Endwalker Story sucked and it's time to admit it

[Iscah]

You are only counting Graha's time travel as the only factor that changed the future, but us going to Elpis also changes the future.

I disagree on that, on two levels.

Firstly, I prefer to see it as that there was no prior WoL-less version of Elpis. It just always happened the way we saw it, with a time traveller appearing and sparking the whole thing off.

Secondly, even if it does require a "first time around" before the WoL changes it to the current version of events, my interpretation of the timeline (Y-shaped diverging at Shadowbringers) still means that there is no period where our WoL does not exist to make that trip and set things in motion. Elpis is still in the pre-diverged part of the timeline and still only requires one visitor from somewhere in the future.

Additionally, it is indicated that our trip to Elpis has already happened before we personally travel there to experience it. Hydaelyn is already aware of the time loop and its looming resolution, and Argos already trusts us.

This time loop cannot exist in a world where we are dead at any point before the end of the convergence.

No it doesn't. As long as there is a point at some time in the future where we are available to go back to Elpis, we can go back.

There is never a time when we are dead in both timelines, and even if there was, our continued involvement in Elpis would prove that there must be a third undiscovered timeline out there as well.

While their histories are 99% the same, they are not 100% the same by dint that we travel to Elpis, at the same time where we would be dead in the 8UC.

Only by your theory.

By mine, they are 100% the same. They are a single event.

[WellGramarye]

Trimmed for space

Additionally, it is indicated that our trip to Elpis has already happened before we personally travel there to experience it. Hydaelyn is already aware of the time loop and its looming resolution, and Argos already trusts us.

Bolded needs in game corroboration and proof. She only asks about time travel because she uses the logic of "1, you have a spell on you only I can cast, 2 I've never met you, thus you must come from my future." Until we tell her information, she has no prior knowledge of us individually.

As for the rest:
IMO, this time travel logic doesn't hold up and becomes a large grandfather paradox, which doesn't work with the few established time travel consequences we've seen so far.

So far the Time Travel Logic has been thus:

A. Graha proves that you CAN change the past, and significantly so. It proves that actions in the past, change the future. This is fact.

B. The side story and Elidibus' warning prove that IF you change that past at crucial junctions and/or significant ways, then the future you return to will not be the same one you left from. This is fact.

C. Venat tells us this:

This tells us that, while we can avoid making grand sweeping changes in time, that small actions will still change the future. We see this with Venat making decisions based on what we told her and the information she learns from us.

I have more I wanna say but at the moment, I'm quite tired. I'll catch back up later.

Trimmed

Thank you for taking the time to make the image. I'm not ignoring your contributions, to this discussion, but you are making the same case as Iscah, so I will mostly be replying in that direction.

[Iscah]

Bolded needs in game corroboration and proof. She only asks about time travel because she uses the logic of "1, you have a spell on you only I can cast, 2 I've never met you, thus you must come from my future." Until we tell her information, she has no prior knowledge of us individually.

You're not thinking of what I'm thinking of.

You're talking about how Venat deduced we are from the future. I'm talking about Hydaelyn as we meet her on the ship at the beginning of Endwalker, before we travel to Elpis. It is here that she talks about approaching the time where our parts in the time loop will converge, therefore she is already aware of and influenced by us in Elpis.

And again, her dog likes us already when we encounter him on the moon – whereas in Elpis we need to earn his trust. That implies that the moon is the second time he has seen us; Elpis is the first.

So far the Time Travel Logic has been thus:

A. Graha proves that you CAN change the past, and significantly so. It proves that actions in the past, change the future. This is fact.

B. The side story and Elidibus' warning prove that IF you change that past at crucial junctions and/or significant ways, then the future you return to will not be the same one you left from. This is fact.

Two parts of the same fact. G'raha demonstrates that you can change the past; Elidibus warns you that you could change the past if you alter something.

I see this as fitting in with my theory that the difference between creating a time loop or a split timeline is changing something that you know has happened in the past of the timeline that you came from.

If we tried to save someone we know will die, or convince Venat not to sunder the world, or kill Hermes or something like that, it would cause a grandfather paradox in a single timeline – and so (I imagine, as suggested by Shadowbringers) the timeline splits at that point to hold the original version of events in one timeline and the altered events in another. The person responsible for the paradox is directed into the timeline holding the events they have altered, which will not lead back to the past they came from.

G'raha exploited this. He deliberately made a change to the world that made his future impossible – not killing an ancestor but preventing the calamity that had such a vast impact on the world he came from. He is now stuck in the changed timeline, although in this case he is perfectly happy for that to be the case.

In Endwalker – at least by the authors' intent – the WoL needs get back to the same timeline they started from so they can bring back news of how the Final Days began and how they can avert it. Thus Elidibus's warning, which we forget and very nearly mess up by telling everything to Venat instead of keeping to ourselves, although we never successfully changed anything and the world ended up in the same state it was always doomed to end up in.

C. Venat tells us this:

This tells us that, while we can avoid making grand sweeping changes in time, that small actions will still change the future. We see this with Venat making decisions based on what we told her and the information she learns from us.

That's not what I read from those statements. It's not about "big actions versus little actions" but actions that alter things versus actions that can be incorporated into the timeline as it always was, though you hadn't previously known it.

As for Venat's hopes that it can still impact events in her time? All we can get from that is that right now she is hopeful that she can still change things for the better and create a path that doesn't lead to the things we've warned her are coming.

Perhaps she will try and try to find other routes, but every development leads her closer to thinking there is no other option than things turning out "as prophesised".

Or maybe in some other branch of time, she found a solution, but we won't see that play out any more than G'raha's friends in the Eighth Umbral Era will have any awareness that he succeeded in that mission. In that case, our knowledge given to her plays the equivalent role to the Exarch in the Shadowbringers time-breaking, but there still has to be this timeline alongside it where our warning changed nothing that we already knew would happen.

There's no guarantee that everyone within the story will fully grasp how time travel works, either. She's not a researcher on the subject; she's just caught up in events involving a time traveller and might make her own assumptions.

Her statement doesn't really make sense to me, outside of that possibility of having created another timeline beyond our knowledge, because her future is our past. If our actions do not change our history, then they cannot have changed what she did in our history.