Ur-Golem's Eye (and a whole bunch of other stuff)

Once upon a time on MTGSalvation, someone brought up the fact that Mirrodin took place millennia after all other stories. In response the then head of the Creative Team Brady Dommermuth pointed out that the flavor text of Ur-Golem's Eye was an error, and that only a few centuries were supposed to have passed.

This is emblematic of what happened to the debate about the Mirrodin timeline. While there were loads of temporal references in the books and in online articles (as we've seen in the last four reviews), as time passed those became harder and harder to find, and thus the debate became focused on the most visible pieces of evidence: flavor text. Which is kinda convenient, as a single piece of those is much easier to declare an error than a whole pile of different sources.

This wouldn't be Multiverse in Review though if I just left it at that. I've dug up all those other references, so now it is time to put it all together, showcase the inconsistencies and trace the development of the Mirrodin timeline over the years. But we're also going to do something else. While trawling through forum threads for my research I kept finding interactions between Brady Dommermuth and... eh... myself. Which got me thinking about the relationship between the Creative Team and the storyline fans, and how it often wasn't great at the time. So for those interested in that sort of thing, stick around after all the timeline talk for some introspection on, well... myself around age 18.

Yeah, this was a weird one to write.

FIGURING OUT THE TIMELINE

To avoid confusion, let’s first see when Mirrodin happens currently.

…

Okay, having just reread that last sentence… I’m being confusing already, aren’t I? Let’s try again: let’s first see where Mirrodin fits on the timeline in the current continuity.

In Planar Chaos, Karn observes Mirrodin and we get the following quote:

"There had not been a major conflict or crisis in Mirrodin for over one hundred years, but something about the place troubled Karn."

At the time some people thought the thing that troubled our favorite silver golem was Memnarch going insane, thus proving the Mirrodin cycle happens in the far future, but then at the end of the Time Spiral story the nature of planeswalkers is fundamentally changed, and since Slobad ascended into the old school 'walker, the original Mirrodin story has to happen before this. We don’t know of any troubles between the fall of Memnarch and the rise of the Phyrexians, so we can be pretty much certain the original Mirrodin happened "over one hundred years" before Time Spiral, which is approximately 4400 AR, or 100 years after Scourge.

Right from the start that sounds off. Just 100 years for Memnarch to rule Mirrodin alone, the rise and destruction of the Ur-Golem civilization, the launch of the 4 suns, the rise of the humanoid civilizations and the eventual fall of Memnarch? We know the elves lose their memories in the rebuking ceremonies, but why are the leonin talking about their ancestor Dakan as if he lived many generations ago, when there is barely space on the timeline for 1 generation of leonin to have existed?

Now, if we didn't have any temporal references, a very generous fan might be able to fudge things to make them work. We know pretty much nothing about the Ur-Golems for example, so maybe their rise and fall happened over the course of just a few years? Or even just a few months/weeks/days? A society of “robots” that was only around for the blink of an eye is a suitably sci-fi concept for Magic's most futuristic plane. Unfortunately, we actually have loads of temporal references. Here’s a little reminder of all the stuff we’ve covered in the last 4 reviews, plus some stuff taken from flavor texts and forum posts:

• In the prologue of The Moons of Mirrodin we hear of Memnarch standing around admiring the scenery for decades.
• The flavor texts of Ur-Golem's Eye and Domineer refer to golems having been around for millennia, an the Ur-Golems being extinct for millennia as well.
• The flavor text of Leveler refers to them show up each century. This lines up with the reference in Moons that they come every "100 cycles", suggesting "cycle" is just a sci-fi sounding name for "year".
• This is interesting, as Moons also says the stories on the Tree of Tales go back "a few hundred cycles", with the earlier runes removed, and that Glissa and Kane have been friends for "over a hundred cycles".
• One arcana article outright states that the Tree of Tales has been carved into for "hundreds of years".
• In The Darksteel Eye Drooge says trolls lived in trees "many thousands of years ago". Playing devil's advocate: maybe they left the trees long before they were abducted to Mirrodin, so this reference might not count. 
• In The Fifth Dawn it says that according to leonin historians, Raksha conquered further than any Kha for a thousand years. (Devil's advocate: historians can be wrong.)
• In the same book an elf also says he has known Glissa's family for centuries. I forgot to mention that one in the last review. How he can remember stuff that far back despite the rebuking ceremony... who knows...
• In various Rei Nakazawa articles he says the vedalken have been working towards an unknown goal for millennia, that the oil has infected Mirrodin for centuries, and that Memnarch has also schemed for millennia.
• In the arcana article Lacunae and the Beacons it is stated the suns rose "centuries before the events of Fifth Dawn" and that this was before civilizations began to form. That last bit seems to contradict Al-Hayat having seen the rise of 3 of them, and the flavor text of Seething Song implying the Vulshok at least saw the rise of the red one. Though perhaps it just means they saw it in their pre-history.
• In a Phyrexia.com forum post Will McDermott states that a cycle equals a year, that Glissa is thus between 100 and 200 years old, and that Scourge-to-Mirrodin probably takes slightly under 1000 years. In an MTGSally post a few years later he says "the number 1000 comes to mind" when asked how many years have passed between those stories.
• And finally we have Brady saying in the MTGSally threat I began this article with that Mirrodin was supposed happen centuries after Scourge rather than millennia ("Not even the better part of a millennium") and that the millennia reference was a mistake.

So it seems we have confusion right from the start. Even discounting the posts by Will and Brady from a few years down the line, both Will's Phyrexia.com post that says it was under 1000 years, and Rei Nakazawa's first article saying it has been millennia came out in the same month as The Moons of Mirrodin. The main point of trouble seems to be the insertion of the Ur-Golems in the timeline. The references from the novels all deal with just the humanoid civilizations and talk about centuries, one millennia at most. This works with the recollection of Will and Brady. Yet the flavor texts and Rei's articles say that before those centuries of humanoid activity there was an Ur-Golem civilization that has been dead for millennia. Having made this distinction, I am reminded of the statements we saw last time by Will and Jess Lebow about how the authors didn't have much contact with the creative team after their initial summit. Were the Ur-Golems thought up by flavor text writers after the summit, and their existence thus never communicated with the authors? 

Whatever the cause, since no source outright states "the creation of Mirrodin was X years ago", all published references match up fairly neatly in a millennia long timeline, with all those references from the novels simply making up the final part of it. This is why the makers of old timelines, like the devilishly handsome guy who made the original incarnation of the timeline on the MTG Wiki, put the events of Mirrodin block in the 6000’s. The final Phyrexia.com timeline follows Will's original idea and thus puts Mirrodin at “just” 5500-5505 AR)

Quick aside: This huge jump might sound bizarre to us now, when we’ve been hanging out at +/- 4560 AR since 2008 CE, but remember that this wasn’t unheard of back in the day. There’s about 2500 years between the stories of The Dark and Ice Age, and the period between Alliances and Mirage used to be called the Empty Quater because it was a millennium about which we knew barely anything (this was before Urza’s block started filling it out.) Speaking of the Empty Quater, the next block would be Kamigawa, which has a story happening during that “empty” millennium, so clearly the creative time at the time was open to jumping around on the timeline. So putting the sci-fi plane in the distant future must’ve seemed like a good idea. You add to its futuristic feel, and if you want to tell another story, you simply return to an earlier point on the timeline! Very neat, no harm done!

But then Planar Chaos came around...

I can think off two reasons why you might want to move Mirrodin backward in time. The first is if you want to re-use the setting and have your other planeswalkers visit it. We’ve talked about how unlikely it is that WotC was already planning a return to Mirrodin from the start (otherwise they wouldn’t have scoured the plane of inhabitants at story’s end), but at some point they must have realized that Mirrodin was a pretty populair plane, and that they sort off painted themselves in a corner by putting it so far removed from the rest of continuity…

The other reason why putting something thousands of years in the future might cause problems: what if you want to do a major shake up of your status quo? Say, to pick a completely random example, you want to massively de-power your main characters? It would be awfully annoying if in your story set in the far future you’ve featured two planeswalkers with godlike powers if your plan is to revamp planeswalkers as mere mortals…

So while putting the story of your sci-fi plane in the future is a nifty idea in theory, it runs into some practical problems down the line. When the creative team got the first inkling of an idea for a possible return to Mirrodin, they must’ve realized that they needed to back peddle on the original timeline statements, just as they needed to undo the depopulation of the setting.

But to reduce it to just a single century... they could've easily had Time Spiral take place a couple of centuries later instead. Again, it's not like Magic hasn't made such time jumps before. Trying to squish everything together so much causes so many problems that I'm starting to wonder if maybe it was just an oversight? In Time Spiral Freyalise said it's been 200 years since Scourge, in Planar Chaos Karn says it's been 100 years since Mirrodin. Maybe nobody thought to put these two statements from different books together with what had been published when Mirrodin came out? Or maybe the creative team had forgotten about all references other than the flavor text of Ur-Golem's Eye, and thought they could easily declare that a single mistake and thus sweep everything under the rug?

Whatever happened, the line from Planar Chaos is the final and most clear published source on Mirrodin's timeline placement, so that's what we are stuck with. The question now is, how can that possibly make sense with the established history of Mirrodin?

The main theories I’ve seen floating around are that either the temporal crisis from Time Spiral is to blame, or that it was Memnarch himself who in his madness twisted the timeline. I have not been able to find any official quote from someone at WotC confirming this though (Although I admit I haven’t gone through all magicthegathering.com articles around the time of Scars block yet. Maybe when I get around to reviewing that something will turn up.)

From what I have been able to find, it seems that these theories go back to the Future Sight fatpack booklet, which has some info on how the time rifts on Dominaria effected other planes. It has the following to say about Mirrodin:

"On Mirrodin, the plane's mana core destabilized and discharged five separate orbs of mana (Mirrodin's "suns"). Moreover, the instability enabled Memnarch's delusions to partially substitute for the plane's reality, effectively shutting out Mirrodin's creator, Karn."

While this is not quite proof that there is a time dilation effect happening on Mirrodin, it gives a decent basis for fanon theories that there is. And while saying time can move differently on different planes really opens up a can of worms for timeline builders, this time (heh) there really is no other way to make the backstory of Mirrodin fit with the rest of continuity. Lacking any official statement we have to find a way to make things work ourselves, and we'd be fools if we didn't use the timeline distorting catastrophe that is just right there to do so.

[EDIT] - Hey everyone, this is Squirle from the future, breaking his own timeline to let you all know this theory was actually elevated to canon! The amazing Cary from Mtglore.com pointed me to, get this, the insert of From the Vault: Lore, which contained a short summary of Memnarch's story, which said "his delusions warped time on Mirrodin relative to the Multiverse, giving Memnarch centuries to search for a Planeswalker spark he could harvest"! I don't own many of these kinds of inserts (as there is often barely any lore in them), so many thanks to Cary for pointing it out! I'm very happy this lines up with the theory I was going with anyway, so I don't have to rewrite huge parts of this article! [/EDIT]

For those who want to take a stab at figuring out how the soul traps work if there were many generations living on Mirrodin, or how the people removed from Mirrodin at the end of Fifth Dawn were reintegrated into their home planes, keep this timeline oddity in mind. While there were humanoids on Mirrodin for centuries, they must only have been gone for a few years at most from their neighbors viewpoints.

This is where the Mirrodin timeline story ends for now. It will stay at ~4400 on the timeline, with a big asterisk indicating that on the plane itself far, far more time has passed. Eventually we'll need to have another discussion about the placement of Scars of Mirrodin, but we'll cross that bridge when we get there.

SOME THOUGHTS ABOUT BEING A STORYLINE FAN

Over the course of writing this article I’ve gone through all of Brady Dommermuth’s posts on MTGSalvation. At least, the ones that are still able to be found, as a bunch of threads (At least all the ones I made myself, and who knows what else) have disappeared into the aether. I’m sure there were more posts by Brady in there somewhere. Most of his replies on the long-disappeared Wizards forums are gone as well, except for a bunch of stuff saved and reposted to No Goblins Allowed. It’s a shame, as they were a very interesting source of information for projects like mine, providing us with behind the scenes insights like the ones used in this article, and even stuff like glimpses of the Forgotten Archive.

Reading the posts that were left was uncomfortable though. Especially those around the time of Future Sight. When the head of creative is saying stuff like “If you need a bad guy … go ahead and blame me”, and keeping the names of the rest of the Creative Team a secret because he is the “human shield”, something seems wrong in the relationship between creator and fans. Even if there is a smiley after the human shield remark. It’s especially uncomfortable for me, as I was storyline moderator at the time, and among those disappeared posts were at least a few instances of me blaming Brady for various continuity issues as well. So now I’ve said everything I have to say about the Mirrodin timeline, I would like to end this article with some musings about the Magic storyline community in the planeshopping era.

Nerdy fans often have a tendency to get very… possessive about the subject of their fandom. We’ve certainly seen a bunch of very toxic manifestations of that in various fandoms over the last few years. But while I’m absolutely baffled by those responses (keeping things vague in the possibly vain hope of keeping my comments readable…), when it comes to the Magic storyline community’s attitude during the planeshopping era… I can kinda understand where it is coming from?

And again, I was part of this community at the time. Feel free to pick me up on any bias in the comments!

There never was a completely great, problem-less Golden Age of the Magic Storyline. Even the much praised (in retrospect) Weatherlight Saga had a few dreadful stories (coughProphecycough) and horrendous continuity issues (coughRamoscough). But it is hard to deny that the Otaria period saw a steep drop off in quality. Odyssey block couldn’t keep the names of its characters consistent, Legends I and II couldn’t keep the continuity of various characters consistent, and Scourge… was Scourge. After Mirrodin quality of the novels picked up again, and there were fewer continuity errors, but that was mostly because Kamigawa and Ravnica blocks had only the most minute links to the rest of the canon.

And then there was the announcement that cards and storyline were being divorced from each other much more than before. Followed by the statement that Ur-Golem’s Eye's flavor text was a mistake, which was interpreted by the fans as flavor text no longer mattering…

Now, in my memory there was an actual post by Brady or Rei Nakazawa… someone official at least, stating that flavor text wasn’t supposed to be taken literally. I haven’t been able to find it in my research though. Maybe it was lost when the Wizards forums went under, or maybe my mind is playing tricks on me and I am actually misremembering a post from a fan, like this one. Whatever the original post was though, it essentially adds up tot he same thing: WotC went from not being able to keep things straight between current books and books that were many years old, to not being able to keep things straight between subsequent books, to not being able to keep things straight between the books and the cards.

In this context I would like to bring up another quote from Brady I was able to find. Someone said that if they were writing for the storyline, they would consider it their job to read all that came before. Brady’s response?

"You're crazy. Even if you're a very fast reader, reading all the previous novels is a commitment of at least 120 hours, or 3 weeks of a 40-hr-per-week job. All our authors (and the vast majority of published authors generally speaking) have day jobs; their novel writing is on the side. Writing three Magic novels a year wouldn't earn you enough money to live comfortably, as much as I wish that weren't true. Producing a good novel in just a few short months is a huge enough task without asking the authors to commit the details of 40+ other novels to memory."

You know what? Brady is absolutely right here. Magic’s continuity is such a jumble of books, comics, websites, card inserts and other junk, that reading everything to keep the continuity straight is completely insane. Especially when your main job is doing something else. Heck, it is exactly what this blog is doing, and eh… well, when I started doing it I was working night shifts in hotels, but you can clearly tell when I started my current 9 to 5 job from the decline of updates…

So I guess I should use this article to apologize to Brady for the various posts boiling down to “Braaaaaaaaaady *shaking fist emoji*” I’ve posted over the years, back when I was a young naïf who vastly underestimated both the amount of work worldbuilding requires and how much work it is to dredge up all that ancient continuity to make sure it works with current projects. Over the years I've developed much more appreciation for the worldbuilding the Creative Team was doing back in the planeshopping era, and have come to realize how many of the things I blamed Brady for were out of his control. Hence me feeling uncomfortable with my old posts.

And yet, and yet, and yet… even now I can’t read that "you're crazy" post as anything other than an admission that WotC isn’t going to be able to keep track of continuity. And if you are told that, after seeing the huge continuity issues in the Otaria era, and the lack of continuity during Kamigawa and Ravinca blocks… well, I get why the community went “If WotC isn’t going to curate continuity, we will do it ourselves!” Perhaps that is not the most useful (or even healthy) attitude, as WotC is always going to be the one that determines what is going to happen next to the storyline, but it's an understandable reaction. To me at least.

You know, when I started this bit, I didn’t really know where it was going, but I feel the typical historian’s answer of “one the one hand and on the other...” coming up. Hopefully that does’t disappoint the people who were hoping for a scathing criticism of WotC or a complete mea culpa from me too much.

So… on the one hand… the fans were expecting too much from the Creative Team. Magic used to have a well curated continuity, but that was back in the Pete Venters days. Looking at the divergence of cards and storyline which already started during the Weatherlight Saga, and the fact that the Forgotten Archive was last updated around 1996, it seems clear that this curation had stopped long before the Brady era of the Creative Team. And with the sprawling nature of Magic’s storyline it was pretty much impossible for them to catch up while also doing their regular jobs. The storyline community themselves pretty much proved how difficult it was to keep everything straight by presenting fan theories about Elder Dragons as canon, or passing on lists of planeswalkers that included Monkey Island and Starcraft characters.

But on the other hand… I’m not going to sit here and pretend Magic’s storyline wasn’t in rather dire straits back then. The lack of continuity between the Odyssey block novels, between the Onslaught block novels and the Onslaught block cards, or between Legends I and Legends II have nothing to do with not being able to know old continuity minutia. Those are just a result of the creative team and the book team doing a shoddy job (apparently mainly by just not talking to each other often enough)

Unfortunately, things tended to glom together in fan discourse. Unreasonable demands merged with valid criticism. Complaints about continuity merged with complaints about the quality of the stories. This was exacerbated by the fandom not knowing the inner workings of WotC. Most people didn’t know there was a difference between the creative team and the book team, even though all those articles on the Magic Book Archive talked about the way those two teams worked (or didn’t work) together. (Maybe that’s why the Book Archive was eventually scrapped, it clearly wasn’t reaching a wide audience…) As a result, people held Brady Dommermuth responsible for every part of the flavor, lore and story. Must’ve been annoying for him. You do great work worldbuilding, only for some guy calling himself “the Squirle Master” to call you out for the quality of a book you didn’t write, or a continuity issue you didn’t even know existed…

So... yeah. Thinking about all those old posts of mine didn't make me very happy, but I'm not going to fully absolve WotC either. I'll say sorry to Brady for holding him responsible for stuff he had nothing to do with, but still think it wasn't a very good idea to send the authors out on their own after the initial creative summit.

You can decide for yourself whether that conclusion is me waffling or being nuanced.

I've been doing rather negative reviews for a while now, haven't I? Onslaught block was the absolute nadir of the storyline, with bad continuity, no card/story integration and just dreadful novels. Mirrodin block was a little better, with a slightly improved and far less bizarre story, and the worldbuilding side of the lore was revitalized with the new planeshopping era. But it is only with the next block that the stories themselves will really turn the corner of their long decline.

I've still got to read a few of the online vignettes, so I'll probably take one or two weeks off from the blog, but after that, prepare yourselves for a whole load of Kamigawa reviews!