Somethign bothered me, and then immediately occurred to me as having an extremely good explanation. I suspect I'm not the only one who's thought of this given the age of the content, but I haven't seen it mentioned before.
First of all, a couple quick bits to lay down some facts, that aren't speculation and are in the game, but for this, need to be laid out, understood, and reminded about.
All of these facts are fine by themselves, but together they create a bit of a problem: Alexander willingly causes a time paradox to ensure its existence, despite that not being required for FFXIV's rules of time travel, and despite Alexander explicitly coming to the conclusion that the best possible future is one where it can't be used. Alexander could have easily ensured a timeline where it never existed--and given its brief time existing basically caused a bad time for everyone involved, as well as a huge drain on the ambient aether just from the times it tried to move, it arguably should've. But it didn't.
So, Alexander must have seen that the best possible timeline wasn't one where it was never present. It was one where Alexander was present, very briefly. Long enough for things to escalate to the point where it visibly used its powers over time, in front of an audience, but only in a span of about twenty minutes (depending on how good your Soul of the Creator run is).
Why? It can't just be that it decided that the world was better off if it had Locus and Rise (although it is). It saw something that required people to have seen it.
It saw two expansions into the future. It saw The Tycoon.
submitted by /u/Cleretic
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First of all, a couple quick bits to lay down some facts, that aren't speculation and are in the game, but for this, need to be laid out, understood, and reminded about.
- The way time travel works in FFXIV is that you go back in time and change the same timeline; there aren't branches, and traveling to the past doesn't mean that you were always going to do so. This means that the act of time travel doesn't inherently create paradoxes (but you yourself could cause one). However, changing your past doesn't cause you to change/cease to exist (hi, Crystal Exarch). Basically we're using Back to the Future rules, but without Marty needing to get his parents back together.
- At the end of the Alexander questline, Alexander sends Mide back in time, with her partner, to found the Hotgo tribe and create the Enigma Codex, the artifact/knowledge repository the Illuminati use to summon Alexander.
- Also at the end, Alexander determined that the best possible future is one without its interference; so, it seals itself into a time bubble to prevent itself from ever being used.
All of these facts are fine by themselves, but together they create a bit of a problem: Alexander willingly causes a time paradox to ensure its existence, despite that not being required for FFXIV's rules of time travel, and despite Alexander explicitly coming to the conclusion that the best possible future is one where it can't be used. Alexander could have easily ensured a timeline where it never existed--and given its brief time existing basically caused a bad time for everyone involved, as well as a huge drain on the ambient aether just from the times it tried to move, it arguably should've. But it didn't.
So, Alexander must have seen that the best possible timeline wasn't one where it was never present. It was one where Alexander was present, very briefly. Long enough for things to escalate to the point where it visibly used its powers over time, in front of an audience, but only in a span of about twenty minutes (depending on how good your Soul of the Creator run is).
Why? It can't just be that it decided that the world was better off if it had Locus and Rise (although it is). It saw something that required people to have seen it.
It saw two expansions into the future. It saw The Tycoon.
submitted by /u/Cleretic
[link] [comments]
Continue reading...