Lore Book Revelations

[Grayve]

Timetravel, including Echo based time travel, confuses me. I need charts, so I am rather glad this isn't still in the game.

As an aside, If anyone has a chart or diagram explaining the Alexander time travel, please link it... I still don't understand what happened, to whom, and when.

[Fenral]

Cilia broke this down pretty well in the patch thread, but I can flatten it into a line for you.

1) Some thousands of years ago, a clan of Au Ra is formed by a young male and female who emerge from a metal giant.

2) A few years earlier than the present, their descendants (including Mide and Dayan) attempt a summoning with assistance from Travanchet. It fails, Dayan is consumed, and the sole survivor is Mide.

3) Just before the present day, Mide contacts the Illuminati, who appear to be working based entirely on a prophecy that spells out exactly how events will play out. They succeed in summoning Alexander.

4 / 2) Many raid bosses later, the WoL, Mide, and co. travel back in time with Alexander to Point 2. The Alexander that appeared at that time was actually the one summoned in the present. The "prophecy" Quickthinx was following was actually a record of your raid progress so far.

5) Alexander Prime is defeated, and Mide is trapped along with Dayan in the core. Alexander declares the world doesn't need it to exist, and opts to erase itself from existence by freezing itself in a single moment in time. Why Mide and Dayan need to be sealed along with him is never really explained, but as it turns out...

6 / 1) Alexander does need them to exist after all. It sends them back into the past, to found the clan that would one day birth themselves, so that they may initiate the loop that ends with Alexander's summoning prevented.

(And that's without going into the other mini-loop that takes place during the Alexander Prime boss itself, where completing Alexander's trial during that boss fight is what allows you to break free of the trap that would have kept you from fighting it.)

Basically, it all happened already, with no definite beginning or end, in a complete f[kupo] you to laws of causality, and the ultimate goal of Alexander was to prevent its own existence.

[Cilia]

Timetravel, including Echo based time travel, confuses me. I need charts, so I am rather glad this isn't still in the game.

As an aside, If anyone has a chart or diagram explaining the Alexander time travel, please link it... I still don't understand what happened, to whom, and when.

This is kind of difficult to follow because, as Quickthinx says, time is a closed circle. You have to get used to fluidity in the flow of time instead of thinking of it as a one-way street. Anyone who has played BlazBlue can get it pretty easily, but it follows like this:

1. At an unknown point in the distant past, Alexander spits out Mide and Dayan. They return to Othard, found the Hotgo tribe, and live out their lives. The idea (legend) of Alexander is passed down in the tribe.

2. Inspired by their ancestors' tales, near past Mide, Dayan, and the others summon Alexander using Travanchet's horn as a catalyst. Things go awry: Dayan is absorbed by Alexander, the other Auri treasure hunters die, and Mide seals Alexander in the lake. (Truth: this wasn't Alexander's summoning, but Roundrox using Alexander's time warp function to return us to that fateful day. The Auri treasure hunters are killed by the on-board Illuminati, and Schrodinger knocks Backrix' journal chronicling A1-A10 from his hands, tumbling to the ground with it before we're warped back to the present. Past Quickthinx gets ahold of Schrodinger, whom he renames Shanoa, and the journal, which he uses as a guide to set up the events of A1-A10.)

3. A1-A10 play out, leading to 2.

4. Upon reaching the core of Alexander, Quickthinx traps us in a time bubble and forces Alexander to cast Judgment on us. We're saved at the last second and go on to face Alexander Prime.

5. After proving our worthiness by surviving Alexander Prime's Divine Judgment, he creates portals that send four party members back to 4 so we can save ourselves. (Alternate timeline: we die from a time paradox. We always survived Divine Judgment, because otherwise we wouldn't be there to have Divine Judgment passed on us. Time travel is funny that way.) Alexander Prime is successfully defeated.

6. Mide throws herself into Alexander's core to shut him down, allowing 1 to happen above. Alexander seals himself outside of spacetime.

It's all one big closed circle - there is no beginning or end. The events of Alexander play out in an infinitely recurring loop, constantly spiraling in on itself. It's a temporal singularity - everything within the loop has to happen, because it already has. We're just actors on a stage, unknowingly performing the same worthless comedy show over and over and over and over and over and over...

Put as simply as it can be, Alexander's Legend -> Alexander's Summoning -> Alexander (Raid) -> Alexander's Legend, ad infinitum.

(Yes, this means that Alexander essentially created himself and that Mide and Dayan are their own distant ancestors. The only other alternative is to believe that there is a "Time Zero" that Alexander originated from, but... it would have to be outside of observable time, and now we're getting really hypothetical in something that's already highly hypothetical to begin with.)

The Echo is something entirely different. With the Echo we can observe others' memories, but not interfere with them. The one exception seems to be Cid's goggles, but I have no idea how or why that single event is an exception. /shrug Even if you could interfere with the past, it would ultimately change nothing since doing so would create a temporal paradox a la not surviving Divine Judgment / failing to save your past self.

[Belhi]

The final truth of Alexander is pretty full on. He is probably the first primal we have faced which we genuinely couldn't have beaten if it had seriously wanted us to dead. It is extremely fortunate that the purpose for existence essentially decreed that it must remove itself from the timestream. Its also the first primal I think we have fought that help us beat it.

[TinyRedLeaf]

Well, to be sure, Alexander's "Gordian knot" — his time paradox which, in this case, allows him to remove himself from the timeline — is possible if one accepts there's only a single timeline. From there comes the assumption that everything in the future must have been caused by something in the past.

If this were a reality that allows multiple, tangential timelines to exist, who knows how many alternative realities are possible?

After all, we now know there used to have been as many 13 Shards of the Source. Technically speaking, we do have a multiverse within the reality that is FFXIV. And, technically, that would also mean that as many as 13 different space-time realities are possible.

Thankfully, we don't have to deal with that mind-exploding possibility, because it seems time flows in a single direction and at the same pace for all 13 shards and the source.

[LineageRazor]

Thankfully, we don't have to deal with that mind-exploding possibility, because it seems time flows in a single direction and at the same pace for all 13 shards and the source.

Well, I'm not so certain that this is true. Dialog from the closing cutscenes from Alexander indicate that he examined many different timelines before deciding that the best one was one in which he sealed himself away. The implication is that he had the ability to NOT choose the timeline we know, if he had deemed another one superior - that he had the means to set us upon whatever track he deemed best, and could, essentially, decide which future is going to be the "real" future.

Of course, Alexander DID make a decision, and the timeline we witnessed reflected that decision, so it's impossible to know whether Alexander ACTUALLY changed anything in the past, or instead simply fulfilled his predetermined role in it. It's seriously implied, however, that Alexander had a choice in the matter. Things turned out the way they did because he willed them to, and that he COULD have willed otherwise.

From a logical standpoint, it doesn't make much sense, to be sure. But, hey, this is Final Fantasy - logic doesn't have to play a role!

[Cilia]

While it's true that Alexander seems to have the ability to reconfigure the timeline (you stop him from doing so by going back to save your past self), whether or not he can ever succeed without causing a time crash is unknown. Everything in the time loop(s) surrounding Alexander had to happen... because it already has. Long before we even set foot in Alexander, we had already defeated him... because had we not, we would not be setting foot in him.

Not only does this make Quickthinx' arrogant belief that he had been "chosen by the future" doubly hilarious, it also makes Alexander somewhat pitiable because he literally cannot do anything that would violate the temporal loop(s) he exists in. It is somewhat implied that Alexander could have changed the timeline, but if we're to follow causality to its logical extreme doing so at all could have made his existence nullified... unless he had an observer, or calculated his actions so precisely so that even if he, say, stopped Bahamut he'd still be summoned 2 years later in the Hinterlands. The aether problem could easily be solved by traveling to the (a) future, loading up, and then returning to the past. Yes it would create a paradox, but if Alexander really can alter the time stream... aether should be a nonissue. And here I thought he was smart.

(Given Alexander himself seems to be an observer, though... well, I dunno. But it's time travel - wonky as all hell because time travel doesn't exist and therefore doesn't have to obey logic. Best to stop thinking about it so hard before my brain starts hurting.)

While we do have a sort of multiverse, it's more like... parallel worlds. Not a multiverse per sé, just alternate timelines that diverged at some point in the past (circa 10,000 years if I remember right). Sure would have been great if we could ask Alexander about that point in time... you know, instead of the cryptic and biased shit we get from Hydaelyn and the Ascians...

Err... wasn't this supposed to be about the Lore Book, not a treatise on time travel?

[Grayve]

*snip*

See? That's the stuff I mean. The confusion is real. How did we save ourselves? How was he summoned if the summoning we saw was only Alex transporting to the past? Who was the original summoners/creators of Primal Alexander? It makes no sense, because he had to already exist in the future to become a legend in the past...

EDIT: Not expecting an answer, as I understand ( I think) that its a temporal paradox, but it explains my point of why I don't like time travel in echos. Only rarely does time travel make logical sense, and the Alex story really destroys the suspension of my belief.

[Khalithar]

Snip

Doesn't everyone love how time travel makes a story so simple and easy to comprehend? /sarcasm

[LineageRazor]

Doesn't everyone love how time travel makes a story so simple and easy to comprehend? /sarcasm

So who wants a simple and easy-to-comprehend story? Not me! I LOVE time travel!