Revelations from Save the Queen

[YianKutku]

I'm mildly curious how Noah intends to summon Kerrigan and not get himself and his Legion Tempered.

Only mildly, because it would be completely in character for Garlemald to try something like that and then Pikachu Face when it goes horribly wrong.

[Anonymoose]

I definitely neglected to add this to the OP reactions.

Gerolt and Rowena's love story making a comeback is as guilty of a pleasure for me as it would be for SE to admit Y'shtola and Thancred used to date. SE deciding they used to be married made her 1.0 dialogue sound like her intention has always been to keep him on a short leash until he can free himself of his demons and reclaim his self worth...which he can't because he's still in love with her, but won't focus on that because he's caught up on how irritated he is to be on her leash at all. She held onto a completely worthless promissory note for how long just to pretend it was a trifling matter to give it to you - someone who needed a smith to craft some of the greatest weapons the world has ever known? I see you, lady. Validating that headcanon is pure dopamine, lol.

[Iscah]

Mikoto's Echo turns out to give her visions of the future...

Using the Echo to see the future is another popular fan-fiction trope that the game itself has never touched. We have been told that the Echo makes people sensitive to the whispers of the soul, but how does that enable one to see through time? Moreover, how can one see through time at all, now that it can be changed? If Alexander's rules were still in play, we'd have some basis for speculation, but the Exarch broke them!

I know we've argued on this before, but I do think Alexander's rules are still in play. Or at least I've spent considerable effort working out a way to explain how the two time-travel plots are compatible.

*waves at wall covered in diagrams, scrawled notes and string*

Even in the Alexander questline itself, Dayan implies that while time should have a single flow from past to future, it could be changed and there was a risk of it happening due to the events of that storyline. I interpret that to mean that if someone has travelled to the past, although their actions are ideally integrated into the one "always happened" version of events, time is destabilised for as long as they remain there because there is a risk they will create an irreconcilably changed version of events. This would cause a single split in the timeline, and this is what the Exarch successfully did.

This isn't the same as a "multiple worlds" scenario with infinite splitting versions of reality, because it only splits in the exceptional circumstance of a time traveller breaking it, and time travel is very rare to achieve. And from a perspective outside of time, the "new" path may have always been there too (but this is kind of mind-bending Schrödinger's timeline stuff and hard to explain succinctly).

So if you think of time as a path that can be walked upon, it is a single line with one fork in it that occurs somewhere between 3.4 and 5.X.*

Without worrying about the why or how of the Echo granting future sight, if time is a path then somehow the Echo visions come from "further along the path" than the person has walked.

In a normal situation where there is only one path of time, then those visions come from the single future - just like a time traveller could come from the future. Either event (including during Alexander) requires some kind of defined future to already exist beyond the current point in time.

Mikoto's visions are short-range and rare, but in the event that she had one shortly before the point where the timelines split, it's possible she could receive one from the "wrong future". If she had a vision shortly before the timeline split, and it showed her something that happened after the split in the bad future, then the version of her in the bad future would see that vision come true as usual. It's only here in the good future that she might not see it come to pass.

In any case we are (hopefully) now past that split and back on a single path, assuming there are no further timeline shenanigans, so her visions at this point are only going to come from the track we're on.

Theoretically you could maybe break the timeline again by preventing one of her visions from coming true, but more likely it's a self-fulfilling prophecy kind of thing where any attempts to stop it still lead to it happening.

There's also actually a precedent for "visions from the wrong timeline" already from, of all things, the Namazu questline as referenced in A World Forsaken, the post-Calamity Tale From the Shadows...

A semiaquatic creature known as a “Namazu” who had arrived bearing donations imparted information apparently gleaned from premonitory dreams. The following is an extract of his recorded testimony:

“The world was never in such a ruinous state in the visions sent to me by the Big One, no, no. Seigetsu the Enlightened said that the future I witnessed was part of another history, a different chain of events with no Eighth Umbral Calamity at all! Whatever that means...”

It remains to be seen whether this is anything more than the nonsensical ramblings of an anthropomorphic catfish. But I shall store it in my data banks for future analysis.

Remains to be seen indeed... it's hard to tell whether we're supposed to take serious lore implications out of Gyoshin's visions of the Big One, or just dismiss it as weirdness for that quest alone, but then to bring it up again here specifically gives it a bit more credibility.

Crack theory: Gyoshin's "prophetic dreams triggered by head trauma" are from the Echo, awakened due to a subconscious reminder of being struck by a meteorite in the Final Days.


* The path analogy is useful for visualising "travelling along the timeline" but not for explaining how the timeline split actually works, as you wouldn't choose a direction when you reach the fork - you split in two and one version continues along each path, without any awareness that it even happened.

And finally... Gerolt and Rowena's love story making a comeback is as guilty of a pleasure for me as it would be for SE to admit Y'shtola and Thancred used to date. SE deciding they used to be married made her 1.0 dialogue sound like her intention has always been to keep him on a short leash until he can free himself of his demons and reclaim his self worth...which he can't because he's still in love with her, but won't focus on that because he's caught up on how irritated he is to be on her leash at all. She held onto a completely worthless promissory note for how long just to pretend it was a trifling matter to give it to you - someone who needed a smith to craft some of the greatest weapons the world has ever known? I see you, lady. Validating that headcanon is pure dopamine, lol.

Congrats on the headcanon validation!

The weirdest thing about that scene (other than, well, all of it) was that Gerolt is there, seeing that you're seeing the memory he has consciously decided to show to you, and protesting that it is absolutely not how it went. Does he not have control over it? Cid could manipulate his memory-world by thinking about what should have been there, so... hmm.

Also, it looked like they'd gone to quite some effort for their animations and physical interactions during that "wedding montage" bit. Pulling animations from elsewhere, or did they actually dedicate time and/or motion capture to it?



PS.

[strike]accidentally[/strike]

You want (s) for strikethrough coding. Also there were a lot of seemingly random double spaces in the paragraph about Gerolt and Rowena. (I deleted them from the quote.)

As to Anonymoose, it's possible or is just my hope this could weave back into the MSQ given we saw how Alexander/Omega (time travel), Crystal Tower (Exarch and time travel) all folded back into the main story. Having this secessionist "Garlean Technology + Eikon weaponization + standard magic" Gabranthian state would make for one hell of a new nemeses, especially if the ever-present Ascian hand is involved.

The difficulty is forcing a situation where this hypothetical Gabranthian state takeover has happened in the MSQ, because that would basically require setting the relic weapon questline as an MSQ progression roadblock.

Remember that the reason the CT/Alexander/Omega tie-in works is because time travel removes the usual requirement for the player to have completed the present-day quests prior to encountering this future outcome of them.

[Veloran]

As far as the Namazu A World Forsaken section goes, that clearly appears to be the Namazu recieving visions from our current timeline. I think this feeds into my own notion of how it works, which is that there are not multiple timelines, but instead only one. G'raha isn't erased because his existence in going back to "change" the past is actually a causal loop, a paradox that always occured yet did not simultaneously. And as for Mikoto, we've already seen a lesser version of her future sight before, possibly even used it depending in your interpretation. Alexander, it was simply using infinite computational power to calculate the future, while it's own existence is the same sort of paradox G'raha is.

[Iscah]

Reading over Mikoto's "extra information" prompts sets up a few interesting possibilities...

Tell me about yourself.

About me!? Oh, there really isn't much to tell, I assure you!
Well, if you must know... Due to advanced placement I found myself attending the Studium much earlier than most. My research in the field of aetherology would eventually earn me the title of Archon. When I am not conducting research in the field, I conduct lectures at the Studium.
Moenbryda is, er...was...my mentor. I would not be the scholar I am today if not for her. I have fond memories of the many nights we toiled together working on her original plans for the aetheric siphon. She was like a sister to me.
Speaking of which, I do have a sister, actually. An identical twin, in fact. Though we have not spoken since she too was named an Archon.
She was my better in all aspects of academia, but she often disagreed with the views of the Forum. I can but assume that is why she took her leave of the Studium.
She was always so strong-willed and quite critical of those around her. Sadly, we never got along very well growing up. I often wonder if that is why Moenbryda was so quick to take me under her wing.
I still see her, in my dreams. Always offering a warm smile and words of encouragement.
If we were to use the crystal focus, perhaps there would be a way to speak with her again. A tempting prospect, but in the end, I know it would not truly be her...

Two different things that stick out to me:

1. Her identical twin sister is clearly going to come into this somehow, and I would not be surprised if we get a "future Echo" where we don't know which of them we're seeing.

2. Bringing up the idea of memory-reviving Moenbryda, even if she does immediately reject it. Is that supposed to be a "shut down the idea before anyone gets it" or are they trying to set it up? Would they? Should they? And how could they get Urianger involved (because if they're going to play that card they'd better not be doing it without him)?

If it was going to happen at all, I could see it being MSQ-gated by Mikoto having a vision of Urianger assisting them, so plans are on hold until we can get him back to the Source and able to help us.

I'm not sure it would be a good thing to pull off overall, rather than just let it stay in the past, but if they're going to then it would be nice to see him get some closure. Certainly moreso than a relatively minor character getting it instead without him.

[Frizze]

1. Her identical twin sister is clearly going to come into this somehow, and I would not be surprised if we get a "future Echo" where we don't know which of them we're seeing.

Entirely possible. Personally im expecting the evil twin(im counting Mikoto as the good twin for lack of evidence of her being evil) to show up helping the IVth legion in some way. They see each other on opposite sides of the battlefield. Family drama ensues.

[Anonymoose]

This would cause a single split in the timeline, and this is what the Exarch successfully did.

This is one of the solutions on my table, as well; driven mostly by the name of the dungeon The Twinning. Crystal twinning is what happens when an inverted lattice grows through the main crystal, which one might posit is a metaphor the new timeline growing out of the old as much as it is a simple reference to "there's (at least the illusion of, if not forsooth) two Crystal Towers now".

I do think Alexander's rules are still in play. <...> Even in the Alexander questline itself, Dayan implies that while time should have a single flow from past to future, it could be changed and there was a risk of it happening due to the events of that storyline. I interpret that to mean that if someone has traveled to the past, although their actions are ideally integrated into the one "always happened" version of events, time is destabilized for as long as they remain there because there is a risk they will create an irreconcilably changed version of events.

I think each time we have this debate, it's mostly the same debate in a different form, lol.

Here's what drives it for me: A game is made by a team and the lore, one component of that team, is there to help it be engaging and immersive. It the choices are "break the lore" or "be hamstrung by the lore", most directors and writers will break it. However, that comes at a cost to engagement and immersion, which may shake the connection between player and world and hurt retainment. Ergo, it's in the team's best interest to cooperate and compromise, and it's clear that the team of FFXIV often tries their best to do just that. But if push comes to shove, "lore" will lose to "cool".

The first step is figuring out if that's what's likely to have happened. The fall of Dalamud; the identity of Allag; the contemporary zeitgeist of Eorzea's technology, the way aether works; the way primals work; the Ascians; how jobs fit into the world; astral, umbral, Light, and Darkness; Garlean history. All of these things have been touched by "cool" demanding lore transform [that's not how this works] into [it has just been discovered that this is how it actually works].

I suspect that is the case here. Yoshida has already confirmed that they didn't know any of this was going to happen when they introduced the Warriors of Darkness, which is when Alexander was being rolled out, as well. That makes it likely that this time travel stuff has priorities rooted in making a cool story that'll sell well: too much of anything is bad, the Light isn't "good" because it's Light. On a functional level, they needed that 100 year gap for the sake of the map as much as they needed that reversal of astral and umbral for the sake of telling that story.

So therefore I end up operating under the pretense of "old versus new" - how does "what it was" become "what it actually is"? And the discrepancy between Alexander's themes and Shadowbringers really leaps out at me because Ishikawa wrote both. It seems like there should be some sort of shared epistemology between them, but where is it?

But I digress. Because historically Final Fantasy has never made much sense, especially during the final hour or two.

Dayan says that ultimately Alexander's decision was in faith because it couldn't actually see what was beyond the Warrior of Light existence, which is one thing they could use to make sense of this. One could claim Alexander couldn't see beyond the Rift shenanigans employed by the Exarch, but then you need to close the instability somehow.

I interpret Dayan as saying that it was all hypothetical; the 4D block of time was set in stone, from the death of their friends to Alexander then traveling back in time so that Mide and Dayan can become their own ancestors. If one changes the 4D block, so much aether is consumed that it makes it not worth it to do so. The existence of Alexander's ability to rewrite time is itself a paradox - it has the ability to conceive of and create the ideal world, can't use it without damaging the world beyond its possibility to be ideal. That point in history was the most unstable because moment Alexander comes into existence is the moment from which any use of Alexander at any other point in history stems, even if it "predates" it. (Which is precisely why merely going into the Crystal Tower and breaking the Tycoon "right now" in theory shouldn't preclude it's use "anywhen else" if certain other moments are properly exploited.)

But Alexander ensured the closure of the loop which precluded that possibility, and in so doing, any version of history where it did not lock itself in its own anti-paradox prison loop was erased, the same way G'raha thought he would be erased and doesn't understand why he isn't and questions whether the future he was sent from is erased.

One could try to claim that Mezaya was born after Alexander's earliest appearance, but before its summoning, and its summoning was before the Warrior of Light made time "blurry" for it. She thus fits into a gap that is set in stone and can be seen. Mikoto, meanwhile, exists on the threshold of allegedly-shifting time, which is harder to explain. What if she was sitting on the couch reading a magazine one day and was like, "Guys, the Eighth Umbral Era is about to... Huh, wait. Never mind!"

[Iscah]

I think each time we have this debate, it's mostly the same debate in a different form, lol.

That's prettymuch inevitable until we get new solid information from the writers about how they intend the time travel to work, because right now we're both looking at it and coming to different conclusions we each consider plausible.

So therefore I end up operating under the pretense of "old versus new" - how does "what it was" become "what it actually is"? And the discrepancy between Alexander's themes and Shadowbringers really leaps out at me because Ishikawa wrote both. It seems like there should be some sort of shared epistemology between them, but where is it?

As I've said, I can see it in my interpretation - or rather I built my interpretation from the starting point that they must be consistent despite initially appearing not to be. The fact that the same person wrote both makes it more likely there's a consistent logic there even if you're not seeing it, simply because that one writer may have particular ideas about how time travel would work in the first place, whether they're all laid out in the game or not.

For all I know, she might have proposed the idea to bring G'raha back into the main story because she'd already worked out how she could set up that time travel plot without breaking the rules established in the Alexander storyline.

Dayan says that ultimately Alexander's decision was in faith because it couldn't actually see what was beyond the Warrior of Light existence, which is one thing they could use to make sense of this. One could claim Alexander couldn't see beyond the Rift shenanigans employed by the Exarch, but then you need to close the instability somehow.

It's maybe a bit hard to explain, and I'm twisting my own theory as I realise new things while writing this, but I think perhaps the instability and the split are not the same thing.

Ideally any time travel would form a stable loop as we saw in Alexander. In this case, time is destabilised until the traveller either returns to their own time, whether via time travel again or simply by enough time passing that they reach the point where they first travelled from, or they die while in the past and can no longer influence events.

But if the timeline does split, the instability only continues in the original timeline. The newly-spawned timeline is stable because the time traveller is no longer interacting with the timeline they originally came from and cannot break it again. If that makes sense.

I guess you could think of it as tension. For every second that the time traveller is present in their own past, the timeline strains with what-ifs and potential changes. What if they try to warn their past self? What if they pick up an object that someone else needed to interact with? What if they successfully stopped something from happening? These possibilities open up and get shut down with every moment. Will this moment break the timeline? No? What about now? Still okay? Still?

If you break it, then on that newly created timeline, the tension is gone. It's broken, so there's no question of when it is going to break. (Though it does remain on the other side of the split where they still haven't broken anything... yet.)

So - I hadn't worked this part out before - it's possible that one time travel incident could spawn multiple offshoots (we can only hope it hasn't), but those offshoots can't split again.

Maybe everything is preordained, but maybe it isn't - and it's worth noting that the two times we see time travel happen during Alexander, people are actively trying to ensure that things play out the way they know it should happen. When we warp to "three years ago" the Illuminati are following the script of events, making sure they don't change them, and we're too bewildered to stop them. And in the time rifts during the final battle, we recognise the situation we were in and need to save ourselves.

(Which is precisely why merely going into the Crystal Tower and breaking the Tycoon "right now" in theory shouldn't preclude it's use "anywhen else" if certain other moments are properly exploited.)

I don't think the Tycoon could have been used without the Exarch's knowledge. We also don't know whether it is an independent time machine that carried the tower with it across time, or whether it can't go anywhere without dragging the entire tower with it. But more likely the second option, as I think the tower is being used as the "battery" to run the time machine in the first place, so leaving it behind wouldn't really be an option, and the Exarch either goes with it or is severely affected by its absence.

If it has been used at any point between the initial travel to the First and our encounter with it in the Twinning, then it is something that happened in the past for the Exarch and he isn't telling us about it. I personally don't see it as a risk. It would be different if other people had access to it in the meanwhile.

One could try to claim that Mezaya was born after Alexander's earliest appearance, but before its summoning, and its summoning was before the Warrior of Light made time "blurry" for it. She thus fits into a gap that is set in stone and can be seen. Mikoto, meanwhile, exists on the threshold of allegedly-shifting time, which is harder to explain. What if she was sitting on the couch reading a magazine one day and was like, "Guys, the Eighth Umbral Era is about to... Huh, wait. Never mind!"

Again, it's about the exact nature of Mikoto's visions. Short time span, rare, and thus far never showing anyone in mortal peril. (As much as I don't like the writers introducing future sight as an element this late in the game, they've done a good job of ensuring it's actually not that useful beyond the immediate situation.) If she had a vision shortly before the point where the timelines diverge, it would still only look like an anomaly if she saw something that didn't also happen in the other timeline.

Remember that wherever the timeline is supposed to have split, it isn't directly at the point of Black Rose being set off - depending on who's arguing, it could be as far back as pre-Stormblood, or it could be when Thancred was pulled to the First, or when the WoL goes there, or only when the First is entirely free from the risk of being rejoined.

In any of these cases, there is a buffer zone of days, weeks or months between the split point and the world actually being altered beyond recognition.

It doesn't sound like Mikoto can "see far enough ahead" that she would be able to detect the Calamity coming even if it was certainly going to happen.

Additionally, if we can assume the vision we saw of Cid is how they normally work for her, that isn't going to give her the sort of revelation you're portraying even if she could see far enough. If she saw a flash of the Calamity she might see someone talking about the disaster, or someone dying, but that isn't going to tell her "never mind". Later on she might realise that it never came to pass, which is unusual, but she won't know that at the time.

[Fenral]

But I digress. Because historically Final Fantasy has never made much sense, especially during the final hour or two.

Sounds like someone just finished FF7: Remake.

I think Mikoto's "futuresight" could be given an alternative explanation that skirts around literal visions of the future. Borrowing a tiny bit from FFXIV's red-headed step-sibling Granblue Fantasy, but when they introduced a character with the same "future sight," the literal mechanism was closer to high-speed, high-data-volume analysis. Basically, said character could take into account the past and present state of everything (with the assistance of an artificial god tailor-made for this purpose), and mathematically project the subsequent state, and repeat this to the point that a short-term view ahead was possible.

If that were taken along with the classical mechanics of the Echo as we know it (we had Echo'd into Cid in the past, therefore our souls had been connected), as well as what Mikoto knew at present (we needed to find someone who was at Bozja)... Maybe, just maybe that would give her Echo ability enough data to calculate us bringing Cid in, as well as have a glimpse of his particular hang-up.

I say "could" in that it would be a way to explain it without digging the hole deeper. It would also explain her inability to predict impending peril, as the ability could not be triggered by events outside her immediate awareness.


(I also really don't like thinking about all the different ways we could lose G'raha forever, again, come June/July, so excuse me for trying to course correct.)

[Kuroka]

1. Her identical twin sister is clearly going to come into this somehow, and I would not be surprised if we get a "future Echo" where we don't know which of them we're seeing.

The whole "she disagreed with the others and didnt get along well but she was even better then me" just screams "Imma go to the enemy!"