Tales From the Shadows Updated (SPOILERS ABOUND)

[Anonymoose]

tl;dr old man yells at cloud of darkness

For whatever it's worth, my issue with it isn't that 5.0's time travel doesn't make sense in a vacuum - the Y-branch is pretty simple. Granted, one hopes it is only a Y, in that case. An infinite fractalling multiverse renders our world (also its own shattered multiverse) not only one insignificant speck in a sea of infinite universal possibilities, but one could argue that it really means we abandoned "our world" to its death to live in a preferable nearby alternative and pretend it's ok because our personal story of it is nice and it works out for us. Moreover, since there would be infinite worlds within which the existence of the Tycoon can never be fully erased, and thus is always potentially accessible, nothing we ever defeat is ever truly dead, and nothing we do cannot be undone, since it could just as easily come back from one of the millions of branches where it still exists. So yes, let us hope it's a Y.

(Recall that I was open to the two-world version based on the FR name for the Twinning being a play on crystal macles; one crystal's inverted lattice growing through itself.)

My issue is that there's no explanation for the seeming contradiction (or at least awkward jibe) in the cosmology and epistemology of Final Fantasy XIV spacetime aetherophysics put forward by the Alexander arc. Except having a debate about that requires understanding different theoretical forms of time travel, which is where said debate always breaks down. Hell, the Terminator movies are all supposed to take place in the same franchise but all use different theories of time travel, lol. No sooner does Agents of SHIELD use the Alexander approach than does Infinity War use the Shadowbringers approach ... and then I think SHIELD goes back and ... undoes the rules from the ... look, the Quantum Realm is the Rift is what I'm saying, apparently.

Though one could argue that perhaps while the infinite branching multiverse is does not concretely exist, it exists as un-manifest potential within the Rift, where all time and space co-exist at once, and by breaking the rules of the Rift we break the rules of time and thus branch what is manifest - creating a two-world limit where we only DOUBLE the amount of things that can come back and bite us, again, lol.

I can't stress this enough - the people in the game (and now the side-story) also recognize that it's weird, lol. This is the same expansion that inverted everything we knew about elements to resolve a contradiction a tiny fraction of this fandom would have noticed. If it's a contradiction puzzle, I try to find and solve it. But if "don't think too hard about it" is the answer then I can set it aside.

Final Fantasy as a long, proud tradition of occasionally not feeling any pressure to explain what just happened.

(Still, I'm a little surprised G'raha didn't give his blood memories to his sleeping self, thus revealing that the timeline with the Eighth Umbral Era was averted from the start because time from a 4D perspective had already been changed and the memories were from a time that "never was" but we still had to live it out subjectively from a limited 3D perspective. Clearly he just does that "next year"...)