Quote Originally Posted by Carin-Eri View Post
To be honest, I'm surprised that the 'End Days' weren't considered to be the 8th calamity in our timeline, all things considered.
It's definitely an interesting question from a societal perspective. Given that the societal definition of a Calamity is essentially 'big damn disasters that enormously fractured, destroyed, or changed society as it was at that point', and it just happened that they lined up exactly with the Ascians' Rejoinings, you can definitely make a claim that the End of Days is a functional Calamity for how badly it hit everyone, especially Garlemald, who like it or not was an enormous influence on Eorzean civilization. Hell, it's debatably even more of one than the Seventh, which was actually pretty localized all things considered.


As to G'raha's timeline: It's working on Dragon Ball rules, it's the same as Trunks' future. The events that led to that future no longer exist, but the timeline still exists somewhere out there in reality. It's effectively orphaned and inaccessible, but it's not clear (and not relevant, or at least won't be for the forseeable future) if that's because it's literally just completely inaccessible by the laws of the universe, or if it's potentially possible but not with any level of current technology or understanding.

An important thing to remember with stories involving time travel is that time travel does not exist, and so does not have objective scientific rules. FFXIV's time travel works however FFXIV needs its time travel to work, and does not need to adhere to any rulesets beyond its own--and being that the game has control over its own rules, it doesn't exactly have to stick religiously to any rules it previously stated, either.

Which is fine and good; both Chrono Trigger and the Terminator were inconsistent with their rules, and just stuck with what worked for the story they were trying to tell.