On Themis [6.4 SPOILER]

[Cleretic]

I'm always very confused as to how people don't understand FFXIV's time travel rules. It's actually remarkably consistent given the different types of stories they've told with it. Basically, there's two possible results for what happens:

1. You create a stable time loop, where the stuff that happens are just how it always happens; this runs on Bill & Ted logic. This is what happened (several times) in Alexander, it's what we were doing in Elpis with Venat's knowing help, and it's what we did in Pandaemonium with the unknowing help of everyone there.

2. You create a new timeline and orphan the old; that timeline is now inaccessible, either in total or just with the techniques we've got. This runs on Dragon Ball logic with extra tragedy, the Crystal Exarch is basically Trunks. This only happened once, with the Crystal Exarch, but is underlined as basically a failure condition by Elidibus when we're traveling to Elpis.

We don't exactly know what causes one to happen but not the other, save that evidently we were at risk of causing the second while going to Elpis; natural assumption is that actually setting the time loop into motion/doing something that definitely COULDN'T be a time loop does it, but we don't have any proof of that. For all we know, the determiner is whether or not we eat cheese on the trip.

I don't see what people's difficulty is, except for perhaps just really wishing it was different to the point where they ignore the reasons it's not. I dunno, maybe it's because I grew up on Doctor Who, which tuck carefully to the time travel rule of 'it works how this specific story needs it to work', so I've got a solid training in not demanding too much of time travel rules.


And as for Themis... well, I wasn't a fan.

Setting aside Athena (who I think the story wasted but that's beside the point), Themis was my least favorite part of the story. And to understand why, I think it's worth contrasting with how Anabeisos especially treated Lahabrea, which was my favorite part of the story. With Lahabrea, the game is very conscious that yes, this is the same guy that caused us so many problems; he hasn't done them yet by his timeline, but he is very clearly the man who will do them. In Abyssos, we're allowed the options to not trust him because of that. And in Anabeisos, we have that scene where he grapples with learning the things he will do, and has no ability to stop himself doing--and we're allowed to give it to him very bluntly and matter-of-factly. I think a hugely valuable part of humanizing a villain like that is the story grappling with the villainous things they did, and that one Lahabrea scene does that in a way that no other Ascian story truly did.

All of this is also true of Elidibus... but despite this, the game never turns that same critical eye to Themis. Even in Anabeisos, when we don't have the argument of 'he hasn't done those things yet', because it is confirmably exactly Elidibus, who already did those things. We basically just skip over the many times when he tried to destroy our world (and sometimes us specifically), with the casual wave-away of 'oh he wasn't all there', and... no, that doesn't fly with me, especially because he's the reason he was in that state in the first place. If the game wants me to look at a villain as a sympathetic person, it needs to not ignore the villainous things they did, and while they did well with that with Lahabrea, 'ignore the villainous things' was exactly what they did with Elidibus.