The Unlife of Queen Sphene and the Endless, Final Fantasy 14
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 29 ก.ย. 2024
- Hopefully enough people have caught up in the MSQ now that we can start covering some of the more heavy details in Dawntrails lore! Be sure to let me know your thoughts in the comment section bellow. Tell me what you think the MSQ will do with Sphene's character in the future if at all!
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Something just occurred to me. If Living Memory's residents aren't technically alive, just their knowledge and experiences, then it wouldn't be inaccurate to just call it a library.
A Library. From Alexandria.
We literally end this expansion by metaphorically burning down the Library of Alexandria to a blackened husk of itself.
I didn't consider calling it the Library of Alexandria. I'll have to keep that lil idea for later!
I hate to admit you are right about the Endless, as I would rather think of them as "living". But your analysis of the situation within the constraints of what we learned in Endwalker, beings without a soul, such as elemental creations like Ifrita, are not considered alive due to a lack of soul. I do then question how concepts on Elpis are created, seeming to be possessed of what we would now refer to as "feral souls". But.....that might be a topic you should cover in another video.
To get to your question to us, about what Sphene is, I think you are on the right track. While I don't believe the crawn is a regulator in the same sense that the people of Solution 9 and surrounding areas possess. No, it's definitely something more. To you I posit this :
Sphene is the updated version of what Otis was.
When you suggested her soul may have been saved, I nearly screamed at the screen. In Alexandria, the dungeon, one piece of dialogue was "They've done it! They've pre.... the queen's........"
What is the missing dialogue? This vision is supposed to show us what happened back then, and we assume the phrase ends in "memories". But....what if the missing dialogue is "soul"? Preservation was so desperate in their mission, they did what the Ancients said you should never do....play god. Sphene herself said that Otis's "regulator" was an old model, and his should cannot be recovered. It is highly suggested by Otis himself that Preservation, in their initial trial with him as a guinea pig, implanted not only memory, but his soul, into the construct. I is my theory, this was their plan for Sphene all along. But in saying this, I suggest something far worse than a machine being forced to follow its programming against the input it has been given from the memories it possesses.
I am suggesting her very soul was a slave to the programming. Her own will was caged, literally and figuratively, by what Preservation put into place. Imagine living a life of hell, stuck in a body that can only perform to your will if it aligns with the programming of the machinery that encases you. Her lies were given to us by the programing. Hence the chuckle every time she feed BS to us, or her own people. We see glimmers of her reaching out to break free at times. It's why before the final battle in Interphos, we remember the following :
"If things should take a turn for the worse.....might I...call upon your aid?"
I know what I need to do.
I can at least elaborate on the concepts that Ancients made. All concepts were Arcane Entities, which is another way to say soulless constructs.
All entities in Elpis were soulless, and only creatures released into the world and allowed to live/reproduce naturally would mysteriously gain souls and become part of the Star's ecosystem. This is why the Ancients were extremely strict on what concepts could and couldn't becoming part of the world. The last thing they wanted was to throw things into chaos and harm life on a large scale.
To them, this was the only ethical way to experiment. Because concepts would be entities made specifically from their aether. Thus they weren't toying with life or the souls of the Star.
Wait. No no no. No you're exactly right, that's exactly what Sphene is. Oh no...
The Sphene you're looking at lost the coinflip. She's is reminiscent to the titular main protagonist of Soma, which was a game that essentially did this plot with a lot more nuances and depth. To abbreviate a lot of the plot, the game takes place on an underground biome after an apocalyptic event. Humankind by this point has achieved a thing called "legacy scans" which scans the entire memory and personality of a person prior to them being scanned. This distinction is incredibly important as throughout the game, Simon, our MC, questions if the ethics of the crew scanning their minds onto technological devices as a failsafe in case something were to happen to them. The idea was that they were the last remnants of humanity and they needed to preserve themselves anyway possible. In the events that follow, Simon discovers he was one such legacy scan, and is scanned multiple times throughout the game. Each Simon is deemed "authentic" by the game's narrative. Each are changed by their circumstances: the first Simon dies shortly after being scanned to another body to preserve the idea that the scanning process is a simple "transfer" of memories rather than a hard "copy-cut-paste". The second Simon was kept below the water as he launched a satellite with the preserved memories of all of the crew, and the last Simon is found in this sort of "afterlife" within the satellite. Again, like Solution 9, this was a form of time capsule to preserve the last remnants of humanity on a larger scale.
Throughout the game, Simon and Catherine (a researcher trapped in a radio) talk about how to fundamentally process how scans work. They boiled it down to a truism: some Simons win the coin flip, others get left at the bottom of the sea. I believe the original Sphene died a long time ago and the Sphene you're looking at is the one who both simultaneously made it to the afterlife and has, subsequently, lost her own coinflip by remaining online for all this time. Endless technology seems to have no real upper limit on brain scans much like the process described in Soma. Say we scan a hundred baseline Sphenes (prior to her involvement in Solution 9). You have to think of it from each copy’s perspective. Each is its own identity and consciousness. From that individual perspective, they lost. From the perspective of the one that moves on, they won.
At the end, the tragedy of Sphene is an existential vehicle to examine deeper concepts, of which I wish DT had more time to get into before being abruptly cut short.
Honestly, no matter what angle you take it through, Dawntrail is really two expansions in one that barely works because an escalation in stakes is so common in FFXIV MSQ stories.
I really think she was one of the most interesting characters in the DT story. Everything surrounding her is both a lie and someone who wants to do right only to HER people. I still love the part the part in the MSQ where she acts like she doesnt WANT to cause a war, she just wants to help her people without fighting. I really love that part in hindsight cause yes, she is blatantly lying but I feel like there's a part of the REAL Sphene there who knows this is all wrong and wants to put an end to it but just can't.
I think this is missing a lot.
It’s a human characteristic of her.
She doesn’t WANT to start the war, but she feels she has to and is justifying it to herself. At the same time, she loathes that about her so there is some definite internal conflict over the actions taken.
I think there was a lot of room for an adult discussion about living on borrowed time/stealing from the future for the memory of the past/the present.
But we weren’t given that in the end. It was rushed into with a pre determined outcome that they just shoved at us in a very clumsy way.
Otis is the MVNPC.
Also, i swear that Eternal Queen is a Star Ocean reference.
I mean, what is a person if not the sum of their memories and experiences?
"Data should behave as such!"
I just ran Alexandria the other day and there was a particular line that stood out to me after watching this video. During the last segments of the dungeon, there’s a character that says that they were able to “preserve Sphene’s…” but then it cut off. I first just assumed that they were talking about her memories, considering everything they talked about up to that point. But then when I thought about Otis and his situation between his endless form and his robot form. now making me think that what they did with Sphene is a lot more one-to-one to what they did with Otis. What if it wasn’t just the memories that they were able to say, but her soul as well? Something else I also notices that throughout all of Alexandria never actually see Sphene. You either just miss her or only here for voice during the actual events. In truth, we don’t really know what speed actually looks like. The version we saw her and interacted with throughout the entire expansion, may not be who she actually is. we could’ve very well then interacting with a younger form of herself. Maybe what she looked like before her death. The post patches could take a route similar to like with Yotsuyu in Stormblood.
Considering the moment she was effectively WoL'd out of the big giant robot computer was when she had her moment of clarity, I think that Sphene was a true Endless that realized the horrible things she had done when the programming was removed; the visual cue of her form reconstituting and limping forward at that point in the fight, paired with the pained head-holding that armature had then too, supports this idea in my mind.
Of course, whether her crown actually is a resonator or not remains to be seen. Particularly since resonators, as far as we're aware right now, have to be connected to a living body to work. But then that's not to suggest that perhaps her crown now being a macguffin can't be taken away and used on someone else.
Which then begs the question: If Gulool Ja is given the crown in a coronation - that crown specifically - what happens then...?
please don't turn this into an iceking situation... this would be juciy juciy drama but i'm gonna be so mad if it happens lmao
@@redwolfmatt I'm with you! I don't want it to be that either! But I am dovetailing off of what's being thought about in the video lol.
I think her being a tortured soul is more interesting than being ill used memories.
Oh now THAT is an interesting point at the end. I just assumed she was another endless that was also chained to a program and forced to do its bidding. But you're right, why DOES she have a resonator if she's a soulless endless?
Much to think about. It really could go either way. All I know for sure is that we still know way less about the setting of Final Fantasy XIV than Endwalker led us to believe haha.
Good video as always, helps clear up some of the fogginess I had around Sphene.
You got one thing wrong though: you repeatedly call the "regulators" "resonators" 🤭
I had to go back and double check my reference screenshots from when I 3D modelled them to make sure they did call them regulators 😅
I literally JUST finished the Dawntrail MSQ as this video came up on my feed :P
I have a question, are you Graha himself? or a kindred spirit/twin of him? you really do sound like him!
Another interesting and informative lore video!
If tge regulator was just a lie, then the end of the msq wouldnt of flashed the image for a second to plant the thought in out head, to remind us "Wait she has a regulator!" Idk if the soul inside is the original sphenes soul, or a composit of souls, that energy when she was defeated may have been gathered into it, but perhaps unlike the other ones, it takes longer to revive her, either way, sphene is not gone and I will bet money she reappears to perhaps freed of her programing, or freed of the defiant portion of her soul,
also side rant in the msq when alisae sees that old womans soul get taken, there is a second orange orb of light, this cant be memories as its shown later memories are on the soul, and thats what gives them the blue hue they have, when purfiied they turn white, I posit this, that orb is dynamis, and thats gonna be one hell of a quagmire, but I think that everyone has a bit of dynamis in them, perhaps its the core or nucleius of a soul, surrounded byaether, but that dosnt fit the two orbs we see, we know dynamis on the source is overshadowed by aether, and is theorized to have slowly attributed to the apearance of the 12 by graha, overshadowed by aether perhaps dynamis does play a factor in maintaining the "nature" of a soul, thats how memories can be perminatly etched onto them, as its etched onto the dynamis of the soul? just speculating,nothing concrete, and speculation on my part.
Also I always like to use the phrase from soul eater "A Sound Soul, dwells within a sound mind, and a sound body"
Glad you didn’t mention anything about her awakening as an ascian in a later patch, would spark pointless discussion.
Poor Sphene 😢 SE did her dirty
The thing eating at me regarding Living Memory and aether itself is, "Why souls?" Why was no other form of aether capable of providing the power they needed? The ancients clearly demonstrated something didn't need a soul to function, and that soulless beings could be a reasonable facsimile of souled beings. If the specific, structured aether of a soul wasn't required, the question then shifts to "what happens to aether when it is used?" Physical aether is shown to transform into other forms... but what of the aether something like a Primal devours? What happened to the aether that makes up the souls fed to the Endless? The hypothesis I am desperate to test is "conservation of aether," that aether cannot be created or destroyed, but can only change form.
Sphene's resonator isn't particularly compelling to me because frankly there's a whole discipline of aetheric physics out there to explore and codify, and the crown is probably some kind of portable terminal anyway. We never actually see Endless outside Living Memory, except for Sphene. Cachiua used a remote terminal, and we see at Vanguard that Sphene also used one (since she was 'downloaded' into soldier bots). It implies Endless can't actually go too far from Living Memory's control systems, and the simplest explanation is that the resonator--if that is in fact what it is--was simply a means of allowing Sphene to travel beyond Living Memory.
SPEEEEN!!!!!
SPHHEEEEEEEENNNEEEE
I'm really confused. When was it stated that her crown is a resonator? Did I miss something during the MSQ? Is it dropped in a sidequest?
Lmao, it was in the msq. When Cahciua introduces us to a hunter to demostrarte how regulators work. Can't blame people for skipping things this expansion though
My theory is that we're trapped in the basement of Castle Oblivion. Which is a very ancient ruin in Tural from the 9th. We've been there since the boat ride when the Queen Eternal kidnapped us by possessing the Elezen goldsmith on the boat. She then transferred her consciousness to Wuk Lamatt. We've been wandering around an Electrope Holodeck ever since then. The reason she kidnapped us, Krile, and Erenville is because she was sealed away by Princess Sphene and the rebel faction Oblivion on the Source before the 9th was rejoined during the Second Umbral Calamity. No time travel was involved. The Key is not just an Azem device for teleportation to other worlds but the literal key to her prison which she will swipe off our inn room desk using her orange cat puppet in order to free herself. The reason she was sealed away was because Preservation used the power of the Void to unwittingly turn her into the "Prime Voidsent" for want of a better term making her effectively unkillable on all worlds not just the 13th. Furthermore, she can open Voidgates at will and unlike us doesn't need the Key to travel to other worlds. She will then travel to the 13th to absorb even more power before travelling to the 1st to absorb Edens power. She will then use an Electrope device to hack the Crystal Tower to open a Timegate to the 9th so she can regain her lost kingdom and rule as the Queen Eternal. She will fail and be forced to retreat back to the present, but the battle will rupture time and space creating Timegates in multiple worlds and time periods because just like Athena the Queen Eternal is a puppet of the Entity responsible for creating Ultima and it's Auracite. This will also allow space travel between shards in the present day. She will then retreat to the 13th to spread Darkness over all the other shards in one last ditch desperate attempt at killing everything else because she believes that nothing should be allowed to exist without her. The peoples of the Source, 1st, 13th, and 9th will then pull their military resources together and attack the Queen Eternals homebase on the 13th guarded by an army of Voidsent, Sin Eaters, and automated Electrope powered drones for the final battle of Dawntrail. Calling it now.
TLDR: The Queen Eternal is Sphene's mother and she's basically Exdeath, Kuja, Emperor Mateus, Marluxia, and Queen Zeal fused together with polymerization.
Oh, and Sorceress Ultimecia as well.
Unlife?
lifen't
She was never even real.
she was a memory of a memory
she was not even the essence of a memory
she was a machine acting how peoples memories told it how Sphene acted.
Memories she was fed and that destroyed souls to keep her running.
i find it so ironic that in the expansion that added the artist Class (pictomancy) that the end game boss was a soulless machine that consumed other memories to exist. not even a little subtle. beautiful XD
so she was a Mecha-Primal.
@@baronfuath5872 basicly.
Artist class expansion comes in the same pack with a world that not feels like someone lived in it at the time of ARR/HW/STB/SB/EW.
It just "appeared" with pre-cooked lore and was jumpstarted at DT launch.
Truly soulless expansion.
Yeah something without a soul cries at her loss. Terrible take.
shes a LLM AI the horrors
i am positive that sphene and otis are cut from the same cloth. the log stuff you read says that her SOUL was successfully extracted and saved BEFORE they had even developed the whole memory cleansing and saving system. and otis was an experiment BINDING SOULS to machines. to me that reads that the post credits zooming in on sphene's resonator still being on is trying to say her soul is still there
Please tell me where this log is. It's the missing piece to the very same theory I posited....that in Alexandira dungeon, they said "They've done it! They Pre/....the queen's...."
@@josephgregorowicz5135 I don't remember off the top of my head, but my bets are that it was someplace in Origenics
@@josephgregorowicz5135 It is part of the MSQ. Otis was alive when Sphene died, and volunteered for the experimentations that led to the whole system. The end of both Otis and Sphene clearly predated the establishment of the memory system (and the finishing of the keep).
TBF, we don't actually know whether Sphene's soul was preserved, only that it was claimed to have worked. We do know that her memories were replaced or dramatically altered. It feels like Sphene isn't the real issue here, that will be those that were behind her creation, i.e. the shadowy "Preservation" group.
Preservation is the group behind the soul extraction process, the study of the Key and probably not innocent in the whole calamity thing. It feels somewhat Ascian, but there's been no indication in the game of that, and soul extraction would be of no interest to the Ascians. Probably more decisively: had they known of the existence of the Key, they would have definitely taken it.
So I'm guessing that Alexandria's shard was brought to a calamity without the help of the Ascians. I hope the Key didn't actually play a role in that, but it would seem likely.
I've kept finding it odd that it in the last dungeon we hear "we've done it! We've recovered the Queen's...." the fact it cuts out there always has made me wonder if there's more then is being let on.
I read the title as "unlife queen sphene" for a second 😂
I mean technically we already did that. xD
@@SynodicScribe she's been unlived at least twice! 😅
She's about to go for a WALK. A very..... ENTHUSIASTIC one. >:D
My theory: There were two Sphenes that we encountered at separate times but never knew it. One was the "real" identity and the other was the "Eternal Queen" AI. That's the reason for them playing a bunch of clips of her talking to us seemingly with little context right before the fight. The "real" identity was aware of the other but was powerless to stop her. That is who she was concerned about hearing her through the robots.
If I had to guess, the crown (the real, non projection, one) is a soul storage device, interred with her in Castle Alexandria's ruins under Everkeep. Sphene's original body is likely locked in statis down there, ravaged by levin sickness. When we find that, I also wouldn't rule out also encountering a version of Alexander himself.
I think portraying Sphene as two characters undercuts her as a character. It takes the responsibility for her decisions away and assigns it to this faceless AI. That's why it's kinda important that in the final fight, her post-Endless memories coming back to say, "no, this IS what I want" is important.
@@jaesaces Honestly though this is pretty much the most likely theory that is true, and the thing is the AI thing and the real sphene was foreshadowed by her final conversation with Wuk Lamat about how if she had met the real Sphene they might have been friends, there is no denying this was intentionally mentioned to set up for the possiblity of that very thing happening.
I suspect, Sphene, or Garnet specifically will flee the castle and we will "Encounter" preservation as Yoshi P said encounter is the word of 6.1
Perservation will try to kidnap her and bring her back, we, will rescue her and refuse to let them.
Also it adds up the final boss of the .3 for storyline refference would be alexander, as the obsession with preserving history and resetting it was likely part of what allowed them to move an entire chunk of their reflection to us, since they need alot of power to do that and alexander has been known in other forms to be a key source to achieving that (see the first and the artifical alexander made by ironworks).
@@CptVanguard I think the "if they knew each other when they were alive" bit is more about how circumstances made it impossible for each person to yield to the other, and that had they met sooner, they might have been able to figure something out before it was too late to turn back.
My personal guess for the 7.X story is that it's about the culture clash as Tural and Alexandria integrate with each other, until someone finds Sphene's regulator and abuses it for selfish ends; specifically, I think they'll use the information and/or access to systems in order to cause another conflict between Tural and Alexandria.
"People without souls are losers, I'm so much better than them!" ~guy with 0.07 souls
I wonder, if the 9th reflection's Aether was used to power the Endless and it ran out, would that mean the lands are now barren like in The Burn?
@@IaconDawnshire I very much want to see their shard beyond just living memory. Could there be other pockets of life out there? Or is it indeed like the burn? But even the burn had some creatures who were able to survive in it. Could Eden potentially be used to revitalize another world, if they figure out how the key worked? So much potential.
Hrm... I'm not sure if I agree with some of the things here. I was under the impression that the Endless where a mix of Memory Aether to form the mind and Corporeal Aether harvested after a living being's death to form the conjured body. Soul Aether goes to the Soul Cells instead.
Tinfoil prediction:
her crown is a failsafe to re-imprint her memories onto her original soul, which is still unused and protected to this day
Why does Sphene have a regulator and the Endless don't? Because Sphene exists in the real world and the Endless only exist in the simulated world of Living Memory. Her crown is clearly more than just a simple regulator . It could well be a portable version of whatever the system is that sustains Living Memory. In Star Trek terms, Living Memory is the holodeck, Sphene's crown is the mobile emitter.
But where actually is the crown? The Sphene we see in Heritage Found and Solution 9 is a hologram projected onto a robot. It's implied that the crown is an actual device, rather than just a glam on a robot. And if the crown is a real thing, does that mean Sphene has an actual body somewhere?
So, you mention “resonator”. Is this a variety of regulator?
Yeah, I meant to say regulator. My brain isn't so smart sometimes. lol
The very fact that Sphene came back after supposedly being purged by the Queen Eternal shows she was more than just an AI. If she had been just a computer with data logs that could be deleted, there would have been nothing left to bring back. Just blank files. If I had to guess, Preservation tried to retrieve Sphene's soul from the Aetherial Sea and rebuild an artificial memory bank. Whether they got the right soul, though, is very difficult to guess.
The deletion was of her memories prior to becoming an Endless, so there was still her data from after her death that was restored to a working Endless temporarily.
@@jaesaces This.
Deletion is also rarely the end for data anyway, since most data storage (in the real world, anyway) has both the physical impression of the data and the "address book" of where those physical impressions are on the media. It's why secure delete procedures exist. Now that I say it, though, there's a neat parallel to the 'burned in' memories of the Final Days on souls in FFXIV. They're like data that we don't have in the file table, but can still stumble upon with the right tools.
Sphene's soul of the ninth reflection has returned to the lifestream. Sphene's soul of the source may be alive and kicking.
So spoiler
When Spheene deleted her memories but later came back, it was her soul that stitch herself back from the memories of the endless. Spheene isn't a Endless, she's all the endless.
That would make sense. She been a constant to Alexandria, so every citizen has memories of her.
Maybe it's because I played it with JP voices, but my read based off of the JP lines is that post-battle Sphene was scraped together from her *own* memories as an Endless. Meaning it's entirely because she enjoyed herself and made so many memories showing us around the place that she was able to come back at all, even if only for ten minutes. After all, the mesoterminal was only instructed to delete the memories of the original Sphene, so Endless Sphene's memories would still have been floating around in there somewhere.
my thought was that it was Dynamis restoring her memories and self despite their deletion 🤔either because of her own lingering feelings or Wuk Lamat's
Remember, if you've done the final MSQ dungeon, you never see the "real" Sphene. You hear her voice only. The image of the real Queen Sphene is lost and likely the Endless version is made up of a memory of what people envisioned Sphene to be.
Notification squad ! Clicked fast AF 😂
This discussion about the Endless reminds me of the memories of Ultima Thule. In the Omicron quests, the whole quest chain was explicitly convincing the memories of lost civilizations that they were alive. That their actions in the present mattered. There is no aether involved in that realm of dynamis, but they clearly are 'alive' - in making new decisions, evolving and changing, and even showing up in Etheirys to learn more.
I know the beings in ultima Thule were made from meteion's memories, but I think they were themselves real beings made from dynamis, the way ancients made creatures from aether. Part of that whole thing was hermes asking at what point does something have a soul and count as life, and the beings meteion made seem to have their own dynamis based souls. Vs here the memories explicitly do not have souls, they were completely separated entirely from their souls. But then it begs the question, since they were capable of doing new things and having new experiences, could they develop new souls over time? And are they any less life if they can't?
They might even have a dynamis-equivalent of a soul eventually.
I like to think of the Endless as semi-alive. The reason is because they can still interact and continue to experience new things, which means the memories of the endless are still increasing, just like a live person. The only difference is that the Endless draws its 'energy source/anchor' off of the soul aether provided inside Living Memory.
This also leads to why Living Memory is running out of souls, the memories of each individual Endless starts exceeding the capacity of a single soul as they exist longer than their intended lifespan, and requires even more souls to sustain itself
While I think that the endless are basically not alive is true, I want to propose a little different point of view to this. You see, while intentional or not, Alexandria touched a very old and complicated philosophical question of what actually makes us human. You say that endless are not alive, because they have no body(mostly) and no soul, which is true. But, does it really matter? You see, soul + body + memories make us a whole living being, but not human. Because human is an individual, collected image of ideas, a grander idea as a whole, if you want, and that individuality is created mostly from our experience = memories. That's why at the end of the day, if you place a normal human and an endless near each other and talk to each of them, you won't notice a difference, if you won't know that one is alive and the other is just an image. Cahciua does not feel like a fake human at all, and it does not matter than we talk to her inside a robot, because body actually plays little value to us when we identify someone as human. That's why it's sad to remove endless, because we sympathize them as real humans.
Early on even before finishing Dawntrail’s MSQ, Sphene was noticeable with contradictions. We’ve been journeying long enough to tell someone is being dishonest with us. The Queen Sphene we meet is truly a tragic character in her own right. A machine with a conscience to cause death is not going to end well in the long run.
As for her crown, I think it might be a master key of sorts. It works as a modified regulator where it contains access to most if not all of Everkeep’s systems normally restricted to anyone not of status of say King or Queen. So as a plot device, it might contain something we can analyze.
I'd say it's as sophisticated as an earring......
I feel Queen Sphene was a 1/2 memory 1/2 program put in place and controlled by Preservation making her less Queen Sphene and more Pawn Sphene. I expect Preservation to be either a short-turn evil enity whose plot line will be solved through the DT patch quests, or more long-term bad guys aka the new Ascians.
Coupla theories here: 1.) Sphene, as the only Endless to "go on walkabout" outside Living Memory (other than Cahciua, but since she was working for a rebel faction, she was clearly Not Authorized), her crown-regulator might have been an enhanced one that allowed her "new" memories to be captured (and analyzed by Preservation/the Eternal Queen and used to further the purpose of preserving the Endless. She'd make a good ambassador-slash-scout-probe in whatever new places the bubble could force itself into, presenting herself as the local authority and beloved by all the shiny happy people while the data was being analyzed by Robot Mother.
2.) The original Preservation was Ascian-adjacent--aware of their efforts and either studying them, influenced by them, or fighting them. What else are Regulators but "memory crystals" on steroids? And, when presented with the knowledge that a Calamity was being engineered to obliterate their world and everything they were in service to a Rejoining with the Source, what else would someone do if unable to stop the Calamity? Preserve everything they could about their people for a post-Calamity reboot. It obviously went waaaay out of control, likely far past the original intent. (The Milala escaping their Calamity to Alexandria via their "Speaker" and dimensional traversal speaks of Meddling from a Higher Power, which would easily suffer "scope-creep" as people learned about the technology and expanded on it).
Her Majesty, Sphene Alexandros XIV, did absolutely nothing wrong. You know, I don't get it. When meeting the Yok Huy and learning about their view on death, everyone was like "that's so TRUE!! The dead will LIVE on in us!!!," but when her Grace puts it into practice, everyone is all like "these things aren't real!! DELETE THEM!!!" The endless may not have souls, but they are no less people, just as the sundered are no less people than the Ascians!!! The only issue here is the COST of maintaining the Endless.
This is why I liked Dawntrail, because THIS is horror.
Sure Endwalker had apocalyptic - end of days - horror (but like… its a video game so its not that bad)
But this is a sort of deeply unsettling horror, the kinda that, for me, makes you go “There is something extremely wrong here…” and then you find out the truth and that feeling sinks in deep.
Sphene! Listen to me.
Spheeeene
SPHEEEEEENE!
Spleen!
speeeeeen
Still waiting for Ultima to be the next big bad
I've been wondering if I'm weird to have felt horror (in the sense of a horror game, not in the sense of this is horrible) at the whole soul and memory thing they had going on. Like, it felt gross that they would use souls as batteries but at least I understood how their culture came to do that. But then they rip peoples memories of their loved ones away when they die, memories they don't get back (I assume they were necessary for the living memory creations) and thinking about that was deeply unsettling. Imagine if you lost all memories of people you care about. For the Alexandrians this was how things always were their whole lives but for the turali people it was something they agreed to for their own safety and security. And sure it was voluntary (thank goodness), but then the ones who accepted it just imposed it on their kids without those kids consent cos they weren't old enough for it (see the aether side quest chain with the bunny girl). But then there's another layer of horror specific to this world's universe since we know souls continue to carry the memories of their past lives when they are reborn, they just don't remember them. But the ascians were able to awaken at least the souls' ancient memories (enough that the one sundered ascian remembered he used to be Gaia's boyfriend and be obsessed and angry enough to not accept her sundered soul shard on the first having a new life without him). But this process removes all the memories from the soul. Or, at least all the active ones. Maybe those souls still have their more deeply buried memories, but just the ones extracted for living memory are lost in this process. Which then means the memories in living memory are the only ones that won't be eternal, since all the lives that get to go to the a athereal sea are there while living memory's lives were shut down.
And holy moly to impose what happened on the 13th (an end to the cycle) on purpose...which I understand how and why, they didn't know that is what they were doing they were just trying to survive the end of their world, but man. (And any hope of their world recovering may have been lost because of what they did, too, if they drained the aether from the world at large.)
All that is to say...a lot of thoughts and comtemplstions spin rent free in my head.
Otis gave his life to protect Sphene, when she could have just "died" and took another robot body. Most frustrating plot point this expansion so far (for me)
I definitely think there's something to Sphene's resonator. After all, why else would it suddenly start glowing after the credits rolled? Something about it is likely going to play a part in the patch content and maybe be something that'll lead into the next expansion. I don't see any other reason they'd she her crown resonator suddenly light up.
I never even considered the crown as "this is her confirmed resonator," but it would make sense to assume her subjects thought it as one. EXCEPT for the fact that most people there would see that she was a young woman who never aged through multiple generations of people. It would be nice to ask the citizens what they considered her to be given she didn't age and seemed to live so long
One thing I wonder is if perhaps it was different from a regular resonator, or perhaps not a resonator at all. Rather, it's something that allows her to exist outside of Solution 9 and Living Memory. Unless I'm misremembering, we never see any Endless other than Sphene outside of those two zones, which are full of processed electrope that might be what allows them to exist there, and Sphene's headdress is actually some kind of device that allows her presence outside those zones.
Technically Cahciua...
@@markup6394 She herself was never outside of those zones, though, just remote controlling a drone, confirmed by the fact that when she stops controlling it it shuts down rather than disappears like the Endless do when Living Memory is shut down.
Do we even actually see Sphene outside of Living Memory?
She's shown to be piloting those robot soldiers the same way Cahciua does with her robot, and she leaves the husk behind when she disappears.
@@captainsavvy07and those soldiers are much more technically sophisticated than cachiua's bot, which may be what let her project her appearance onto them.
@@SomeCallMeAku I think Sphene did the same thing: remote controlling robots. And we dont know if she could return and controll another body because she disappeared with the gate, just like Cahciua.
i do cry if my carbuncel dies :(
Otis' procedure was meant as a precursor to what would be done to Sphene. If his soul was captured, but not his memories then could Sphene not have at the very least had her soul captured as well from the same procedure?
Commenting for the Algorithm
I wonder if part of the future patches will be someone trying to use Sphene and/or the remaining stored souls (if there are any) as a weapon that we will have to either stop in the patches of this expansion or that it will be something to deal with in the next expansion.
That could also be part of the Arcadion story IMO.
About her resonator, It gives me the sense of soul crystal. Since no others master Venet's spell, It won't bond the soul or have the potential to wake one, but it maybe contain some core part of her memory. Now she was free from the machine and system, maybe we will approach her in some way, like we did in P raids ? Also the reason lord of neo-Alxendria need new candidate. Will it serve some function, like a haunting memory for concilling?
Sphene basically being an AI chatbot reconstruction of a person who died is part of why I hated the MSQ this expansion. It wasn't the first time I was like "Why doesn't my WOL just say something!" but it was so frustrating never seeing anyone point this out in the 7.0 MSQ. The whole thing's pretty easy to view as anti-crypto in particular, anti-corporate in general. Why? Because Alexandria's going in killing people, destroying the land, all so they can get more resources to keep Living Memory and the AI chatbot Endless "alive." Instead we had to sit through this both sides bullshit where the Scions were trying to justify it/see their point of view to the extent that they never even tried to say why it was wrong to begin with. What a clusterfuck of bad writing this expansion's been.
Memories are anchored to the time and/or person that creates them. The begin to decay as soon as they are created. The Material Aether builds a foundation around the memories to slow this decay (Neurons, brain tissue, etc). Once the material aether holding the memories together are gone and the soul returns to the aetherial sea, memories in tow, the decay begins to speed up. I imagine the aetherial currents inside the atherial sea also help to break down the memories.. But that is why memory is the "weakest" of the three. At least as I understand it from FF14. ^_^
"was sphene anything more than programmed memories?" look no further than otis. he was a fragment of preserved memory, and the "body" they gave him was able to overwrite all free will. it's just a memory mixtape in a machine.
I'd like to think of Sphene as a manifestation of an entity not too different to an Ivalician raid boss/auricite-possessed.
I like to think of the crown as a prototype/proof of concept to the regulators, an item similar to the auricite/soulstone im which memories are engraved upon, but in a less fragmented, more whole capacity. But due to being inefficient for mass production, Sphene's crown became a one of a kind item. The crown stores memory but not soul, thus requiring a puppet body which houses a cleansed soul to externally power the crown, kind of like a Ser Otis 2.0. (thus also justifying her ability to walk freely in and out of Solution 9 and the capability of taking over drone bodies one after another.)
Regulators then being a mimicry being able to store both memory and soul, but the memory isnt self sustaining like Sphene's crown, a purposeful design to ensure regulators are reusable upon the wearer's death.
The reality of souls makes the naming of the Soulkin class of creatures rather ironic. Constructs created with and animated by purely material aether, they lack souls entirely.
Also interesting, the nature of memories being contained in crystal. Soul crystals can hold memories for generations to pass on martial techniques, and I wonder if ancient concept crystals may work on a similar level.
Sephiro-er, I mean Sphene: I will *never* be... only a memory.
In actuality while I liked most of DT, I really didn't like how Sphene was done simply because she continuously had to fight for screentime and development with Zoraal Ja, and I felt the emotional stakes fall flat when the Endless were fully revealed. It's said that they can be shut down and kept in storage, and that it's been done to mitigate power draw, so at least to me there's logically no reason why she can't just put Living Memory and all the Endless in there in sleep mode and look for a better option. Hydaelyn knows we have options, from Allagan cloning to the Omicrons having completely converted themselves to a digital consciousness and even Otis persisting in a robotic body for over 400 years with no energy issues. There's just too many ways around this that weren't addressed for me to really have felt anything for the plight of this toaster/character.
For a lack of better word in my opinion, the Endless are like a walking, talking computer with memories stored within them, that makes them act certain ways
In my opinion Scribe, I think we need to talk about Preservation a lot more. We have NEXT TO NOTHING ON THEM other than what they were made for. Heck, we don't know if Preservation is still there, but the only assumption that my friends say is that Preservation is gone, even after I dived into all the Side Quests for Living Memory.
There has to be more to that crown at the end, and it has to lead back to Preservation, either as a flashback or as an entity that still exists in Alexandria trying to further their nation's future(such as trying to find a cure for levin sickness, perhaps?). I just want to see where this comes to a head, because if Preservation is just used and thrown away as an idea, that just doesn't make sense given what little we get in Living Memory and their whole fiasco of Interdimensional Fusion.
My questions to pose are 'Does Preservation still exist' and 'What are they planning to do now that their machine has been destroyed'?
I found it strange that Queen Sphene couldn't answer a simple question of "What was your favorite food". Maybe those kinds of memories were erased at some point to make room for newer ones, like all the names and details of living Alexandrians.
Or maybe Queen Sphenes memories are an artificial patchwork of what other people remember of her. If most people agree that she was a kind and caring girl, then that must have been true. Differing accounts of irrelevant or private details won't make her a better ruler, so those can be ignored.
Wait a minute... Wasn't there a group of people on the Source who also tried to resurrect a beloved ruler? What did they do about the lack of preserved memories?
I think queen sphene's regulator contains an ascian's soul or to be more precise a complete soul from before the sundering making it a super powerful battery and possibly explaining why it teleports with her when she changed robot host bodies.
This reminds me why robots and and computer programing is such a double edged sword even irl.
Because, for better or worse, a program does exactly what its told to do, and only what its told to do, to the letter.
"Save our people memories at all costs", what do you think a computer would do with that command?
I thought the crown was like an external hard drive -- in case the internal files within Sphene got corrupted or deleted. Whether that means she's coming back in some capacity, or it unlocks something within Everkeep, I can't guess yet.
The crown glowing makes me think her "death" triggered some command within it.
I don't think we have enough information just yet to say what she was and, more importantly, waht her resonator is. We know from the MSQ that her resonator is special, maybe the people just meant it in the sense of its design, but who knows.
Maybe it really does contain the original soul and maybe it did contain her living memories prior to their deletion. In which case Sphene is now rendered as good as a newborn if we could use her resonator to bring her back in some way, a ghost in the machine most likely.
Though maybe, and not necessarily exclusive of the previous idea, her resonator worked in part like a physical access key, a factor of authentication which allowed the system, be it just that of the Queen Eternal or the conjunction of machine and soul, to exercise their power as monarch of Alexandria. In which case, have we purged the Queen Eternal from the system? Could the soul of the queen live on through a new bearer or is it nothing more than an artifact to be wielded... Or destroyed, that Sphene may finally, truly rest?
It makes me wonder if maybe, cliched I know, dynamis perhaps has something to do with memory. Dynamis seems to have something to do with emotion and memories and emotion are deeply tied together. Perhaps that's why memories seem to fade so quickly without a soul to contain them, dynamis is largely overridden by aether and so can only exist in places that lack aether like Mare Lamentorum. If that is the case, then it suggests that the Endless could continue on or even maybe take on new forms of life by placing what remains of Alexandria in a location or maybe even a realm that is abundant in dynamis.
For me the story was dead the moment wuk Lamar's caretaker was taken to the bown up place and we arrive when she dies.
That was utter bs.
I can't help but wonder if she was given the soul of the original sphene. I don't know how I feel about that thought, but it does burn in my mind.
This video perfectly explains why I didn't like Sphene and Alexandria and the response from the scions. What they do with the souls is vile but yet everyone acted like "its fine its a different culture we just need to accept that they're different and we can't tell them its wrong because they're just different."
it's not the last we'll see of her I hope that we will get better closure to Alexandria than the trash they wrote for it.
What does Spheen do if she is not the queen? maybe we will get a Agent Smith situation AI robbed of it's purpose
I saw living memory as a location where they were using soul aether to provide memory the corporal form to exist. To have a physical self that could then live out and act upon regret. Just enough to sustain, but not enough to give it substance or depth. Mind you this may not be entirely right, as there is the fact that you can interact with it but it lacks taste, but it is emphasized that despite the fact that there is energy enough to hold the memory, there isn't enough energy to give form to the endless and they are put in a form of stasis until enough surplus is harvested to make it viable.
This stasis I think is important to keep in mind when discussing Queen Sphene herself. Or rather Sphene as she got preserved upon her original death. It is my thought that the Alexandrians figured out the first part of the process first, the extraction and maintenance of a soul in stasis before figuring out how to impart that memory on another unit later. Sphene could very well be much like how the memoriate crystals are from the void, soul and memory locked in a seemingly permanent shape, but then they figured out how to remove that memory and use its coded information to duplicate and impart on other things. The two Otis seems significant for this part. That stored memory isn't precious. It isn't unique.
Everkeep and it's systems were built after Sphene's death. The eternal queen, the program and unit, were built afterword. The process of purifying souls and repurposing them seems to be an after her death. Hers was not the first one to have been put through that process, I strongly believe. I more suspect that her original essence was kept on hand as a failsafe, a reserve in order to maintain the program if recalibration ever was necessary. After all, as a organization that.... Might not be entirely benevolent what purpose would they have to faithfully recreate Sphene entirely? They needed the illusion of her to satisfy the people who adored her and would do all they could for her.
It is my thought that we are going to find the original holding chamber for Sphene. And figure out how to properly reverse the process in order to give her peace, and to give us the tool to free other souls trapped in a similar form of stasis.
I read "unfit to be a queen and unfit to be a it device and unfit to be an expansion"
Think I'm biased ...
Oh! What if they have cloned Sphene? That is why she has a regulator. To transfer her memories to the clone? Which would expose why Zooral Ja has Goola Ja. They clone the two people in case they died.
It seems to me that her crown being a more decorative resonator was just a story told to the people of Alexandria, because the MSQ shows that she's not really a physical presence, just a hologram over a robot soldier.
Am I seriously the only one that sees the parallel between FFXIV and Destiny’s Final Shape story?
There is no way to explain the endless and sphene that doesnt horrify me, resulting in the fell cleaving of every single endless. Rightfully putting an end to the practice of cheap and casual soul extraction.
It was still sad turning them off though lol. Your videos are always so good.
Regulators.
Knowing that hers was seen at the end of MSQ, makes me wonder if that means something or otherwise.
Wouldn't it be possible for sphenes original soul to have reincarnated as she already died long before the events of dawntrail?
She wasn't a real person. Just a AI following instructions.
14:15 ??? don't we literally have dialogue about Preservation capturing her soul after her death, but being unable to do anything with it until they perfect the system with Otis
upon which they split the memories and replace holes with programming and her prime directive, also symantics :P
it's regulator, not resonator
The only thing that needed to be "unlifed" is those Wolverine-ass sideburns...
Something kinda interesting about being raised atheist and lacking the cultural significance tied to the concept of souls is trying to fully wrap my head around these things in-game. Like I accept this is a different world and a work of fiction and all so yeah their rules can be totally different from reality, but I have difficulty really caring about soul aether=person as I would argue that what is someone if not the sum of their memories anyway? I get it, but I don't *get* it, emotionally.
In a reality like that of FFXIV. Your Soul, is the only thing consistent from life to life. Memories and appearances come and go, but your soul will ever be the same. It is who you are when everything else is stripped away.
@@SynodicScribe I think I can understand that, when you put it that way. ♥
Spirituality has nothing to do with religion. The way we think of the body / mind comes from Descartes, much later in the 17th century. At least in semitic religions, there is no distinction between body and mind / soul for mortals, so someone dying "only in spirit" or "only in body" does not happen. It was awfully overdebated by theologians, per example, on how Jesus could be three entities at once (they called souls 'natures'), one body with three minds / souls / beings. The legacy of this debate (plus maybe the greek idea that emotions are themselves possessions by spirits) and the muslim iconography of beings in memory and soul but body like 'smokeless fire' that influences the aether as we see in FF14. I recommend reading on Locke and Descartes perception of what memories, impressions and souls are.
@@brasasrestauranteI would think twice before linking the philosophical foundations of a japanese work to western thinkers though
theyre called regulators however resonator sounds so much more fitting.
I believe Spene's soul was preserved (haha) by Preservation, like Otis. But instead of creating a singular entity like Otis the machine, Spene's soul was stored in the Meso Terminal, and augmented with AI. When the AI (supposedly successfully) wiped Spene's memories, her soul still rebelled when she heard Wuk Lamat call to her, and the memories Spene had as an endless were restored. I feel as though her regulator could have been an illusion, or it is going to be like Krile's earring, either storing data or overall more than it seems. Really hard to tell.
However the story goes, I am excited to see what happens in the patches.
I thought they were called Regulators, not Resonators? That aside, some interesting points in the video. My theory is that, in all but the method, Sphene was a primal. An artificially created copy of a real or imagined entity made of sacrifice and faith that drained more from the world around her to keep herself and her people going than she put out.
Yeah I must have had a stroke while recording. I meant Regulator. lol
Sphene is a character who deserved better writing in living memory
So if I understand correctly, Aether is basically Eat, Pray, Love. Got it !
Heys scribe. I was wondering if you are going to do a video about what you think will happen next for the Star. Like how other nations will react to such marvels like solution nine and technology from Alexandria I bet the forum of sharliyan would love to study such too
You'll get an answer to that sooner than you think. ^^
My man you know I love your stuff and have followed you for years now and i cant wait to hear what you have to say in this video but i just gotta ask... Dont you think the title and thumbnail is just a little spoilery? Im sure there are plenty of fans of yours that arent completely caught up with msq just yet and the title/thumbnail alone kinda gives away that she is gonna be a villain
I mean. There's already been hundreds of memes, pictures, threads and other spoilery content out on the internet right this moment. If anything I'm extremely late to the party.
@@SynodicScribe that is true, but you've always just been very careful about not spoiling things (and obviously you still put the spoilers tags in the beginnings of your videos) but this one is just straight up giving away that a character initially presented as an ally actually isnt in the newest content of the game.
Obviously not a big deal or anything, just unlike you. Personally I think it's irrelevant that there are memes or spoilers elsewhere in the internet.
Video was great btw, I never even considered the fact she was wearing a resonator I now find that very intriguing. Though it also could easily just be an appearance keeping thing. My subjects are expected to wear one so their beloved queen will so they follow suit.
I hope we can unlife her again. She was so sweet.
She's memories from the presivation
When you say Resonator, did you mean Regulator? Or am I confusing something
No you're right. I meant Regulator and musta head a stroke while recording. lol
Thought provoking stuff.
What do you think about the idea of memory aether in relation to the Echo? I found it odd that most if not all abilities that we know of so far can all be explained in a technical sense as an interaction or mastery over memory aether, of oneself or with another. Video idea perhaps?
If I had to guess. I'd assume the Echo, which is currently spirit based ability, is purposely reaching out and harmonizing with memory aether specifically in order to glimpse into that persons past.
A fun thought to be sure! I should certainly do a more detaled video on the world's life cycle.
resonator? i thought they were called regulators?
Yeah I must have had a stroke while recording. My bad. lol