The Endless don’t make sense

Okay, I’ve been thinking about the Endless “aether vampire” thing lately bc of a fic I’m working on, and the whole thing just doesn’t add up. Here’s a thread.

First, I want to clarify: the Endless don’t use souls as an energy source. They use “lifeforce”, an alternate translation of the same term that was previously called “corporeal aether”. So no, they don’t “eat souls”. Souls are used in regulators to revive and empower living people. These are two different concepts. I can’t blame people for being confused since the localizers just randomly decided to use a different word all of a sudden, but tbh, the fact that they don’t use the word “souls” kind of should have been a hint?

With that out of the way…

Everything is made of aether. There was a whole Thing with teaching Zero that she could eat food instead of just absorbing it. Likewise Alxaal and Prishe are basically just Endless attached to electrope, yeah? And they can eat.

“But maybe human aether is the most efficient?” Well… I’m about to take a bit of a leap here, but I posit that it’s not.

In which me being an annoying vegan pays off

The Ea taught us that the laws of thermodynamics hold in the world of FFXIV.

Lah-laakh: The stars will continue to spread apart, as will their finite thermal energies.
Lah-laakh: Eventually, all heavenly bodies will grow cold and freeze. No new stars will be born, and the universe will enter unto an eternal ice age.

In the real world, it takes more energy to produce 100 calories of livestock meat than 100 calories of plants. This is because LIVESTOCK EAT PLANTS. You have to feed them before you can slaughter and eat them. The same principle should hold for aether, which we know is finite. Thus it should be massively inefficient to harvest human corporeal aether for the terminals that run the Endless.

In fact, because the Source is so aetherically dense, the aether of all humans on the remaining other shards should be dwarfed by the aether of non-human life on the Source alone.

So then why?

My hypothesis is this: The Endless were specifically designed to require human aether in order to force Sphene to enact worldmergers, thus preserving the Ninth at the cost of the other reflections.

Once they were safe from the Solstice, Calyx could then bust out a “brand new” method of harvesting aether from plants, rocks, sprites, weather idk, that would greatly extend the projected lifespan of the Endless and allow for greater capacity. Eventually they would become a combination of the Ea and the Nibirun: Living in Paradise, counting down the days until the universe runs out of aether.