I'm still unclear on what origin was originally supposed to do? It sounds like, the two worlds of xenoblade were going to collide and all the people on it die. We see this in a scene of the worlds literally colliding. Origin was supposed to "restart the world" after that. Wtf does that mean? Are they basically allowing all life on both worlds to die but they are content with creating life again afterwards? Thats not even a solution. Everybody dies, no one is saved (except the queens somehow).
In a nutshell, the worlds were going to annihilate into energy upon coming in contact with each other (even if other collisions don't involve annihilation, fully overlapping would cause it). Origin is a sort of Ark (in a game where the protagonist's name is Noah, because Takahashi) that contains a comprehensive record of the worlds and every person living in them that will harness the energy of that apocalyptic annihilation recreate the worlds instantly in the same state they were prior to impact (except presumably more stably to prevent them from having the same problem again). That does mean everybody dies (including the queens) but identical copies (complete with memories) are created instantly after their death, so calling it a practical solution isn't inaccurate. It's like ideas of teleportation that rely on destroying your local self and recreating you elsewhere: It means you die, but nothing about you is actually lost, so it's fine. The alternative is that everyone just dies, so...
YoukaiSlayer posted...
Anyway, origin's power is somehow activated coalescing the dying peoples fear of being killed by the planet collision and freezes time right then and somehow creates a 3rd world that is a combination of the two in a frozen instant during collision. Somehow restarting origin just harmlessly splits the worlds back apart?
Aionios exists because Moebius used Origin's power to freeze time, then force the two worlds as close as possible to overlapping before actually annihilating, allowing them to exist without having to fear what might happen if Origin didn't work (which is what coalesced into Moebius in the first place as a consequence of compiling everyone's thoughts and wills inside Origin). When Moebius was defeated and Origin was set back on its original course, they separated and went back to their original states and collision course (and then were recreated by Origin).
YoukaiSlayer posted...
So then WHY does he make everyone suffer for his amusement?
Because when your existence consists of eternally repeating the same experiences and actions out of fear of facing unforeseen adversity, you're pretty inevitably going to start trying to come up with ways to have fun with that process.
YoukaiSlayer posted...
Even IF you need people to die to harvest energy to keep the worlds from colliding, you can do that pretty peacefully. The amount of life energy they harvest has nothing to do with how fast they die, only how many get brought to life, since all of them will eventually die anyway. If you didn't erase their memories, they have eternal life effectively, and just have to swap out bodies every 10 years.
Given the thermodynamic implications of eternally respawning people, I'm guessing the "life energy" that is harvested is based on their memories and emotions and other such things that don't typically get carried over. That means carrying them over would make the system unsustainable (even more so than it already is), especially given the need to store that information somehow (everyone's birth states are roughly based on how they were stored in Origin when Aionios began). As for the life spans, letting people live out full lives would mean 8-9 times as much life energy would be tied up in the system at any given time, and I could believe that a monster born of the collective unconscious' fear of change would rather limit people's lifespans than choose to leave 85%+ of people out of the new world.
That, and there's a strong undercurrent of anti-capitalist themes in the game, and one of the more harmful trends in capitalism is giant corporations taking advantage of their scale to make enormous amounts of money from making tiny profit margins many times over. That paradigm works really well for those collecting those profits, but strongly encourages treating workers like trash. Moebius collecting their take from a large number of shorter, lower-yield lives that are treated as being throwaway instead of a small number of longer, higher-yield ones that are more valued falls very nicely in line with that.
YoukaiSlayer posted...
For extra badness, we get the scene were N and M sacrifice themselves to kill Z because apparently he's literally invincible to us and we can do nothing to hurt him making our involvement pointless and M who already regretted all this could have just killed him at any time apparently. Also, how the f*** is M still around? She escaped the flow with the homecoming, only to still exist because she and Mio are the same person, except they aren't. The fact that Noah is trying to beg N to stay, the same N responsible for committing genocide and torturing many people on this planet and perputating this awful pointless cycle of pain and killing because he was sad, it's f***ing pathetic. Why do jrpgs want so badly to forgive genocidal maniacs?
Consider those more abstract representations of N and M. Just as Noah and Mio represent the parts of N and M that regretted the way things turned out, N and M represent the parts of Noah and Mio that are afraid of the future and want to keep things the same, which Noah and Mio had to let go of to defeat Z. When Noah incorporated N, that wasn't a matter of forgiving N for the genocide, it was a matter of accepting that N's attitudes and beliefs were a part of him that he had to deal with instead of denying.
YoukaiSlayer posted...
On top of that, they clearly created an annihilation converter for use with the cannon that sucks up all the black fog. [...] So basically, they've already solved this problem
Unfortunately, you can't really design a world in which everyone has the freedom to choose how to live their lives around the fundamental requirement that a handful of people have nuclear artillery that you just have to trust they won't misuse or lose control of. The Annihilator also doesn't really redirect annihilation events that would otherwise happen so much as it induces new, controlled ones, so I don't think it could really solve the issue.
YoukaiSlayer posted...
There's nothing more still about the life on Aionios than on alrest or the xenoblade 1 world. People are born and live their lives and make choices and move forward constantly. We are a witness to it for the entire damn game.
That's only *because* we give them that freedom, though. It's a recurring theme with every single colony that they want to live differently but can't because filling up the Clock takes all of their time and energy. If the Clocks are a requirement for the world to exist (as they seem to be, since Moebius needs to maintain the world and the Clocks maintain Moebius), then the world prevents people from living their lives freely.
---
This is my signature. It exists to keep people from skipping the last line of my posts.