Revelations from Save the Queen

[Anonymoose]

This would cause a single split in the timeline, and this is what the Exarch successfully did.

This is one of the solutions on my table, as well; driven mostly by the name of the dungeon The Twinning. Crystal twinning is what happens when an inverted lattice grows through the main crystal, which one might posit is a metaphor the new timeline growing out of the old as much as it is a simple reference to "there's (at least the illusion of, if not forsooth) two Crystal Towers now".

I do think Alexander's rules are still in play. <...> Even in the Alexander questline itself, Dayan implies that while time should have a single flow from past to future, it could be changed and there was a risk of it happening due to the events of that storyline. I interpret that to mean that if someone has traveled to the past, although their actions are ideally integrated into the one "always happened" version of events, time is destabilized for as long as they remain there because there is a risk they will create an irreconcilably changed version of events.

I think each time we have this debate, it's mostly the same debate in a different form, lol.

Here's what drives it for me: A game is made by a team and the lore, one component of that team, is there to help it be engaging and immersive. It the choices are "break the lore" or "be hamstrung by the lore", most directors and writers will break it. However, that comes at a cost to engagement and immersion, which may shake the connection between player and world and hurt retainment. Ergo, it's in the team's best interest to cooperate and compromise, and it's clear that the team of FFXIV often tries their best to do just that. But if push comes to shove, "lore" will lose to "cool".

The first step is figuring out if that's what's likely to have happened. The fall of Dalamud; the identity of Allag; the contemporary zeitgeist of Eorzea's technology, the way aether works; the way primals work; the Ascians; how jobs fit into the world; astral, umbral, Light, and Darkness; Garlean history. All of these things have been touched by "cool" demanding lore transform [that's not how this works] into [it has just been discovered that this is how it actually works].

I suspect that is the case here. Yoshida has already confirmed that they didn't know any of this was going to happen when they introduced the Warriors of Darkness, which is when Alexander was being rolled out, as well. That makes it likely that this time travel stuff has priorities rooted in making a cool story that'll sell well: too much of anything is bad, the Light isn't "good" because it's Light. On a functional level, they needed that 100 year gap for the sake of the map as much as they needed that reversal of astral and umbral for the sake of telling that story.

So therefore I end up operating under the pretense of "old versus new" - how does "what it was" become "what it actually is"? And the discrepancy between Alexander's themes and Shadowbringers really leaps out at me because Ishikawa wrote both. It seems like there should be some sort of shared epistemology between them, but where is it?

But I digress. Because historically Final Fantasy has never made much sense, especially during the final hour or two.

Dayan says that ultimately Alexander's decision was in faith because it couldn't actually see what was beyond the Warrior of Light existence, which is one thing they could use to make sense of this. One could claim Alexander couldn't see beyond the Rift shenanigans employed by the Exarch, but then you need to close the instability somehow.

I interpret Dayan as saying that it was all hypothetical; the 4D block of time was set in stone, from the death of their friends to Alexander then traveling back in time so that Mide and Dayan can become their own ancestors. If one changes the 4D block, so much aether is consumed that it makes it not worth it to do so. The existence of Alexander's ability to rewrite time is itself a paradox - it has the ability to conceive of and create the ideal world, can't use it without damaging the world beyond its possibility to be ideal. That point in history was the most unstable because moment Alexander comes into existence is the moment from which any use of Alexander at any other point in history stems, even if it "predates" it. (Which is precisely why merely going into the Crystal Tower and breaking the Tycoon "right now" in theory shouldn't preclude it's use "anywhen else" if certain other moments are properly exploited.)

But Alexander ensured the closure of the loop which precluded that possibility, and in so doing, any version of history where it did not lock itself in its own anti-paradox prison loop was erased, the same way G'raha thought he would be erased and doesn't understand why he isn't and questions whether the future he was sent from is erased.

One could try to claim that Mezaya was born after Alexander's earliest appearance, but before its summoning, and its summoning was before the Warrior of Light made time "blurry" for it. She thus fits into a gap that is set in stone and can be seen. Mikoto, meanwhile, exists on the threshold of allegedly-shifting time, which is harder to explain. What if she was sitting on the couch reading a magazine one day and was like, "Guys, the Eighth Umbral Era is about to... Huh, wait. Never mind!"