A Wibbly Wobbly Timey Wimey Citation At Last

[kaynide]

I am not in any way arguing again the fact that the timeline split once due to the events of Shadowbringers.

In fact I am arguing in favour of the arguments you are putting in favour of it – it was hard to do, it took effort to cause an extremely rare outcome of a split timeline. That is the way to marry up the ability to split timelines with the discussion in Alexander about time having a single proper path.

What I'm objecting to is the proposal that there are a constantly, infinitely splitting array of timelines forming spontaneously "each time an event occurs".

In fact, I'm not even sure that it's possible for stable loops to form in an infinitely splitting many-timelines scenario, if "time-traveller is present"/"time-traveller is not present" is a difference that immediately causes another split.

I'm with you here, honestly. I think multiverse "everything-everywhere-all-at-once" scenarios are lazy/awful, unless they ARE the central thing in the fiction (as in the movie).

My biggest issue is that we have lore that's all well and good, and rules we hope we can theorize by, but the writers seem to regularly additive-retcon things in ways that I'm not much a fan for, since late Shadowbringers/Endwalker.

Like, we said earlier, Time Travel and Dimensional Travel should be hard, and super risky. It took generations, a psuedo-alexander unit, and finally the entire Crystal Tower. And even then it was off, sending him farther back than intended. After all that, G'raha mistakenly soul-snatched the wrong people several times before finally getting us over there.

Emet (and I assume all ancients) found even the concept of time travel inconceivable, and was more than ok to dissect G'raha over it.

But, -suddenly- Elidabus (who is somehow still somewhat sentient/intact despite being absorbed by the tower) can just send us exactly to the time and place we need to be? Just like that? Didn't we destroy the Alexander-Unit?