A few new Taiga theories...
This is more of a casual post just to share some thoughts that came up as I went through the new episode.
It was mentioned before that Taiga was a great student, but seemed to suddenly go haywire and possibly have his memory problems a few months prior to the game's start. I wonder if that is the exact moment where the time loop begins. Maybe Taiga doesn't necessarily have foresight or "multiple Taigas" in him—like how the mesmer matches don't affect the MC, maybe the looping time doesn't effect Taiga, so he's seen and lived every single loop himself. But everyone around him loops back living life as if everything had been normal and the loop never happened, so they see Taiga "suddenly" lose his mind when in reality, he's just gone back to the same point again out of who knows how many times.
Maybe his memory problems are because he simply has so many time loops to swim through in his brain. They're probably not exactly the same every time, but close enough that he can "come back to reality" during things like missions and get the group out of there alive. And/or, maybe he's willingly dissociating as a coping method from all the trauma he's endured thus far. The trauma itself may also be damaging him mentally to aid in dissociation/memory loss.
It seems like the time loops are pretty damn close to similarity though. Taiga seemed to be capable of predicting what the Hundun's next move would be despite the fact that everything behind the door was allegedly randomly-generated. He commented a few times how some had changed (I assume he meant from alternate timelines), but still managed to act on others as he usually does—as if he already knew what would happen. Not that we don't know this already, but that's probably also why Taiga's decided to be a loose cannon. Because he's probably tried behaving every possible way he could think of before with no change in results. If his prologue line is not the very first loop of time, then that probably is his question to the player: tell me what to do because nothing I try ever works [and I want this to end]. So he knows that no matter how he acts or what he fucks up, it really will hurtle towards the same ending, because everything looks the exact same as the hundred(s) of timeloops he's already lived through.
I think Taiga uses his luck to predict if the future will be the same. Like he did with Haru, he flipped a coin and vouched his stigma on it. I think he does the same too with the future—flips a coin, plays a round, does something that he can use to invoke his stigma. "Heads, the future is the same and the world ends, Tails, we can stop it/something changes/etc." but it lands on heads every single time. I think that weighs on his hopelessness because he knows how reliable his own stigma is. And maybe so late into the game, with nothing any different from before, his coins still landing on heads, he's chosen to simply endure until it starts all over again. He just wants to be carefree and happy until he once again has to go through all hell breaking loose, then time resets and it starts once more. Connecting this to his memory loss and back to the memory anomaly from the first Sinostra episode, perhaps he's also "gambling" away his memories in hopes he can change things. Maybe he's using memories as his "bet". Maybe that's also why he gambles as much as he does. Partially to sacrifice the horrible memories that plague him so he can live in blissful ignorance like everyone around him for a little while, and partially to wager them in attempt to change the future. Maybe Taiga's gambling over the months wasn't just him shutting down and ignoring the problem, maybe that was his last-ditch effort to do something before the imminent tragedy and reset.
Either he hasn't told anyone because he fears what may happen if he does, or he thinks they won't believe him, or more likely: Taiga has tried to tell everyone before what's happening. But that either made things worse or it simply did nothing to stop the time loop. He mostly seems to not act unless there's an emergency or someone else provides information he can act off of first, so I'm willing to believe that things become much worse if people are aware of the time loop. Or perhaps, the loop resets much sooner if he tries to make people aware.
There's a few options: 1. There is no known cure for the Kyklos's curse. Because if there was, Taiga could have enacted it by now and perhaps put an end to the time loop. Or, 2. Taiga knows the cure for the Kyklos's curse, but he's choosing to let the MC change either out of hopelessness or perhaps thinking something can be done after the fact. 3. A specific cure exists, but Taiga has not become aware of it through any timeline he's lived through. The MC is cured every time, so he has no concern about it because he know she'll be fine. 4. A specific cure exists, but even curing MC early on in the timeline does not stop their fate, thus he remains hands-off with the matter until a solution is presented by someone other than himself.
I think Taiga knows who the spy is, but like with everything else, he can't out them outright. It's not that he's trying to figure out who it is, but rather he's trying to get others to reach that conclusion. Maybe he thinks finding them is one of the keys to breaking the time loop.
I think Hyde is the major key factor for shit hitting the fan in the Worse Possible Endings for each time loop, but Taiga knows he can't do anything to the man without serious repurcussions.
I think Taiga has died in multiple different ways in different time loops. It's why he doesn't fear consequences, pain, or death itself. I think that's part of why he doesn't act against the powers that be more either, because he knows he and possibly others will suffer if he tries. We know "Darkwick has eyes everywhere" but we're now aware that Hodge and Podge may have some ability to tap into this sight, if not tapping into or otherwise sharing this ability with Hyde himself. (Perhaps that's why Hyde covers his eyes, so he can process his all-seeing vision without confusing it for what he could see in front of him with his own eyes? Or perhaps it only works if he covers his eyes. Theoretically, that means he could still see his surroundings perfectly fine, he just may view himself from a third-person perspective.) If this is true, then Taiga's hands really are tied in regards to trying to do anything. They are under constant surveillance by Hyde, other staff, possibly other ghouls, and seemingly a few anomalies thrown into the mix. There aren't many opportunities where he could fully act without being caught.
This is a bit more out there, but perhaps Hyde is also aware of the time loops. That could be another reason Taiga doesn't go against him, because he knows that Hyde isn't going to stop whatever he's doing as well. And what Hyde is doing may also be his own "research" into various methods he could take to stop the loop, or just seeing what triggers time to loop again out of morbid curiosity. That could be how and why Hyde got into the position he's in, but if that would be true, he's ironically a little more insane than Taiga.
At least when he's being sensible, Taiga is ironically the only character we can truly trust, simply because of the fact that he knows so much and there's clearly some little part of him that doesn't want things to end like they always do, or otherwise to go through yet another damn loop.
