User blog comment:Red Eyed Raven/just a quick thought/@comment-4829046-20131212101525/@comment-7418318-20131213091831

Better to overthink stuff to the point where there are no more sure answers to be had, than to be a sheep who just accepts everything on good faith if you ask me. I don't mean to blame anyone here, since not overthinking things is not the same as not thinking at all. Just a general statement.

That being said, I'll just continue my overthinking :P

I thought the whole time travel thing over (again...) at night and it isn't really all that bad if you introduce just one more factor: Balance.

Maybe all things and beings are naturally anchored into their own time. If someone travels to a different time, it takes constant effort to stay there, without being drawn back to where they really belong. The further you get away from your time of origin, the bigger the energy-cost.

So I propose the following theory: When someone uses the Eclipse Gate to travel through time, the gate retains a connection to the subject to prevent it from being pulled back to it's own time. If the connection is severed, the subject is pulled back to it's own time. That would explain how the Dragons could vanish, but both they and the people from the present could retain their memories and how the destruction they wrought could remain. Which neatly solves one of the big two problems.

The second matter that was problematic was that F-Lucy didn't change according to the consequences of her own actions in her past (like a cut on the cheek of the past self immediately forming a scar on the future self's cheek, to give an easy example). Now my theory to this is, that the connection between the gate and the traveller not only prevents them from being pulled back into their own time, but also acts as an isolator (whether intentional or as a side-effect) which prevents such "cascade effects" as I like to call them from taking effect, as long as the connection is intact.

With those two theories, only the whole "golden plains" scene with F-Lucy going to heaven rather than just vanishing out of existance remains a little problematic, but that can be explained away with the multiverse-theory of every decision branching off into new parallel dimentions/timelines/whatever.

Apart from the Golden Plains thing, which still is quite shaky (and was probably only done to take away the sadness over F-Lucy and all her friends dying or ceasing to exist alltogether), those two theories make a lot of sense (for me anyway), but I'm sure someone else will poke holes through it soon enough ^^.