#2131

The doomsday device would display the amount of time you had to get back to your hive and enter the Medium before the forest was destroyed.

Pressing that button didn’t start a countdown - it just displayed one that was already ticking down, without a clock to show it. 

This is exactly the same timer as the one on Terezi’s Cruxtruder, so I’m wondering what the point of all this was. What’s up with this redundant black box, and who is it really for?

At the time, it wouldn't occur to you to wonder whether the device was directly responsible for the apocalypse, or merely served as its precisely calibrated harbinger. And it certainly wouldn't occur to you to cast doubt on any perceived difference between those two things. It wouldn't until later, when you better understood the game you were about to play.

Yeah, I don’t know about this. ‘Acausality’ in Sburb is starting to rub me the wrong way, and it’s time to talk about it. 

The implication here is that saying ‘the timer caused the meteors’ is exactly as true as saying ‘the timer is predicting the meteors’ - that causality is meaningless when it comes to Sburb. But in this case, that doesn’t actually make sense.

The timer didn’t cause the meteors - the Reckoning did. 

The Reckoning destroys Alternia because Skaia’s defense portals are designed to redirect the meteors there, for some reason.

This apocalypse is a direct result of how Sburb was designed. 

Note that Terezi is only tipping the scale because the world is ‘about to end anyway’. Even if she was causing the apocalypse here, she’s being tricked into doing so, by Sburb and by fate. 

If I push Alice over, and she falls onto Bob, Alice isn’t to blame. It’s still my fault, and Terezi isn’t doing anything wrong here. 

Also - and I know this is tangential, but I need  to talk about this - these ‘self-generating’ time loops are starting to get a little suspicious.

Look at poor Rose, here. Her world is literally ending as a result of technology neither she nor anyone else on Earth can understand, and she’s concluding that there was nothing to be done. In retrospect, this fatalism reminds me a lot of AA’s current state - you know, AA, the most obviously manipulated character in the comic. 

Rose is later ‘justified’ in this attitude by Nanna, by the trolls, and by insight into how the game works. This was a time-loop, caused by nothing. 

What a perfect little bow to tie around it all. You can’t prevent this, Rose. This will happen, AA. No matter how hard you look, you won’t find another way, so stop looking. 

Anyway, isn’t it interesting that all Sburb’s pre-programmed time-loops benefit the game, and screw over the Players?

The Players are made by the game, so they’re destined to play the game. They can never have a normal life, and no one caused this. Just get on with it.

The Players’ planet is destined to be destroyed, so they have nowhere to go but the Medium. Play the game or die - but no one caused this, so don’t go crying about it. 

The Exiles were always helping the Players, so their planet was always going to be repurposed as a Sburb seed planet. Leave your planet to us, and remember - no one caused this, so don’t question why this is happening.