Why YOU are (probably) getting this SV scene wrong (spoilers!)

Jirarudan · January 3

Ok so, that scene at the crystal pool after you get Terapagos. Turtle does its thing, the area fills with mist, the professor steps out. Eventually you give them your copy of Briar's book, before they go back to their original time.

People keep messing up what happens in this scene and even insisting that the effects of it are the OPPOSITE of what they actually are! I see people swear up and down that because of this scene, we're the reason they get obsessed with their research, abandon Arven, get paranoid, and eventually get killed by a paradox dragon.

But that's a WOEFUL misunderstanding of that scene because we did NOT condemn them, we SAVED them.

First off, you need to understand that absolutely nothing changes in our world other than we now have their book. Nothing has changed for Arven, or the professor, or the AI, or anyone else involved.

But I say that because everything you did impacted a different timeline, something they even TELL you when they greet you.

They're already obsessed with their goal, to the point where they consider it inevitable that Arven will be alone, no matter how far into the future they came. You didn't create that in them. They're also already building their machine.

The timeline of events they give you doesn't match up with what the professor from our world wrote about. For one, Arven is already born AND the other parent has already left, things that didn't happen to our professor until after they had already met the paradox dragon. And yet this one only knows it from an illustration in Heath's book!

And of course the biggest point of all. While the professor from our world did write about a similar encounter where they received a white book, the one from our world never gave up their copy of Heath's book to get it. The one we meet trades their own. How do we know that the one from our world didn't do so? Because it was still in the lighthouse. If it hadn't been there, Arven's dog would have died, and the AI never could have shut down the time machine so Paldea would have been ruined.

So why do I say that we saved this other version of them? It's what they say before they leave. They're going to go home to read their new book. Going home means going to Arven.

Anyway it's a really lovely scene and I like to wonder what that other timeline is like.