Endwalker's story had me, but lost me. Ethical issues especially (spoilers)

[KizuyaKatogami]

About blanked Empathy and saving Ancients. We ARE saving them! Always and ever. Cause we ARE them, minus Creation magic and god complex.

And to drive point home with Garlean parallels. Saving Garleans doesn't mean that we will build an airship and go fly to bomb some beast tribes. "Cause it's The Garlean Way!". Saving the Garlean People does not mean that I'm fine with them rebuilding world conquering Empire.

Same thing with Ancients. It's their culture and creation magic that goes the way of Dodo. And about the culture if we can get our hands on records I'm all for preserving those. What else really was lost with Sundering? And culturally it appears Sundering was only positive. If one goes by Hythlos monologue about shark monsters Ancient society is bit Creatively taped out.

@LittleArrow
I'd add that Alpha is inheritor of Omega. Thus making that Omicrons dodged the Oblivion also for now. Thier form is completely different, but self-enchanting was always their thing.

We aren’t the ancients though. We’re broken fractions of them.Even Hydar=elyn herself doesnt consider the sundered the same. She uses the term "last of my kind." Culturally the sundering was good? The sundering wasn’t good in any way. Even the devs said this in ShB that the sundering was very much a bad thing. The sundering resulted in people being literally split apart from themselves, losing their memories, their loved ones, everything. As far as eventually killing themselves, for all we know, if they ever did reach perfection on the star, they could’ve eventually travelled to another one to repeat the same process and help that star thrive and prosper as well. There’s a whole lot of headcanon going on here, especially relating it to Meteion’s final dungeon. Like someone else mentioned it’s basically Minority Report.

[Slatersev]

We aren’t the ancients though. We’re broken fractions of them.Even Hydar=elyn herself doesnt consider the sundered the same. She uses the term "last of my kind." Culturally the sundering was good? The sundering wasn’t good in any way. Even the devs said this in ShB that the sundering was very much a bad thing. The sundering resulted in people being literally split apart from themselves, losing their memories, their loved ones, everything. As far as eventually killing themselves, for all we know, if they ever did reach perfection on the star, they could’ve eventually travelled to another one to repeat the same process and help that star thrive and prosper as well. There’s a whole lot of headcanon going on here, especially relating it to Meteion’s final dungeon. Like someone else mentioned it’s basically Minority Report.

That's even more of a headcanon then the original post.

[Iscah]

My own thoughts in Elpis were based around my understanding of how time travel works in this game: it's a stable loop unless the traveller's actions break it. Breaking the loop locks the traveller into the new timeline they have created, while the old one remains in place – but they cannot return to it.

At least that was my understanding for G'raha's timeline-breaking trip, but then he has a time machine that moves permanently to a place in time, while Elidibus's time portal is perhaps more tethered in our specific timeline as a way back from wherever... not that I considered this at the time. So my line of thinking as I entered Elpis was "I'd better not break anything or I'll never be able to go back".

Either way, as shown by the side story confirming that the Eighth Calamity timeline does not unravel but continues to exist, all the talk in Shadowbringers about unwriting or overwriting the bad timeline was speculative. It does not cease to be. Creating a better alternative timeline does not undo the suffering of the bad one, just creates a second alternative alongside it.

We would doom our own timeline by never returning to it with the answer of how to halt the Final Days, and we would not actually save the ancient world from its suffering either. Our mere existence guarantees the reality of everything that happened in the timeline that leads to our life thus far.

And ultimately, the thing we would have to do to prevent the Final Days and create this hypothetical alternate timeline would be stopping Meteion from delivering her report and fleeing. If we didn't see that happen then we would not learn what we have to do to save the present. But until it happens in the past, we don't know that we need to stop it – and in fact had an inadvertent hand in causing it by tracking down Meteion when she was trying to hide.

And whether or not we'd return to our future is a tossup. Actually, I can't remember how we did that in the first place. All the technology needed to send us back in time... we didn't exactly stick it in our pocket and take it with us. How did we leave Elpis?

Seems to be some kind of magick by Elidibus – maybe using a different mechanism to the "time machine" even though it's still in the Crystal Tower? We're not travelling in the tower like G'raha did, but creating a portal through the mirror... which G'raha could do to send us across the rift, but not through time. Maybe Elidibus figured out a different way of configuring it?

Anyway, assuming it created a sort of fixed portal to that location, we apparently just returned to our entry point and went back through it.

His soul and memories came back with us to our timeline, he didn't end up back in the other branched path, so it does show that they can end up in a different timeline. Though I suppose that could be explained away due to him being in the crystal.

The Source and First are not branched timelines, even though they are two copies of the same original world. They are still physically linked, as seen in the other timeline where they were rejoined, destroying the First and severely damaging the Source by the effects of its stagnant aether.

The Source and First together (along with all of the other shards) are part of a single timeline. G'raha's actions in travelling back from future to present created a split in this whole timeline to create a version of events where the Source and First are both saved instead of both doomed.

On a related note, the Exarch is not "the First's counterpart" to the G'raha we woke up in the tower in 5.3, but from the other Source's future. His actual counterpart (as Ardbert was to us) will still be out there somewhere in the First, unknown and irrelevant to the story.