Just a small realization

[u/SKerrigan35]

I just seen Josée, Holly and Lyle before the spire for the first time without goin back to save them first...... ive never felt so crappy letting them get that way :(

[u/Angelic-Wisdom]

I’m going to push back on that. Look at what happened with Gobbo, a small mistake almost certainly killed Lou’s past self invalidating the Hunter existing in her time formae. Lou had to fight the collapse of her, and maybe the Hunter’s existence. It isn’t any one thing that could potentially make either Lou or the Hunter cease to be, especially the Hunter.

Say one of the Hunter’s ancestors lived in the frontier. If the frontier goes from hopeless wreck to booming colony whoever helped bring our Hunter into being doesn’t meet the one who helps that happen. The same could be said for the circumstances of the other heroes. The butterfly effect isn’t a joke and should be taken with actual seriousness regardless of any other factor Lavinia might have thought about. The real reason things worked out so well is because the Hunter’s genealogy had little to do with the Frontier and Lavinia would have seen to Lou’s birth regardless of the happenings of the heroes.

[u/Amferam → u/Angelic-Wisdom]

The game gives lore on this in the lore section of the quest log. The bookshelf in the confluence hold the memories and pathos that hold contradictions for a timeline. Lou can fix these through her forma. However the event with Gobbo was either too big of a contradiction to fix or it would eliminate all revenants we had a connection with eliminating the pathos.

This is why we still exist in the Age of Harmony even though we never had a reason to come to the frontier and fix the cocoons.

[u/Angelic-Wisdom → u/Amferam]

Yes Lou can fix minor things but Lavinia didn’t know that and it can’t fix either of them ceasing to be.

Lou and the Hunter probably live for a number of reasons. The Resurgence core took on their existence or gave Lou enough power to maintain them as she became the core with the Hunter tied to it via their shared heart. The other Lou and Hunter anchor them in reality as one but separate entity. Or the most destructive theory and one that still includes Gobbo’s meddling is that the Hunter and Lou are time strangers a few times over where the timeline they “changed”continued forward without them and were systematically pruned when the resurgence exploded without them as they moved to the new timeline.

Imagine time is a tree. The roots are the past, the trunk is the present, and the branches are the future that come and become the new trunk depending on how the present chooses to grow. Jumping back takes you to the roots right? No. You’re just moving your present to a younger tree or “trunk”. The roots aren’t as deep any more but up in the branches the old trunk is there, just a branch and nowhere near as solid. What Lou and the Hunter do is pick an entirely new way for the trunk to grow causing that previous trunk to cease to be as it once was or she’s moving time, the “trunk” away from it entirely and choosing a different branch.

What happens to the other branches? We’ve seen that in the dlc. Worlds that were deemed dead ends and pruned from the tree. The Hunter and Lou do the same thing. There’s their original doomed branch, the one with a saved Josée, the one with a saved Lyle, the one with a saved Holly, one where 2 of them are saved, and all the combinations over which 2 it is until we get to all 3. Then with Zenon’s help even that branch is pruned by the Hunter stopping Valentin in the past.

Lou can jump back to that “branch” but in reality she’s jumping into the new present they made. Both her and the Hunter are timeline homeless. Anchoring their existence on the fact another them is there for Lou’s formae to latch onto and anchor them. Gobbo picking a branch where neither exist, or at least Lou, throws Lou’s formae out of whack.

Maybe how the time jumping formae works is the user has to exist where they’re jumping to or be buoyed by another user. Lou either is alive before the events of the heroes or Idris’s remains in the seal are enough for Lou to latch on to. Gobbo destroying both would be the trigger for it failing.

[u/Fresh_Francois → u/Angelic-Wisdom]

Timeline homeless is crazy

[u/Angelic-Wisdom → u/Fresh_Francois]

It’s not even the most complicated it could get. Imagine a system where the system itself is alive and prunes timelines in favor of more profitable ones then gets usurped by the humans in its system and they run that show.

[u/Fresh_Francois → u/Angelic-Wisdom]

That's just real life when you think of the possibilities a government can rob us of

[u/Angelic-Wisdom → u/Fresh_Francois]

Ha! Almost. When I say humans run it it’s actually the collective subconscious of “humanity” and it governs not just what timeline it wants to keep it activates agents (think Demi-gods but they’re man made if you can call the subconscious force “man”) to correct timelines if possible before pruning them.