>>56221498>HopiumDespite being half-baked, the plot of The Way Home was easily the most interesting part of SV's story. It raised a lot of interesting questions, and since we knew for a fact that there would be DLC to explain this, there was more than enough reason to speculate as to what would happen and what it could all mean. While the game says it's all time travel, a lot of those little details simply don't make sense based on that explanation. Combined with the new DLC coming soon, there was plenty of reason to suspect that things weren't as cut-and-dry as it seemed, that there was some other hypothesis that answered all these questions
And thus, Imagination Theory was born, the theory that there actually was no time travel and that the "time machine" was, in actuality, a machine that turns the dreams of whomever uses it into a reality using Terapagos' powers. The Paradox Pokemon were basically tulpas that could only be given lasting physical form thanks to the "time machine". Terapagos, of course, needed to convince people to build it for them for whatever reason and did so by implanting that knowledge into whomever stepped foot into Area Zero
Regardless of your thoughts on this theory, its propogation was entirely the result of the potential that The Way Home set up, a potential story that, for many, could've answered all of the mysteries it set up. In reality, of course, the answers were never that grand. Area Zero, Terapagos, and The Way Home were all just one big Mystery Box. Endless potential that, when revealed, is almost always disappointing compared to the tantalizing mystery. Pokemon fans fell for the bait, headcannon'd a bunch of explanations for the inhumanly shitty writing and then spent the better half of a year bitching endlessly about it. In the end, both sides were wrong: It wasn't tulpas nor time travel, it was just a shittier version of Ultra Space
The fandom played itself
