Earthbound / Mother 2 Cosmology Blog (Composite)

 

(Edit by Twice!)

I’M FUCKING TWEAKING AT 5 IN THE MORNING TYPING THIS

This blog was made entirely off the cuff for shits and giggles due to a conversation I had recently where we discussed Earthbound for a bit, and I decided to do some digging into some of the arguments presented in the Ness vs Frisk blog and realized that some pretty crazy shit got missed out, and then realized I had to drop a blog on this because of course I do. Consider this a fun little in between project while waiting for Billkari, I finished this in like a single night.

As a quick little prelude, this blog’s concept is probably a little controversial. I’m mainly doing this as a thought exercise for fun, but I understand having reservations with compositing Earthbound’s different continuities into a single cosmology for many reasons.

For one, all of Earthbound’s continuities are wildly different, handled by different creators, featuring largely different stories, completely different characterizations, and character’s having wildly different roles. There’s very little connecting tissue in that, oftentimes, only the most barebones cliff notes aspects of Earthbound’s story carries over between versions. However, all versions of Earthbound follow Shigesato Itoi’s (the creator of Mother) blueprints for the story, making them generally adaptations of the same main plot.

While one may be fine with this being used to comp a character, comping a cosmology is often a more questionable, shady matter. I’m mainly doing this for fun, however, at the end of the blog I’ll include a brief breakdown / tl;dr of what each iteration of Earthbound’s cosmology would be using only the material within their source and nothing else.

For this document, I’ll be using the Earthbound/Mother game canon trilogy, the Earthbound Manga, and the Mother 2: Giygas Strikes Back novelization. The Mother 1 novelization will not be accounted for, as its cosmology seems to be wildly separate and exists as only a single universe, and ultimately isn’t too relevant cosmology wise.

The novelization can be found here, and the manga can be found here, should you want to verify anything listed here scans wise.

The Multiverse:

Within the Earthbound Manga, Jeff elaborates that the Earthbound cosmology runs off of multiverse theory, specifically, that there are infinite parallel worlds existing, with new worlds being created off of every possible decision a person could make, all parallel to one another.

The novelization, similarly implies to have an infinite multiversal cosmology as well, with Jeff seemingly comparing the universes that originate from beyond the Rift as diverging variables of infinity, branches from the Tree of Possibilities itself.

The Time Axis / The Fourth Dimension:

In the Earthbound Manga, there exists the Fourth Dimension, also referred to as the Time Axis. Within the manga, the Time Axis encompasses the infinite universes of the multiverse, with disruptions / vibrations within the Time Axis being capable of bridging universes together, with the act being compared to stapling two pieces of paper together.

The Rift of Time:

These kids are tweaking bruh

Probably the most underlooked location in Earthbound’s cosmology, the Rift of Time originates from Earthbound Novel 2, with Giygas having taken root within it as his lair. There’s a lot to go over, so let's begin.

The Rift of Time is stated to be the place where all universes are born, where all universes gather, where they all die, and where they’re all reborn. It's where a multitude of timelines, and where all forms and possibilities of existence gather. Effectively, this means that the Rift of Time is the place that encompasses all universes, timelines, and all possibilities of existence itself. Furthermore, the Rift is stated to exist between the dimensions (“the” likely meaning “all”) more than once, a space that exists between the many universes, and to be an interdimensional realm. 

The Rift is notably stated to be beyond space and time, to the point it's specified to be completely separate from timelines of individual universes, and a place where Giygas could rule over “all of time and space”. Time notably flows differently for everyone within, and as a whole, time is completely chaotic within it, with time able to oscillate from the beginning of the universe to the universes’ end in an instant, with living beings incapable of handling experiencing time at such a rate.

Something else notable is, outside of it necessarily needing to be a greater infinity to encompass and exist between an infinite multiverse and its timelines, is that there are further implications that The Rift is a higher dimensional space. The Rift is referred to as “super-dimensional” on two separate occasions by Jeff and a Starman, an underling of Giygas. In order to be able to enter the Rift of Time, one must use a time-space traversing ship that’s stated to be “multi-dimensional”, and must also pass through three-dimensional space to reach it. The Rift of Time itself is also stated to contain “every one of the multiple dimensions in the universe” as part of itself. Collectively, I believe these could be used as further evidence of higher dimensionality.

All in all, I think the Rift of Time is pretty blatantly an Infinite 5D structure.

Beyond the Rift:

After their battle with Porky, the crew find themselves in a space beyond the rift of time itself, with this space noted to be “amid the mysterious multiple axes of space and time”, implying this space encompasses all spatial dimensions. Jeff refers to this space as the “trunk” of the “Tree of Possibilities”, the place in which “all the variables of infinity diverge”.

I will specify however, this entire bit from the novel is related to exclusively two sentences and is rather unclear. This could be referring to the Rift itself, even if it mentions being beyond it. The analogy of being the tree of possibilities generally makes sense with how the Rift is described, not quite what's outside of it? The rift is where all possibilities originate from, thus it should logistically be the trunk of the tree of possibilities no? If you take it at face value however, this could potentially be evidence for a 6D location, otherwise it's further evidence for the Rift being 5D.

TL;DR:

So yeah a composite Earthbound cosmology is like solidly 5D, possibly 6D with leniency lol. 

Earthbound the game itself only really seems to have a single universe to its name from memory.

Earthbound’s manga has an infinite multiverse which is encompassed by its fourth dimension, thus making it an infinite 4D cosmology.

Earthbound’s novelization, via the Rift of Time is at least an Infinite 5D cosmology, possibly even 6D depending on the specifics of Beyond the Rift. It is a little unclear if the events of the final few paragraphs speak directly about the space “beyond the rift” or the Rift itself, so depending on interpretation the novelization’s cosmology is either Inf 5D or Inf 6D. 

Now that I’ve tricked you into reading this blog in its entirety and reeled you in with the clickbait thumbnail, I suppose this is also the part where I should mention that nobody scales to any of this, I just did all this shit for fun lol. Once again, I did this mainly for a fun thought exercise, actually putting any of this to use is extremely difficult as Earthbound doesn’t really have any solid scalable full cosmology wiping feats, the debatable feats for scaling to sections of the cosmology are extremely shaky and unspecific imho, and the variety of different continuities can make a cosmology comp difficult to argue. It’s kinda crazy how close Ness is to having some really batshit insane scaling though, if a few sentences here and there were different he’d probably be one of the strongest Nintendo characters period.