#I hate what's happened to Reddit.

[lasesmed]

This is literally so real

[yuri-is-online]

Love and Deepspace Timeline: MC, Philos, and the Aether Core

Look I finished Xav's myths card. I don't regret waiting until I was done with it to post his timeline because the last two nodes have more to do with MC than him, but I am in a state so we are making this to cope.

This is all speculation and should not be taken as fact, I have done two other posts, one on Zayne and one on Xavier and I will not be doing one on Rafayel please see this reddit post by u/joonmin for relevant information about his myths card blah blah blah.

This post is less of a timeline and more here to answer questions you very likely have if you: A) decided to browse reddit and saw people saying Xavier feels like the "cannon ro" [this is a gacha game there isn't one] but have never read any of his memories, moments, or dates B) read chapter 8 and went "none of this makes sense I feel like I am missing something" or C) just generally are confused about L&D's world building and what's up with MC. I have answers for you. Wibbly wobbly soupy answers. This post also has a TL;DR in case you don't want to see me break out the string board and just want the relevant bits of information about MC you won't get from the msq.

SPOILERS FOR ALL IN GAME CONTENT UP TO CHAPTER 8, VARIOUS MOMENTS, AND ANECDOTES RELATED TO ALL 3 ROS, PROCEED WITH CARE.

Current Timeline MC (i.e. The one we are playing as)

The game starts with MC's graduation from the Academy and first day as a fully licensed hunter. We learn a few things in this first chapter, namely that MC is combat trained, has a rare heart condition known as Protocore Syndrome that has no known cure, and that her decision to become a hunter has something to do with what she experienced fourteen years ago during the Catastrophe when the Deepspace Tunnel opened and Wanderers started invading earth.

Specifically MC describes something burrowing itself into her heart. She feels helpless, like prey, and has a strong desire to never feel anything like this again. Which is unfortunate because I have a feeling a lot of someones are going to be on her trail sooner rather than later.

In Chapter 5 it is revealed that MC has an Aether core fused to her heart. This sort of human experimentation is highly illegal and it is unknown who did this to MC other than our beloved Grandmother was directly involved. Grandma appears to have taken MC away from wherever this happened after the tests started to threaten MC's life.

This is known to Dr. Zayne and Dr. Noah, though neither seem to know more than what Grandma told them. Neither of them seem to fully understand what an Aether core is or what it is doing to MC's heart. Zayne in particular seems to find this extremely concerning.

Uncovering the mystery of the Aether core seems to be what will be driving the first arc so we will not be discussing it at length here. I do want to note that Xavier absolutely knows what it is, while Zayne does not but does seem to know more of the technical aspects of how it is effecting MC, and Rafayel is at least aware of it being valuable and maybe why exactly the people in the N109 Zone want it.

At some point in the past MC met and made a promise to Rafayel. It is my personal theory that this likely took place on Hat Island during the field trip MC talks about due to some of the comments made in Chapter 7.

MC and Caleb were friends with Zayne in childhood. MC's exact age is a bit fuzzy, but the game does seem to suggest she is younger than Zayne. She does not know why Zayne disappeared from her life or what led him to become a doctor.

Comments in Chapter 4 suggests that Caleb encouraged MC to become a hunter. He seems to be very supportive of her, but Grandma seems more interested in trusting MC's protection to Zayne.

On the surface MC seems pretty normal. Her memories from before the Catastrophe seem to be gone, if she had a mother and father or other blood relatives, she doesn't remember them anymore.

Philos MC (i.e. What is Going on in the Myths)

It is revealed in Xavier's When Shooting Stars Fall anecdote that Philos is Earth in the distant future. This has confused numerous people in the notes of my Xav's timeline so I am going to be insufferable and attempt to assist with a graph:

The MC you play belongs to the game timeline, the MCs (plural each myths card features a different one) in the Myths cards come from the Philos timeline. I have tagged the Game timeline as a "potential tangent" as the events that take place in game are entirely reliant on the existence of the Deepspace Tunnel, which is created in the Philos timeline.

At some point in the Original/Philos Timeline, Earth's core ceases to function. Humanity replaces it with a new, artificial core that causes noticeable weather changes and fuses all of the tectonic plates together, and begins a new calendar counting forward from the years since Earth ceased to be and Philos was born. As a result, we don't know what exact year Earth's core giving out happened in the Original Timeline. The artificial core allows almost all humans to "live eternal." They seem to be like Tolkien's elves in the sense they can live for an eternity but they start to get tired after a while and give up on life. This is why there is a royal family that needs a line of succession. Xavier is the Crown Prince of Philos, he meets MC in school and learns she has a rare disease called Protocore Syndrome which will not allow her to live forever. He attempts to cure this by finding a specific protocore she mentions, but fails to reach her in time and is forced to watch her die. This all happens in the year 214.

At some point MC is reborn and assigned to the same teacher as Xavier. She is to train to become his knight and serve as the leader of the Lightseekers, an order tasked with killing Wanderers. At some point during or before Xavier's coming of age ceremony, he learns the truth about Philos: the planet is dying due to the artificial core never having been meant to sustain the planet this long. The Royal Family's solution for this is to occasionally feed humans to the heart of Philos in Starfall Forest. When they do this, it creates Wanderers. As if that wasn't bad enough, Xavier learns that his father and the royal family have found what they think could be a permanent solution: there is a girl who has achieved true immortality. She is the only person on Philos who can die and be reborn constantly, and while they don't seem to know why she does this, the royal family believes this girl is the life force of the planet itself.

This girl is MC and Xavier does not want this to happen. He has a plan that he does not explain to MC, but it involves traveling back in time. He says they have specific places in time picked out, but we know from Xavier's Passing By anecdote that something went wrong with his team's attempt at time travel and now there is no guarantee that the MC he left on Philos as its Queen is still there.

So now we have two timelines: Original/Philos Timeline and Game/Tangent Timeline. But all of that is just taking Xavier's anecdotes and Myths card into account... so what happens if we try to plug in the other two ROs?

Rafayel

In u/Joonmin's reddit post they mention two very important bits of information: 1) It has been 30,000 years since the sea dried up and 2) MC is a member of the royal family of Philos, not by birth but because "she has a heart that’s been blessed by the gods" and has "awoken from the depths." If all three myths cards take place in the same Philos timeline as the one Xavier leaves, we can reasonably place Raf's myths card after Xavier's backtrack mission.

So the Philos timeline would look like this. I have a note for Zayne's card there as well, but if I had to get picky with it I'm slightly tempted to place his Myths card between MC's first death and her being reborn to meet Xavier again. The other explanation would be that there are three separate Philos timelines created because the MC was successfully scarified to the Heart of Philos. In Xavier's Myths 6 MC briefly takes a dip in the space time anomaly at the center of Starfall Forest which could also explain MC scattering across different timelines, but the in game spacepedia makes a point to say that there is a chance that life still exists on Philos:

So it could simply be that MC over there has been stuck in the exact cycle of death and rebirth that Xavier was trying to prevent. It could also mean that when they add that mystery fourth love interest there is an explanation for a fourth possible myths card. Anyway all this information leaves us with a set of timelines that currently look like this:

This still leaves a lot of unanswered questions. For example, if the Philos timeline is where this all starts, what version of it is? What caused Earth's core to give out in that original timeline? Is Rafayel and Lumeria's existence the consequences of clashing timelines or are mermaids cannon to this universe? What effect on the space time continuum did Xavier's actions have? And how much of this is actually going to be answered in game?

TL;DR

Philos is Earth in the future with an artificial core that started running out of power, and never should have been made in the first place.

The royal family fed some of their long lived humans to the anomaly in Starfall forest to keep the planet running, but then they found out about a girl who could constantly be reborn each time she died and had an idea.

An idea Xavier wasn't very keen on but who cares. They thought that "when the time was right" they would sacrifice her to the rift and leave her there to die and be reborn forever. They also did not think to ask her.

Oh yeah when they fed people to the rift they turned into Wanderers. So wanderers = people as mentioned in Zayne's Still in the Dark anecdote.

Whatever makes MC reincarnate might have something to do with Lumeria, or at the very least the Lumerians in Rafayel's myths card seem to think it does.

In game MC, current timeline MC knows none of this, and has no memories from her lives, past or future. This is consistent across all her incarnations.

Final Thoughts

The only reason why I think this way about timelines is because I watched Donnie Darko in a college theater class. People like to argue about that movie and how it is supposed to be interpreted, but generally speaking they all seem to think that Tangent Timelines and the Tangent Universes they spawn get deleted very quickly, so maybe that's why the game starts by talking about "being able to leave this loop" and why Xavier seems to think something bad will be happening to Linkon City soon.

Chapter 8 ends with Xavier attempting to send a message back through the Deepspace Tunnel to make contact with someone. Interestingly enough he calls this "Traceback II." This sounded familiar to me and sure enough the game starts by mentioning that exact same thing, it is going past a black hole and is what says that line "we are stuck in this loop."

I thought in previous posts that the Aether Core is what could cure MC... but now I think the Aether Core is likely what Philos's artificial core is called... so who created it in the first place? ｢(ﾟﾍﾟ)

The Deepspace Tunnel is a spacetime anomaly likely caused by Philos's existence since it was "never meant to exist." So why was it created? And by who?

[chirpsythismorning]

The way fans on the st sub are almost all in agreement Nancy ending up with neither Jon nor Steve wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world, and how they can even come up with a sleuth of reasons as to why, honestly pretty valid and fair reasons, but then are absolutely gobsmacked when fans merely speculate something along those lines for El is, quite something.

[thefabulousfab-3]

“I can’t believe Penelope got a happy ending”

Oh my god, you’re so right it’s not like this show is a romance where every main couple is guaranteed a happy ending. Oh wait…

[shsl-roomba]

the dr fandom cant handle wlw ships in any other context than background fluff with no depth

i like sakuraoi and tsumioda ect but they always get woobified and mellowed out like did they SEE 1-4??? aoi did not pull all that to get sidelined as a supportive background lesbian in your ishimondo fanfic

and don’t get me wrong. my girls need a break sometimes fluff is great i don’t have a problem with it. but it’s the constant sidelining of wlw ships in favour of het/mlm ships in pretty much any fandom that gets to me.

and how wlw ships are only acceptable in the community when they don’t have any dysfunction or toxicity, and if the ship does have even the slightest hint of the above qualities it is either mellowed out to the point of being unrecognisable or dumped on with thinly veiled misogyny and homophobia and when i say slightest hint i mean the literally slightest hint. like the girls will argue once and the fandom will label the ship toxic while shipping. fucking kuzupeko or something.

wlw ships are seen almost entirely as a way to get female characters out of the way of mlm ships. in het ships the female character is a tool to develop the male character. they show significantly less depth and probably dies to forward the male character’s development (sound familiar?)

in any situation female characters are characterised by their relations to male characters. a female character’s (usually romantic, or at least interpreted as such) relationship with a male character is their defining characteristic. if said female character is in a wlw relationship they are reduced to their most basic traits while male characters are explored and given depth, and exist in the story only to offer support to the male characters.

i haven’t even mentioned how female characters must be in a relationship to be even remotely relevant in a story, but that’s a rant for another time.

grrah the way that female characters mirrors how wlw ships are treated by the community, and that characters/ships that aren’t completely perfect and deemed acceptable by the community are dumped on by the larger dr community while worse ships or characters are welcomed because they happen to contain a male character is gonna be my 13th reason istg.

anyways this rant is getting long but in summary danganronpa fans hate women and they hate wlw relationships that they can’t jerk off to.

[pinacoladamatata]

eating my popcorn watching all this drama go down irt the larian discord server

[ivalice-tifalucis]

Gosh, I know the drama about Lea Michele and Glee and then the drama surrounding Funny Girl revival which is such a hot mess. Beanie Feldstein shouldn't have gotten the job but nepo baby everyone!!!! Everyone raging over eventual Lea Michele casting is also woww especially because the Glee behind the scene problem was still quite fresh on public's minds.

After watching POTO then I also know Ramin is the male lead. Man, I keep gasping and wtf-ing watching the recap of the drama (as in the drama surrounding not the musical itself) on youtube videos and then reading through comments and threads on reddit. I feel slightly bad that people especially on reddit were gossiping everything about Funny Girl and they open every Ramin's cards there including the Rierra thingy which I honestly wanna know more and now I sort of know more but at what cost (sigh). I still have so many questions though but I don't know who to ask or even to talk about Rierra. Ugh, Amber Ardolino for fucks sake, I know she's an influencer but of all pics she could use as her pfp it's gotta be when she watched Harmony...haaa ofc. No wonder he took the Italy job, good for him. He looked so knackered.

I'm glad at least now it's over by the time I arrive to the fandom. He got booked af too, maybe thanks to this(?). Also, this is why you don't ship real person (but I already did anyway, several times hehe).

Rierra...ugh, I give up. I need someone to talk to. Please!!! What the hell is going on??? This is beyond the "shippers are crazy and things got blown out of proportion" problem because I've been in situation where I am the crazy shipper (and later realize it), I've also seen people crack shipping real people to disturbing level, I've shipped RP and saw it crumbling before my eyes too, and then I also in the position where I feel vindicated that my RP ship is real and going stronger and stronger whether it's right in my face or through something cryptical or easy to miss unless you look deeper. This is something different.

[hannibard]

Witcher reddit is so fucking homophobic/biphobic

Shut up shut up shut up!!!!!!!

[vulpinesaint]

You're such a redditor

fascinating ask. would love to know what prompted it. did you not care for the roast duck joe biden post anon or did the relentless witcher blogging just really give redditor for you

[dennisboobs]

we do a little ranting in the tags, as a treat.

[hivvernal]

Tumblr's recent ai scraping posts and admitting that they'll partner with programs to scrape users, manually having to opt out of it on each individual blog just to try to dodge it, and general woes have really put a damper on how much I want to draw and share. Easy to feel hopeless in these times right with just about everything happening in and around the world but I settled that I'll still share things here for the time being and until tumblr really becomes completely unwelcome to artists.

[mrsmarlasinger]

Hmmmmmmmm quick question! What do you do when your executive dysfunction has reached such a critical state that you:

are actively ignoring things you desperately need to do

are ghosting your employers (even though you can make it all go away by doing the one thing you most need to do: send an email and QUIT)

have almost three dozen notifications that you can't even bring yourself to look at

completely unironically have done nothing but sleep and flip between two apps for days

are fucking up your professional/financial future even though you need to move out in a matter of months

✨and✨

are paralyzed by anxiety that keeps mounting to increasingly unsustainable heights

YET

you GENUINELY CANNOT figure out how to PHYSICALLY FORCE YOUR BODY to do the (extremely short, extremely important) list of things you keep telling yourself you're going to do

because at this point you can't even shower or change the clothes you've been wearing for days on end?

Asking for a friend. I'm the friend.

[chirpsythismorning]

Birthdaygate didn’t seem plausible to me, and to be truthful I’ve hated it ever since that gate surfaced. But your recent posts have fully convinced me. All of that can’t be a coincidence.

Changing lives, one byler birthdaygate denier at a time 😌

[idiotsdayparade]

i miss my cat so fucking bad i feel like i'm going crazy

[neverendingford]

.

[the-anon-ghost]

me, talking to someone on reddit: my prices are 20$ per character sheet some random 17 year old after getting done with his “this is why people are using ai art” rant in some art community comments: that seems really expensive- me: do you want your wolf fanfic love story or not kyle