Sundering stuff established in the Q&A

[Iscah]

In other words, Yoshi-P favors the idea of it being a stable time loop, and most of the in-game events do support this interpretation. Moreover, this would mean it's not the first loop, and it won't be the last. Stable time loops are eternal unless some external force swoops in to disrupt them. Makes one wonder just how many times the loop has repeated now. The entire system would essentially be consigned to it, as the loop was forced into being a necessity for Etheirys to survive.

This is all very wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey but the "loop" part of a stable time loop does not actually mean that events happen over and over.

The events form a loop in that every part of it relies on some other part supporting its existence, but it all happens along one timeline, and everyone and everything involved only experiences their role (or multiple roles at different points in their life) in the loop once. It all happens in a single pass chronologically, even though the movement of people around the timeline may be non-linear.

(In a story that is strictly a time loop model there is nothing that can be disrupted here. In this game's model, with the potential for time to be altered as in Shadowbringers, the disrupted sequence of events would likely spin off into an alternate timeline.)

It does result in a unsatisfying "where did ideas come from" question if knowledge gets passed from the future to the past and then relied upon in setting up that future, which is why I maintain in this case that we either shouldn't have spoken the whole truth, instead concealing the specific roles that the others would play, or that Venat should have lost her memory with the others.

Either of those paths would make her decisions (right or wrong) hers to make, but now we are faced with an awkward conundrum of responsibility where – on the assumption that she feels obliged to continue and not break the timeline as we described it – she basically has no say in any of the things she does. She is merely walking an ordained path that we enforced upon her by describing her own past actions.

Maybe she would have chosen to do the things anyway, but she never had the chance to consider it or even come up with the ideas independently.