Here’s the thing-I consider the Endless to be similar to a person who is medically brain dead yet hooked up to a machine that is keeping their respiratory and cardiovascular systems working. The person is dead. But a machine is creating an illusion of life. An illusion that does nothing but make the family feel guilty when they realize that it’s time for the illusion to end.

Why are we taking the idea that Sphene's crown is a resonator at face value? Considering it appears on all of the bodies she hijacks along with the rest of her clothes, bodies which are robots and dont have them, its likely just part of the hologram. She isnt even the one who calls it a resonator

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.

I feel like the argument of "are endless alive" is a rather frustrating semantic one. They are alive in every way that matters, but their life comes at mucu to great a cost. What we do in the msq is not good, or easy, it is necessary.

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)

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

Commenting for the Algorithm

I personally believe that the Sphene we saw is just like the other Endless, just the recreation of her memories. Albeit with the added "forced servitude" programmed in. I wanna say her ability to hop between robot bodies is special, but Cahciua was able to do the same, just not to the same proficiency and speed as Sphene. They focused on her crown/regulator at the end of DT's MSQ. As i've stated, i believe the Sphene we met is an Endless/Memory. My theory is that we'll get to meet her soul itself, just like we met Otis the Soul and Otis the memory separately. Which may probably be different compared to her Endless incarnation, especially in beliefs since i assume she won't be shackled by a programming. And may probably be shocked at what her Endless version did.

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.

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?

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. ^_^

Wouldn't it be possible for sphenes original soul to have reincarnated as she already died long before the events of dawntrail?

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

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.

While not about Sphene specifically, while in the unlost world, I couldn’t help but see parallels to the black mirror episode San Junipero In the show you learn that some of the dead become tired of existence and bored, but that doesn’t seem to be the case in Alexandria. Which makes me wonder about the day to day existence of the endless. Are they unable to form and acquire new memory? And if so that might explain how even after centuries, they don’t seem tired of their existence But bringing that back to Sphene… we know she CAN form new memories. She remembers Wuk Lamat after being absorbed in the final fight. So this does seem to potentially make her even more unique compared to the others

SPEEEEEEENE!!! LISSENTUMEEEE

Another interesting and informative lore video!

SPHHEEEEEEEENNNEEEE

So if I understand correctly, Aether is basically Eat, Pray, Love. Got it !

DUDE I MISSED YOUR LORE VIDEOS!!!!!!!!!!! IM SO HAPPY

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.

Im not sure how much of the real Sphene was left in the being that we encountered in Heritage Found. Ultimately, though, by sacrificing living souls for memories of the dead, Sphene was really no better than the ascians.

"People without souls are losers, I'm so much better than them!" ~guy with 0.07 souls

Sphene and the endless are not people. They are a computer program with memory data programed to mimic people they have no soul. Nothing more. Even the game shows that they are just a parasite on the star, consuming resources till nothing remains.

Quick note to remember: Queen Sphene is dead. We never meet Queen Sphene. We've never actually seen Queen Sphene. All we meet is a manipulated memory obsessed with other memories. Please don't judge the dead based on an empty faulty projection created by a society that put all their burdens on this one projection to bear without even having her permission to do so.

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?

I think her being a tortured soul is more interesting than being ill used memories.

I don't think that Souls are used as fuel for the Endless, "life energy" is. It's never said what this life-energy really is but it isn't Souls. The Origenics dungeon explicitly states and shows that the Memory components of people's Aether is going to the Meso Terminal while the Soul component is going elsewhere to get cleansed and then gets distributed back down to Alexandria to be used by people's regulators. And like you said; the Endless don't use these regulators. So what really is this mysterious "life-energy" that they supposedly do need? Having said that, I personally thought the Endless were more alive and full of soul than most of the one-dimensional and soulless characters in the rest of Tural.

I literally JUST finished the Dawntrail MSQ as this video came up on my feed :P

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 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

Go to YoRHa: Dark Apocalypse to.

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 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?

"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.

OMG… I didn’t even think of that. I was so focused on why the Endless is a horrible thing and why Alexandria is a really flawed system that would be frowned upon… but why does Sphene has a resonator never crossed my mind. That’s a really good point. For me, before, she was just a memory. I didn’t feel bad as much cause the real Sphene passed on. What we have here is something horrible that the Presevers did: Trying to make Sphene coexist with the others. And they programmed her a way so that above anything, the “Sphene” MUST obey, but she was also conflicted cause the memory wouldn’t want that. Which then brings this: There may be some candle to that truth in the video. Recall, before the final confrontation, Sphene was programmed to forget everything and then allow the fusion to happen. The memories that resided was a defense mechanism in the final dungeon of the MSQ. But isn’t weird that after Krile mentioned there is nothing left of Sphene that… Sphene suddenly resurfaces when Wuk Lamat confronted it? How, pray tell, did the program suddenly got the memory again? Wasn’t it programmed to suddenly forget and just focus on the fusion? As a data bank, once you erase, that’s it. Sure technically you could find a way that’s drastic, but you have to go out of the way. The machine can’t. Once it’s set, it’ll stay course. And the last thing too is… why the last shot of Sphene’s crown? When the dust is settled, that’s the last thing we see. I believe there’s more to this story. Seriously, after all the discussion that happened, this is making me think a bit more positive of the expansion. I still hold what I say, but the feeling of it went for the better after all that. So thank you and to the others for doing that! :)

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 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.

this is part of why i bore no remorse in shutting down the terminals the endless are not alive, the game explains it somewhat clearly, the endless are cheap imitations of real people, serving sphene's programming. trying to make us feel sad about it is just insulting. and the worst part is it didn't even have to be that way since they could have just kept the soul + memories in their simulations, which would arguably be more alive and real than the current iteration

The only wrong thing she did was not talking to Wuk Lamat.

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.

Isn't the soul just another battery that exists to house/power memories? Eorzeans have a weird soul fetish. Would be like a culture that is obsessed with the appendix and declare someone undead without it. And how the hell do you call the souls in Alexandria enslaved when they just do the same thing that happens in the aetherial sea except it is a closed system?

Yeah but have u considered that shes hot therefore objectively better than wuk lamat?

Im hoping for that mech otis is still stored in the resonator somehow. Otherwise i think it just information on preservation.

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...?

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

So, you mention “resonator”. Is this a variety of regulator?

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.

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.

Unlife?