Quote Originally Posted by purgatori View Post
What I meant to say, and probably did not convey was a world in which all the shards have been rejoined into one world. As for Alexander, I have only done the one clear of the whole raid sequence and have not delved very deeply into the lore implications. I'm actually much more au fait with Nier/Drakengard lore than FFXIV, so that's the main angle I'm approaching it from. NieR can definitely accommodate multiple dimensions, but perhaps FFXIV cannot... Which would be fine, because, as I said, I would find that a somewhat uninteresting solution anyway.
A key point of time travel in the Alexander storyline is making sure history is kept on course and not derailed/altered by the goblins. Alexander itself seems to have some kind of overview of time (described like it's running a computer simulation, but it seems to have knowledge beyond what its summoners could give it) and decides on the correct course of action to create the best possible future.

It's a "stable time loop" story setup where traveling to the past and doing stuff there becomes part of the timeline and "always happened that way" - you don't actually alter events, just get a new understanding of what happened. This seems entirely at odds with the concept of a splitting multiverse.

(Again, for working Shadowbringers into this, I assume there must be a point where the timeline can't bend to accomodate the difference between what you previously knew to have happened and what is happening now - say, successfully averting a Calamity that you know is historical fact - and that paradox causes time itself to break into two separate paths: the one that led you here and the one resulting from your actions. No further splits are possible because you're now on a different path with no knowledge of how it will play out, and can't create another inconsistency.)