Question about Mohtrek/Time Travel

Hello Greg. The power of the Kanohi Mohtrek allows you to summon versions of yourself, which, can supposedly be used to alter the timeline by inscribing messages, or if the past-self dies. Is this real time travel, or is it possibly some kind of dimensional travel?

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I’m wondering this myself, for the fact that Greg seems to always have been adamant that there is no way to do time travel in the BIONICLE universe.

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To help revive a dead thread, I always thought that the Olmak offered some form of time travel (think Endgame) if you travel to an alternate timeline, or to a world that has the same events as another, only that they happened before or later, or “traveling back/forward in time”. However, according to BIONICLEsector01, “Although achieving time travel with an Olmak was impossible, users could travel to alternate dimensions where time flowed at a different rate than at home”.

What exactly is the distinction then, I ask myself? I’m guessing to help elaborate the question @Wolk asked, there’s two forms of time travel: traditional time travel, as in going back in time in your own universe, and dimensional travel, where you can go to different universes that are exactly like your very own but at a different point in time.

With traditional time travel, you can affect your own timeline (and then all the paradoxes that follow before and after and currently) because to understate it, all you are doing is moving backwards or forwards in a stream of events. This is traveling within your one universe.

With dimensional travel, what you do in a different universe affects their “timeline”, whatever you define that as. You are not moving within your own universe, affecting your own timeline, but instead are going elsewhere and becoming entangled in a different timeline altogether. The Dark Mirror series of Jaller’s Best Friend is basically this theory, I guess.

Takanuva didn’t time travel per se, but he did go to an alternate universe through the Olmak. With speculation, I want to say that the period of time in which Takanuva leaves and returns to Karda Nui matters heavily. If he gets 360noscoped by the Olmak and traveled dimensions for, say 50 years, and then came back to Karda Nui only 3 seconds after getting teleported to the different universes by the Olmak, that is technically time travel in the sense that he skips time in our main canon universe, by getting stuck in a different dimension.

In a nutshell, if the time someone is missing (objectively, not by our own relative perception of time…? opens a larger can of worms if time is constant/multiversal to all universes) in one universe, or several in Takanuva’s case, does not equal the time that passes in another universe, it can be considered a form of time travel. However, this is all heavily reliant on how long he was gone versus how much time actually passed in the main universe, an amount of time I do not know of.

To sum it all up, if it is true that Mr. Farshtey didn’t want time travel in the Bionicle canon, it’s massively understandable. Time travel would introduce way too many paradoxes, and for me, time travel is whatever the author defines as, no matter how much I think time travel works. Time travel I would define more as a genre due to its multiple interpretations rather than a singular concept, which case in point shows the difficulty in adding time travel as an element to Bionicle’s already expansive lore.

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Yup! The reason I think I asked this way back when was due to Greg’s numerous statements of there being no time travel in Bionicle, which the Mohtrek - if using traditional time travel - contradicts.

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I know it’s an old thread, but I felt like this had to be said. This statement may not be true, if the BIONICLE universe follows the block universe theory explanation that states everything happens simultaneously. According to the theory , the universe is a giant block of all the things that ever happen at any time and at any place. On this view, the past, present and future all exist — and are equally real.

We know the death of a Mohtrek user does create a new timeline where they never existed, and Bitil noticed his battle-wear—thus breaking causality within his own timeline? But as Greg would say, Bitil is dead so it doesn’t matter.

Or to cater to the unstoppably curious: it seems like you can definitely send messages back in time via a Mohtrek. It’s a bad idea writing-wise to introduce that mechanic to a story, because then you always have the “why don’t we just go back in time?” plot hole to avoid, and so it loops back around to “Bitil has been killed off, his mask is gone, and thus it does not matter as the situation will never be encountered”.

somewhat tangential but couldn’t you hypothetically also wear the Vahi over a Mohtrek like how vakama wore it over his huna in the movie?