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[lordnincompoop]

Arrite, so Lexxy just twittered that she'll be up for more than 24 hours. And as we all know, she's one of the main art contributors.

Since she's working mainly on MSPA now, all that art probably means Hussnasty's cooking up another flash.

[RedWarrior0]

Hussie just needs to incorporate Chess Boxing into Homestuck and it will officially be win. It's win right now, but it will be more win.

[Soadreqm]

I'm still holding onto the idea that Hussie will slowly add more and more plot holes into the story until it reaches the point where the comic is just a jumbled mess.

With all the weird time shit, how would you notice?

Anyway, all the timelines in Terezi's timeline viewer are the Alpha Timeline. Terezi can only view the Alpha Timeline, and cannot communicate with doomed timelines. This is the reason all the trolls went away in the bad future where Terezi killed John. All the lines are most likely the various stable time Daves running about. And the unstable time Daves too, I guess.

Also, creating a doomed Dave on purpose probably counts as murder for purposes of Karkat warnings, so this is the time Terezi kills Dave. Unless of course she kills him again a couple of times, and that simply didn't come up. And I guess she also created a whole universe where Dave just disappeared and the rest of the kids died shortly thereafter. Good thing she can get away with things.

Does anyone have any idea how the coin flip shit works? Because I don't. Do random choices always spawn doomed offshoot timelines or what? I don't think that can be it. If they did, there would be doomed Daves everywhere.

[Rose]

there's a 50/50 chance of dave either wearing the red-sleived shirt, or the panzy green one.

this makes two possible timelines, both equally likeley, and both equally valid until one of the daves dies.

[Jim Groovester]

Given a completely random decision where both options are equally valid, the timeline will split, with one timeline representing one option and the other the oppositie.

One Dave is Alpha Dave, by nothing other than random chance.
One Dave is doomed, by nothing other than random chance.

[Soadreqm]

Thought experiment. If Terezi tossed, instead of a coin, a golfball-shaped hundred-sided die she nicked from Vriska, would that create 99 doomed Daves? What if she rigged a situation where Dave has a 1/∞ chance of succeeding in his quest, with instructions for every doomed Dave to reverse back to the alpha timeline? Would that create INFINITE Daves out of nothing? Also infinite boondollars, obviously. And infinite grist, if you can recycle the items they have.

Yeah, I don't think that's it.

Or possibly that is it, and Dave just hasn't been making any random choices. Aradia raised an army by rigging herself to randomly sabotage the game to create doomed offshoot timelines.

[Tylui]

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Gray = dead
Dark Red = in another time line, but alive
Red = here and alive

That sounds reasonable to me, but what are your thoughts?

Also, the far right one is Godtier Dave, maybe.

Also, both sleepy Dave and long sleeve Dave are the doomed Daves. Long-sleeved kills Felt Dave, making Felt Dave doomed. Felt Dave gets resurrected as Godtier Dave, making him the only One True Alpha Dave. Just after resurrection, Bec Noir appears and kills Longsleeve Dave.

[Soadreqm]

The timeline viewer clearly shows Longsleeve Dave living a good long time.

So, what do you think will happen if a Dave ascends to the god tiers while there are still Daves running around? I suppose the Daves would have to remain separate, at least. Do the mundane!Daves still get to use the Dream Self? Does the Dream Self become godtier!Dave, giving ultimate power to whoever happens to be sleeping? If dream selves are supposed to be separate from the weird time shit, as claimed by badfuture!Dave, what happens when two Daves are sleeping at the same time?

I love time travel.

[Jim Groovester]

Thought experiment. If Terezi tossed, instead of a coin, a golfball-shaped hundred-sided die she nicked from Vriska, would that create 99 doomed Daves? What if she rigged a situation where Dave has a 1/∞ chance of succeeding in his quest, with instructions for every doomed Dave to reverse back to the alpha timeline? Would that create INFINITE Daves out of nothing? Also infinite boondollars, obviously. And infinite grist, if you can recycle the items they have.

But it doesn't matter what Terezi uses on her end. She could use a coin, an eight sided die, or the decibel level of Karkat's voice.

The result of the toss doesn't matter, because that's always going to be the same, because there's nothing Dave can do to change the outcome of the flip. What Dave chooses to do based on the result is what splits the timeline.

I.E.,

Terezi flipped a coin. It ended up bad heads.
Doomed Dave picked bad heads to learn about the god tiers now.
Alpha Dave picked bad heads to wait to learn about the god tiers.

If Terezi had flipped good heads instead the result would be exactly the same. There'd still be a doomed Dave lying on the bed and Alpha Dave would be standing before him with a sword held in his hand.

Even if Terezi rolled an infinite sided die, the result would be the same, because there will always be a doomed Dave who decided to choose opposite what Alpha Dave did.

The result doesn't matter at all. Terezi doesn't even need to flip a coin at all, just pretend like she does. Only what Dave decides to do on the result splits the timeline.

[Tylui]

The timeline viewer clearly shows Longsleeve Dave living a good long time.

The timeline viewer clearly shows Longsleeve Dave living at least 874% longer from their current time. We cannot glean any more information than that considering we cannot see further than on the screen, and since we have no units of time.

[Soadreqm]

I think that kind of makes sense, to a point, although it makes the Infinite Daves cheat even worse. If all that is required to make a doomed offshoot timeline is for Dave to make a decision without knowing the consequences, how come isn't he ass deep in time traveling doom Daves?

[Aqizzar]

The result doesn't matter at all. Terezi doesn't even need to flip a coin at all, just pretend like she does. Only what Dave decides to do on the result splits the timeline.

In other words, there is no coin.  She's really good at orchestrating demises, the coin is just for dramatic effect.

Still doesn't explain this new intrusion of non-discrete Chaos Theory into the already headspinning time mechanics.

[Jim Groovester]

I think that kind of makes sense, to a point, although it makes the Infinite Daves cheat even worse. If all that is required to make a doomed offshoot timeline is for Dave to make a decision without knowing the consequences, how come isn't he ass deep in time traveling doom Daves?

Bluh bluh plot hole.

I'm just going to quote Husselhoff.

Just because there's a slight "many worlds" twist to the time mechanics being added doesn't mean every extrapolation from that theoretical framework applies here.

It doesn't necessarily mean every decision that can be made will be made, as that theory usually holds.

It is a work of fiction that amalgamizes a variety of temporal mechanics. This is another dimension to it, in keeping with some of the decision-outcome volatility already present.

Just because Terezi isolated a clear cut binary choice for Dave which resulted in an offshoot doesn't mean there are also dimensions in which Dave bleated like a goat ironically while doing a pirouette into the lava, simply because it was possible.

It COULD mean that. But not automatically. There's nothing that illogical about a system which channels this outcome-volatility into fewer, more discrete moments rather than applying it to all moments and all possibilities.

So, there you go. Apparently Dave isn't ass deep in time traveling doomed Daves because there aren't that many of these decisions which split the timeline just by what Dave chooses to do.

It sounds like a bunch of crap to me but I'm not writing the damn comic, and it presents a cool moral choice for Dave so I'm not going to complain that much about it.

[Aqizzar]

I long ago understood that it's easier to rationalize these weird, mix-n-match temporal mechanics by remembering that it's not the real universe.  No, not that it's a comic, but that it's Sburb.  It's a universe with it's own rules, which seem to be almost self-aware, and certainly more interested in breeding heroes than it is in rigorous adherence to unproven laws of physics.  Why are there a distinctly limited number of Daves running around when the mechanics exist to make an infinite number of irregular Daves?  It's the same reason both in-story and out, because it's cooler this way.

[FuzzyZergling]

I have no idea what you guys are talking about with plot holes.
I have found no plot holes.
None.

...Maybe I'm not looking hard enough?