Tales From the Shadows Updated (SPOILERS ABOUND)

[kujoestars]

I’m so glad to see that the doomed timeline isn’t meant to just fade out of existence quietly side-eyes Homestuck. Even though horrible things had happened, many lives were lost, and they won’t be the “real” timeline, it ties back in to the theme of man’s ability to endure and rebuild. Q~Q

It’s perfect closure for the Eighth Umbral Era, and I couldn’t be happier that SE decided to cap it off with the theme of hope. In this way, they are furthering hammering in the theme of how every little thing we do matters. We don’t have to be accomplished warriors or politicians or whatnot to be heroes. We don’t have to fight great wars. Just as long as we help out fellow man and work together to build a brighter future, we can turn things around and begin anew.

[Iscah]

Nice to get confirmation that the split timeline... well, is a split timeline, and that it's not unravelling.

From the picture of G'raha, we can see that his right hand isn't crystallised yet so maybe he only bonds to the tower just before he leaves, or at least it hasn't started "paying him back" yet and most of his visible state as the Exarch was directly the price of his time-travel trip, since it's indicated that he looked like that when he arrived.

Omega sounds like he's getting old and senile... I'm kind of disappointed that nobody ever found out he was still in there. I was hoping it would have been their key to finally working out how to utilise the rift. It also spoils my idea that an eventual Twinning (Hard) would involve finding him skittering around the Crystal Tower.

And for anyone fretting that it's only a happy ending until the Ascians get involved again... the reborn Warrior of Light can get involved again too. And humanity as a whole is a lot more aware of Ascian involvement than they have been in previous eras, too.

[Grimr]

/sigh With the eight umbral era not disappearing and the crystal tower remaining on the first seems to confirm my suspicions that the eight umbral calamity has not been averted. Two timelines can not exist together. Its a world of paradoxes. One timeline will take over the other.

If they had averted the eight umbra calamity, the tower would have gone back to erozea along with the scions. It is probably a different calamity altogether but it would facilitate the need to go back and avert it.

[Iscah]

/sigh With the eight umbral era not disappearing and the crystal remaining on the first seems to confirm my suspicions that the eight umbral calamity has not been averted. Two timelines can not exist together. Its a world of paradoxes. One timeline will take over the other.

If they had averted the eight umbra calamity, the tower would have gone back to erozea along with the scions. It is probably a different calamity altogether but it would facilitate the need to go back and avert it.

They're averting the Calamity by preventing it from happening in this version of the timeline, even though it will still happen in the other timeline. In fact, that split actually prevents a paradox, because we're not raising that issue of "travelling back to prevent a historical event, thus erasing the event from history and removing your motivation to time-travel in the first place". Here, because the two timelines co-exist, G'raha can be aware of what happened in one version of history while still being able to prevent it in the other.

There's no reason at all for the tower to vanish back to Eorzea - the whole point of the split timeline is that there will be no unravelling and no resetting. Once the two versions of time have diverged, they exist as they are. The tower is in Lakeland and it's staying there unless someone fires up the TARDIS engine again (which won't be happening because we broke it).

The whole point of this story seems to be to confirm the opposite of your suspicions: that the split does not need to be resolved and the two versions of the timeline will continue to co-exist, despite each being inaccessible and undetectable to the other.

It's worth pointing out that this story is set 200 years into the future of the other timeline. Unless their story is going to overwrite ours again, which would defeat the purpose of the whole exercise, then it has not happened to them yet even though their world exists far beyond the limits of our modern-day time bubble.

I'm fairly sure that this story is simply to clarify that the other timeline has not been destroyed and is not in a hopeless situation. While you can never say never in this story, I don't feel like we'll be hearing from them again.



Edit to add: If you're of the impression that the Eighth Calamity can't have been averted until we see the tower and the Scions returned to their original places, that was essentially a working theory at the time, based on an incorrect assumption of the consequences. The Exarch expected that a successful aversion of the Calamity would cause time to unwind and the tower to revert to its rightful place in future Mor Dhona - but then here we are in that unwanted paradox state, asking whether that would also undo the very work that lead to the Calamity being averted in the first place. Of course that didn't actually happen and the timeline split instead of being overwritten, so the final outcome is different.

[JeanneOrnitier]

I'm glad this means Midgardsormr is just sleeping after Omega raids and not gone. Hopefully we seem him again in our timeline soon.

This was a sweet story, although not my favorite of the bunch. I never considered what happened to the future Ironworks after they sent G'raha back. I'm glad they got a hopeful ending. Isn't hope very appropriate for ShB?

[Jonnycbad]

This reeks of Chrono Cross where there are two parallel dimensions that diverge from a singular point. I just hope we don't get Time Assassins that come to kill us to ensure their timeline where they were born actually becomes the dominant one.

[kujoestars]

snip

Gonna have to break this post apart because of character limit, but here goes:

That’s not how time travel works both by the consensus in the physics community (theoretically speaking, of course) and the game’s own darn rules established in the Alexander story (i.e. time travel can only occur as a result of a causal loop). But basically, you can’t actually change the future by changing the past. The only way you can travel through time is if you were meant to in the first place.

Maybe being a former Homestuck fan makes comprehending the concept of alt timelines resulting from time travel easier. But to some them up, in Homestuck there is an Alpha Timeline (i.e. the “real” timeline where everything happens as it “should”) and countless Doomed Timelines (i.e. things were not “supposed“ to happen this way due to a “bad” choice made by a Time Player, who all have the ability to time travel).

Homestuck had used a similar plotpoint somewhere in Act 3 where John was tricked into confronting his game world’s (fyi, Homestuck is about kids who play a game that destroy the world and forces them to create a new one in another plane known as Paradox Space before releasing it) Denizen, which are the giant NPC monsters inhabiting each player’s world. The result was that he was killed, which prompted Dave, his best friend and Knight of Time, to travel back to the point in time where he did not stop John from meeting Typheus.

[kujoestars]

There, he informed his past self of the Doomed John’s fate and thus Alpha Dave was able to convince John into reconsidering. Doomed Dave then merges with the sprite (i.e. the game’s magical guides that need to have an object or entity tossed into them), becoming Davesprite in order to continue assisting his Alpha counterpart and friends. Later on in the story, however, we learn that it was actually SUPPOSED to happen all along. Doomed John was not simply killed by Typheus; the Denizen was actually pleasant and simply told him about how his was not what’s “supposed” to happen. And so he was given two choices: He could live and allow everything to stagnate or he could die and ensure the Alpha Timeline continues on. John, dear boy he is, chose the latter, which prompted Doomed Dave to go back and ensure his Alpha self does not make the same mistake.

Of course, the difference between Homestuck’s doomed timelines and the one in XIV is that in Homestuck, doomed timelines ALL fade away, which also kills any survivors in them (although their ghosts are sent to an afterlife of sorts if they don’t find some way or transferring themselves to their Alpha selves). This is why Time Players often are warned of Bad Choices by coming across the corpse of a doomed self the moment they consider it; it’s Paradox Space’s way of ensuring the Alpha Timeline survives. This is also why the Beta Kids had MUCH FEWER doomed timelines than the Trolls did; Terezi being able to see what happens in the Kids’ future via a terminal means she could basically tell Dave exactly what he needs go do to avoid creating Dead Daves D34D D4V3S 4R3 TH3 3N3MY!

[kujoestars]

However, as the latest short story shows, the doomed timeline is able to continue existing and moving forward because there’s no force to prevent it from existing. Sending G’raha back simply caused it to become a branch in the timeline, which was speculated as a possibility both in the story and in-game (heck, the branch thing was emphasized in game because people were working for “a future they will never see” since it won’t change their situation at all. And there’s also the fact there isn’t some Greater Force(TM) to forcibly remove them like in Homestuck (which spends the majority of its time in the strange game/not-game world of Paradox Space).

Think of it like this diagram here:



I color-coded each timeline in addition to the “base” where things happened the same. In the base timeline, G’raha was snoozing in the Crystal Tower. That holds true for both timelines, so think of it as the “trunk” of this “tree”.

The branching point is whether or not the 8th Umbral Calamity occurred. For the doomed timeline, it came to pass and things progressed horribly, which leads to the red “branch”. Breaking off from that branch though is G’raha being eventually awakened and sent back to the trunk at a point well before the Calamity. From here come the events leading up to and continuing until the end of Shadowbringers, where G’raha ultimately merges his mind and soul with his past self, which then continues off on the green branch.

Not pictured is doomed timeline G’raha’s body being left in the First as a lovely statue, but it only serves to cement that everything is as it should be. Because you can’t remove the trunk without removing the branches. That’s Time Travel 101.

In other words, by Occam’s Razor, time travel can never change what has already occurred; only create a new outcome independent of the original. This is actually why the vast majority of time travel plots drive me nuts (including Terminator as much as I love the first two films), but thankfully 14 managed to cleanly avoid that bad trope.

So in any case, yes, while the Ascians sure still exist in the doomed timeline, it’s not our problem. All it means is that a multiverse exists.

Dang, never thought I’d end up talking about Homestuck in detail again anywhere, but I guess it’s true you can NEVER escape the Homestuck. u.u

[Rosenstrauch]

So in any case, yes, while the Ascians sure still exist in the doomed timeline, it’s not our problem.

So long as nothing happens to bring us there, at least. The WoL is usually not the sort to look the other way. Though saying that, I find myself imagining the bizarre scenario of the WoL traveling to the Eighth Umbral Astral Era timeline and discovering that our own future reincarnation was recruited by Emet-Selch and Elidibus to shore up their ranks.