Lore Book Revelations

[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!

[Cilia]

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.

It's a causal paradox, specifically a bootstrap paradox.

As I explained earlier, the only way to make heads or tails of it is to assume there is a "Zeroth Loop" that we cannot observe where, say, the Auri treasure hunters really did summon Alexander, and the Illuminati later independently "refurbished" him, leading to the events of the raid. The Illuminati shoot the Auri treasure hunters in their confusion, and Backrix loses his footing, his journal tumbling to the ground without Schrodinger's influence. Past Quickthinx gets ahold of it. We genuinely proved ourselves worthy to Alexander, and after her sacrifice he takes pity on Mide and Dayan, releasing them in the distant past. With the knowledge of Alexander, his tale is passed down in the Hotgo tribe as legend until near-past Mide and Dayan try to summon him - however the time loop is now in effect, meaning Alexander now has to exist as a fixed entity in time. To this end he creates Schrodinger / Shanoa, an automaton cat he acts through that will nudge events to keep the loop perpetual.

In other words, the "Zeroth Loop" is a genuinely alternate timeline that may no longer exist because Alexander is self-observing. Since it exists outside of our ability to observe, such as it is, it's anyone's guess what the "Zeroth Loop" really was like and by extension how and when Alexander first came into existence. (This is all highly hypothetical, mind.)

Except for the "Zeroth Loop," we're all just actors on the stage, unwittingly performing the same worthless comedy show for eternity. And even if we did know, we still couldn't perform anything but that same worthless comedy show. Exactly when or how Alexander was first summoned nobody knows for sure since the "Zeroth Loop" cannot be observed by us, but the events surrounding Alexander are the way it had - well, has, I guess - to be... Can't turn out any other way.

I'm probably getting way more involved than you asked for, and for that, I apologize.

Side note: the Echo is not time travel, it's just the ability to dive into others' souls and view their memories.

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

I'm not a fan of it in particular, but I do enjoy how it makes me think. Usually it's just "bad guys are doing bad things, go stop them!" Here I'm having to actually think... if only a little. The first BlazBlue game ran heavily on a similar setup, and Sonic 06 had a big one as a part of the story, so it's not really anything new to me.

[Grayve]

*snip*

While fascinating, that only raises more questions. Specifically, if there is at least one 'alternate timeline', does that not mean there are more? And how does an 'alternate timeline' differ from an 'alternate dimension'? While I don't mind time travel stories, they need to establish the rules they work under, and stick to those rules. The Alex tale does not do the former, as far as I can tell. Did Alex kill (or let die) millions of alternate lives and worlds to calculate his results via alternate timelines? Did the WoL die over and over before the true ending happened? (if there are answers, please tell me... its questions like these that make me shove Alex into 'fun fights, but ignore the story' in my brain, unlike the rest of the games story.

And, yes, I know the Echo isn't time travel. Viewing the past is fine, but doing so and not being aware what you are viewing is the past is not. It only confuses the narrative, at least to me. Maybe playing through the events (of 1.0) made sense, but reading about them only makes me confused. Also, Echo with in an Echo just... makes even more confusion.