

Major spoilers for A2, but it opens at a school in the town of St. Ivalice before the protagonist awakens in Ivalice roughly circa ffxii. It eventually turns out that another kid at school found a magic book or something and recreated the world as they want it to be, so you have to get them to wake up to return the world to how it was.
Theres nothing in the game to clarify whether that means any of the events happened in the timeline or not, or what it means for the other games.
Donations are the Devs income stream, so they are in fact paying for .ml out of their own pocket. “funding development” doesn’t actually mean anything beyond “paying the developer’s wages” for Lemmy, so once you’ve paid them you don’t get a choice in how they spend their income.