darien_specter
06-30-2002, 10:53 PM
Well, to jumpstart some fresh new game discussion, I will present A NEW THEORY. Oooohhh... This one hasn't quite got all the kinks worked out yet, so bear with me. And again, I know that a likely answer is, as always, "that's just the way the game works." Well, phooey. That's no fun.
So here we go: It's this matter of Raziel's time travel, specifically his backwards time travel, and the activation of Reaver fonts. Raziel steps backward almost six hundred years... yet Dark, Light, and Air remain sealed, and all the fonts are working, even though Raziel has not, historically, activated those forges.
The answer, I think, lies in the relativity of events. We have the main flow of history, that we are all slowly reconstructing. Let us call this "relative to Nosgoth." Then, there is the unfolding drama of Raziel's experience. We'll call this "relative to Raziel." This is the frame of reference in which the game is played.
Herein lies, for one thing, the paradoxes. Events relative to history have happened in a certain way, and if Raziel could have found a nice Encyclopedia Nosgothica (:D) in the SR1 era, the farthest forward we've seen, he'd have known how everything would unfold - including that Kain dies at William's tomb and that Raziel "dies" when he is imprisoned in the Reaver. Hence, Kain's explanation that "we have always met here." This is the destiny aspect of history. However, Raziel (and Kain, since he's kind of following him) experiences these events relative to himself. In his history, the past comes after the future, because that's how he's experienced it. So this is the free will aspect: because it hasn't happened for Raziel yet, he can decide to do something else. (I would posit, though, that for him to do something else, he would have to know that event's outcome relative to Nosgoth - info Kain posesses, and occasionally supplies.) And so, if Raziel does something contrary to what history relative to Nosgoth has recorded, that history changes. Howsomever, history relative to Raziel remains unaffected, because his future has not yet occurred - even though the history of Nosgoth has already preordained his entire life!
(To briefly touch on what led me to all of this in the first place, I would hypothesize that, for whatever reason, the Reaver fonts and forges somehow exist relative to Raziel. Thus, if we could unearth one of those buried fonts in SR1, none of them would yet be active - because Raziel has yet to encounter them. They move through history with him, not with the rest of Nosgoth.)
The history-altering paradoxes, then, are bound inextricably with these moments when, knowing the Nosgoth-relative outcome of an event, Raziel changes his decision. To explain: Kain's history should have ended in William's chapel. But it didn't; Raziel chose instead to spare his life. Thus, history relative to Nosgoth had to alter to account for his continued existence relative to Raziel. But it would have done so, as we are told in the game, in the simplest possible way. History relative to Nosgoth therefore recorded Kain as making some other choice in the Sarafan chapel 500 years BPC - allowing Raziel to die utterly, not even following him back to that period, or any of an infinte possiblity of choices. Instead, Kain chose to pull the Reaver and save Raziel's life, whose history should have ended then and there. And so Nosgoth's history was forced to change once again, to accommodate Raziel's continued existence (and, perhaps, as mentioned in other discussions, the simultaneous existence of the Soul Reaver - truly now Raziel's twin soul, instead of only himself thousands of years older. Such an occurance may indeed be the simplest solution for the course of history...) Thus, a new course of preordained events has been created for Raziel throughout the ages of Nosgoth's history. It is yet up to Raziel, however, to follow them...
I have not yet been able to fit Moebius and the Elder into this concept yet, though I am certain that they do fit. It's just a matter of figuring out how...
So here we go: It's this matter of Raziel's time travel, specifically his backwards time travel, and the activation of Reaver fonts. Raziel steps backward almost six hundred years... yet Dark, Light, and Air remain sealed, and all the fonts are working, even though Raziel has not, historically, activated those forges.
The answer, I think, lies in the relativity of events. We have the main flow of history, that we are all slowly reconstructing. Let us call this "relative to Nosgoth." Then, there is the unfolding drama of Raziel's experience. We'll call this "relative to Raziel." This is the frame of reference in which the game is played.
Herein lies, for one thing, the paradoxes. Events relative to history have happened in a certain way, and if Raziel could have found a nice Encyclopedia Nosgothica (:D) in the SR1 era, the farthest forward we've seen, he'd have known how everything would unfold - including that Kain dies at William's tomb and that Raziel "dies" when he is imprisoned in the Reaver. Hence, Kain's explanation that "we have always met here." This is the destiny aspect of history. However, Raziel (and Kain, since he's kind of following him) experiences these events relative to himself. In his history, the past comes after the future, because that's how he's experienced it. So this is the free will aspect: because it hasn't happened for Raziel yet, he can decide to do something else. (I would posit, though, that for him to do something else, he would have to know that event's outcome relative to Nosgoth - info Kain posesses, and occasionally supplies.) And so, if Raziel does something contrary to what history relative to Nosgoth has recorded, that history changes. Howsomever, history relative to Raziel remains unaffected, because his future has not yet occurred - even though the history of Nosgoth has already preordained his entire life!
(To briefly touch on what led me to all of this in the first place, I would hypothesize that, for whatever reason, the Reaver fonts and forges somehow exist relative to Raziel. Thus, if we could unearth one of those buried fonts in SR1, none of them would yet be active - because Raziel has yet to encounter them. They move through history with him, not with the rest of Nosgoth.)
The history-altering paradoxes, then, are bound inextricably with these moments when, knowing the Nosgoth-relative outcome of an event, Raziel changes his decision. To explain: Kain's history should have ended in William's chapel. But it didn't; Raziel chose instead to spare his life. Thus, history relative to Nosgoth had to alter to account for his continued existence relative to Raziel. But it would have done so, as we are told in the game, in the simplest possible way. History relative to Nosgoth therefore recorded Kain as making some other choice in the Sarafan chapel 500 years BPC - allowing Raziel to die utterly, not even following him back to that period, or any of an infinte possiblity of choices. Instead, Kain chose to pull the Reaver and save Raziel's life, whose history should have ended then and there. And so Nosgoth's history was forced to change once again, to accommodate Raziel's continued existence (and, perhaps, as mentioned in other discussions, the simultaneous existence of the Soul Reaver - truly now Raziel's twin soul, instead of only himself thousands of years older. Such an occurance may indeed be the simplest solution for the course of history...) Thus, a new course of preordained events has been created for Raziel throughout the ages of Nosgoth's history. It is yet up to Raziel, however, to follow them...
I have not yet been able to fit Moebius and the Elder into this concept yet, though I am certain that they do fit. It's just a matter of figuring out how...