This is literally his only human trait and from the perspective of an immortal god, the people are dying and being reborn. He says it himself directly. And it should matter to him, it's the core of his being, or rather all of his being.
From the perspective of an immortal god, individuals' deaths and rebirths are pretty meaningless. He just sees that as a means to an end, namely minimizing total suffering (as he defines it) by making sure that everything is as predictable as possible. That's a very human bit of egocentrism.
YoukaiSlayer posted...
Again, no, they explicitly state that's not the case and that the converter absorbs the black fog. As for the 2nd part, the fact that the cannon works is proof enough. They absorb the black fog and shoot it and it causes annihilation. How could it be any different?
It's stated that it condenses it, but not how or what that means, so there's some room for interpretation there. It's explicitly stated elsewhere that black fog density doesn't correlate with annihilation risk, so it's not simply a matter of "cram enough fog in here then it'll explode," so it has to depend on something else. Then, once the fog begins the annihilation reaction, the cannon shoots it somewhere else to explode.
YoukaiSlayer posted...
I'm also pretty sure interlinking was never said to attract black fog but it is a long game so I might have just forgot a conversation.
It aggressively gathers around O and P right before they annihilate and was gathering similarly around Lanz and Sena when they tried to kamikaze N (as an aside, that sequence is heckin underrated in terms of turbosad, thanks to being overshadowed by the rest of the chapter 5 finale). That's one of the major indicators that black fog responds to spatial abnormalities, and in turn suggests that the power of interlinking comes from exploiting the energy released by coming as close as possible to annihilating without actually doing so (with the time limit reached when the interaction proceeds past the point of no return and the pair can no longer separate to stop it), which in turn is the power Moebius used to create Aionios (by bringing the two worlds as close together as possible, resulting in the occasional "leak" that results in annihilation).
There's a lot of room to speculate around the black fog, but there are also a lot of clues scattered around that combine to form the various theories that exist.
YoukaiSlayer posted...
I don't accept that. I didn't free them so they could come to terms with their own death. That's so f***ing sad and s***ty.
Even if Aionios weren't destroyed, though, they'd still have died. All that work you put into getting Zeon his potatoes? He's 10th term and will be dead in less than a year. Isurd finally learned to trust his lieutenants enough to not mire them down in bureaucracy? One of them will be taking over his position when he dies next year. Valdi? He's finally free to make new robot friends for a whole four more years.
Sure, you can say that they've left legacies and whatnot, but every single person that was freed from the flame clock will be dead within 10 years, and many of them much sooner than that. Virtually every one of those colonies is going to fall to ruin after being abandoned because there aren't enough people left to maintain them (bearing in mind that the Castle isn't going to be sending replacements) and the survivors gather together in a desperate attempt to make enough babies to avoid extinction (the oldest of which will be around 4-5 when the last of the original adults die, if we assume that nobody reproduces before 14-15). The only chance of passing anything on is to become assimilated by the City, which gives them the opportunity to have a kid, but really not much else, and whatever they achieved as a colony is going to be largely irrelevant in the face of the City having already done it.
Quite simply, there is no future for Aionios without Moebius supplying a steady stream of new people. The paradigm Z established means - probably deliberately - that it's all but impossible to get a self-sustaining population going. It is bleak, so as terrible as it seems to willingly wipe it all out for the sake of recreating a world free of Moebius, that really is the only way people can actually be granted the freedom to live their lives as they want to. Our role throughout the story and side quests is to give people the chance to enjoy a small fraction of that freedom before their rapidly-approaching demise, which primes them to want it enough to overcome the fear that gave rise to Moebius in the first place.
YoukaiSlayer posted...
Honestly continuing to even think about the game is just depressing me.
That's understandable. It's a profoundly depressing setting and it doesn't sugarcoat the ending to make it happy enough to offset that. You actually have to dig to find the happiness and hope that the party's victory brings, and even then, it's not without its costs (including splitting up the absolute best party dynamic and chemistry I've ever seen in a game) and it's not a guaranteed improvement. But it's there, and to accuse the game of just shoehorning a sad ending in for feels points does it a pretty profound disservice. It's significantly more layered than that and the sad aspects are completely consistent with the details of the story as presented. You may not want a sad story, and in that case it may not be the game you need right now, but that's a matter of personal preference, not a failure on the game's part.
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