Back when I made my post about Saber and Avenger from Fate/Stay Night, I truthfully did not have the best idea of the inner workings of this franchise or even that entry. What I said about a gender bent King Arthur being genius I still stand by to this day but I'd be remiss not to mention that that was an idea that Nasu likely stumbled into due to the revisions of Fate/Prototype in which Arthur was male and his master was a girl who was far more similar conceptually to Sakura than Shirou. Not to say that it's not valid to stumble into an idea but I think I overvalued the input of a person who may not have had the best idea of how to approach the series even that far back. And what I said about Avenger is also invalid, almost completely. It is true that the Avenger class was made specifically for Angra Mainyu but that's only true from a meta perspective. In reality Angra Mainyu did not become the spirit of the grail until his defeat in the 3rd Fuyuki Grail War, in which he was summoned as an Avenger. These statements are present in some form in that post but the implication that the Avenger Class was made specifically for the Spirit of the Grail was incorrect. It's times like these that I'm grateful this blog never received a huge amount of traction.
That said, I've learned a lot about the Fate series since then and I have both a brand new appreciation for each respective entry as well as many more valid criticisms than in that original post so I'd like to discuss them here.
Fate/Extra: The Asset Reuse Game
If you're into anything related to game design you know that asset reuse is not exactly new to video games in general. Pretty much every game reused assets all over the place even if you don't consciously see which specific assets they're reusing. Sometimes it's a matter of animations in a movelist being used by characters, sometimes it's reused enemy types or models for different but similar enemy types, sometimes it's as benign as the devs using the same flame animation for every torch. Asset reuse can't honestly be called a legitimate criticism normally because every game does it. Even different games by the same company are likely to end up reusing a lot of environmental geometry and textures in ways that make it less noticeable or more forgivable if noticed.
Fate/Extra is not one of those times, however. I will be fair and mention that there are quite an abundance of original assets in Fate/Extra. From many of the original servants, to characters like Hakuno Kishinami down to certain environmental stages, to say that the amount of asset reuse in Fate/Extra is the problem would be a lie. The problem is that there are specific situations where it is simultaneously blatant and unwarranted.
What I'm referring to here are specific characters in specific situations. Firstly there's Nero Claudius, who is a palette swap of Artoria, Fate/Stay Night's Archer and Lancer show up with minimal alterations, Rin Tohsaka shows up in the setting as well as Kirei Kotomine, and some others that I'm not 100% convinced are asset reuse are still heavy allusions to Fate/Stay Night such as Shinji Matou, Sakura Matou, Taiga Fujimura, and Ryudo Issei.
Now when I say asset reuse, I'm thoroughly convinced that the ones that are asset reuse are specifically reused from the game Fate/Unlimited Codes, which in itself is a compilation fighting game of elements from Fate/Stay Night, Fate/Zero, and Fate/Hollow Ataraxia. Most of the playable characters show up in 2 of the 3 entries, and the ones that don't are specific to Hollow Ataraxia or Fate/Zero such as Bazett and Zero Lancer.
Nero's design is a variation of Artoria with Artoria's armor removed, recolored red rather than blue, and with green eyes instead of blue. Later depictions would separate them further even with this design, such as Nero exposing more skin and having a fuller figure and larger bust but as of the original game, Nero is mostly a reuse of an Artoria costume from Unlimited Codes. Archer and Lancer are also carryovers with Archer having limited design alterations even in later depictions apart from longer hair, and Lancer has some design alterations on the Gae Bolg but most of his alterations are a use of his assets on Rin. Rin Tohsaka is also a reuse, with her character portrait having notably redder lips but I don't believe the model shows that even in closeup shots. The NPC Sakura Matou would've required more alterations due to her playable version being her from Heaven's Feel's third act, but apart from color alterations and removing the veins, all they'd had to do was add a lab coat for her doctor role since it looks like she's even still wearing the same dress.
The ones I listed thus far are not a huge problem for me, to be honest for two reasons. Firstly, both these games were low budget on the PSP so it makes sense to use some previous assets in a new game as a cost cutting measure. Keep in mind, these games came out before the widespread appeal of the franchise that was likely spawned by UFOtable's Fate/Zero adaptation. So they probably made enough money to get by but were not the mega-franchise holders that they would be as of Fate/Grand Order. This is all fine. What's not as fine are the original assets that reference Fate/Stay Night.
Keep in mind my exposure to Unlimited Codes is limited so there's a possibility that Issei, Taiga, and Shinji have model depictions somewhere in Unlimited Codes. The bigger problem is how all this affects the world building.
To some extent, character appearances from Stay Night in Extra are understandable and make logical sense in the setting. For instance, Archer and Lancer are both heroic spirits which means they could potentially be summoned to any Grail War, original location completely ignored because this is at a time when neither of them are alive anyway. Meanwhile, while it is convenient that Nero looks like Artoria to a great extent, this isn't necessarily manipulative and there are ways to justify why this might be the case or why the characters are different enough.
In addition, the Kirei in this game is an AI intended to be a referee for the Grail War using data to pick the best fit. Kirei Kotomine participated in no less than 2 Grail Wars, so on some level him being a big enough figure to be the referee in this one makes sense by way of his experience. Most people don't even survive long enough to participate in one grail war even if they survive past it but Kirei participated in two which makes him a notable anomaly.
However, Issei, Shinji, Sakura, Taiga, and Rin just look like Stay Night characters for no real reason. I imagine anyone reading this may immediately respond by saying there are narrative reasons for what they are or why they look like that.
Issei, Taiga, and Sakura are just AI so it's just a coincidence, or Shinji and Rin are descended from the Rin and Shinji from Stay Night, are some of the excuses I've heard. However, firstly, from a world building perspective, neither of these are great justifications. Taiga and Issei were not big enough figures in Stay Night to warrant them being part of a Grail War, and if Sakura Matou is an AI that has no real association with the previous Sakura, that just means there's even less reason for her to look, act like, and even have the same name as that character. As for the descendants argument, you're expecting me to believe that Shinji and Rin are so full of themselves that they would have offspring or relatives be named after themselves, as well as so inbred that those offspring look basically identical to them?
Excuses like this harm the world building not only by not being solid enough justifications but also by virtue of them existing specifically for the sake of marketing. What I mean by that is that while the Fate series had not received huge acclaim at the time, Fate/Stay Night was the most popular entry at the time. This is why pretty much every character in Fate/Extra is either original or a reference to Stay Night. Obviously, the in-universe reason can be whatever the writers wanted because they have control over the lore and the world building. I'm more pointing out that the only reason there is a character in Fate/Extra that looks like, sounds like, and is named after Rin Tohsaka is because that's what the fans wanted. That's why characters like that also apply to Shinji, Issei, Sakura, Kuzuki, and Taiga despite none of them having any real justification for it. Even the school in the game is just a replica of the high school that Shirou attended in Fate/Stay Night.
I can see the argument that the school and the student body are based off characters from a specific region and that's why everyone looks the way they do. Some characters look like generic Fate high schoolers but some characters look like characters from Fate/Stay Night even if they don't get a character portrait like Ayako Mitsuzuri and the trio of girls that disliked Rin. But if that's the case, they're missing someone: Shirou Emiya. If that was going to be the case, be universal about it because there was no Shirou Emiya model that I could find if this was the theory.
Of course, it's not all bad. Firstly, there are various original servants to this game. Vlad Dracula, Lu Bu, Robinhood, Nursery Rhyme, Francis Drake, and Gawain all make their first appearances in this game and none of them look anything like existing characters from previous entries, though Gawain does kind of look like Proto-Arthur. In addition, Nero is probably the best servant in the whole series in my eyes so on that subjective note, she's not a bad inclusion. Many tend to argue Tamamo is the better waifu but the point is that there is good here in terms of visual design, helped by the fact that the combat system is really unique for a turn-based rpg.
I just wish this game didn't have to rip so much from Fate/Stay Night in order to be built.
Servant Tier List: Who is the best choice?
If you've followed this blog for a while, you know I don't tend to use images. I prefer to let my arguments and points speak for themselves without dressing them up in any meaningless presentation. This is the advantage of a text only format, it's more difficult to obscure a point via presentation so it's easier to scrutinize, making quality assurance a must. That said, I will be using an image for this section just for the sake of reducing the size of the conversation because of the topic at hand.
Essentially, I asked myself the question "Who is the best servant?" Not from a power scaling or versus debate perspective. Rather, if you were suddenly chosen to take part in the holy grail war, and you had your choice of catalyst to summon whatever servant you deemed necessary, who would be the best choice? So here I came up with a few things to consider:
Firstly, when you summon this servant, what are you realistically going to receive? I got together with a friend on this and he made his tier list with some characters higher than I did because he was judging them at their absolute strongest. The problem with that, though, is that their absolute strongest is usually due to hax that you're not always going to end up with. But some hax are more reasonable to keep than others. For instance, I think it's fair to judge Artoria Pendragon as herself in possession of the Avalon scabbard as pretty much every grail war she's summoned for used it as her catalyst, essentially meaning if you summoned Artoria, you more than likely have Avalon in your possession. Having a catalyst like that be given to a servant as an optional hax is very different from Gawain forcing the sun to rise at random moments because of a blessing granted to him in a specific singularity that, as of the current arc of Fate/Grand Order, is no longer part of the chronology.
Secondly, how many servants does this particular servant have hard counters against? By which I mean, like any good tier list, some characters will do better in certain matchups than others and because of that, the characters that rank higher will generally do better in more matchups than others, making them a safer bet. For instance, Mordred's Noble Phantasm Clarent has an advantage over any version of Artoria due to Clarent being her cause of death. However, how frequently is that advantage going to be a factor? If Mordred is summoned in a Grail War that Artoria isn't even present for, does that favor her chances in any meaningful way? The answer is no, although Mordred likely killed a lot of people with Clarent, it will only serve as a weakness for any servants that both were killed by it and are present for the Grail War. Meanwhile, things like Lancelot's anti-dragon trait, Artemis' anti-cheater trait, or Scathach's anti-divinity trait are useful in far more situations because of how many servants have such traits. Scathach's anti-divinity is especially useful because it not only nearly invalidates divine characters but if a character doesn't possess divinity, Scathach isn't at any less of an advantage because divinity is a durability skill, not a damage dealing skill.
And finally, how useful are the character's skills in a standard grail war? Sure the Grail Wars of Extra and Apocrypha are entertaining but they're not what you can expect to end up in. The Grail Wars of Fate/Stay Night and Fate/Zero are far more standard and, as a result, far more along the lines of what you can expect to find yourself in so we'll be working with that in mind. Some servants will end up ranking lower as a result of this because they can be really strong if given enough prep time, prep time that this format simply will not grant them.
So with that in mind here's my tier list, I'll post it and if you recognize any servant in particular, you know where they stand and will know why after I explain myself.
Okay so let's go through each section one at a time, starting with the bottom.
The Alters section is just the section containing any servant that is outside the bounds of a normal summon. Basically this constitutes nonstandard classes like Rulers and Avengers, Angra Mainyu disregarded, alter servants like Saber or Archer Alter because their existences are inherently corrupted, and alternate costume servants like summers, santa's, and cosplays, because that's not really how grail wars work. So essentially if you see a servant in the alter category, they do not count.
Servants in the human tier are exactly what they sound like, they're servants that are so weak that even a normal human stands a fair shot at beating them. Angra Mainyu is a minor exception due to having an anti-human trait, but generally when it comes to this tier, literally any servant is better than these.
D Rank is for the weakest servants that still qualify as heroic spirits. These are the ones that don't have a tendency to win a lot of matchups and, while strong in certain circumstances, need to be really creative about how they approach situations and, depending on enemy hax, even that may not be enough.
Note on Medusa Lily, though, is that while she is D-Rank, her Mystic Eyes of Petrification are still going to be A+ Rank independent of her age. Generally speaking, lily servants are around 2 ranks below their fully grown versions due to lacking experience and insight but her Mystic Eyes should still have the same properties that they do as an adult.
For clarity because none of the anime adaptations really explain it, her Mystic Eyes of Petrification will do one of two things depending on the opponent's mana parameter: if the mana parameter is below B rank, they'll be immediately turned to stone. B ranks can still be petrified but if you have B rank mana or above, you might not be petrified but all your parameters will be reduced by a full letter rank. Keep in mind, letter ranks are a big deal in the Fate Universe, so much so that the higher your letter rank goes the stronger you'll be relative to a lower letter rank, meaning that the difference between A and B rank is much bigger than the difference between B and C rank. By virtue of that alone, Medusa Lily is just barely outside the confines of C rank.
Speaking of which, C Rank is for the generally average tier servants. They're not particularly weak but there are plenty of stronger servants, so much so that you can win a grail war with these guys but you'll have to strategize and, in some cases, play dirty if that's your goal. This category is mostly comprised of Assassins and Berserkers because many of them fit that bill nicely, can win if you're creative but not the best picks generally.
However, I will note that much of the top of C rank used to be in B rank before I dropped them down to average out the ranks because I had a crapton of servants that were A and B rank but comparatively little in C rank. This was a problem for me because a ranking system doesn't matter if everything, or almost everything is above average. If everything's above average, then nothing is. Some need to be below average in order for above average to mean anything. Side bar, I got into a fight with a friend over this once and he thought I was being an immature child for pointing out the fact that if everything on the list is A rank or higher, there's no need for those other ranks to exist. Unfortunate.
Anyway, this is why some big-dick servants like Berserker Lancelot and Sakata Kintoki ended up in C tier. By all rights, they're nearly as powerful as the B tiers, but by law of averages they don't quite make the cut.
Next is the B Ranks. This is where some particularly powerful servants end up. Many of them either have anti-army noble phantasms, skills or abilities that counter anti-army noble phantasms, or have buffs or immunities that would make them an incredible pain to deal with if you go up against them.
So a few particular characters of note since some of them may end up contentious. Firstly, Iskandar is pretty close to the bottom of B tier to the point of being close to C tier. A lot of people think of Iskandar as one of the most powerful servants in all of Fate. Some of it is the charisma he displayed in Fate/Zero but I did hear some solid arguments for him being higher. In particular, his luck stat is A rank, which means he's effectively immune to Fate altering attacks. At this point, I was not happy. However, after thinking about it some more, I realized that most characters don't have skills like that. Apart from the Gae Bolg, which only two characters total in the entire lore have ever wielded to my knowledge, there aren't too many Noble Phantasms that disrupt causality. So when I got to brass tacks, I asked myself, what does it really take to defeat Iskandar? And the answer is pretty simple: if your attacks can hit him while he's riding his chariot, and you have a Noble Phantasm that can defeat his Ionian Hetairoi, you can beat him.
This is what kept him in B rank: noble phantasms that can beat both sets of abilities are universal in A rank and are fairly common in B Rank. With B Rank, Iskandar could be defeated but he at least has a fighting chance, in A rank, he's getting squashed pretty easily.
Next up Archer EMIYA. Now many people may believe he's on the weaker end of Servants and shouldn't have ended up as high as he did. But I have some pretty solid arguments in favor of EMIYA's placement: firstly is Unlimited Blade Works. He would obviously have to get it off for it to apply but if the reality marble can be activated, which Shirou showed can be made easier with Rho Aias, what he has access to is not necessarily on par with Gilgamesh's Gate of Babylon, but it's of a similar nature, and the weapons travel faster, making a similar method of combat even more effective against certain enemies.
Not only that but if you want a servant that can deal with Gilgamesh and you can't summon Enkidu for whatever reason, EMIYA is probably your best bet. Everybody else has a hard counter, but EMIYA's weaknesses are not known to Gilgamesh and because of that he doesn't have a weapon built to counter him, giving him a distinct advantage in a group of grail wars where he is otherwise weaker than a lot of servants.
Finally is his nature: EMIYA is far more like Kiritsugu than any living version of Shirou ever will be and because of that he's far more likely to play dirty and use tactics that more honorable heroic spirits would be against, like say binding an opponent with a Gaes, twisting the space around the opponent to bypass their normal defenses, pitting two completely different servants in the grail war against each other, or perhaps even aiming for the master before the servant even has a chance to react. This gives EMIYA the distinction of being very effective in a lot of situations.
The last somewhat contentious pick is Medusa. A lot of people believe Medusa is not a very powerful servant. This comes down to two factors: firstly, of the anime adaptations of Fate/Stay Night, Medusa is killed rather easily in two of them. The only one this doesn't apply to is Heaven's Feel which I'll get to. It's also worth noting that these two routes have Shinji as Medusa's master, putting her at barebones fighting capacity compared to the other servants, even Saber who at least had the benefit of Avalon and a magic core. Of course, Medusa is strong in Heaven's Feel but I think many people may underestimate just how strong she is because the anime adaptations don't explain things as well as the visual novels do.
You see, one of the benefits of the visual novels for the Fate series in general is that they have many endings. Sure each route has a good ending and a true ending but even the bad endings can say a lot about what is and is not possible in this setting. In particular, one bad ending of Heaven's Feel clarifies Medusa's Mystic Eyes of Petrification in terms of its effect: sure there's the obvious thing I mentioned earlier but one thing that most people don't know that this bad ending clarifies is that for her Mystic Eyes to work, you don't have to look at her eyes or her face, you just have to look in her general direction. This makes her Mystic Eyes incredibly powerful against any servant that uses their eyes to look at her because it means when her mystic eye killer is taken off you effectively can't look at her if you don't want to be petrified but taking your eyes off her will allow her A Rank Agility to allow her to completely blitz you.
This isn't subjective at all either, in the third act of Heaven's Feel, Medusa was nearly capable of defeating Saber Alter by herself with the only real problems she faced being Excalibur Morgan and a Mana Burst that worked as a soft-limiter of the petrification but even her magic resistance wasn't enough to protect her.
The thing is, Medusa's Mystic Eyes, in combination with all of her other skills are so powerful that she not only sustains a high rank in the B category but she even counters some of those in the A category. Sure there are servants in A rank that can invalidate her but much of what allows other servants to beat her is more about who strikes first than about them being objectively better servants.
Now that the contentious picks are out of the way, let's talk A rank. A rank is where a big amount of powerful servants reside. If B rank has big-dick servants, A rank has giant-dick servants, so much so that many of them aren't even usable effectively by masters who don't have an easy way to supply them with mana. Arjuna, Lancelot, Gawain, Lu Bu, Heracles, Karna, Rama, Ozzy, Scathach, even Cu and Artoria are up there. These are the servants that, provided you can supply them with enough mana, they can steamroll through almost any opponent.
One thing I forgot to clarify earlier is that when a character ends up in a certain rank, they're not necessarily stronger or weaker than any other servant within that rank, that's just where they're most comfortable relative to the letters. Artoria, Gawain, Lancelot, and Arjuna all have enough raw power output to completely nullify Heracles but in the hand of a good master, Heracles can be completely invincible. Gawain during the day is nearly unstoppable except for the fact that many mage shenanigans occur at night, which he at least has a blessing he can use to nullify that disadvantage for 3 hours, but once the sun goes down, his odds of making it out alive drop significantly. Lancelot isn't excessively powerful compared to other A Ranks but he's probably got the highest fighting skill of at least the Knights of the Round Table and may even compare to the greatest of fighters in A rank like Cu Chulainn and Achilles. Siegfried is basically invulnerable in the right conditions but his dragon trait serves as a problem when facing those servants that have anti-dragon traits.
In other words, if you have an A rank servant, your opponent's best option is to fight them with another A rank servant. You don't automatically win by doing so but you at least have a sturdy advantage if you can get an A Rank servant.
Finally, there's the EX Rank, these are the top of the top, many servants in this category are either gods, grands, or grand-tiers. These servants don't have nearly as many weaknesses as the ones lower down. Need raw power to defeat the other servants?Artemis and Orion have huge amounts of power. Need to invalidate invulnerability to defeat a servant you otherwise can't kill? King Hassan is your man. Need a counter but don't know what the best fit for the job is? Gilgamesh and Solomon have you covered. Need a servant that generates their own mana just in case you can't supply it effectively? Just pick Skadi or Enkidu.
Not only that but many of these servants cover largely similar things. For example Independent Action doesn't make up for the ability to generate your own mana but Orion, Artemis, and Gilgamesh do have it by virtue of being Archers, allowing them to sustain themselves for a certain period of time without assistance. Solomon and Gilgamesh both have high levels of Clairvoyance, allowing them to see things that they shouldn't be able to, allowing Solomon to find out his opponent's weaknesses, and prepare for them before they'll ever be needed. Gilgamesh's Ea has a destructive capacity that is just as lethal as King Hassan's short of applying the concept of death to immortal entities. Gilgamesh and Enkidu both have the chains that bind gods so if you're going up against a divine servant, these guys are basically unbeatable.
Of course the release of the latest lostbelt and the introduction of new servant classes (I.E. Pretender) complicates the issue but ultimately as long as it remains a nonstandard class, the only complication will be the introduction of new servants of existing classes rather than the introduction of new classes in general.
Time Travel: Is it possible?
I've been thinking about how possible time travel is and the more I research the more I find I don't necessarily know if it is or is not possible. However, after the game theory ten year anniversary remaster of episode 1, I feel like more people are aware of the question from Steven Hawking that is less dismissible than you might assume: if time travel is possible, where are all the time travelers? And when I thought about it, I came up with three potential answers. No I don't exactly have a way to segue this into Fate but I've wanted to talk about it because Fate deals a lot with time travel.
In terms of answers to that question, the first is "Yeah, he's right, it isn't possible," the second is "Probably because we live on a timeline where time travel didn't happen" which I'll explain more as we go forward, and the third possible answer is "We may not know how time travel works well enough to answer that question yet."
So starting with the first one, saying time travel isn't possible isn't the sort of thing you can prove because it's a negative. In debate, generally speaking, you can't prove a negative and therefore you shouldn't be expected to prove one. There are ways to work around it, that being that you look at all the possible ways it could work and if none of them do, you can logic that it may not be possible. It's not an invalid choice as much as it is just defeatist and a bit of a cop out. The other two answers are a lot more fun for something like this.
The second answer is that time travel just didn't occur on this timeline. In order to understand this one though, there are two different ways of looking at potential time travel: the first is the self-consistency hypothesis which MatPat in the video I referenced said his old self didn't seem to understand but didn't clarify it himself so I will in a bit, and the second is the many worlds interpretation.
The self-consistency hypothesis states that events are essentially set in stone and that even if you change them they'll find a way to happen in a different way. There isn't really any time travel in Hunter X Hunter but there are examples of how this sort of thing could work in that series. In Hunter X Hunter the Yorknew Arc presented Neon Nostrade, a girl who had the ability to predict the future. She said her predictions were 100% accurate but her father had been giving out those predictions to his clients with the intention of avoiding danger. If her predictions were 100% accurate, how can they be used to avoid danger? Well, turns out that while Neon's predictions are accurate, they are not timely. Yes that is a wording I got from a Hunter X Hunter reddit, no I don't remember which one, I'm not sourcing it because I don't know that I could find it again, it was a long time ago.
Anyway, Neon described her poems as being in 4 verses, each one representing a week in the month, she notes the stipulation that usually the first one has already occurred by the time someone received it but the issue is the rest of the poems. We don't see a lot of them in Yorknew but we do get enough to get an idea of what future may come for the Phantom Troupe.
According to the poems in Yorknew there were going to be 6 total deaths in the Troupe following the events of the Auction. Multiple Characters didn't receive predictions because in order to work they needed a first name, last name, blood type, and birthday, information some of the characters were missing due to being from Meteor City. However, 3 of the confirmed kills were Shizuku, Shalnark, and Pakunoda. I'll get more into that in a bit.
In addition, some poems take note of an angel and a demon. The angel and demon work together but it's the demon that is resulting in the deaths. Many of them don't know about it because the demon is only referenced in one poem that they did not get to see. The demon and angel are only referenced in Hisoka's Poem, which he hid with a story about a sword of law, which would allude to Kurapika's Judgment Chain that I don't believe Hisoka knew about that is something Kurapika has anyway.
Now, the way Yorknew ends doesn't really go the way this stuff suggests. Pakunoda ends up dead, sure, but apart from her and Uvogin, the Troupe is more or less unaffected and able to move on just fine. Sure they hate Kurapika but there isn't any indication at the time the series ended that they were going to hunt him down even when Chrollo got his exorcism. Sure they'd kill Kurapika if they came across him but I doubt any of the troupe were looking forward to that fight.
Why is all this relevant now? Okay, so the Dark Continent Arc actually makes use of these poems in a way that suggests that self-consistency is in effect, even without time travel. So of the 3 confirmed deaths, Pakunoda's already occurred but what's noteworthy about the way the arc goes pertains to these poems. I was intentionally vague on some things for the sake of story telling so let's put the pieces together now.
Hisoka's poem talks about a demon and an angel working together and the demon offering a trade. Given what Hisoka does with Kurapika before this, it's suggested that Kurapika is the angel and Hisoka is the demon. Which makes sense if you know anything about these characters.
In addition to that, while Chrollo is stated to be the survivor of six dead members, it's worth noting that this likely doesn't include Pakunoda as she's dead long before any of this takes place. Shalnark and Shizuku have poems that suggest they're going to die during this arc but both make use of the demon to signal it. The troupe thinks the demon is Kurapika but in actuality we know it's Hisoka.
Not only that but there are a total of 6 characters outside of that that did not receive poems: four phantom troupe members from Yorknew, plus Kalluto and Illumi who join later. Kalluto isn't suggested to be involved in any of the deaths but I think one of them suggested Illumi might be.
Now, in the Dark Continent arc, Shalnark was killed by Hisoka, and he was killed exactly the way his poem described, without help and screaming for the sake of another. In this case, Kortopi who was one of the ones that didn't have a poem due to lacking the necessary information to receive one.
That is what I'm talking about: Neon's poems are correct, and predicting them for the following month prevents them from occurring for the moment but, if you do that, the timeline will just adjust to make them happen at a much more fitting time.
Of course if you want a way to conceptualize it, Hunter X Hunter has that covered too. The 4th Prince of Kakin has developed Nen over the course of the series and he's a specialist. Ignoring his Talent for Nen, his natural ability is that while in a state of Zetsu, he gets to see a full ten seconds into the future without time moving forward. If he stays in Zetsu he can see further into the future but time will begin moving again. Once his eyes open up and he begins using Nen again, he can move freely within the predetermined time and once he's made his changes, the timeline will reset to account for them.
In other words, if someone from the future came back in time and prevented World War 2, the self-consistency hypothesis wouldn't necessarily make World War 2 happen at a later time, it may just make it so that World War 2 not happening is just history, sure the time traveler would know what they did but to everyone else, World War 2 simply wasn't a thing.
Or what about the reverse: what about a Time Traveler going back in time to make World War 2 occur. Sure we may say that's ridiculous and that World War 2 occurred because of the circumstances at the time but how would you be able to prove thi?. How do you know those circumstances weren't fabricated by a time traveler? See what I mean?
In other words, this potentially means that a time traveler could very well be messing with the time stream and most of us would have no way of knowing. In other words, with self consistency, the question answers nothing.
Okay, so what if the world isn't self-consistent? The self-consistency hypothesis is predicated on the idea that either there's a greater power making everything happen the way it's supposed to, or wavefunctions that none of us have any means of calculating would result in the same situations anyway. Multi-verse seems a lot more appealing to those of us that believe a timeline could be changed completely just by altering a small set of variables, which is true, if applied early enough in the chain. So then we get into the issue of "Our time line simply doesn't have time travelers."
Many of you may think "Well, hold on, if it is multi-verse theory, wouldn't we be able to detect time travelers if they were traveling through time?" And those of you that think that don't know how multi-verse theory works. Multi-verse theory is inherently based on choice because the assumption it comes with is that there is a separate timeline for every single altered variable.
The basic example everyone uses is that if you do something with 2 choices, option A and option B, regardless of which universe you went through, there is a universe where you chose option A and one where you chose option B. But the hypothetical assumes that you're the variable that's changing.
In reality there could be millions of universes where you choose option A and B respectively because while those universes are keeping those options, they're changing variables elsewhere to allow this to exist in this vacuum. This is why an episode of Rick and Morty can have an episode where Rick and Morty Cronenberg a universe and just leave it, and another where they cure the Cronenbergs and then subsequently die. In reality, there are also probably universes where they cure the Cronenbergs and don't die and a universe where they don't cure the Cronenbergs but stay behind to live in their mess. In reality moving to a universe where your life is identical is actually easy enough in that system of mechanics because the way you'd do that is to alter just one variable in the entire universe, it doesn't even matter which one.
In this regard, if there are universes where time travel occurred, there must also be universes where time travel never occurred as time travel is inherently dependent on the one doing the traveling. If you think there must be a universe where a time traveler went somewhere on the timeline you're on, you must also accept that there is another universe where such a thing never occurred.
In other words, having a timeline where you did or did not meet a time traveler would be a 50/50 shot at that point, though it would be a gamble you'd have no method nor reason to bet on. In other words, it's possible that time travel is possible and that we don't have proof because we're on a timeline where it simply never occurred, or it did occur but to us it wasn't the result of time travel, it's simply history. In either case, how would we verify?
Then there's option number 3: we don't know enough about how time travel works to tell. Since this is already a science heavy section, I'm going to throw a little bit more in and talk about special relativity. You see, in Eistein's model of physics, there are two types of relativity: special relativity applies to light, general relativity applies to everything else. General relativity is just the idea that how fast something is moving perception wise depends on how fast you're moving relative to them. To give you a basic example, let's say there are three kids on a track. One of them stands in one spot, one moves at 10 meters per second, and the other moves in the same direction at 20 meters per second. To the one standing still, those figures remain unchanged. However, to the one running at 10 meters per second, his two friends are moving at 10 meters per seconds in opposite directions, and to the one running 20 meters per second, those figures are the same but inverted in both direction and in who they apply to.
Special relativity states that light will travel the same speed, approximately 3 million meters per second relative to you independent of how fast you're moving. In other words, if you move at 10 meters per second after a light ray, that light will still look like it's moving at 3 million meters per second to your eyes, meaning it's actual velocity is more like 3 million and ten meters per second. How can this be? Well, if you only watch game theories or versus videos, you may not have an answer but I do so bare with me.
When it comes to light movement there's something known as time dilation. Time dilation is essentially where time relative to you is not the same as time relative to anyone else. You can look up the formula for time dilation but a few things of note are that firstly, you won't notice any alterations in the flow of time below Mach 300, as any alterations to the flow of time at mach 1 or above will likely be in small increments over a few hours. However, as you get closer to the speed of light, time around will gradually slow until it stops at light speed. In other words, while you're moving at the speed of light, time around you is completely frozen. In other words, functionally, the speed of light is infinite, as if you move while time is frozen your speed may as well be infinite.
Now it's suggested by this formula that moving faster than light isn't possible because the function itself requires a root of the speed of light squared, effectively making it impossible due to creating imaginary numbers. But it's theorized that moving faster than light will allow you to rewind time to some extent. Truthfully, I don't know if this is true, unless there's a way to segment relative time in frozen general time away from it formulaically. However, to do this at all would require a body with zero mass to travel at the speed of light until we find other workarounds.
However, if you were to do this with a physical body, your matter would invert and become anti-matter and if it collides with the atoms that comprised your body when you were alive, you'll disintegrated and create annihilation energy. Of course actual time travelers would know this and create methods of working around it. Like say projecting the consciousness or soul across time and space to a body that is compatible with it.
So what if, just bare with me for even more minutes, the time travelers did come back to our timeline but they're inhabiting existing bodies that are already here to bypass the problem of matter/anti-matter collisions. This way, no matter becomes anti-matter, resulting in zero timeline disruptions via nuclear explosion, and it would have the added benefit of you inhabiting a body that, in all likelihood, already has identification via birth records. In other words, say there's someone you know that you can verify was born when you think they were but they start rambling about a future they came from and that they can predict what's going to happen. Well, in that circumstance, he could be telling the truth based on this logic but the fact that you saw his birth certificate cements in your mind that he's not from the future, he's just being crazy. It's a perfect cover.
A lot of the wrenches in any of this come from someone you may have heard of by the name of John Titor. John Titor was someone who made wild predictions about the future back during the 90's to early 2000's. Many of his earlier predictions ended up coming true, in particular information about an IBM computer used by the CIA that IBM had not even announced yet. His later predictions turned out false but his excuse at the time was that the timeline has diverged too much for him to know anymore.
The thing is he does not hurt or help any of these theories, he simply throws a wrench into the discussion. You could say "Well he's obviously not a time traveler, just someone with insider knowledge," you could say "He is a time traveler and we're on a different timeline from one where he had zero intervention," you could even say "He is a time traveler and his birth records couldn't even contradict it because of body snatching." As far as most of us are aware in terms of John Titor, all we know about him definitively is that he was a man who knew a lot more than he was supposed to.
So the next time someone throws Steven Hawking's time travel question at you, ask them out for coffee because it's going to be a long one.
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