The Truth About Time Travel - FFXIV Lore

foreign [Music] spoilers you've been warned are they gone okay let's begin hey all and our ever expanding sisyphilian task to explain the Wonders and Mysteries of Final Fantasy 14. I've embarked on a quest to make sense of that most wonderful non-traditionally shark-jumping quandary of all fiction time travel now as much as the topic has a tendency to be mind-bending I think Final Fantasy 14 gives us the tools to make real clear sense of when where why and how temporal Magics and Mechanics Work in that vein who likes flowcharts just kidding but before we get into other visuals let me explain the forms of time travel as they seem we'll get back to that later to exist in Final Fantasy 14. in general at face value there appears to be three forms of time travel that we bear witness to in our adventures fixed Loop Branch timeline and fixed points with some other asterisk based situations to account for as well and before it comes up no dragon song reprise is not time travel it's just canonically a Bard's what if fan fiction the first example of actual time travel we come across in our adventures or at least canonically if you played the game in order of release is the events around Alexander on the topic at hand when it comes to Alexander we learn in the raid that three years ago mide and her crew tried to summon Alexander with an Aether Gathering horn like the one on Louisa's staff tubemadi they failed but the Alexander from their future our present arrives with us in tow making it seem like they succeeded on causing a causal Loop that will lead to its summoning later when it consumes midday's boyfriend's soul and Troy enjoy the cat leaves themselves and a journal of the future presence events in the past time travel man mide also puts up the barrier that we find in the Hinterlands which ultimately keeps Alexander and its time stuck within the bubble in our present the Illuminati summoned Alexander into a Charlene structure and a sequence of events that leads to the barrier's creation keeping it locked in place and US traveling back three years inside said barrier take place beyond time travel one of Alexander's other skills is having so much computational power that it was and is able to predict the events of all possible timelines note it did not travel to these timelines but predicted the outcome of possible actions it could have taken and that could have happened within the limitations of its known data which means so far the only events that have and will ever happen have and did happen already we also find out that due to the inordinate amount of eighth are required to travel through time and Alexander's objective to make a perfect world The only possible way for such a thing to happen was for Alexander to be removed from the equation entirely resulting in Alexander locking itself in a single instant internally within the barrier Alexander's awareness of this and causality is made explicit through Dayan midday's hubby and also through the creation of schroinger the oh so cute and fluffy curl of Doom who was made by Alexander since Alexander does not get summoned if the three-year time Loop does not happen and the creation of schroinger was also part of this fixed Loop the Alexander series of events is a closed circuit with the future having to happen first to allow for the past so before we move forward we should go over some of the metaphysics around the mechanisms behind time travel Loosely you take a lot of ether and I mean a lot like a solar powered monolith Ring Pop a doomland due to device or one sad boy's soul and with technology or Magics or technological Magics create a terror in the fabric of space and time which unlike many things in Final Fantasy 14 seems to follow Loosely and studying principles of space-time except for the part where you can send a Target through said tear into an interdimensional Rift everything involving said Rift we will describe as is stinian principles of space-time no I'm not proud of that joke a little the rift is a whirling ceaselessly churning sea of endless chaos that sits between both space and time we see that Rift during stormblood with Omega and that endless Starry expands on our arrival in the first in shadowbringers and our travels to alpis and end Walker those quote unquote Stars seeming to be moments of people's lives broadly anytime we travel between Reflections we tend to see this interdimensional Rift but just because we are shifting through space doesn't mean we are through time specially all Reflections are intrinsically linked meaning that a portal somewhere on the source leads you broadly to the same physical space on another reflection like the first or the 13th but their flow of time can phase in and out of sync with hardly any time passing on the source while Sentry passed on the first on a long enough time scale it does seem like the reflections and Source are at least somewhat synchronous with roughly 10 000 years passing both on the 13th and seemingly on the source post-flood of Darkness but that's a whole other tangent or video this all leads us into our second major example of time travel the branch timeline of the eighth number Calamity and the Crystal Tower while in Alexander was in isolation a fixed causal Loop in shadowbringers we have grahatiya who is awoken within the Crystal Tower and travels from his present in the eighth number Calamity timeline backwards to our present but on the first taking not only himself but the entirety of Syracuse Tower with him this this was accomplished when the survivors of the eighth armor Calamity like the members of the Garland Ironworks and their descendants realized they couldn't save their world but they could help make a better one and spent 200 years working on a way to enter the crystal tower that had been sealed since our adventures within it when they found grahatea through him and using the data and stories from the warrior of light's Adventures within the crystal tower contending with Alexander and facing off against Omega they learned how to open Gates transport things through time and move through space respectively and can I just take a moment to note the beauty and nobility of spending all that time and energy knowing that it won't save your world but it may give others a fighting chance no joke here I just think that's a really powerful message what's more they do not know until they send graha back if it will erase their timeline altogether or what ramifications it will have if you want to hear their story you can check out our reading of it over here they forged a system beneath the tower and made the Tycoon which should be familiar if you enjoy rocking out in excellent memes as it's the final boss of the twinning a dungeon which has us exploring the mechanisms made by the 8th umbral Ironworks beneath the crystal tower using their creation they send grahatia into the past to change the course of history unlike Back to the Future however when graha came to the past and prevented his original timeline's events from coming to pass he did not disappear despite uriyanje's theorizing he may this becomes a running textual idea that despite there being time travel very few if any people are truly sure of its full consequences or implications which means just because one character States a hypothesis does not in fact mean it's fact which could possibly maybe kind of potentially sort of be something worth remembering when some characters talk about other metaphysical Concepts they don't fully understand I'm looking at you and philia stop talking about the echo like you know the final suggested type of time travel is what we see in end Walker with our multiple Journeys to Albus via heidelin's instructions throughout nwalker were set on a course that eventually leads us to an interaction with the soul of the little bits now trapped within the crystal tower in that conversation we not only find out more about alpis but through cryptic dialogue more on that later we are told that Elizabeth saw us there in alpis in the past convinced that it is the right thing to do he sends us back through Time by sacrificing all that's left of his soul within the tower in order to power the Magics he does warn us not to interfere with events in the past unsure of what effect it might have on the future but between his comments here Emmett's surprised at the potential of time magic starring shadowbringers and the musings of a non-elpis it's clear that they understand about as much as everyone else when it comes to the possible ramifications When we arrive we of course immediately end up intervening and not only make friends with the foes who have not yet met us and the na but explain our entire past and their entire future to them this awareness will be struck from Emmett's Hermes and his ladeus's memories thanks to Kairos but vinyl remembers everything we told her which means that heidelin has an awareness of how some key events play out from this moment to the moment she last saws as something she alluded to when we first meet her on the boat to charlian it's really worth hitting home that we tell Vena about our adventures she knows what we must go through and then it must happen to take us here she cannot save us from every tragedy or from every loss and that goes hand in hand with ultimately understanding our answer to her question the fact that Emmett ultimately retains his memory is once they are restored to him via death also shows that us going back to Albus was not some form of alternate timeline but a fixed point that was always a part of our journey even stronger evidence can be found in the guise of an Afghan Hound wrong dog wrong dog that's my dog it's Argos okay it's Argos this Fluffy Boy immediately takes a shine to us on Mario lamentorum but doesn't in the past on elpis until we earn his trust which is why we have his Trust on Mare and when it comes to the events of pandemonium it's the same thing or well it probably is the fact a little bits can partially recall the events of us going back to alphys assumes that we did and the cause of it being foggy may be as simple as the loss of memories he struggled with over time but regardless of why that recollection motivates him to send us back but he only has it because we were there there is any number of smaller points to explain how this example is part of a fixed Loop but better to not just recount the entire story of Ben Walker there is a fourth kind of situation or category that aren't so much time travel as temporal manipulation and they pop up a few times the most notable is the Magics of all thick cast by Louis swab on the warrior of light at the Battle of carton now which suspended the warrior of light in a moment of temporal stasis for five years returning them to the world outside the stone of all thick in the Shroud louiswell was able to accomplish this thanks to the horn upon his staff to zamadi which has the power to draw in vast quantities of Aether and the recent destruction of the Primal of The Twelve above cart now which led to large sums of Aether being present in the air the same Aether Louis sua would put to use to become the Phoenix the second example of stasis was the Magics and Technology of the crystal tower crafted by Amman to pause time for everything within Syracuse when the tower was sealed off both during the fourth and mcclamity and when it was sealed Again by graha during the events of Crystal Tower and another example of temporal pausing is when it pops up in Alexander and Tycoon while having the power to compute Futures and travel in time also could cause causality like the mechanic he uses in Soul the Creator spells like stop and break on the other hand don't actually pause time but instead stun freeze or hold a Target in place meaning they are binding spells rather than temporal manipulation but on the topic of what happens to a Target when it's pause in time where the warrior of light went during those five years Louisa magic them away to is ambiguous and whether Frozen in time or sent forward it's an endless and pretty pointless argument but the crystal tower's magic is emphatically more of a stasis spell than the magic of althix which seems to pocket away the warrior of light speaking of spells which should talk about astrologian real quick well astromancy does Source Itself by connecting one's ather2 and pulling on the Aether of the stars and the Fate they ordained some of that is more High oratory than literal capability tugging on fate does not equate to affecting time as the astrologians and stars actions can be part of a preset fixture of events and the reading of the cars that affects the threat of someone's Fate on a macro scale are just the path that someone was meant to go down Leva herself puts it best any Layman will tell you that the cards can predict a man's future this is both true and untrue it is not the future that a card predicts but the card influencing the man so that a certain future becomes more attainable seeking to tell a man's Fortune you draw a card from your deck upon reading the card you scribe that the man will be victorious in a coming battle what is it that brings the man his victory but Aether tapped from one of the lower six Heavens granting the man's strength making it all that much easier for him to overcome his anime so yeah not so much future prediction but using the stars to predict the future because you're making the future happen based on the fact that you have agency before we move on I feel like I'm forgetting something all right I forgot to talk about the magic Visions Mikoto who joined us on our evilly scene adventures and seemingly out of nowhere during the events of bosia is revealed to not only have the echo but the power to witness glimpses of the future is the primary example of visions of the future in a very tangible way and on the multiple occasions we do play witness to these Visions they all happen the exact same way as perceived seemingly unavoidably so though the moments following them tend to make the assumed outcome and actual outcome mismatched the fundamental point is that the future seems immutable this ability to perceive events which have not happened yet but seemed locked into a natural flow goes well dovetailing into our next section how in reality there is only a fixed Loop okay so I've established hope time travel mechanically functions or at least how it's often perceived to work only all of that two put it bluntly and the words of another content creator is wrong praise joke at first of his name it's all fixed Loot and I can prove it in the raid series we are told specifically not that Alexander can see into the future but that it can predict possible outcomes for the future and I quote Alexander dreamed of all the realities imaginable all the realities mathematically computable and in the end reach a single logical conclusion it would change nothing and erase itself from existence so while branching outcomes are told to be possible and Alexander does have the power to shift time and space and emphatically it does not use this power to Tinker just because it could does not mean it did possibility for sexuality and while confusing it is not in fact an omniscient chat GPT like I said earlier it's all explicitly a fixed Loop though Alexander does Say by way of Dan the reason for its lack of intervention is that the warrior of light is pivotal to stopping a looming threat and I quote 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 fourth remains shrouded in mystery Beyond even the colossus's ability to calculate and yet Alexander chose to believe in them and the lights within them now what that line is referencing in specific is not the purview of this video but I would just point out what the culmination of the most recent expansion was how end Walker is ultimately the Crux of this fixed Loop in Timeline with no character really knowing the outcome from our return to Alphas onwards and the wonderful fan theorizing speculation of these lines in locusts [Music] good said Celestial noise be the song of a lonely bird at the edge of the universe who can say and sure that is some retroactively speculative Insanity which neither Koji or anyone on the writing team intended but it's sure fun to wonder remember our cons fan in responsibly now I hear some of you saying but Elio clearly it's not all fixed loot we literally have two timelines accounted for not only existing But continuing to exist to which I would say you are right and also wrong the eighth armor Calamity timeline not only emphatically happened but thanks to the NM promised tomorrow short story we know that it continued to live on even after the events that led to its creation were prevented even with a certain poem writing Yu-Gi-Oh playing Ellison speculating otherwise so great case solved except the eighth Emerald timeline is a part of the fixed Loop don't believe me well let's walk down the series of events that got us here and then jump forwards a bit at the start of 2.0 we awake to heidelin and trusting us with our whole quest which she does in part by already knowing that we were her chosen having visited her in alpis in the first place a lot of stuff happens but fast forward past that all to an interesting moment memory we play witness to at the start of 5.0 when Arbor and his group give themselves up to Halt the flood of light well everyone except Arbor who Heil in through menphilia specifically prevents from giving his soul saying your time has not yet come which from what we know later and what his ultimate fate is [Music] sorry about that from what we know later and what his ultimate phase is makes sense but why does heidelin know that at this point in time I'm sure you can see where I'm going in tandem with this we have the eighth Emerald timeline split which thanks to the XR coming back in time is a prevented outcome except we needed those events to happen so the x-arc could be here to save us and allow shadowbringers to happen when we hit end Walker we have vanilla Phantom stalking us and possessing kriel giving us cryptic hints and guiding us to where she knows we need to be and tons of other key clues for when we arrive on Alphas like the very flower itself but before we arrive there though we get a convo with the sad boy himself we recalls seeing us in alpis and while this is clearly foreshadowing for pandemonium he struggled to recall the memory could be anything from a loss of memories fractured psyche or my personal favorite the devs not being able to account for if the player will actually do the side content please go do all the raids think about what we know thanks to end Walker up to the point that we visit Elvis the non knows all the events that will lead us here to what extent in detail isn't totally clear but she is explicitly told the broad Strokes by us which means that for benad to know what was going to happen like she did in shadowbringers and pre-alpus we must have gone to alpis in the first place and us going to Alphas does not happen if the events of shadowbringers don't happen which don't happen if the eighth Amber Calamity timeline does not happen which can only happen if we go to alpis perfect Loop there are a ton of other events that are pivotal to the outcomes we get like the events of the crystal tower having to happen at least in the eighth Emerald Calamity timeline and as of 5.3 for us as well and a myriad of tiny things but I don't think covering every and any single one would do much to convey the point stronger or clearer than I have here but if you're replaying through the story make sure to keep an eye out for them okay so why does this all matter anyways well for one it's a major plot point that benefits from clarification even if just for players better understanding The Narrative but just as importantly it would suggest that time travel and Final Fantasy 14 is not a willy-nilly Affair that will be applied to retroactively change events we cared about or constantly used though admittedly that may be hypercopium and Wishful Thinking on my part seeing as we have had it be a major plot point for two expansions in a row there's also the possibility that due to the nature of the interdimensional Riff and its chaotic state of being that while the events of the heidelin and zodiac Saga were a fixed Loop maybe not every form forever will have to fit in that same Playbook or that all possible outcomes of all possible events exist all at once the limitations are frustratingly but also evocatively unclear at least for now so what do you think think I misunderstood something or that there are some things that disprove my explanation here feel free to share since we all benefit from better understanding the metaphysics of this game we love with time and space just one more Horizon to be explored who knows where our journey will take us next with all that said stay safe our cons and thanks for watching hey all thanks for watching if you enjoyed this video praise the 12 by giving it a like and comment or by subscribing it goes a long way to helping the channel don't forget new videos every week and if you want to engage with us further why not check out our Discord and patreon in the link below and become a part of our community with that said see you around fellow archons [Music] wow you could call the events of Alexander a Quantum break a real Chrono Trigger where he's caught in a kinda death Loop in the sands of time and you know in the outer Wilds of shadowbringers rahatiya really is a Time splitter can't hate him though Gotta Love hit when he blinks and the braid of his life is strange and on that I'm gonna head out on a more emotional note and let you

Channel: The Eorzean Archives

Views: 7,099

Keywords: Alexander, Exarch, Venat, Louisoix, ffxiv, ff14, final fantasy 14, final fantasy xiv, final fantasy, msq, eorzean archives, FFXIV, a realm reborn, shadowbringers, stormblood, endwalker, arr, scions, thancred, 6.0, Sharlayan, Hydaelyn, G'raha Tia, Elioaux, Estinien, time, space, alexander, exarch, crystal tower, venat, elpis, time travel, ffxiv time travel, paradox, elidibus

Id: eauLlddLom4

Length: 19min 42sec (1182 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 21 2023