#its been sitting in my drafts since before the crossover happened i had to heavily edit it lmao

[anastacialy]

guys.

i figured out who e!false is.

but if i'm right i'm going to be so annoyed!! (/positive)

so i've seen a bunch of people stipulate that she might be a time traveler, which is definitely a great theory — but i have a specific type of time traveler in mind. this may sound silly, but hear me out, there's lots of evidence pointing toward this conclusion. i'm not just mashing fandoms senselessly.

false is a time lord.

or, at the very least, parts of her backstory may take inspiration from them. for those unfamiliar with doctor who, time lords are a species of alien from the planet gallifrey. they can travel through time and space through the use of their TARDIS, if they have one — not every time lord has access, as has been established in the show. they are able to regenerate when they die, (though it is a limited amount of times, time lords get twelve lives - correspondent to the hours on a standard clock.) and when they do so, they can change in appearance, gender, personality, and have some trouble remembering their previous lives for the first moments of their regeneration. and they have two hearts — but that might not be as important.

what's this have to do with false? well, not much yet. it's clear that e!false isn't a regeneration of hc!false, because they look exactly alike. but it's been implied that hc!false put e!false into another world, and didn't expect to see her when she went through the rift. so, how's that time lord behavior? see, there's a key point we're missing. when time lords are in serious danger, as a last effort to hide from their enemies, they can become a human: shutting off one of their hearts, and removing all their memories, locking them away in a golden pocketwatch.

i think hc!false took her past—or future—self, removed her memories via the golden pocketwatch (represented by the in-game minecraft clock) and dropped her through the timestream and into another world.

here are some points that helped me reach this conclusion.

- in e!false's series, she has established that she's been having dreams of her past life. this was key when the doctor had hidden as a human - he dreamed of his life as a time lord, wrote about it and sketched in his diary about what adventures he'd gone on, under the impression that he merely had a wild imagination. e!false seems to have figured out that it's her past life right away, as it seems hc!false, in a hurry to transform her, did not provide her human counterpart any false (ha) memories. she even remarks in empires episode nine, that the dreams were "about time and space and things." however, later in the episode she also seems to pull a 180° much like the doctor did, and claim that her dreams aren't of a past life at all, and that she's meerly very creative in her dreams.

- hc!false knows of e!false's existence, but e!false does not know of hers. hc!false remarked, in episode thirty-one of hermitcraft, that "time and space is obviously unstable," and that "if [she] were to get too close this world could collapse" which is a common theme in doctor who. she also remarks that she hopes e!false's "memory loss is still working," and that she "tried [her] absolute best" which is confirmation that she's the one who took e!falses memories away.

- e!false's old world shares some similarities with gallifrey. mostly built in copper-like metals, the scenery of gallifrey seems influenced by steampunk design, with huge spires of gears like the interworkings of a clock. with false's latest clocktower, she may be attempting to recapture that aesthetic.

- in one of her latest episodes, e!false started hearing strange voices in her dreams, saying things like "tick, tock, tick, tock" and "time is running out." in doctor who, when the doctor was going to be losing what they thought was their last life, an ever-changing nursery rhyme was played at the end of several episodes. the first and third lines were consistently: "tick, tock, goes the clock, [changing second line] tick, tock, goes the clock, [changing fourth line.]"

- the small clocks, which happen to also be gold, that were strewn about e!false's base in episode nine absolutely felt like a clue she left for herself to check the watch, to me. only by opening the golden pocketwatch would her memories fully return.

- gallifrey is not a nice place to live. while much of early-days and new-who doctor who doesn't touch on this, it has been revealed in later seasons that the time lords create an oppressive society, difficult to live within. in the earlier seasons, the doctor regretted their involvement in the time war, and wished desperately to save and return to their home planet—once it was available to them, they avoided it, wanted nothing to do with the current rulers of gallifrey, fearing what might happen if they came home. similarly, earlier episodes of false's showed a yearning to return to her old life, while the voices said: "i don't want to go back." (also possibly referencing the tenth doctor's death, in which he tearfully remarks "i don't want to go," before regenerating into his eleventh (technically twelfth) life.

- both of their continued references to other planets — e!false assumes, again in episode nine, that the pumpkin man that has been following her is not a creature of this world. while there are plenty of oddities in the world of empires, including the magic each empire seems to posess, she latches onto the idea that the pumpkin watching her is an alien specifically.

- in doctor who, it's established that you'll run into your past and future self eventually. while it's something that's not supposed to happen, and tends to be implied that the past version of the time lord won't retain the memory while the future self will, it happens consistently throughout the canon. and it isn't just the doctor — the master, another time lord, has also run into their past self.

- even if this isn't the true backstory of e!false, other empires are also being openly inspired by pieces of popular media. in sausage's first episode, he establishes that sanctuary is inspired by disney's encanto, and joey makes references to pirates of the caribbean often. plus, everyone's seen how many toy story references there have been! so cc!false is perfectly within her rights to draw heavy inspiration from doctor who.