I think that must be the most brought-up irony/quirk in the Chrono series. I've seen it mentioned no less than a dozen times.
Haha, yes, I know I just dredged up an often-repeated observation.
Your commentary on the gurus was an interesting read. One nit-picky point, however. You say it was Aristotle that put forward the idea of four elements. Maybe he made the idea more popular and more widely accepted, but I thought that much earlier the poet Hesiod had put forward his cosmological picture with the earth covered by water and surrounded by air and fire. Thales thought the one constant was Water, Anaximander went for the vague "Indefinate Boundless," Anaximenes proposed "Aer," and Heraclitus went with Fire (along with establishing the notion of the "Logos"), and then of course there were the Pythagoreans with "All is Number." Maybe Aristotle was the first to speak of 4 elements, but I thought it happened earlier, during the Pre-Socratic period.
Oh well, lets veer back to the topic after I sent us careening into Ancient philosophy.
Hmmm... kudos to you for remembering all those names. The only one I would have been able to match with his idea was Anaximander with his boundless. I know the other names, but I forgot precisely which they thought. As for Aristotle, the reason I said it so was because that view of the universe was later considered the Aristotilian one, and held for almost two thousand years. Moreover, regarding Hesiod... I'm not certain he actually considered the entire universe founded upon the four elements as Aristotle did. Hesiod wrote in the time of Homer, and his view of the world would have been very much grounded in myth and religion. I never actually read through the Theogony, but I did skim the beginning such for a paper, and remember that he maintains that first of all came Chaos, or, rather, Chaos came into being first of all. From Chaos comes all the other later Titans, Olympians, and other such deities, from Gaia to Ouranos to Typheous, Erebos, Styx, etc. But whatver his world-view may have been, I do not think that he saw it in a scientific light, and as such, even if there were successive layers, would not have considered them to be the framework of the universe. It may be, however, that certain of the Natural Philosophers did indeed think up the Earth, Air, Fire, Water idea before Aristotle (if I remember rightly, he was far later than any of them), but, as I have said, it is Aristotle who is remembered for it.
Oh, and getting off topic and going on a tangent isn't bad, so long as one can find their way back. That's what my Classics professor always said last semester.
And back on topic... what I wrote about the famed Three has been my view for a long time, ever since writing my story. I speak of them in that manner in it, actually. They always seemed in some ways like philosophers, anyway.
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