Time, it will not wait...
A thorough answer for @deemoyza! It turned into a rant so I decided to give it it's own post! I think you might find me pulling away from the subject a bit at first because the short answer is, I have a headcanon for this and it encapsulates a lot of my ideas about FF8 as a game that I hope you will find interesting enough to stick around for my answer. 😁
Like I said, I never thought I'd be talking about the problems with actual time as opposed to time travel, (though I will touch on those, in a bit) but to the discerning eye, it's evident. Squall hits the Fire Cavern in the morning and by night he's a SeeD. Okay, that's a packed day. A train heist, an assassination attempt, traveling cross-continent to Galbadia Garden and then to Deling City in time to make another assassination attempt by nightfall. Not to mention stopping by to explore the local labyrinth -- this is a lot to digest. (I suppose you can rest in Balamb but they don't let you rest in Timber or Deling City, which is unnecessary anyway, by that point you've farmed 600 cure spells)
And it goes further. Even in flashback sequences, Laguna runs from Timber to Deling City in a day and makes Julia's show with time to spare. And for me, that parallel didn't go unnoticed.
Let's take a moment to discuss something that always bothered me about the JME. (Oh gosh, way off topic I know but it's important, trust.) Ultimecia can somehow use this machine to find Edea, another Sorceress in another time. Ellone's power doesn't do this, really at all, it works on knowing the people involved and there's something to that involving the “Descendents of Hyne” being connected, but I find that imagining the usefulness of such a machine without essentially disabling this limitation of “knowing” someone to be a bit unbelievable, maybe because of the warlike setting of the world of FF8. What use is it if you can only see the past of your loved ones? You'd much more expect the JME to be used in infiltration and spying. So if it's not singling out Sorceresses by some kind of setting (what kind of tyrant would add that feature?) or through Ultimecia's “knowing” the players involved, I imagine the simplest explanation is that there had to be some trial-and-error. Ultimecia tries again and again until she finds who she's looking for… someone close to Ellone.
Ellone's powers have another rule that is important to this conversation, besides needing to know both people connected through her power, and that is: “you can't change the past.”
Though it may seem off topic again, I want to just make a quick aside to this important point: Everything that happens in the game happens in Ultimecia's past and most importantly, if we’re following Ellone’s rule about changing the past, Ultimecia *cannot” change the past using the JME. That means that when Ultimecia finds the Junction Machine Ellone, there is no Adel’s tomb in space, Adel has already been brought down by the Lunar Cry, and killed. The Lunatic Pandora is not where Laguna placed it in the ocean, because it was moved, by Ultimecia, before the first time she touched the JME.
So with these things in mind (and many others, involving how Ellone gets her powers, Time Compression theory, etc) my headcanon is essentially this:
We, as the player, are watching Squall & Co. essentially as if *we* were Ultimecia, skulking through their thoughts with the JME, influencing their decisions. Time as viewed through this lens isn't setting a constant pace, if Squall can watch Laguna run from Timber to Deling, the fade out between is a “fast forward” of sorts, he's not experiencing the whole of what happened, but instead a series of important moments strung together as if they're chronological. This is my explanation for the “time dilation” of the storyline. Now, when I play the game, knowing what Squall is thinking fills me with a grave dread -- as if someone is peering into his mind.
If you haven't read the Time/Ultimecia FAQ that's been floating around the internet for maybe forever, it proposes a “static” model of time. This means that ALL of time in FF8 came into the world at the same moment in order for the rules of Ellone's time travel to be true: “you can't change the past” -- I find that looking at Ultimecia's Era as the dynamic (read: changeable) future and Squall's Time as the past but seen through this lens of Ellone's powers in machine form makes far more sense, allows for time to progress normally for the people involved without changing any of the way the game is presented to us, rather working with what we’re given to observe it.
Squall’s past, the ‘Modern Era’, can’t be changed from ‘Squall’s Time’ (at least not through Ellone's power) so I infer this: from ‘Ultimecia’s Era’ which does exist and is happening, ‘Squall Time’ is her past and has (even though it doesn’t seem like it from the players perspective at first glance) already happened and therefore can’t be changed through the JME.
And so I think that perhaps there is a lot more time between these things (Dollet, Timber, Deling City) when given this lens. It helps fix some issues (Zell forgot everyone but has only been using GFs for maybe a day and a half longer than Irvine?) and makes it easier for me to look at both this issue of “how did all of this happen in a week?” and the questions I have about time travel events in the game from a different (and to me, more easily parsed) perspective.
