Board Thread:Policies/@comment-4548390-20170330210246/@comment-26066818-20190601144356

Nausiated,

When you say you haven't read past Extinction, do you mean Extermination? Because the finale of is based around the time loop theory, that the O5 return to the past and literally, in every way, become the past selves of the current, adult O5. Bullet points just to make this easier:

-Ahab's current Hounds are being created by his brainwashed former X-Men students from the future, Manon and Maxime. Their memory- and emotion-manipulating powers allow them to instantly transform X-Men into new Hounds. -Young Jean travels to the future (M&M's past), and learns from younger, good Manon how to perform and reverse her memory tricks. -The O5 return to era, and Young Jean "hides" the O5's memories from  onwards away in their subconscious, a "message in a bottle" set to be recovered on a certain date. -Sure enough after the O5 return home, the adult Earth-616 O5 begin remembering the experiences of their younger selves. Bobby remarks about how young Bobby went to see Hamilton without him and adult Jean, remembering what young Jean learned from Manon, uses that knowledge to reverse the Hounds and neutralize their advantage.

Other examples have turned up since then confirming that the adult O5 remember being the young time-displaced O5. As mentioned above, adult Bobby confronted adult Jean about outing him as gay when she was young Jean and he was young Bobby, in Winter's End #1. Cyclops mentioned having his younger self's memories in and reunited with Kamala in, confirming he remembered being her teammate as young Cyclops.

So it's very clear from the text: the final word on the O5 is that they WERE past versions of the Earth-616 X-Men, and the adult X-Men now remember being the O5 during their time in the future.

Going into the past doesn't always create a divergent timeline in Marvel. The Earth-616 timeline supports multiple examples of people traveling into the past to affect the present. The "Lost In Space-Time" arc from -24 had the team travel to the past and get rescued because Khonshu and Firebird's ancestors carried messages into the future. Hawkeye changed the past of 616 (creating Moon Knight's weapons, etc.), which carried forward into HIS present, not an alternate present, to allow their rescue.

Or perhaps a better way of looking at it is, yes, a divergence always happens when time travel is involved, but sometimes the "Earth-616" designation moves to the timeline that only exists because of time travel, and doesn't remain with the original, unaltered Earth-616.

My go-to example of this is the Age of Apocalypse, which had three timelines: -Timeline A: No time travel. -Timeline B: Legion and the X-Men travel into the past and Xavier is killed, creating the AOA. -Timeline C: AoA Bishop travels into the past and kills Legion before Xavier can be killed.

"Earth-616" remains in Timeline C from that point on, even though changes occurred in the past of Timeline C due to time travel, such as the arrival of Dark Beast and Sugarman. So Earth-616 is ultimately the divergent branched timeline in this example.

The same seems to apply here to the O5 case.