people—they exist differently from everyone else we know and love.
It’s hard not to see the parallels𓃲 between what we do as the Warrior of Light in Dawntrail, and what Emet-Selch and the Ascians were trying to achieve. The Sundering split the Source🎉 into 13 reflections, and each of the people on the Source (except a select few) were also split into 13 different shards—13 separate people living wildly different lives in different worlds.
As one of the🍸 survivors of the Source, Emet-Selch wants the Unsundered World back as it was. He wants those he loves back as they were. To achieve this, the Ascians plan to cause Umbral Calamities in the 13 reflections to merge them back into the Source as part of the Rejoining. After the Source is reinstated in full, the plan was to sacrifice part of their population to bring back their loved ones, in a similar way to how they sacri🤪ficed themselves to create Zodiark.
Of course, the Ascians' plan meant those individual worlds with all their inhabitants as they currently exist would have to die in order for the Source and the Ancients to be restored as they once were. To the Ascians, our Warrior of Light and allies are not ‘real people’, we🅠 are just a fragment of those they actually consider to be real, so they don’t care if whole worlds have to die in order to restor🅠e what they lost.
In both cases, those intending to be killed are deemed less ꦍthan a real existence. When we do it, we’re the heroes, but when Emet-Selch and the Ascians try to do the same thing, they’re the villains. I can’t help but imagine the ideal of a rag-tag band of Endless led by a certain Warrior taking issue with us going around Living Memory deleting us, and going out of their way to stop us, much like we did to the Ascians.
While Dawntrail goes to great lengths to꧟ show some of the Endless are satisfied with the idea of being deleted, surely not all of them would welcome their demise, especially as we see so many happily living the lives they were denied in their true life? At this point, I had to wonder, are we the baddies?
It’s a strange role reversal to consider, one that hits even harder as Dawntrail comes to a close and we see Sphene’s crown by itself with a striking similarity to that of the Ascians’ glyphs they sometimes🙈 have in front of their faces.
The biggest difference between the two dilemmas is that others weren’t be♌ing killed for us as the shards of the Ancients to survive, but the same cannot be said of the Endless. As they need a great deal of aether to continue functioning, Sphene was targeting other nations and worlds to ensure the survival of her own people.
On the surface, it 🅷seems like a big enough problem that we felt forced to delete a whole city of people. Yet for all the times we’ve dabbled and dealt with aether in the past, I can’t help but wonder if it would have been feasible that another solution could have been found? A source of aether or alternative to ensure the Endless could continue ‘living’ as they were, without the need for others to die? We didn’t even try to find an alternative. I guess we’ll never know.
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