Quote Originally Posted by lezard21 View Post
Time travel isn't real, there is nothing to understand. They can make up whatever rule they want, like you can only travel back in time to any Tuesday where a Loporrit used a green hat but not any other day. The thing is the bare minimum you have to do if you want to use a lazy plot advancing tool like time travel is to stay consistent to those rules you yourself established.

In ShB we have cat husband traveling back in time to avert the apocalypse. He stays in the past for 100 years and never once mentions the fact about going back to his time or being on a timer to fulfill his mission. After he succeeds he does mention that he is surprised he didn't poof into non existance and arrives to the conclusion that they created a separate timeline, while his own post apocaliptic timeline still exists somewhere.

Then in EW time travel is suddenly a 2-way rotating door but you can't remain in the past for too long and also also you can't change the past to create a separate timeline where the world didn't explode because uuuh..."hey mark, why are we using time travel in the plot again??" "Idk we needed an excuse to shoehorn more Emet Selch into the plot because twitter made a lot of yaoi with him".
No, in ShB, he never mentions about going back in his time because he wants to change the future - to avert the calamity. This is fully understood as creating a separate timeline - because the calamity that changed many lives and caused a shard to be rejoined never happened.

In the Endwalker timeline, the only main thing that changed is the events that led up to the Final Days. The Final Days itself never changed.
The way SE tells the story, Time travel really works in 2 ways. If you know about the butterfly effect, many small things can change the future. That's the multithread theory that doesn't agree with the story.

However, there's also the other theory that if a major event in the timeline doesn't change, the events that led up to it is inconsequential and falls within that timeline. This would be either the "converging point" or " pivot point". This pivot point would be the Final Days - as it pretty much leads to the sundering of everyone at that time. If that pivot point never changes, the future which leads to the present cannot change, and thus the timeline will remain stable. Thus, it leads to Hyadelyn to make sure she doesn't change anything that diverges the timeline to our present point. Hence, our timeline "converged" later on when we came back to the present. In reality, she simply lived through the time we traveled.

This also works inline with Hyadelyn's power - as her laws reside over stability. She could also forced a convergence and stabilized the timeline at the point of sundering too, and it makes sense that sundering actually merged the timelines together as it did a hard reset to the past.