I think I finally figured out what is driving me batty about dream bubbles and doomed timelines.
The continued existence of Punk Vriska implies that the pre-retcon timeline existed/exists as a doomed timeline. So, somewhere there should exist a Tavros who was part of Tavrisprite and eventually ditched the pirate ship.
There now also exists a Tavros who became Tavrosprite.
Tavros died before these timelines diverged.
Do ghosts in the dream bubbles duplicate every time a doomed timeline forms, just in case they’re summoned into it?
What about Sollux? Does he have one live half and multiple dead halves?
Or Aradia? Well, actually Aradia is probably taking care to avoid doomed timelines, but if she wasn’t, would a live primary Aradia and a live but doomed Aradia be able to interact?
I’m so confused.
yeah, this is just… how? do we get ghosts for lava-karkat and sliced-in-half gamzee? you’d think this wouldn’t happen, because retconning was said to mean these things DIDN’T HAPPEN, not that they happened but were negated… so…? what gives?
This new alpha timeline doesn’t diverge at Cascade! Terezi was careful to keep it parallel to her own timeline up until the decision to kill or spare Vriska because if it deviated too far she’d lose the perspective to accurately predict what would happen, but she had John changing things as far back as Lemonsnout’s trial, which took place shortly before she entered the Medium. What we’ve actually got on our hands here is an extremly slow-burn retcon of the Alternian trolls’ entire session, to the point that everyone but Terezi experienced everything between a few hours before the session began and a few hours after the door was destroyed almost exactly the same in both timelines - and Terezi herself has only very small differences.
So it’s not “the timeline where Terezi executed Vriska” vs. “the timeline where John rescued Vriska,” it’s “the timeline where Terezi executed Lemonsnout” vs. “the timeline where John rescued Lemonsnout.” It takes a while for the timelines to diverge noticably, but there are in fact two Tavroses who attempted to face down two Vriskas on two meteors, and both were killed and later used to prototype the kernalsprites of two Janes. (For those keeping track, I’m fairly certain that all this also means that there are now two functionally identical Beta Human universes, with the point of divergence being the first contact with the trolls from the respective doomed & main timelines, and each of these Beta Human universes successfully scratched into Alpha Human universes.)
this is way too complex for me to parse right now but you may be onto something
tbh i'm really hoping this clusterfuck just means that ghosts don't duplicate or change and stuff just happens in linear progression for them
by which i mean i hope tavros in tavrosprite is the same tavros who used to be tavrisprite bc that would be really cool