(no subject)

Reading old fanfic is weirdly like time travel.

There were all these things that were Most Important
and all the corners they'd got into we needed to help them out of
but also all the happy bits that we know... well, we know what happened next
and sometimes it's the reason we quit the fandom
or just what all the next round of fixit fic is about.

And it's weird because we can still write fic about any of it - if I want to reread Extreme Justice and write fic set there, tada, it is possible - but it also feels
like stuff we can't reach
or I can't.

I can do stuff for the characters but the Me that felt those feels is... whole decades away. No fixing any of that.

Can still make presents.



Though I am finding it is really weird to read about teenage heroes, and my long term feeling that they were my age so they kind of always are is instead giving way to an urge to feed them and make sure they wrap up warm
which was not what I was looking for in reading a fic of that rating
but now? every teenage hero feels like an adult failed. like someone should look after them better than that.
not least because when I left off reading at least half of them were dead.

... why do I even this genre anyway?



And why are so few stories about actual adults
... okay, i mean actual middle people like me.

feels like everyone in that age bracket is either mentors to be sidelined and exceeded or actual bad guys to be opposed. i know sometimes they're playing entrenched systems that have failed to solve the problems but i dislike the narrowing of roles.

though there are a lot of aging white guy action heroes.

and i cold watch Agents of Shield.

And Iron Man and Rhodey and...



... okay, I've been reading in DC too long, and somehow leaving out the Justice Society. I miss stories where everyone has a part.

I shall go quest for more stories.

How Time Works

So the basic problem of time travel stories is we don't know how time works.

Our current best understanding of physics is still a work in progress that leaves some relevant details unanswered, and, also, I do not have a physics degree, and last time I wrested a basic understanding of very limited bits of physics from a For Dummies book I ... mostly ignored it to make a pretty plot.
And the reader, setting out, does not know how time works.

I mean you can have fun with that, you can use film or book framing to set up flashbacks that are assumed to be for the reader only, then read as memories, then turn out to be flash forwards as time and life and memory turn out to work differently than you may expect, and then do really artistic things with it
but
at some point the reader has to understand what you're doing
and let's face it, no matter how you write it, there'll be someone who don't.

I mean I've seen Highlander blurbed as a time travel story so many times, and they only travel at the same second per second rate as the rest of us. Someone will miss the point always.

So, time travel? Builds on fuzzy unknowns of physics to bend the rules into a probable impossibility - there's stories and editorials that argue time travel is by definition fantasy because science will never be able to do it - and from these impossibilities create a story where the possibilities and ethics utterly depend on how time travel works
but
next to nobody wants to sit through the introductory lecture.

I mean there's those that happily will, I buy game rule books for fun, I'm not alone in that, some of us like seeing the rules.

But it's a minority interest.

And framing each story in a time travel lesson isn't likely to gain followers.

Just like every story is an argument in ethics but not many stories sit down and cite their sources and put their theoretical base on display.

So some people write time travel stories without deciding on rules. Or with saying explicitly there are no rules, you just make up what seems drama at the time.

... Doctor Who and the DCU have many good points, but they also throw out their own continuity pretty routinely, including the level where the laws of physics live.

And I've said before that makes the ethics damn near impossible to judge.

https://beccaelizabeth.dreamwidth.org/3304726.html

can turn your bad guys into puppet victims

https://beccaelizabeth.dreamwidth.org/3368408.html

And with the settings wrong story ends up limited to boring tragedy.

https://beccaelizabeth.dreamwidth.org/3278349.html



... and having reread how much I've written on the topic I kind of stalled, because do I have new thoughts?



Okay, one thought, that is supposed to be a big cliffhanger revelation in the time travel story I may someday build...
( Read more... )

*rereads self*

... okay, try again, without the rambling digressions:

( Read more... )

Last minute cliffhanger twist!


... setting it up without sliding it into the Legends plot would take a lot of do.

But once it works...

well if you combine the 'explosion' at the Vanishing Point, the way it didn't destroy anything but the people, and Rip's little emergency exit into film school... canon already gives you a way that everyone who 'died' at the Vanishing Point secretly made it out

fobwatched.



And maybe only Rip had a backup brain, or maybe it's common Time Master practice...

but there's so much mileage in the idea tht a temporal explosion only destroys your existing timeline, and bumps you into an alternative life, wherever it drops you off.

You can get the same basic personality traits dropped in different eras learning different attitudes.

It's the AU generator to end all.

And so much soulmates goodness possible!

And! Then! You'd have an ethical dilemma, like with Rip and Phil, but making it a lot more clear they'e both real.

Like I know why Legends used George Lucas, but what if the director whose work inspired the crew was actually fobwatched Rip? They'd in some sense love hum in both personas.

And if the backup copies were all the Time Master versions, the people that were recently the enemy, there's such a temptation to drop their tapes in the disposal. But that's everyone Rip ever cared about.

An for some of them they might know if they'd actually got dumped back into near enough their original lives, but for others they'd have no idea.

And what would they want from them? Temporal theory? Heroics? Or just living a long good life?

And what would it make them, to look at that many lives and just decide what would happen to them?

(Time Masters)(again)


And then there'd be Len. In another life entirely, no more Leonard Snart than Leo was, but in some senses a continuation of Len's life. They know where to find Len to copy paste his mind back in, or they might have scanned him well enough when he was crew. They could find this guy who is in some ways his future and just... swap him. For their guy.

Ethics.


Though if they'e properly fobwatched with only their minds erased then their genetics would match and one could prove the connection to his sister. So what would she mean to him, with only that between them?


So many stories.



And they're time travel stories, where you swap someone's past for a different one, but much more controllable in scale and outcomes. You wouldn't have to change the whole world for it, just change them, from that point in their lives forwards.

And if backup copies are possible it would even be reversible.



Once mindwipe is in play though it's a whole multifaceted story driving tech on its own. Like the Winter Soldier or the one story in one of the magazines I subscribe to, where the soldier keeps realising he's on the wrong side, but the owners can wipe him back to his last day as many times as they like. Memory as time travel, storing the most convenient version of someone, and just reverting and having another go if they ever go off course.

Combining that with time travel gets... convoluted.




... as do my ideas here.

... I'll post this and try and think which bits are Story as I want to write them.


Because what I sat down to write about is:

we don't know how time travel works, so you need to sit down and decide what kind of Story you want to get out of it, and set up the physics accordingly.

And a degree of Cannot ups the difficulty, like gravity makes it harder to fly, but it's very boring if Cannot is all the deciding and every consequence.

Must Not is a lot more interesting, because it's about how some things come at too high a cost.

And however you set it, it's implicitly about free will and the power of choice
which is why mindwipe and slavery gets mixed up in it
because if you're not careful then the only choices that matter are those of time travellers
and if you're too far into tragedy not even those.

and then what's the point?


so

there's always a way out.


it's just a bit of a different story if that way out is Bill and Ted keys.