[ENDWALKER MSQ SPOILERS] Timeline weirdness

[Lurina]

I think my original point in this conversation in this thread was that I would simply rather spend my time in the "present" rather than the ancient world if given a choice. And then that lead to me commenting on how I don't like either what the ancients did in Elpis or the concept of "those who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones". I don't think they should have been sundered for what they were doing in Elpis either, although it does play into why I don't think they would have been able to permanently defeat Meteion but that is another can of worms I'd rather not open right now.

That's fair. This part of the conversation started because of Yuella asserting that the Ancient's deserved to be sundered for their "lifestyle", though, and drawing an explicit distinction between us and them by saying:

I don't know why people are so enamored by the ancient lifestyle anyway. It's not a good lifestyle. They wantonly create living beings and then kill them off cold-heartedly if they're "not suitable" even though these creatures feel pain.

I think Rulakir was pointing out their hypocrisy - since this statement could just as easily describe modern human culture - rather than saying that it was wrong to criticize the Ancients at all, which is the way you seemed to interpret it in your reply.

As modern humans, we are all complicit in extra-species violence and manipulation on a scale so spectacular that it boggles the mind. In the time it took me to type this message, we have cold-bloodedly slaughtered roughly 400,000 chickens, creatures proven to experience complex emotional states and capable of solving simple math problems (as well as being, by the way, a subspecies of our own creation), despite the fact that we've advanced to the point we don't even need meat to survive. And that's just chickens. To condemn a fictional culture as deserving of death on that basis is goofy, unless you'd also extend that judgement to yourself.

[Cilia]

The "time" within which 99.9% of Final Fantasy XIV takes place is now known to be a time loop. Everything from our departure from the Crystal Tower / arrival on Elpis up to our return to the Crystal Tower / departure from Elpis is more or less set in stone, since otherwise we wouldn't be in a position to shape the distant past that led to us going there.

Kind of breaks the whole existentialist narrative of Endwalker, we're the Warrior of Light both because we choose to be and because otherwise it creates a paradox. Time travel, gotta love it!

[Rannie]

If Venat had no knowledge of what was to come then how was it that Minfillia, as the oracle of light/Word of the Mother know that Ardbert's job wasn't complete when they traveled back to the first to stop the flood of Light? It was almost as if she knew the WoL would be coming to the first to try to save it...

"Your time has not yet come"

Also "Not even the most Valiant of Heros can stand alone"

[Bhearil]

Personally I think that Tycoon tech allowed them to bypass the normal time travel constrictions to instead slip into another timeline that splitted 13 thousand years ago. Its still possible that Venat was warned beforehand same as in our timeline, but who and how it was done would be different because it wasnt our WoL since we died before we could time travel, or even that Venat managed to escape the memory altering by herself but was forced to work with that knowledge alone since they needed Hermes mind no matter what to fight against the coming situation and would have instantly turned on them if the truth was revealed

The timeline during those 13 thousand years was pretty much the same but since that crucial point was different the branching happened much earlier than we though on Shadowbringers because our appearance in Elpis kickstarted an eons long gambit and Venat ways could be aparently similar but far different in intention in that "Bad End" timeline compared to ours

[Vflower]

So after thinking a bit more about how to reconcile our timeline and the Elpis timeline, I remembered our first meeting with Hydaeyln in Endwalker.

There, she confirms the same origin story that we heard in ShB and then says:

A conjunction has begun to form; an intertwining of your time and mine.[...]Then shall I honor the promise made in another time. Another age.

You can use these lines to gain a coherent understanding of the different timelines shown in Endwalker:

The Hydaelyn we know is -presumably- the most powerful primal in existence, summoned long ago, and as a being with such immense power, she has some amount of insight into the flow of time and different timelines. Thus, she knows, albeit vaguely, that 'she' made a promise to the WoL in a different timeline.

This would also explain why, throughout the whole game, she never really talked to us directly about our meeting in Elpis.
The Venat that we met in Elpis and who we shared all this information with ("your time") isn't Hydaelyn. Our Hydaelyn never met us in Elpis ("and mine"), she just knows that there is some weird thing going on with different timelines.

'Our' Venat didn't even let Zodiark's summoning happen, based on what we saw in the river of time. It's clearly a separate timeline.

[Iscah]

Personally I think that Tycoon tech allowed them to bypass the normal time travel constrictions to instead slip into another timeline that splitted 13 thousand years ago.

A timeline that split away 13,000 years ago would likely be as different as the Source is to the First. Not one you can just jump to and have everything the same except for a few details at the beginning while everything at the end is the same.

(Even if this were possible, it comes with the side consequence that the WoL who the Exarch waited a hundred years to save is not the person he once knew but an alternate-timeline copy, and every time he reminisces about our past time together he's actually remembering someone who isn't us but apparently is a perfect substitute.)

Peering/Altering different timelines is beyond them and only was managed by Garlond works after 200 years of research combining magiteck with allaghan's and Omega's tech plus Alexander's time bending powers and was a one way travel

Indeed, and they don't (at least as shown) even have the power to jump timelines, only to move backwards along the same timeline. The branching timelines are a result of G'raha's actions after he arrives.


Your two posts seem to be confusingly at odds with each other. I didn't realise they were both from the same person until after I'd written the replies.

'Our' Venat didn't even let Zodiark's summoning happen, based on what we saw in the river of time. It's clearly a separate timeline.

The events we saw in the river of time are not literal. They can't be, although it's very vague about it. We have Venat witnessing a man attacked by a monster and not intervening; Hyth farewelling Emet as he goes to be one of the original sacrifices that gave birth to Zodiark, immediately followed by Venat confronting the group attempting to carry out a sacrifice to Zodiark.

It's all extremely unhelpful, and I hope we can ask for some further answers at the next lore Q&A.

[Bhearil]

Hydaelyn lacks any kind of time powers, same as Zodiark despite being extremely more powerful than her (even if she can counter Zodiark due to her division skill). she is just saying that both their times finally aligned: She had to wait for our WoL to be born but also she couldnt spill the beams before the WoL traveled to the past to avoid a time paradox

Primals are created with an specific set of powers and the only known Primal with time related powers is Alexander.

it is true that Ancients have time related powers (like Elidibus sending us to the past or Gaia and Nabriales "slown time" shaenigans) but it was stated that time travel only gives at best a different perspective on some event and nothing will really change.

Peering/Altering different timelines is beyond them and only was managed by Garlond works after 200 years of research combining magiteck with allaghan's and Omega's tech plus Alexander's time bending powers and was a one way travel

[Bhearil]

Even if the timeline splitted 13 thousand years ago the events that transpired meanwhile should remain the same because if the "trigger" didnt happened 13 thousand years ago the consequences only would have manifested during late Stormblood. Traveling to the past allowed the present to have a "black box" that gave us a chance to break free from the End of Days, but everything in between remained unaltered, because both paralel worlds are virtually the same since the WoL visit to the past was unnoticed to everyone but Venat and she tried to keep it hidden until the proper time came.

Think about it: The fact that Wol visited or not the past doesnt change the End of Days arrival, and "dead end" timeline Hydaelyn on the surface seems to behave very similar to ours, which means that anything in between remained virtually the same.

If you could go to the ancient Rome and save an random slave that was supposed to die and instead lives his life normally, is not the same timeline anymore even if the actions of that slave living his life doesnt change history in any way because is one more among nameless millions of people living simple lives that never got recorded in history neither were relevant in any way to it

[Iscah]

If you could go to the ancient Rome and save an random slave that was supposed to die and instead lives his life normally, is not the same timeline anymore even if the actions of that slave living his life doesnt change history in any way because is one more among nameless millions of people living simple lives that never got recorded in history neither were relevant in any way to it

That's not how it works.

You change that one thing. A person lives instead of dying. Maybe they invent something or destroy something. Maybe they save someone else's life in turn, or murder someone. Maybe they startle a butterfly.

Maybe they have children and the consequences of every future generation ripples down through history: each descendant could marry someone who, in another path of time, married a different person – utterly changing the mix of people in the world over time. Each descendant again could invent or destroy things or change a further person's life.

You cannot change the starting circumstances of a whole world and leave it to run for 13,000 years and expect it to produce the same result.

[Cilia]

What G'raha's time jumping did was make a different branching timeline, while his original 8UC timeline continued into its own future. Just the same there are countless possibilities where Venat / Hydaelyn succeeded in saving the day, but since we exist as a consequence of the multitude of failures at her hands to change the future we dictated to her we can't observe those alternate realities.

Remember how in Back to the Future Doc and Marty make a bunch of jumps forward and back through time? Each time the "present" (1985) is different, but following time travel as it's been explained to us in this game the timelines they leave behind continue on - the "original" 1985, "better" 1985, "best" 1985, and "bad" 1985 all exist, but Doc and Marty can't observe them all and their time traveling shenanigans limit them to "best" 1985 by the end of the trilogy.

That is to say, the relative past is "preordained" because it already happened from our perspective and if events aren't set up so they roughly occur as we said we won't be in a position to go to Elpis, creating a temporal paradox. I think G'raha gets around this by having the altered past become his new future.

Further G'raha can't return to the 8UC timeline, because moving forward in time will only take him to the future of the Shadowbringers timeline (or what it would be if he'd vanished at whatever point he time traveled), just like the events on Elpis playing out any way besides a time loop that sets up the story as we know it would break the timeline and leave us unable to return to the "present" we wanted to save. (Remember, Doc and Marty couldn't go back to the 2015 Gray's Sports Almanac came from - going forward from "bad" 1985 would just take them to an equally "bad" 2015. And of course the Butterfly effect should render the Almanac useless at some point... but I digress.)

Time isn't something you play with lightly.