Conjecture Question..Any evidence to support/reject this theory concerning Echo?

[Jacien]

I didn't think they were thrown forward in time really, just hidden away until the calamity passed. Though I suppose there's no functional difference really.

First of all, let's avoid arguing semantics over what happened. Time-statis, time-jump, time-skip, time-travel, aetherial coma, etc. Whatever. The end result is that we are 5 years from the point where we left off in 1.0.

Is there any evidence out there that would support the theory that our lives in 1.0, everything we experienced at that time was just an Echo? And when we were sent to ARR, that was the end of the very long and elaborate echo? In essence, we were being sent "back to the future"?

I feel like this picked up steam only because of the Conspiracy Keanu pic regarding the same in thing in that memes topic. Otherwise, as of now this is the same thing as the theory from Assassin's Creed that the player was playing as someone else using an Animus to look into Desmond's past (who used an Animus).

I'd call this the "Xzibit" theory (Yo dawg, I heard you liked Echo, so we put a flashback in your flashback, so you can Echo jump while you echo jump), but kids nowadays would called it Inception, or Echoception or some jazz.

However, you need to know the fundamentals on how Echo jumping works.

1) You are not traveling into the past. You are seeing a virtual replay from the perspective of the person you're "invading". Thus you cannot change what happened in the past, only the person's memories.
2) You are not possessing or "Quantum leaping" into someone else. You are added in as a third-party viewing the events alongside the person you're "invading".

Citations:

Minfilia: The Echo allows you to breach the wall of a person's soul, and hear the resonations of their past. You will be there in their memories, seeing things as they saw them. You may even interact with that which lies therein. However, the past is like a stone tablet. You cannot uncarve what is already written.

Some have theorized that the Midlander takes over the body of a fourth party member, and witnesses what that person saw. While an interesting theory, this, unfortunately, is not how the Echo works.

Your power essentially places you in a "virtual realm" (I just made that up) to see the events as they happened in the past thanks to the person you're using it on.

As a result of Echo-jumping, if you leave enough of an impression while sifting in their virtual realm of the past, you actually alter their memories of what happened, and they'll believe you were there to begin with (like the ALC30/THM30 quests), or will realize that you were tampering with their memories/shouldn't have been there in the first place (the Seedseer in the pic below gets angry at you).:

However, Echo-jumping into the past does not mean you're time-traveling. You are replaying a person's view of events that happened. As mentioned before, there is an established rule that the past is "set in stone", so when you think you're changing something, you're changing the person's interpretation of events. This does not mean you're changing the past, only the person's memories.

Why is knowing this all important?

Knowing how the Echo works is key to show how "everything you did in 1.0 was just an Echo-jump" is pretty much inconceivable.

The city-state starter quests did this to a much lesser degree, but it wasn't about your character. Your character was viewing events of the past in pieces after interacting with different characters (Anonymoose and others have some posts breaking down each city-state storylines).

So for this theory to work, it would have to follow the set rules. Meaning, a third-party user would have to Echo your character in the Present to see what they were doing the entire time they were Adventuring pre-Calamity. But somehow, they happened to stay out of view the entire time and not influence your character in any way (even during instances like Primal fights or the confrontation against Nael, or even places where events happened where your character was alone).

Essentially, this is pointless. It's more of a recap that you'd see in an anime explaining what happened last week, rather than it being a twist.

EDIT: Still editing/revising. This essentially became me explaining how Echo works.