Tales From the Shadows Updated (SPOILERS ABOUND)

[Yuella]

Doe't XI have alt timelines and traveling through them in more recent xpacs?

Wings of the Goddess is the time travelling expansion. It dealt with the Crystal War (pre-vanilla) where we (the playable races) beat Shadowlord's army. The expansion actually implied that the Shadowlord would've won if we had not interfered in Wings of the Goddess.

[LineageRazor]

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

The impending death of the Flash player will make it easier to escape the Homestuck. ;_;

I'm glad they're gonna rebuild. But the rebuilding seems to have been something that didn't result from their time travel efforts, so it begs the question of "Couldn't we have just been doing that before?" [/hb]

Well, to be fair, the fact that hope exists is attributable to almost literally a deux ex machina - a dead dragon god unexpectedly came to life and offered to help out. That's not something they could have been working toward, because almost nobody even knew Middy COULD come to life.

The sundered ascians they raise from soul shards are from shards of Ascians who are tempered and predisposed to go along with the convocation.

Emet mentions that while they PREFER to use Ascian convocation soul shard bearers, they don't always. Anyone at all can be raised to be an Ascian - including, theoretically, a bearer of Azem's shard. Now, actually getting that rapscallion to cooperate with their nefarious plans might be another story, since do-goodery seems to be baked in pretty deep...

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.

They could always go the XI route - an infinite fractalling multiverse, but one in which the vast majority of timelines are "incorrect" and fade away (or, as was the case in XI, messily devoured by Atomos). Only "sturdy" timelines survive, and we've now been assured that the Exarch's former home is one such sturdy timeline.

Wings of the Goddess is the time travelling expansion. It dealt with the Crystal War (pre-vanilla) where we (the playable races) beat Shadowlord's army. The expansion actually implied that the Shadowlord would've won if we had not interfered in Wings of the Goddess.

More specifically, the Shadowlord only lost because Altana herself stepped in and arranged for him to lose. The resistance members of that now-lost timeline (a stalemate against the Shadowlord), led by Lilith, called BS on the fact that all of their sacrifices and hard-won victories were being rewarded with a one-way trip to Atomos's stomach, and used time travel to try to reestablish their timeline as the dominant one. Their world was a crapsack one, but it was a world they'd shed enough blood and tears for that they rebelled against the idea that a goddess's whim had doomed them all, even if the world that replaced it was a better, more peaceful one. (Though, that peacefulness would come back to bite Altana hard come "Rhapsodies of Vana'diel", when the peace allowed the Cloud of Darkness to encroach.)

Much like this case, that story had a happy-ish ending in which it's implied that Lilisette's departure to the other timeline (to take up Lilith's mantle after her defeat) would cause that timeline to become a stable, alternate timeline safe from Atomos's hunger. (Just why her presence there stablized the timeline was never really made clear.)