Hi, i will start from this, i have no what so evidence to my theory and it's speculation, this is i bet the first time that somebody has a theory like this (original) and it may blow your mind off or just make you rofl for hours.
I think that Tobi is nobody else then Sasuke yes folks i believe that Tobi is in fact Sasuke, Tobi came from the future to complete his goal, since i believe that in his timeline he lost to Naruto and had no hope of destroying the leaf and avenging the uchia more to this i believe that tobi (sasuke) got consumed by hate that much that he doesnt even care for any kind of goals he just wants destruction to the whole world.
How could he come to the past? Well i believe that his sharingan that enables him to move trough space and dimensions enables him to move trough time without any problems since it is called Space-Time jutsu, the reason why he never shows his face is that he does not want to be recocnised as Sasuke i mean if anybody knew it would be the greatest man hunt ever since, everybody would see the danger from a man from the future.
Saying that he is a shell from his former self just means that he aged to much, probably almost died in the battle with naruto and needed zetsu cells to be kept alive and it probably took aloot of his streangth to use the time jutsu.
I believe that he made several time jumps and prepaired the ground for the ultimate revenge.
And if i am correct you will find the evidences for this theory pretty quickly when Sasuke begins to use space time jutsus thanks to his EMS.
your thoughs?
If your hypotheses is true, time travel rules from "
12 Monkeys" would seem to apply - the rules being mainly this: no matter what one tries to do to effect the past the traveler finds out that the past, relative to their original starting point and every subsequent travel point there after, had happened the way that it did
because they had time traveled in the first place. Strong physical and philosophical Determinism.
Why? Because Tobi failed at capturing the 9 tails from Minato, the day Naruto was born. Sasuke most certainly knows this if he's doing wild time traveling Jutsu. If your going to mess with relativity know your history!!! Hence he would have seen his own failure from the vantage point of both time trveler and in history as a ninja who had not yet messed with reletivity.
Since in your hypotheses Sauske, as Tobi, would have realized this relatively early on, after his failure, and thus given up I doubt that it's correct in it's assumption of time travel.
Sorry Drama - nice try though!