Quote Originally Posted by Big D View Post
...As for that article on changing history... if it's possible to travel through time, then it's possible to change the past. The very presence of a time traveler in the past alters what actually happened, from the position of air molecules that their body displaces to the overall mass of the universe. It's not something that needs to be focussed on too much in an FFVIII discussion...
Gonna be honest and admit I didn't bother reading the link, but I'd like to comment regardless. Your assumption that the existence of a time traveler operates solely on assumption (then again, so does all time travel). Personally, I'm of the mind that if someone travels into the past to change something, it has already been done. By traveling back, one would merely be fulfilling actions which have already been accomplished. Perhaps that's a bit too much of a blow if one buys into anything other than hard determinism, but it's the only thing that makes sense to me. Well, unless you want to start buying into the kind of stuff string theory (which I only understand on a superficial level) is based off of, specifically the existence of infinite alternate universes branching into an infinite number of time lines.

Regarding the actual theory itself: while interesting, I think it's a mistake to take any references made by Square at face value. While Final Fantasy is notorious for referencing mythology and history, it's also notorious for doing it badly. Shiva is the most notorious example of this (although I vaguely remember there being an explanation for that particularly obvious blunder). Anyway, their track record is so poor, I think it's more appropriate to assume that a reference is botched and thus too unstable from which to extrapolate.