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

[Iscah]

The use of creation magics to create creatures out of desires to follow fads, personal amusement, and advancement and then dress it up as good for the planet (and that the vetting process of the Convocation struck me as something that their culture thought was objective and rational while in truth was not) while admitting that said creations would gain souls beyond their control not deterring the readiness to delete said 'playthings'... That their role as stewards of the planet and god-like framing came across as both self-appointed and arrogant.

Souls are a plot oddity that needs further looking into - I'll be paying close attention on my second playthrough.

The short story "Through His Eyes" says that souls cannot be created but "spontaneously manifested within creatures that were born in accordance with the laws of nature [...] a gift from the star itself, long held to be impossible to recreate". Admittedly "long held" suggests that belief may have changed, but everything else points to it still being a fact and the phoinix's imbued soul being an accident.

Meanwhile in Elpis it's all about created beings and the small number of people experimenting with naturally breeding their plants and animals are shunted off to a side island we don't even visit in the course of the story.

Possibly the created beings are soulless but their offspring acquire souls, but I can't remember how it was talked about in the MSQ.

Though come to think of it, Alpha (and possibly Omega) seem to subvert the "only natural creatures can acquire souls" thing anyway. I'd say the ancients must be mistaken, but if they can see souls in the first place then it shouldn't be a mistake they can make.

Well we needed the information we gathered in Elpis. I am quite sure that the WoL themselves had thought that they would just observe there and seeing our reactions to Venats question we were not really at ease about telling them the truth. Only after Venat herself said that we should only worry about our future and not their present did we tell them about it all.

What could we have done otherwise? Stumble around Elpis on our own in the hope of finding the answers? The deeper investigation about Hermes and Meteion only started after we told them about the future and that we somehow were send on Elpis.

I have to say that I am surprised we willingly gave them the entire story when only mildly pressed for it.

At least with my mindset of "must not break anything", I would have thought it sufficient to explain that yes, I was from the future as Venat had deduced, and I was here because the world of my time was facing a disaster that we understood had happened before in the past, and were hoping to pick up some clues about how the people of that time had dealt with it.

I'm not so sure that makes sense, given our timeline is causally dependent on G'raha's timeline, and in that timeline Venat would now be extremely confused about why she has a bunch of memories that no longer align with reality and are causally impossible.

Rosenstrauch did a good job of explaining the larger picture of it, but the simple answer to this is - yes, Venat/Hydaelyn in the Eighth Calamity timeline would see her champion die without ever completing the time loop and fulfilling the purpose she hoped they would.

Her confusion is inevitable, but if our telling "the whole story" in Elpis included talking about the events of Shadowbringers and averting a foretold calamity, she may be able to deduce that she has ended up on the wrong side of the split timeline and therefore there is nothing strange about events not lining up. This really just means she needs to make a new plan and doesn't need to wait for circumstances to match what she previously anticipated.

What happens after that is entirely speculatory and not really relevant to making sense of the plot in this timeline.

...the story never bothers to establish any internal logic suggesting a single derivatively-branching connected timeline, nor that the two are connected on the same branch, rather than, say, the concept of wholly parallel worlds.

I don't think the story needs to "establish" that the two timelines are on the same branch. That seems like the basic assumption to me, while the idea of them splitting into fully parallel worlds seems odd and much harder to reconcile with the known story.

G'raha travels back in time along a single timeline (as he knows it) and his actions cause a second timeline to branch off from the first one. It seems far more natural to picture that as a branching structure than a duplication of everything.

And just so we're clear: I have no interest in continuing this conversation further. Talking about time travel gives me a headache—and it's not because time travel itself is hard to understand. It really isn't. No, it's explaining it that's the painful part. Makes me feel like I—an American mutt who only understand English—am trying to speak Indonesian to Martians. All of this is a spectacular waste of everyone's time if we have a communication breakdown.

It's a good explanation. And yes, it's incredibly hard to put the concepts in words from the very beginning and not have people misinterpreting through their own different starting point of understanding.

[Veloran]

I don't think the story needs to "establish" that the two timelines are on the same branch. That seems like the basic assumption to me, while the idea of them splitting into fully parallel worlds seems odd and much harder to reconcile with the known story.

G'raha travels back in time along a single timeline (as he knows it) and his actions cause a second timeline to branch off from the first one. It seems far more natural to picture that as a branching structure than a duplication of everything.

The nature of G'raha's time travel, that is to say going through the interdimensional rift, would suggest from the start that we're dealing with parallel timelines and not divergent timelines. After all with both Alexander and Elpis, events are ultimately causal loops - the future remains completely unchanged from the time travel, or more accurately it was always this way, which was not the case with G'raha.

[Iscah]

The nature of G'raha's time travel, that is to say going through the interdimensional rift, would suggest from the start that we're dealing with parallel timelines and not divergent timelines.

The rift does not take G'raha from one timeline to another. It takes him from the Source to the First, both of which exist within a single timeline.

Having originated from copies of the sundered original world, the Source and First (and all the other shards) superficially look like different timelines, but they are not. They are physically linked and the whole basis of the Eighth Calamity is that they are rejoined to each other.

The plot of Shadowbringers is entirely about G'raha coming back from the future of the Source-and-First where things went badly for both worlds together, and instead creating a new branch of time where both worlds are saved together.

It's correct that the other instances of time travel are causal loops, but that just tells us that it's possible for causal loops to form, while G'raha demonstrates that it is also possible to break that causal loop if you change the right thing in the past - and the short story An Unpromised Future confirms that its outcome is two lasting halves of a split timeline.

Even back in Alexander, it's acknowledged that there was a risk of time being altered. It just didn't happen that time because we stopped the Illuminati before they could do so. For the first part of the story they were deliberately repeating the "prophesised" events recorded in the journal, so they weren't interested in doing anything that would break the loop at that point.

[Veloran]

The rift does not take G'raha from one timeline to another. It takes him from the Source to the First, both of which exist within a single timeline.

I'm aware. But, the combination of the two forms of travel seems like it resulted in a completely different form of time travel from what is normally displayed in the story, where there is otherwise one single timeline and all backwards time travel merely results in a causal loop. This appears to be why the Ascians take such an interest in G'raha, because to their knowledge his form of time travel shouldn't be possible. Since the Interdimensional Rift is something that has historically connected parallel worlds in FF, it may be G'raha did more than just hopping a shard and going back in time.

[Iscah]

Since the Interdimensional Rift is something that has historically connected parallel worlds in FF, it may be G'raha did more than just hopping a shard and going back in time.

That's not anything that is suggested within the story, though, so it sounds like an overreach of speculation on your part rather than a failure of the writers to explain their mechanism.

Within the story, what we are told is that the rift connects the shards. G'raha uses it to jump between shards. Claiming he did more than that is an idea that has not been hinted by the story and therefore does not need to be explained.

Expecting them to rule out additional unhinted possibilities is like complaining that the author of a novel doesn't mention "there were not any elephants in the room" when there was no reason to have assumed there were elephants.

[Veloran]

That's not anything that is suggested within the story, though, so it sounds like an overreach of speculation on your part rather than a failure of the writers to explain their mechanism.

Within the story, what we are told is that the rift connects the shards. G'raha uses it to jump between shards. Claiming he did more than that is an idea that has not been hinted by the story and therefore does not need to be explained.

Expecting them to rule out additional unhinted possibilities is like complaining that the author of a novel doesn't mention "there were not any elephants in the room" when there was no reason to have assumed there were elephants.

Neither a branching timeline nor parallel worlds have really been mentioned in the story either. Time travel as a whole is a very underdeveloped idea despite it's frequent use.

[Lauront]

Personal distaste of time travel aside, this is an interesting read.

[NautiaHadas]

Frankly, I wish there was something to do about it but I accept the story going like that in a fatalistic kind of way, what with time travel being such a delicate thing to do in story writing.

If there's one thing to get mad about for me, it's the copper bell mine incident. Let's just say that putting down a slave revolt wasn't too high on my list of things I wanted to do.

[Rulakir]

Personal distaste of time travel aside, this is an interesting read.

"Assuming this, that the future can not be undone no matter what, that means G'raha's initial world still exists. And it still has Emet and Elidibus in their world working to usher in a rejoining, except there is no WoL left to stop them, and Hydaelyn is too weak to combat them at this point. Which means, assuming things don't go terribly terribly wrong, they will succeed in their plans. This has a lot of potential outcomes."

It's a sad state of affairs when the only potential 'happy' ending for the Ancients is one in which the Ascians are ultimately successful in their Ardor only to still be ignorant of Meteion and both Hermes' & Venat's treachery. It's almost like EW was constructed to ensure that no positive outcome for them is possible. As a result, I sincerely hope we do not visit the Crystal Exarch's original timeline because we already know exactly how that would go.

[Absimiliard]

Is it really that bad of an outcome? Successful Rejoining isn't going to allow the Final Days to resume, as Zodiark would still be alive. Besides that, there's all the experiences from their time as sundered. The newly unsundered Ancients would no doubt be very different from what they were, with much stronger wills and significantly altered outlooks from what they had before. They could even restore the world's depleted aether reserves in exactly the same way they had cultivated it in the past. Sounds like a pretty good outcome to me.

There's really no reason to care about the other worlds in the universe. Only "our" star is really relevant. In the unlikely event that other life-bearing worlds still exist out there? Well, sucks to be them.