#i do love reddit

[oysters-aint-for-me]

i read the cutest reddit thread today where this 19 yo boy was “babysitting” his 15 yo little sister while his parents were away on vacation and she got this horrific period and needed to be taken to the ER.

and this sweet 19 yo boy was doing all he could to take care of her, giving her meds and water and then packing stuff up to go to the hospital once reddit was like “yeah if she’s soaking two tampons in an hour you should go” - but being only a little older than a child himself, he didn’t know what to pack, so he brought like three things, and one of them was SUNSCREEN.

lmao everyone on reddit was like “you’re a really good brother but sunscreen?? for the hospital??” lmao they are roasting him. also op’s sister changed his name in her phone to “spf” and their dad calls him “bananaboat” now. this guy is never living this down

(also his sister is ok and it turns out their family has some kind of genetic blood disorder)

[sinsydia]

Sebastian being a menace Pt. 2

[lovesickgoose]

It's sweaty medic season

[beargregor]

wait i'm curious, what makes you say that gregor doesn't like everyone else (if i read that post right)? just curious since i've never seen anyone else say that

i don't necessarily think gregor dislikes everyone else at lcb but i do think that gregor is an incredibly petty person that isn't nearly as close to the rest of the sinners and even outright dislikes some of them cough cough rodya cough cough which a lot of people just Refuse to see because he's as much of a doormat as he is. there's several examples i could get into to try and prove my point however i'll just focus on what i personally think to be the biggest ones.

additionally, this is going to be kind of long, so i'm adding a read more. read more! read it. sorry for being so wordy. i have several diseases.

Pt1. gregor is the type to try and get along at least decently with everyone, especially if he gets a good first impression from them.

this is less a point in favor of gregor's distance w/ the rest of the sinners and more just a contributing factor to it. once again there's several examples i could point to here but i think the most in your face one happened in canto I with yuri, as several people have pointed out. even before gregor comes clean about growing attached to her as quickly as he did because she reminds him of his sister, we get this interaction.

i'll go ahead and make the disclaimer now that i don't necessarily think gregor is the most reliable of narrators, especially when it comes to his feelings and interactions with most people, but from the way he acts when the topic of yuri comes up (and the way we still see him act even all the way up to c7, nearly a whole year after yuri's death) i don't see reason to question his sentiment here. gregor immediately got that aya and yuri were close, potentially even taking note of their traded belts, and went out of his way to get something nice for yuri despite hardly knowing her.

i feel like a lot of people have forgotten as much, especially since it's been so long since c1, but gregor actually spent a good bit of season 1 doing the exact same thing with the other sinners! gregor reads a connection between him and ishmael pretty quickly despite getting off to a rocky start

mostly because gregor can tell that ishmael is pretty sardonic in a very similar way to him. there's been multiple instances where ishmael and gregor have essentially expressed the same sentiment at different moments, most notably gregor's little argument after ishmael got shot with a decay ampule in c4

and ishmael's response to pilot talking about self-sacrifice in c5

i could go ahead and pull up more examples, but in general pm has gone out of their way to show us that gregor and ishmael are pretty similar, so it makes sense for gregor to assume that they're friends, right?

this will be pushpin 1. keep note of this for Later.

ishmael's only the first sinner we see gregor trying to do this with in s1, we also see him try it out with heathcliff, sinclair, and ryoushuu

he's tried to get along with charon, being one of very few sinners that we've seen actually try to establish a connection with her at all

even rodya, despite my insistence that gregor doesn't like her nearly as much as the fandom thinks he does

all of these seem pretty fine and dandy, right? sure it frequently leans towards self-degradation, micromanaging, and commiseration, but gregor can at least be pretty chummy with most of the sinners, can't he?

Pt2. hell's chicken was more than just comic relief guys please

i'm fully aware that this is quite the hot take, but i think hell's chicken deserves a lot more credit for character writing than the fandom gives it. hell's chicken gave us foreshadowing for several events, such as the donqui bloodfiend reveal

heathcliff's distortion in c6 (as well as hong lu's highly speculated distortion at some point in the future)

and ryoushuu and sinclair's continued connection by making him the odd one out on her team

which, hey! that implies something about gregor's odd one out, don quixote, too, doesn't it? yes. yes it does. that's pushpin 2. keep note of that for later.

speaking of pushpins, hey! that's pushpin 1!

splitting into teams is one of the major events in hell's chicken, and most of the sinner's choices are either motivated by very little, backhanded, or motivated primarily by not wanting to be on the opposite leader's side. i didn't include all of the picks, just because i feel like including most of them already gets this across, but i think gregor took one major thing from this: most of the sinners, when push comes to shove, will only side with gregor when they refuse to or can't take his opponent's side.

now, don't get me wrong, i'm fully aware that this is primarily intended to be comedic relief, but when gregor is being described as having his trust broken by ishmael or nearly crying because no one on his team properly sided with him for him, i feel like it's pretty fair to read into this.

something that i think is pretty important to remember in conjunction with this is that we know that gregor is the type to hold a grudge, both from his general attitude towards the G corp soldiers in c1 as well as his continued distaste for vergilius

even beyond the splitting into teams of hell's chicken, the sinners have given gregor plenty of reasons to feel bitter. i feel like this is something people have noticed but haven't really put a finger on, but it's kind of wild just how often the rest of the sinners make gregor the butt of the joke

and sure, we could argue that a fair few of these aren't really made with any ill intent. quite a bit of it could have been meant as harmless teasing, but with gregor being more sensitive than most, it coming from nearly all sides, and as often as it does? yeah, i think he's prone to taking it a bit personally.

Pt3. yes i do still think gregor was the third most important character in canto VII you guys gotta hear me out okay

of course, all of this leads up to the bit of the story i highlighted, doesn't it? c7? i totally get why people haven't really picked up on all the gregor things i did in it, seeing as they were mostly not *directly* said about him or by him.

personally, i think that gregor's distaste for talking about himself on any serious level and thus leading to him getting sort of "sidelined" narratively (which i take issue with that claim, but still. it's effective for getting what i mean across atm) is supposed to lead players to take a deeper look at the times gregor gets held up to other characters and compare and contrast what's being said about them by the matchup. as i showed earlier with his immediate latching onto ishmael, i think this is something gregor himself is at least partially aware of too.

so, that begs the question, who was gregor compared to in canto VII that makes me think it's one of the most critical pieces in understanding his character?

really, i'd like to avoid getting too lost in the analysis of this canto specifically, since i'd like to do a proper post about this later, but i figure i can bury the lede a little before doing it properly.

c7 features several characters being made to perform in sansón's play, acting out the relevant backstory for this segment of the plot. a lot of these characters have rather direct, degrading reasons for playing the roles they do.

outis, a character with an inflated ego who wants her journey to have a purpose, is made to play an aimlessly wandering villager with a single line.

hong lu and ryoushuu, two characters for whom families and the expectations placed upon them are likely going to play a major role, are made to play bloodfiends.

rodya, a character who resents her lot in life and is constantly shown to be eager to leave her destitution behind her and become someone special, is made to play a helpless villager that's too poor to even offer any money to the hero that saves her.

heathcliff, a character that has spent most of his life getting dehumanized by comparing him to beastly animals, is made to play a literal bear whose sole purpose in the plot is to get beat up and then quickly left by the wayside.

sinclair, a character that has two opposed parties essentially treating him as a macguffin to procure for their side, is made to play the character who was arguably the catalyst for this entire canto, not to mention playing a decently major role in ruina.

our star don quixote is made to play her father, the first kindred, but there's someone by their side the entire time, isn't there? don quixote's dear, steadfastly loyal companion. a character which don quixote has tasked themself with getting to come out of their shell?

hello again, pushpin 2.

gregor has been made to play our unreachable star, sancho. someone had to, of course. you can't really tell a story without it's main character, now can you?

now, i should once again give a disclaimer. i am not trying to say that i think adapting what happens to donqui/sancho in c7 to gregor is the road pm is going to take here, not only would that toe a bit past the line of foreshadowing, but it'd also just amount to rehashing that plotline again, which i don't think would make for a particularly exciting story.

what i DO think is that we can take a lot of the things that are said to either directly be the case for sancho and use them to inform how we see gregor.

and god, does playing sancho have some fucking implications for our favorite ossan archetype.

starting off, the earliest moment we get to see of sancho is quite literally her just waiting for death to take her in a pile of ashes.

which, i should remind everyone, is actually pretty damn close to what happens to gregor's literary counterpart at the end of the metamorphosis. gregor samsa experiences one final breaking point that pushes him over the edge and makes him decide to just wait for starvation to take him.

gregor and sancho both consider themselves to no longer be human, something which sancho goes out of her way to highlight repeatedly throughout the canto and gregor is quick to get defensive on her behalf for when outis starts really tearing into her

sancho spends quite a lot of this story denying herself the joys of community and friendship, despite knowing that, even with the rest of the sinners frequently making jokes at her expense and outright insulting her, they were things that she desperately craved.

and, while this is getting into my "outis is a red herring meant to distract us from gregor's eventual betrayal" theorizing, i also think it's worth noting for this discussion that sancho's fellow kindreds, her family, all seem to be under the impression that she dislikes them and ultimately her departure was an act of betrayal

and that, despite gregor being one of LCB's resident mood makers and attempted conflict de-escalators, one of the sinners that's most prone to making appeals to the bonds they've all forged together, only him and faust remained silent during everyone's speech

so yeah, i think there's quite a lot of little details and hints building up to the reveal that gregor's not quite as fond of everyone as he presents himself to be. i do think a lot of this ultimately comes down to gregor getting in the way of his own happiness, similarly to donqui, particularly because he's been frequently portrayed as something of a self fulfilling prophecy, especially by giving him as many christ allegories as they have by way of priest and garden of thorns. gregor is convinced that the rest of the sinners don't like him because he's not convinced anyone could like him, so he convinces himself that he hates them because why should he care if someone that he hates hates him too?

a lot of this ultimately ties back to my personal interpretation of what happens in the metamorphosis as well as my own theories regarding all the times gregor has made weird callbacks and references to lobcorp and ruina, but yeah. i think about this guy and his deeper characterization a fairly normal amount, i think.

to end this off i'll highlight one of my favorite little "gregor is fucking seething and trying so hard to keep it cool" moments, in the credits CG for c7 we see rodya teasing him by drawing a little horse on his window and actively pointing and laughing at it, which gregor really doesn't seem all too pleased about.

i personally think this ties into the other cruel part of sansón forcing gregor to play rocinante, which is the more literal "he's actually just straight up playing rocinante" side of things. gregor was quite literally made to play something less than human, less than even animal really, as he was reduced to nothing more than the shoes don quixote wore as she got to play the leading role. sansón directly makes jokes about gregor being nothing more than shoes in the play twice, which adds to this reading, i think.

this, imo, really plays into the adaptation of the metamorphosis! i've seen a lot of readings for the book that posit that, despite being the protagonist, gregor samsa can't really be considered the main character due to nearly everything he experiences in it being used to further his family's character development at his expense, which i think fits nicely with limbus gregor seemingly having the most said about him through indirect means by holding him up to other characters. also it's rodya carelessly making fun of His Big Major Insecurities™ again like she did in c1 which i always find fun. rodya i love you but god you're the worst.

[coco-chip]

🍡💌💻

love comes in all shapes and sizes....right?

back at it again with the weird gyjo aus!

basically gyro is a reddit incel misogynist loser and johnny is his anime waifu!

gyro is completely dedicated to johnny and johnny alone he has a ton of merch, makes fan edits, makes audio splices, he even cooks for johnny! his biggest dream is for johnny to become real so he can marry him

Johnny is from a relatively controversial anime! its genre is magical girl/monster of the week, but its main draw is that each girl and guy of the magical squad is built to romantically and sexually appeal to the audience. with each member filling a specific spot or trope. the show features a ton of fan service cause of this and theres a lot of 18+ official merch.

Johnny specifically was made to appeal to those attracted to the terminally ill delicate waifu. hence his disability. its similar to katawa shoujo where johnny's disability is portrayed really well but only because its supposed to appeal to those with a fetish for it. Johnny's also a big time kuudere as another charm point.

[dead-sp1der]

Here we go again, more stats of Ethogirls and Etho

Some things to note:

They each have a different numbers of episodes out, so in order to keep this fair I took the total of times they say a Hermits name and then graphed what the distribution is

I have not counted their own names in these graphs because I didn't count how many times Etho said his own name (my bad)

Both Bdubs and Joel say their own names more than any other name (I will include their graphs with the stats that include their own names under this)

Etho and Bdubs mention each other the most, and Joel mentions Gem the most and Gem mentions Grian the most

Etho barely says Joel's name in his videos, which is kinda funny to me, Bdubs says Joel's name more often than Etho, both in raw numbers and when put into percentages

Joel, of all the three Ethogirls, says Etho's name the least in his videos compared to how often he says other Hermit's names

Grian is the only Hermit Gem has mentioned in every single one of her episodes so far

I will reblog this post with the raw data so people can double check my measurements

I give my full permission to post this stuff on twitter as long as you don't tag the creators or anything

So if Joel, Bdubs's or Gem's own names are included in their stats, these are their graphs:

In conclusion, Etho is a Bdubs fan first and foremost Bdubs is the biggest Ethogirl so far Joel is a Gemboy and the least Ethogirl of the Ethogirls Gem is a Grian fan

[kuro-is-doodlin]

Smoking's bad.

(❗Mention of death)

|You shouldn't smoke..|

You turn your head, exhaling some smoke to the side before looking back at the door to see Isabeau. He's your most loyal customer, you swear he's been here since you started. You know his order by heart now, he rarely ever change, and when he does, he keeps the next one for a while. One day, he didn't came, it made you worry. Turns out he slept all day after a big test. You felt stupid afterwards... You chat for a while some days when it's quiet in the shop, you even got him a nickname..

"Isa... I'm fine. It helps me clear my head."

|It's bad for you, and I know you know it.|

"Come on, I'll be fiiiine. It's not a smoke or two that's gonna mess me up."

|You don't smoke "one or two", Siffrin..|

Wuh Oh. Full name.

|Don't think I didn't notice you've been doing it more. Is there something bothering you? You can tell me-|

"We're in a worker to customer relationship right now, don't try and tell me what to do."

Wait, it got out a bit too harsh, you don't want to hurt him. Maybe you should-

|Oh don't do that to me now. It's been what, a year we've been chatting? I am allowed to be worried for your health. Plus, I see you're not doing well. You don't usually react like that.|

"I know, I'm just..."

|I won't tell anyone.. okay? I promise. You can talk to me Sif.|

He's getting closer. You know he hates the smell of cigarettes, so you sigh and crush it in the ashtray beside you, and sit down. He thank you, and sit next to you.

"It's just... I'm still thinking about that guy I-..."

You take a deep breath in.. and out.

"I didn't mean to.. end his life..."

|It was self defense Sif... It could have been you in his pla-|

"Well maybe it should have!"

|And let him hurt the kid and their babysitter?|

You shut your mouth tight, your hand mindlessly tugging on your sleeve. If they had been hurt.. you couldn't have forgiven yourself.

|I don't know exactly how you feel, but you did what you thought best to protect them, and it worked.|

His hand approaches you, you flinch a little, and look at him. He wait for your approval, before slowly taking yours, stopping your incessant tugging. As always, his palm is warm, a little.. moist. He's not as comfortable with the situation as he seem out to be.

|Now, you know I'm not the kind of person qualified for all those things turning in your head. I can listen to you, care for you, be here to support you, but you need someone who will actually help you go through it.|

"I know... I'm just.."

|Scared?|

"Yeah..."

|It tends to do that at first, but after some time you'll come to find relief going there. That's what it did to me at least.|

"You've gone to therapy ?"

|Mhm, when I was figuring myself out mostly. Helped a lot with unraveling the mess my brain was in.|

"Huh. I-... I might give it a try then.. maybe."

|Promise ?|

"Urgh... Promise."

|Now that's more like it. Proud of you buddy.|

You look at his face. He has that big stupid smile on again. Stars why is he so-

"It's just for you."

You smirk. You know how he reacts by heart. A flinch, and his cheeks get all red as he looks away. Heh.. shy refrigerator.

"Alright, time to get back to work."

|Urgh... I don't want to study anymore...|

"And with a free refill?"

|No need to tell me twice! I'm gonna destroy those questions!|

You let out a small chuckle, and get back inside, your hand leaving his. For now.

[brooksdavis]

9K MAKE ME CHOOSE:･ﾟ✧:･ﾟ@louistomlinsun ASKED: Alex Karev or George O'Malley?

When people reach out a hand, you don’t bite it. Trust me, I did it for years, and the only thing it accomplishes is that people stop reaching out.

[inkskinned]

it is all chaos and entropy. the thing is that the chaos and entropy make it beautiful and lovely.

yes, it's true that nature and the universe are uncaring and unspecific, and that is terrifying. i have lived through some of the unfairness - i got born like this, with my body caving into itself, with this ironic love of dance when i sometimes can't stand up for longer than 15 minutes. i am a poet with hands that are slowly shutting down - i can't hold a pen some days. recently i found a dead bird on our front porch. she had no visible injuries. she had just died, the way things die sometimes.

it is also true that nature and the universe are uncaring and unspecific, and that is wonderful. the sheer happenstance that makes rain turn into a rainbow. the impossible coincidence of finding your best friend. i have made so many mistakes and i have let myself down and i have harmed other people by accident. nature moves anyway. on the worst day of my life she delivers me an orange juice sunset, as if she is saying try again tomorrow.

how vast and unknowing the universe! how small we are! isn't that lovely. the universe has given us flowers and harp strings and the shape of clouds. how massive our lives are in comparison to a grasshopper. the world so bright, still undiscovered. even after 30 years of being on this earth, i learned about a new type of animal today: the dhole.

chance echoing in my life like a harmony between two people talking. do you think you and i, living in different worlds but connected through the internet - do you think we've ever seen the same butterfly? they migrate thousands of miles. it's possible, right?

how beautiful the ways we fill the vastness of space. i love that when large amounts of people are applauding in a room, they all start clapping at the same time. i love that the ocean reminds us of our mother's heartbeat. i love that out of all the colors, chlorophyll chose green. i love the coincidences. i love the places where science says i don't know, but it just happens.

"the universe doesn't care about you!" oh, i know. that's okay. i care about the universe. i will put my big stupid heart out into it and watch the universe feast on it. it is not painful. it is strange - the more love you pour into the unfeeling world, the more it feels the world loves you in return. i know it's confirmation bias. i think i'm okay if my proof of kindness is just my own body and my own spirit.

i buried the bird from our porch deep in the woods. that same day, an old friend reaches out to me and says i miss you. wherever you go, no matter how bad it gets - you try to do good.

[gaminegay]

Genuinely i wonder how common it is to hallucinate / perceive things oddly / have a notably altered perception of things

[drinking-tea-at-parties]

Thinking about Ruby,,,,,,

The Hardie boys went to her when they had problems. They saw her as a leader.... People around the neighborhood knew her... AUGH

She TESTED THE FUCKED UP PALE MACHINE ON HERSELF FIRST ARRRRRRGGGGHHHH

We only get to see this tiny snippet of who she is but I need to know everything about her.

[am-i-the-asshole-official]

Btw, I think it's very funny people keep assuming I'm a reddit transplant, I've been a tumblrina for 12 years and only ever used reddit for AITA (and occasionally to look up something in a video game)

But with reddit undergoing an Elon Musk process and about to implode, I thought y'know what, our concept now

[tragictempest]

here's like a bunch of bts pictures of the cast of school spirits because I love them and you should too

[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?

[fake-married-my-dead-fiance]

On the one hand, if you don't like the female lead's behaviour, don't watch the show. On the other hand, pretty weird to expect someone who spent half her life as a slave and the next half in hell to have a nuanced understanding of consent

[delu-lusional]

Junko enoshima ft. Ikuzono below the divider :333