Sorry, but i just can't see it that way.Originally Posted by Blastedspider
Sorry, but i just can't see it that way.
Someone explained this very thoroughly a couple of weeks ago.
In typemoon there are two views of the universe. The Actual Universe and the Observable Universe.
The AU is like a giant stone tablet with everything that ever has or will happen etched into it. There's no past or future, everything just is and is layed out clearly all at once. Likewise, events don't "unfold"- every "possibility" is actually just another etching. These etchings take the shape of branching lines, corresponding to the timelines as we understand them.
The OU is what humans actually witness. Imagine a blind person running their fingers along the lines in the etching in order to understand it. This is what gives motion to time. We start by feeling the past, and then running our finger down the line towards the future.
The problem is that the blind person, Alaya, only has limited energy. Running their finger across every single line on the AU is impossible. So when the line they're tracing starts repeating over and over (stagnation), they just give up on it and stop wasting energy tracing that line.
This is "pruning"- not really the destruction of a timeline, just Alaya no longer providing any energy towards it. That said, the observable universe is all humans are capable of observing. Worlds exist within the AU that are not traced by Alaya, but we can't even look at those worlds.
We do have the ability to simulate worlds like that ourselves (see: Lostbelts) but simulating an unobserved timeline and actually traveling to one are very very different.
The meta reason is probably just that this is a game and games where nothing happens are boring. But everything I said is the in universe narrative on pruning and the universe.
Yeah, that sure was a good part of CCC.
Counter-Force/Alaya only supports full of possibilities (=interesting) timelines, and doesn't care about stagnant (=boring) ones.
Nasu's ideas are very weird.
Twice Pieceman was a villain. Beryl Gut was a villain. Comparison (which is "Envy", aka the source of conflict) is Humanity's Evil, means it should be overcome.
But then Kirschtaria is "villain" and peaceful stagnation considered to be "evil" too.
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But this is probably correct.
Though, if Alaya wants to keep energy, isn't it better to keep stagnant timelines because they require less energy to sustain?
It's not that complicated. Every single Nasuverse villain is fundamentally right in some sense, but always with a critical flaw that makes causes their "righteousness" to fall apart, and lead them onto the path of wickedness.
Take Twice, for example. His thoughts about conflict, while extreme, are corroborated in other places in EXTRA as being essentially correct. But the problem is that the realization he has about human nature requiring conflict, is to him, a justification for his own hatred of humanity. The reason he's actually trying to embroil the world in war isn't because he simply believes in his thoughts about conflict to such an extreme extent, but rather that he wants to prove that humanity is the kind of despicable creature capable of nothing but bloodshed that he imagines. This is his principal flaw, and why he's a villain.
The same goes for a majority of the other Nasuverse villains. They're all fundamentally correct in some aspect, while simultaneously incorrect in another, more critical way.
There are some that don't really fit this pattern, but they're usually the bad ones (Archimedes?).
It's akin to watering a plant what's already withered.
Also the time humans experience is not the same time as the one experienced by those outside human context. Avalon is outside the human context. Merlin, who lives there doesn't experience the same passage of time as people who exist inside the human context.
The priest was waiting for the arrival of the princess, who was only an enemy of all of them.
For the priest, the golden princess was the one and only main heroine.
Everyone else was unworthy of his respect, no matter how strong they were.
Tsukihime 2 Prelude III
Good timelines are all alike; every lost timeline is lost in its own way. There is a reason why there are 7 Beasts.
Besides Alaya wants more possibilities (=entertainment).
Alaya prunes the stagnant and repetitive stories but is subservient to theand so keeps tracing the Fate line anyway.$$$$$$$$$$Greater Will
They did say FSN was the close to the center of the tree, but FGO was even closer. Timeline goes where the Greater Will demands.
Last edited by TresserT; January 20th, 2023 at 08:28 PM.
Would've been extremely funny if the SR for Nito gacha was Tlaloc, but they probably don't have enough SR servants to exclude them from other LB7 gachas.
Urgh, I really dislike that they had to add that FGO is more correct than FSN. I wish this could've been left unanswered.
Also how does this work Gacha is clearly evil? Meta reasons go!
From what I understand, Alaya actually could observe every timeline if it wanted to. It's just that if it does that, the entire system will collapse very quickly. That would be bad, obviously.
It's more like the more you observe each universe, the shakier the foundations get. Alaya needs to prune timelines (aka stop observing them) in order to keep things stable. So it just ignores whatever isn't interesting and keeps observing what is.
If we're going to keep on with the idea that this is metacommentary, then essentially think of every possible timeline as a possible idea that TYPE-MOON could realize. However, they have limited energy, time and resources. If they dedicated themselves to realize every single thing they possibly could, everyone would burn out and the company would go under. So they only make the ones that seem to be promising.
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Anything that makes Nasu fat stacks of dosh clearly can't be evil.
Not sure what are you talking about. All Fate works have a distinctly different "flavor" to them (either on a conceptual level or because of the author).
So are we just trying to go meta and failing to be meta?
Because to just summarize the portion, Alaya expunges timelines that don't have humans going anywhere because it's goal is to fund the timelines that are able to get Humanity off the Planet and reach their destiny while not basically being easy pickings for others.
We can go with "Stagnation isn't bad if Humanity reached perfection" because Stagnation ultimately means that we won't be ready when something huge shakes it out entirely(See Olympus when the Gods died and people found out or the Yaga when they truly saw Ivan for how powerful he was basically gave up right on the dot).
It reminds me of the latest thing Nasu brought up that Zelretch did try and find actual successors and none of them could deal with the responsibility Second Magic can do because using it wrong can literally kill billions, if not trillions of people and deny entire timelines(Nasu even all but mentioned something similar way back in a question if Zelretch wanted to keep one route around of F/SN and delete two others that he would rather not even answer the question). I mean we can speculate over the meta reason till we are blue in the face but I'm pretty sure we was given the actual reason and to be frank:
I don't really see how deciding to stop early "because we got it good" and leave ourselves open to any major shakeup is supposed to be a good thing.
This of course leads into the ServentVerse, where not only has Humanity gone to space but they are quite literally overwriting it with their own will. Humanity is the Eldiritch God to other civilizations there.
I'm not really trying to 'decipher' the story or anything. I think understanding what an author fully intended for their story is impossible without them just going out and saying it, and personally speaking I find the idea that there is only one valid interpretation to a story - the interpretation of the author - to be pretty boring myself.
It's irrelevant to me whether or not any metatextual reading of the narrative is 'wrong' or not. I'm someone who likes to think about the meaning of stories, and more importantly, I enjoy stories about stories, narratives that make us think and contemplate on the way that we personally choose to engage with the concept of a narrative to begin with. That's going to reflect in the games I enjoy, but it will also reflect in the ways that I interpret a story. Even if it is wrong, in the strict sense that it's not the reading that Nasu "intended", it is still more engaging for me to interpret it that way.
In my view, the idea of a story postulating the "correct way" for humans to live is just not very interesting to me to begin with. It's certainly an interesting look into what the author considers a "good society", at least. But I'd prefer not to imagine that we could know anything about how Nasu feels we should live and develop as a society. At least this way, I get something out of it as opposed to merely "I disagree with what this story is trying to say about how human society ought to develop and there isn't much else I can say about it".
To be fair as well, in story the quite a few characters have talked about how PHH isn't necessarily "correct", and not just from the enemy side. There was a whole thing with Spartacus about it in LB3 before the negative parts started being revealed, and also hoped at the end that if it turned out PHH would fall they could accept it with as much grace as QSH (at least showing at that time). Wodime's plan was also seen as valid...its just PHH wouldn't exist if it worked and Chaldea wants to get PHH back. Hell if Wodime's plan was basically "people of PHH alive again but now everyone is Gods" instead of needing to keep them sacrificed they probably wouldn't have been as opposed. And of course while LB6 Chaldea was still committed to getting PHH back they were ultimately on board with trying to save as many lives as they could as part of their deal with Barghest.
Out of universe there could be any number of reasons you could ascribe as to why whats done is done, but in story it is accepted that PHH may not necessarily be correct as well and any of the LBs could, possibly, take their place. And that isn't really good or bad on the whole.
Just had a little epiphany: Daybit wants ORT to destroy everything before the hollowing can happen, right? That it would be better than what the Alien God has in plan. Now, originally, like many also did, I recalled the Animusphere Chant, with hollowing being a step needed to reach "God" ("in the void, lies god"). However, I just remembered the last line from the Cosmos in the Lostbelt trailer, which seems to be spoken by our main antagonist: "Good grief, creating things to fill itself with is a bad habit of this Universe". Could it be that the Alien God's main goal is to just annihilate existence? That the Animusphere's theorized sixth magic is absolute destruction, without return (like a counterpart of the First, which creates from nothingness)? That Beast VII's Love for Humanity is that to exist is to suffer and thus worthless, that it is better and merciful to end it all (it is VII of the END, after all).
I'm speculating this with the idea that Olga is just a stepping stone for a true antagonist, as we know she wants to govern humanity, not full-on destroy it, mind you. Whether this is probable or not, I really just wanted to recall this connection between the phrase from the trailer and the hollowing as a worst catastrophe than global destruction by ORT that came to mind.
Last edited by MoonCell; January 21st, 2023 at 12:37 AM.
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