New Revelations: Time Shenanigans

[Anonymoose]

Aside from the nuances of the elements, one of the bigger thorns in my side has been the new time shenanigans.
(Disclaimer: If you don't like to think too hard about it, skip this thread.)

Let’s be honest about two things up front:

• It’s not like previous Final Fantasy games have made much sense once you scratch at the veneer, but FFXIV has spoiled us. For all I know, that’s been paused, lol. For all I know, I’m still sitting over here, like,“It’s still Final Fantasy if everyone has believable motivations and even the crazy events logically track on some level!” And Yoshdia’s like, [Thor face] “Is it, though?”

• Time travel usually bothers the seven hells outta me. 90% of the time, it cheapens the world we’re from and damages the story’s consistency / integrity.

This is why I found Alexander to be a pleasant surprise: it was the one in ten. However, it also established certain themes about how time in FFXIV should be seen. It was complex, well thought out, and tracked logically. If you don’t recall, Alexander (ostensibly) established that time is a monolithic four-dimensional block that just objectively is. The past, the present, and the future are all happening at once, even if the three-dimensional beings within that block are still fated to subjectively experience the whole enchilada as a series of individual moments.

This is not quite determinism, as the block can be changed. However, if anything is changed, everything is changed. From the perspective of things trapped within the block, the “old block” ceases to be and fades into oblivion, while the “new block” becomes the “way it always was” (perhaps including a new stable loop, as was the case in Alexander).

So…what’s going on in Shadowbringers?

Let’s start with the easy part: Temporal Divergence (Relative Time Passage)

As a consequence of the displacement of the dimensional planes, the speed at which time (subjectively) passes within worlds appears similar, but relativity between worlds is in constant flux. While time on the First has, for a while now, been "passing at a faster rate" and is now "slowing down" relative to the Source (or perhaps the Source is "speeding up”!) and they are approaching a temporary equality as Shadowbringers takes place.

As a result, the Warriors of Darkness’s journey, including their coming to our world in 3.4, was one hundred years ago, First-side. (Ergo, Mitron and Loghrif have been dead since 3.4.) 4.4 was 5 to 3 years ago depending on the progress, and 4.5 was a year ago.

What do I make of this? Nothing much, really. "The Rift" causes relative oscillation that results in a very convenient maintaining of the time bubble in both dimensions while at the same time displacing the story enough that the First has its own exciting post-apocalyptic status quo and our friends are well-established when we get there. It's a plot contrivance.

Note, however, that even if either the Source or the First stopped moving with relation to the other entirely, there doesn’t seem to be a way Amdapor could have seen the First’s sin eaters as a result of this, so we’ll need another excuse there.

But…about G’raha and End of the World…

If you don’t recall, the story as we know it right now is…

• The Eighth Umbral Calamity occurs soon-ish
• Global war breaks out (perhaps these are considered Zodiark’s sacrifices, idk)
• At some point, the Warrior of Light is killed
• Cid et al. muse about reversing the flow of time and hopping the rift being theoretically possible
• Cid et al. get old and die and never fully work it out.
• Cid et al. decide the next generation can decide if the plan is worth doing.
• 200 years later, the world is even worse off.
• The Ironworks muse about going to the First to prevent it from being rejoined, thereby deleting their existence
• After tales of Eorzea’s greatest hero gave them hope, they consider it their way of giving back
• The Ironworks break into Crystal Tower, awakening G’raha
• They retrofit the Emperor’s Throne (a dimensional wedge into the Thirteenth) with technology from Alexander and Omega (designed based on records kept by NOAH and the Ironworks) to make it capable of storing enough energy to cross the Rift itself into past and pry through a healthy shard membrane
• They resolve to send G'raha, since he’s the only one bound to the tower and must go alone
• G’raha aims for “Patch 5.1” of the time block, but hits “Patch 3.5” (which is 90-whatever years offset on the First)

Let’s back to Alexander for a moment: the Wings of Time allow Alexander to extrapolate from the current 4D block all the possible alternate pasts, presents, and futures. However, in doing so, Alexander chose to change nothing aside from subverting its own existence and isolating itself within a stable loop. (Even this, you’ll notice, still sent “new” ripples throughout all of history, and yet history as we know it is “the way it always was and the only way it could have been”.) There was nothing more Alexander could or should change without making things worse, in its nigh-omniscient opinion.

I don’t know if this implies that Alexander was fine with the Eighth Umbral, or if its core being a primal made it somehow helpless to improve the situation, or if Alexander saw the altering of the time block by G’raha and left things to him because it knew how 5.1+ would pan out… Idk, we’re probably not supposed to think too hard about that part. (Yet?) But G’raha explicitly states that the Wings of Time and Omega’s ability to navigate the infinite uncertain chaos of time and space (The Rift) are how they pulled this off.

We (ostensibly) succeed in preventing the Eighth Rejoining, and thereby changed the future. But, if time works how the Alexander story arc put forward…how are we able to juxtapose the “before and after” from our position? Shouldn’t there be a new “way it always was and could only have been” from our three-dimensional perspective? Forget that, even if we take a less intellectually rigorous position on time travel and start invoking tropes, what is G’raha even still doing here?

So here are the possibilities we’re looking at…

One: It still is and has always been a closed loop in the current 4D block, and we just don’t know it yet. The people 200 years from now will misunderstand or misrepresent their own situation, but everything is “as it always was and should be” and we’re subjectively ignorant about it for now. Future G’raha is still coming back to the First, the Source will be fine after future G’raha leaves, this loop is a significant part of the big picture of the world’s salvation.

Two: The loop is still open, the block is in flux, we live in an unresolved paradox, and things are about to get weird. (See: Donnie Darko)

Three: In addition to all the cosmic clusterfluff we have so far, we’re now doing branching timelines, where G’raha’s “old branch” sacrificed themselves to create this “new branch”. This would imply that there are infinite potential branches of time, some of them have time and dimension-crossing capabilities, we’re never safe from anything even after we’ve killed it, and our universe is one of billions of similar universes and the one the game just happens to take place in suddenly feels small and insignificant. (Wings of the Goddess worked fine in XI, but XIV…?)

Four: The name of the dungeon, The Twinning, refers to the phenomenon of Crystal Twinning (see: macle). Rather than just being a simple reference to our branch of time gaining a copy-pasted Syrcus Tower from a deleted one, history itself has “grown an inverted lattice straight through its intended path”, we’re thus limiting the branches to two, and this is yet another aberration of the natural order of our beautifully broken universe.

Five: We’re just taking a very intellectually soft approach time to time travel where one person at a time is the center of the universe and time changes around them willy nilly and we shouldn’t know, explore, or care about the literally billions of other lives and historical that are twisting in the Rift-wind around us. (I struggle to believe this is the case after how nuanced Alexander was, but this is a Final Fantasy game, lol.)

Six: ThE RiFt wOrKs iN MyStErIoUs WaYs

The fact that Ishikawa-san was involved in Alexander and Shadowbringers, and invoked Alexander in Shadowbringers, is driving me godsdamned batty.
What do you think is going on? (Did I miss something?)

[Daralii]

Considering what Elidibus was saying on his moon base, I'm temporarily going to assume that it's number two.

"And now that I have shared with you the truth of this world and its reflections, who can predict how events will unfold? ...Not I. 'Emissary'... What a poor jest that title has become. The flow of history has become muddied, its currents wild beyond my capacity to direct them."

[Cilia]

Notably, Crystal Exarch G'raha allowed people to take what they needed from the Tower, but he refused to allow others to dwell within it as he was fully convinced that after all was said and done he and it would causally disappear as a result of the future that he hails from being undone. The fact that didn't happen is a great surprise to him.

Can't really figure it out if in-universe nobody understands it.

[Anonymoose]

"And now that I have shared with you the truth of this world and its reflections, who can predict how events will unfold? ...Not I. 'Emissary'... What a poor jest that title has become. The flow of history has become muddied, its currents wild beyond my capacity to direct them."

HmMm. I had back-burnered that in my mind as a foreshadow of Zenos's plan to have us each eat a Great Crystal and fight to the death and Elidbus's plan to trick people into trying to kill us. Let's take a look at it. Let me know anything jumps out that makes sense for our time dilemma.

Specifics from other languages in blue.

I can no longer see his aura. Oblivion has claimed him...
Emet-Selch...gone. Lahabrea...gone. I alone remain─the last of the unbroken (aka Originals).
Once more, I am moved to reevaluate the potential of these tattered souls.
Ah, Zenos. Never did I dream you could overpower me so completely, possessed as I was of your body, and all its uncanny strength...
And now that I have shared with you the truth of this world and its reflections, who can predict how events will unfold? ...Not I.
“Emissary”... What a poor jest that title has become. The flow of history has become muddied, its currents wild beyond my capacity to direct them.
You have wrested the advantage, Hydaelyn. The thieving hands of Your disciples tighten their grip on our star.
The origins of the world remain hidden and its inhabitants ignorant of their broken existence, just as You and Your creators desired.
They celebrate the gift of imperfect life─uncaring, unknowing as we weaken and fade forgotten into oblivion.
But do not imagine Yourself rid of us.
Though Your champion has indeed proven the most egregious obstacle to our ascendance─a barbed thorn in my side─[they] may yet be removed and cast into the abyss.
Oh yes...it can be done. I will keep these “heroes” mired in the First, and victory will be ours at the last.
Warriors of Darkness now, are they? Then their fate is decided.
They shall meet the same end as those who came before─death at the hands of Warriors of Light!

Can't really figure it out if in-universe nobody understands it.

But I can try to narrow it down! lol

The more I can understand early, the easier it will be to entrench the intended reading in its proper context later.

...Hopefully.

[Rannie]

Moose you didnt include the Dr. Who positioning of time travel with fixed points in time that cant be altered though I still stick with what he says about it being big ball of wibbley wobbley timey whimey mess.

Meaning fixed points in history that can not be altered. Call me pessimistic, but I honestly don't believe we have completely altered the 8th umbral catastrophe. And if we think on it from a dr who stand point when there are those moments in history that are supposed to happen (ie Pompeii being destroyed by vesuvius or Rose Tyler's father being hit by a car), if they are changed then something even worse will happen or some thing will cause the events to play out the same yet. And or the whole of time space would collapse in on it self.

[SaberMaxwell]

Regarding Elidibus' speech...

I was thinking "they" was just gender neutral pronouns for us. But then he says "heroes" plural? Is ge acknowledging Thancred et al as Warriors of Darkness? It's especially odd to me he says he'll keep us "mired in the First" after we the WoL just put our boots back on Source soil.

So is he planning to kill us, the WoL, with roaming WoL hitsquads or is he gonna cut the Scion's lives short?

[EdwinLi]

Regarding Elidibus' speech...

I was thinking "they" was just gender neutral pronouns for us. But then he says "heroes" plural? Is ge acknowledging Thancred et al as Warriors of Darkness? It's especially odd to me he says he'll keep us "mired in the First" after we the WoL just put our boots back on Source soil.

So is he planning to kill us, the WoL, with roaming WoL hitsquads or is he gonna cut the Scion's lives short?

He is refer to the Scions since they are Warriors of Darkness as well in the First. The Scion's have been a huge asset to WoL being the ones who can lead WoL to places where he or hse needed to be and with them gone, WoL will lose a huge asset to their journey and combat capable allies.

At this point, considering these characters in the Trust are expect to be on a journey with WoL for the long term beyond 5.0 now, losing the Scions will probably prevent WoL from saving the world as they have been people who help take care of issues since WoL cannot be in two places at once.

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As for time events....

I am still going for the part where Exarch and G'raha Tia may end up with a Old Spock and Young Spock relationship and timeline theory.

Exarch remains behind in the Crystal Tower thus aiding Ironworks to master the CT sooner than his old timeline (like Old Spock) while G'raha Tia becomes a "Trust" that adventures with WoL and become a new member of the Scions so he can experience the Adventure that will one day define him and his own life similar to how Exarch's adventure in his old timeline through the areas of 2.0 to 4.X to find the stories of WoL ended up defining what he will become (like Young Spock).

[ShadowNyx3]

The Alexander and Omega technology making all this possible is cool and it does seem like they put a lot of care into crafting time mechanics in this lore, but I have seen no mention of the time mechanic that made everything we have now possible...Althyk!

Louisoix tapped into the power of Althyk to send us from 1.0 to 2.0, in much the same way as G’raha brought other players to our time to fight Hades.

Perhaps this is yet to come as the Twelve remain an incredibly mysterious and potentially vital role in everything to come, but I think that the time aspect on display here might be our first link to showing that the Twelve have powers on the world scale and not just Eorzea where their only real influence is seen.

Something to think about.

[Vulcwen]

If they actually want to be consistent, I'd expect: the first 3 options all at once. It'd be a most complicated time loop with multiple branches that will be fixed in the future but as now is still in an unresolved paradox.

[Remedi]

I think we are forgetting the fact that alexander did acknowledge strains of history different than our timeline. We got baited by Roundrox's actions, but Dai told us that Alexander could see all the possibilities and futures, that imho implies that alternate realities do exist sadly.

As for the exarch not outright disappearing, well....the twinning theory seems solid to me. Though the theory of someone disappearing because their story won't come to pass means that story won't change because they will never create the time machine.
So what if the actual time loop remains the same regardless?
In this new future Cid will still create the time machine and the CRT will be opened to send G'raha Tia back in time to make sure the story remains closed.