Right, then... [Nier: Automata/Copied Factory] [Spoilers]

[Iscah]

Maybe a bit off topic: Its interesting that this would have been the best possible future since without the time travel later it would have ended with a dieing source and another calamity done. How bad would have been the other ones? Seeing how the bad future would have happened not that long after Alexander anyways.

I nearly mentioned this last night but opted for brevity over going into all the ins and outs of Alexander.

You're assuming that it would only be able to see the bad future because the good future "hasn't been created" yet, but I don't think that's the case. I think from an observer's viewpoint (whether it has true control over time or is just that ludicrously good at predicting), both futures exist equally already.

A condensed version of Dayan's explanation in Judgement Day:

From this place─unfettered by the mortal construct of time─Alexander looks out upon past, present, and future, seeing infinite possibilities. [It] possesses the power to travel through time and space, and reshape history for the better─but such power comes at great cost. The sheer quantity of aether consumed in the process means that Alexander itself would─mayhap not immediately, but inevitably─bring ruin to this world. This perfect machine, this supreme manifestation of logic and science, deemed its own existence a threat.
And so it chose to do nothing. To leave history untouched, and the future in the hands of man, with all his imperfections. Such was Alexander's divine judgment.
A time will come when the fate of this world is placed in the hands of one warrior. For reasons hidden to me, the future from that day forth remains shrouded in mystery─beyond even the colossus's ability to calculate. And yet Alexander chose to believe in that woman, and the light within her.

Alexander's "best possible future" leads to a point where fate is in our hands, and the outcome cannot be predicted beyond that. Perhaps that's the deciding point between taking the path to calamity or not. All other paths lead to guaranteed ruin as Alexander drains the world of aether; this one has a chance of success.


Fetching that quote also reminded me of the other reason why the Alexander story seems to rule out infinite splittings of time, at least in the long term:
(purgatori posted while I was typing this, so more to come...)

The summoning of the colossus, and the events that followed, had potentially disastrous consequence for our reality. Its fabric strained to accommodate an infinite number of potential futures separated by nary a thread.
Were the wings of time to fall into the hands of the Illuminati, the repercussions would be dire indeed. History would be rewritten over and over again, each time bleeding the land of aether. And in the end, the colossus would usher in another calamity.

It sounds like the act of time travel destabilises time itself, creating the possibility that other potential futures will spawn off it - if my take on it is right, one new split per time travel if events are altered by the traveler, and time is destabilised for as long as they have the potential to change events they are aware of. The Illuminati would create a huge number of splits by doing so repeatedly. Alexander wants to prevent this and "preserve the circle of time as it had already been set in motion".

This is also why it seems possible to reconcile Shadowbringers' time-altering with Alexander's model of time - once we reach the point where "the future is changed", all the other infinite possibilities cease to be and we're left with one single split point. It still sounds like they may have destabilised something in spacetime by doing so, but if that's the case then we're stuck with it now (and may have to clean up the mess later). Or maybe it's not an issue now that the "infinite possibilities" have been resolved.

Thanks for offering up that clarification. I feel like I have a better handle on how the storyline has handled timey-wimey stuff now. I can also see why squaring Alexander with Graha'Tia is difficult, but I like your proposed solution. In some ways this is not too dissimilar from NieR/Drakengard, in that timelines don't 'naturally' diverge in a multiverse fashion (i.e., whenever there are multiple possible cause-effect outcomes in any given instance). Up until a certain point in Earth's history, the timeline is singular and stable, but a paradox is caused by a great cataclysm in 800AD results in 'multiple world divergence phenomena,' giving rise to two timelines: one in which Europe becomes the fantasy world of Midgard, in which the Drakengard games take place, and the one which mirrors our own history exactly, up until 2012 when beings from Midgard cross over into 'our' history to spark the events that leads to the NieR timeline (yes, it's extremely confusing).

NieR/Drakengard even has its own Alexander of sorts in the form of an Android known as Accord. Not a whole lot is known about her, but she appears to be able to operate between timelines (at will?), and works to ensure that undesirable outcomes are averted (obviously, her powers are limited, because very bad things occur with some regularity in the NieR/Drakengard universe). And it just so happens that Accord is referenced in the weapon shop flyer fragment discovered in the copied factory :]

That does sound like a more compatible mechanism of time. Trying to integrate the two convincingly still seems like a fiddly job though, and you still have aether which (presumably) doesn't exist in NieR but seems universal in FFXIV's reality, so it's harder for them to come from the same origin. It depends how far they want to take the crossover.

(Also, pickiness on name spelling/apostrophising because I'm pedantic about these things: it's G'raha Tia, ie. "Raha of the G tribe". Tia is a tribe rank.)

(For example - are androids machines, or bags of blood? It depends on the scene!)

That would drive me nuts, I think! I hate it when ambigious things in stories get conflicting evidence about whether they're Thing A or Thing B, instead of just leaving it at "could be either".