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	Re: Durandal & Rubicon
	Posted By: Andromeda_5[Kilo]	Date: 1/26/05 10:47 a.m.
	In Response To: Re: Durandal & Rubicon (Forrest of B.org) : We just went over this a while back, which devolved into some thread about : philosophy and proof... : Literary-artistically, I have a problem with saying that a story's end point : is to unwrite itself. That everything that happened in Marathon Infinity : made it so that it all DIDN'T happen. It's the equivilant kind of : hand-waving as ending a story with "...and then he woke up, relieved : to find that it was all a dream." Bungie doesn't seem that cheap with : their stories. They use that a lot in Star Trek, I find it quite interesting. Showing something that could-have-been without making it permanently screwing up the whole story. : Temporal-mechanically, there's no reason to think that just because the : player managed to find/create a timeline in which the W'rkncacnter wasn't : released, that suddenly the W'rkncacnter was not released in ANY timeline, : and that all the "branched" timelines vanish leaving only the : "original" with some mysteriously changed event. Well, the character can only go with one timeline, (unlesss he's a paradine). So the other timelines wouldn't "dissappear", they'd just never again be experienced by the characters. : Lets take a simpler, more real-world idea for comparison, not involving suns : and demons but normal everyday circumstances, plus time travel. Say I'm : walking along someday and someone shoots at me, and as the bullet flies : toward my head, I vanish back into the past. In the past, I do things : differently, I still wind up with someone shooting at me, vanishing into : the past, and so on over and over again. Then finally one time through I : manage to find a bulletproof helmet before I get shot, and I'm at no risk : of dying and don't have to transport (or be transported) back in time : anymore. : Now, why would I suddenly find myself in the FIRST timeline, except now, the : guy shooting at me has no bullets? I already saw him shoot me and the : bullet fly out before I vanished, and I went and did all this other stuff : and now... what, everything since the gun was fired was a hallucination? : (Which would, again, be really cheap writing). When exactly did the : bullets leave the gun chamber (i.e. why is the gun suddenly not loaded?). : Wouldn't it make more sense that, since I've changed history, I'm still in : the world where I've got a bulletproof helmet and I just laugh at the guy : who tried to shoot me? And anything else different in that world is still : different. That is reality to me now. Reality, from my perspective, has : been changed. Anyone from a timeline where I got shot, who didn't travel : back in time, would have still seen the gunman shoot me, and probably seen : me vanish and gone wtf? Those timelines still exist to those people, : provided he didn't shoot them next, but I'm in a different one where I've : got a bulletproof helmet and I kick the gunman's ass. Then you will end up dying several million times over, but the "story" won't focus on all your dying selves...instead you'll continue to live in the one timeline where things are changed. : Replace "gun" with "nova", "bullet" with : "W'rkncacnter", and "helmet" with "Jjaro : containment field" and you've got the end of the Marathon story. If : Rubicon takes place in an M2-like timeline where the player didn't just : vanish into the past, Durandal and Thoth didn't merge, and the sun blew up : instead of being collapsed, then there should be a W'rkncacnter loose. If : there's not, then why not? Why is the W'rk no longer in the sun, or why : didn't it escape if it was still there? You'd have to answer these : questions either without time travel, or with a different set of : time-travel circumstances than we witnessed in Infinity (i.e., go back in : time and take the W'rk out of the sun ages ago). But there's no way that : just doing what we did in Infinity could produce the Rubicon timeline. : Though if you ignored Infinity entirely, Marathon 2 never said explicitly : that the W'rkncacnter was released. So Rubicon could be said to be a : sequel to M2, not accounting for the information in Infinity. And having : been there proofreading Nick's original story draft, I'd wager pretty : strongly that that's the best explanation: the original story was a sequel : to M2, not Infinity. The final version involved some elements of Infinity, : but it's still in essence just a sequel to M2. Pretty much.

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Replies:

	Durandal & Rubicon	tcm	1/26/05 9:07 a.m.
	Re: Durandal & Rubicon	Forrest of B.org	1/26/05 9:35 a.m.
	Re: Durandal & Rubicon	Andromeda_5[Kilo]	1/26/05 10:03 a.m.
	Re: Durandal & Rubicon	Forrest of B.org	1/26/05 10:27 a.m.
	Re: Durandal & Rubicon	Andromeda_5[Kilo]	1/26/05 10:47 a.m.
	Re: Durandal & Rubicon	Forrest of B.org	1/26/05 11:18 a.m.
	Re: Durandal & Rubicon	thermoplyae	1/27/05 7:28 a.m.
	Re: Durandal & Rubicon	Steve Levinson	1/26/05 11:41 a.m.
	Re: Durandal & Rubicon	Forrest of B.org	1/26/05 11:50 a.m.
	Re: Durandal & Rubicon	Andromeda_5[Kilo]	1/26/05 11:53 a.m.
	Re: Durandal & Rubicon - well Forrest...	Blayne	1/27/05 11:43 a.m.
	Re: Durandal & Rubicon - well Forrest...	Andrew Nagy...mb	1/27/05 8:24 p.m.
	Re: Durandal & Rubicon - well Forrest...	Steve Levinson	1/31/05 8:21 p.m.
	Re: Durandal & Rubicon	Steve Levinson	1/26/05 9:49 a.m.
	Re: Durandal & Rubicon	Mark van Laere	2/11/05 1:30 p.m.
	Re: Durandal & Rubicon	ukimalefu	2/11/05 8:11 p.m.
	embedded spam image? sounds EVIL *NM*	Andrew Nagy	2/12/05 9:38 a.m.
	Re: Durandal & Rubicon	Roguexcx	1/26/05 10:02 a.m.
	Re: Durandal & Rubicon	tcm	1/26/05 2:58 p.m.

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