As a Wild Mass Guessing subpage, all spoilers are unmarked. You Have Been Warned.
The titular horizon is the event horizon of The Singularity.
- As the world is clearly a simulation RPG Mechanics 'Verse rather than a genuine fantasy world, it might be plausible to consider that the players underwent Brain Uploading. One possibility of how this could happen is if a superintelligent AI with benefolent intent but Blue-and-Orange Morality decided to improve the lives of humans by creating utopian worlds that fulfill their desires. It's just that MMO gamers actually don't want peace and quiet: their particular desire is an adventure where they can experience peril and hardship, but on their own terms, with fair rules for all, guaranteed rewards for becoming good at the game whether it's measured in terms of mastery, strategy or perseverance, and the ability to keep improving ever after.
The Knights of Izumo are either the game developers or GM's.
- There are places that they normally habit, according to the People of the Land. But the Game Masters have been missing, and the rules of the world have changed. It appears events aren't necessarily managed, either. They are also said to be on par with Adventurers or perhaps stronger, which would fit with standard game protocols for GM's or developers, and they'd naturally have a vested interest in keeping the People of the Land alive. They also would make sense as a defense mechanism against forces that the Adventurers hadn't leveled high enough to face yet, which would've explained why they'd have legendary status - the Knights of Izumo have ALWAYS been fighting high-end monsters, as far as the People of the Land can remember.
- Izumo also being a real town, it could be the home of the game studio that created Elder Tale. But that would just be crazy.
- Also, at some point, it's been stated that when it first started out, Elder Tale was an American game. Then again, after all this time, it's a known fact that different companies operate the various servers around the world. so Izumo could be where the physical Japan Server and by extension, the company running it are.
- Seems Jossed given the revelations of Kanami, Go! East! The Knights of Izumo and the other knight orders are being hunted down and eliminated by the new Genius monsters. The Elder Tales main character was rescued by Kanami and seems to have no knowledge of Elder Tales being any kind of game.
After the Goblin King War, Raynesia will be known as THE HERO OF THE LEAGUE OF FREEDOM CITIES
When word gets around that she inspired the people of Akibara to march off to war, the people of the land will be amazed. The tale will grow with the telling until they're saying she, a lander, was The Leader of an army of adventurers and personally fought the Goblin King in single combat. Some of them might even say she's one of the Ancients or some "Goddess of Victory". Naturally, Raynesia will be terribly embarrassed by these stories and insist that she's just a lazy and cowardly princess, but the only thing she'll accomplish is adding "modesty" to her list of virtues.
Rudy thinks he's in Exalted instead of Elder Tales
He often says to Izuzu that he's "going to become an adventurer" and adventurers are looked upon as more than human, like demi-gods. He tries his hardest to perform amazing heroics in battle. Clearly, he's trying to become a Solar Exalted by accomplishing a feat of heroism that should be impossible for a lander. The NPC Characters are also people from the real world
But in this case, maybe they are people that didn't play the game. Their lives work just like real people's because, since they didn't play the game, they don't work under the same rules. And they have personalities, occupations and family that they carried from the real world, and this is because in the "real" game, their personality aspects are undefined. Shiroe is an Incubator but he focuses on hope instead of despair
- If you examine his exploits, they focus around young girls. He marches to Susukino to rescue Serara and then he takes down the Hamelin Guild primarily because they enslaved Minori; he regularly sends encouraging messages to the latter while working on The Plan to free her. Afterward, he teaches her how to be a strategist like him which boosts her spirits higher. When Akatsuki feels down and useless, he tells her otherwise. Capping it all, he brought hope to a hopeless situation at Minori's request. When Rudy was on the verge of premanent death, he offered a contract to the boy that would make him into an advenuterer, i.e., a superpowered human-ish creature that cannot die."I want you to make a contract with me and become an adventurer!" /人◕‿‿◕人
The Knights of Izumo summoned the psyches of the Adventurers.
- It was revealed that the Knights of Izumo, for whatever reason, are missing from the land of Yamato. Coincidentally, the Adventurers gained full sentinence in the world of Elder Tale around the same time. This cannot be just mere timing. The Knights of Izumo, and the other 12 bands of knights that guard the rest of the world, discovered the existence of the <Genius> Monsters, and realizing that with all their limitations coded into them, they could not possibly hope to protect the Landers from the <Genius> Monsters. Thus, they decided that the best strategy would be to cast another World Fraction, and fully summon the unlimited potential of the Adventurers' real world psyches into the world of Elder Tale.
Shiroe is Satan.
- Rudy signed a contract at a crossroads that gave him adventurer powers with someone who arrived by flying monster, revived him as undead with magic incense, and whose primary role is the manipulation of souls in the form of MP. All that's missing is a scene of him being surprisingly good at playing Isuzu's lute.
Kanami (The leader of the Tea Party) will join Log Horizon one she gets back to Japan/Yamato.
- To start with, it been shown in the web spin-off of Log Horizon that Kanami is indeed travelling overland from Europe to get back to Japan/Yamato to reunite with her old friends. Secondly, Word of God states that Log Horizon will have a member for each of the 12 game classes. So far, we have 9 of these. note , and the 3 remaining classes are Summoner, Druid and Monk. Kanami's class was Swashbuckler; but after moving to Europe, she created a new account under the Monk class. So, since that's one of the unfilled classes in the Log Horizon roster, it seems to make sense that, once she finds her way back to Akihabara, she might end up filling this slot.
- And the summoner and druid will be Roe 2 and Serara respectively (if Serara decides to change guilds).
- Unless there will be more than one of each class, this is likely jossed. The end of the 13th volume has two new members added to the guild, the siblings Leila (monk) and Litka (druid), a.k.a. surviving members of the Izumo Knights. So unless there will be an overlap between classes, Kanami and Serara joining to fill those classes is likely not in the cards.
Roe 2 will join Log Horizon
Similar to the one about Kanami joining Log Horizon, there will be a slot for a summoner. That summoner could be Roe 2. Shoujiro is younger than he looks.
Prior to the start of the series, Shoujiro was a younger character with an older looking avatar. That's why he looks up to Shiro as an older brother, and his 'harem', while some are interested in romantically, many have a sisterly/motherly interest in him. Akatsuki and Tetra will eventually compare notes, and Tetra will find out about the Potion of Change Appearance
- Whether Tetra finds one and uses it is anyone's guess.
- Or an inversion: Tetra is Transgender and currently going full ham in joy.
Akatsuki is a real ninja
- Early on, when she used the potion of change appearance, she said it was fun to roleplay someone different from her real self but she didn't want to do that all the time. However, she's been really keeping up her role as a ninja.
- Elder Tales was already a proto-bardo. The excitement generated by the release 12t expansion pack managed to somehow generate enough mania to push it into a full-fledged bardo. Like The Grid, access to the Bardo is granted by being in front of a computer and spending some mania. This new bardo supports itself whenever an adventurer dies, it slowly drains mental stats, not enough to be harmful, but enough that the player loses some memories.
Elder Tale a Genius Loci and is using the death of adventurers to grow itself.
- When an adventurer dies he or she loses some memories, but these memories aren't lost. They are used by Elder Tale to improve itself, growing larger, more natural and more real. This process will be fueled by an Arms Race between the adventurers and monsters, and when that hits the law of diminishing returns, some easy method (aside from the one Shiroe discovered) will be found to turn People of the Land into adventurers.
Roe 2 now exists in the current Elder Tale world because of the sacrifice of Shiroe's Memories
- Roe 2 was one of Shiroe's Beta test characters. The fact that she doesn't appear until Shiroe loses a part of himself would indicate that the alt was able to come into existence, in a similar way to the RMT bot existing as a "living" being.
The Fools and Geniuses are A.I.s
- Roe 2 gave an infodump to Minori with loads of computer-related terminology, talking about how limited their language protocols are.
Soujirou is Hamlet
- He and Shiroe basically have an exchange directly from Act 2 Scene 2 in episode 7. In essence, the following occurs:Soujirou: "Akiba is a prison."Shiroe: "Then the world is one."Soujirou: "A goodly one; in which there are many confines, wards, and dungeons, Akiba being one of the worst."
Elder Tale got modified by the C-Consciousness of S.T.A.L.K.E.R.
Starting in the USA, the MMO eventually spread world wide, including to Russia in the continuity where Strelok joined (rather than destroyed) the C-Consciousness. The C-C started and maintained Russian server, which got them in the door for becoming a third-party developer working with Altharva Inc. With the last expansion, "Homesteading the Noosphere" the C-C linked the entire system as part of an experiment, the results of which created the "May Incident". Level 100 may be the advertised max level in the Noosphere expansion, but with the coming of the Catastrophe, the Yamato server (the only known server to have actually gotten the expansion before everything went to shit) adventurers aren't restrained to that.
Basically, once someone reaches Level 100, they'll expect to stop levelling, only to find that they keep gaining experience, meaning adventurers in the Yamato server can keep on leveling forever, constantly becoming stronger.- Also, as an addenum to this, any players who leaves the Yamato server will revert to Level 90, as none of the other servers had the expansion, but they regain their normal level when they return to it. Similarly, any external players (such as Kanami) who enter the Yamato server gain the ability to become higher than Level 90, though they don't gain any immediate experience for everything they did outside of it.
The Homesteading the Noosphere update is a forced settling of Theldiesa.
It's not wanted by anyone sane, but the adventurers are essentially colonizing Theldiesa. The gamer abilities they have are patching any holes that might get in the way, and eventually will be lost.
If Elder Tales had remained a game, the Ancients would've been killed off in the storyline.
The Ancients were crutch characters, that battled the heavy hitter enemies, until the Adventurers grew strong enough to take over. Part of the storyline of the expansion would be that the Geniuses would've killed the Ancients, and the players would've needed to pick up the slack in defending the world. Elder Tales is no longer a game, but certain planned story elements carried over, such as the one above, which is why it was so easy for the Geniuses to defeat the Ancients, even though they were out-numbered 5 to 1. The Geniuses were a story element in the planned expansion pack.
They aren't native to Theldesia, so they aren't at all natural, being A.I.s with simple motives and attacks patterns, unable to grow beyond their programming making them strong, but easy to defeat. The Odyssey Knights would've eventually disbanded.
If you lose memories each time you die, a group whose goal is to die as many times as possible would eventually lose the reason why they're dying, to experience their memories of home. Krusty's Overskill Hyperion Eye also allows him to read surface thoughs.
Normally, it only allows to determine HP and status, but maybe this is a third benefit that he's concealing. Regan was the one who summoned the adventurers to Theldesia.
He's amazingly familiar with World-class magic having researched it before. However, it was not out of any malicious intent, but it was in order to counter the Geniuses. Why Nyanta's original guild collapsed.
'The house was getting old, but it couldn't handle the bad weather, so half the house collapsed.' according to Nyanta. This should probably not be taken literally. What likely really happened was that basing a Guild around just being Catperson was a bad idea, as everyone had different ideas about what it means to be a Catperson and would roleplay it differently. There was no real bond between the members, and when disagreements happened, there would either be fights or people walking away. In the end, there wasn't enough to people to keep it afloat. Shiroe doomed the economy via hyperinflation.
Adventures fight monsters, get cash dropped by monsters, and use these to buy goods and services. It would be logical that there would be so much gold in the system that goods and services would eventually cost so much because the value of each individual coin would go down. Now, this wouldn't be a problem if coins were allowed to leave circulation, and there was a method for this, buying property would have you paying gold to the system, and would no longer be in circulation. In addition to this, you would need to pay monthly tax on the properties you own, which would also take money out of circulation. However, when Shiroe made a contract with the Kunie clan to take all the money for guildhall and cathedral maintenance, plus all the money for the zones in and around Akhihabara this removed a valuable method to drain money from the system. Unless there are other methods to drain money from adventurers, this will mean that they will keep accumulating wealth, until money eventually becomes worthless. Turning a Person of the Land into an adventurer no longer requires Phantasmal class items.
It was only needed during the first time, but new contracts can be made with lesser, but still valuable items. Touri is King of Westlande
He's only a figurehead king, without any real political power, but its the only way any of the events of the first half of Season 3 make any sense whatsoever. This way, Touri, as King can grant Eins the title of Duke of Akihabara, and Eins can swear fealty to King Touri as his lord. Westlande's ploy with Duke Eins was never expected to succeed.
The Westland senate was afraid of giving King Touri any real power, and having a powerful adventurer swear fealty to him would be giving him exactly that. Likely, the expectation was that this ploy would be defeated by the adventurers of Akihabara, leaving Touri in an even worse position, while at the same time, sowing political confusion and damage. Empathiom is related to/derived from negative emotions.
The power source the Travelers are looking for is derived from negative emotions. When an adventurer dies, they relive a painful memory from the old world. William mentions that if you die a hundred times, you learn that you suck and are petty a hundred times. These memories would trigger the related feelings of guilt and shame, then the memory is harvested and the adventurer could then revive.