Time travel suckage
May. 13th, 2019 03:21 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethI am pretty obsessed with time travel stories
but
I am very, very, tired of certain patterns in them.
Like, I have all these elaborate plans for saving characters at the last second or secretly having faked their deaths, yes, so time travel fixit fics are of win.
But I cannot be having with those stories where
someone who is struggling to rebuild their life after trauma
works hard, does all the right things, really tries
and then the story tells them that secretly the only way to get better
is to have the bad thing never have happened.
I just... I've seen stories that were very explicitly that, the only way to be okay is to undo the original bad
and I hate that.
The difference is which direction people go in to like stay? And live?
Like, if the story has someone travel forwards, and get new opportunities, and make friends, and build a life
then yaay
that's recovery!
Got to love that, the basic idea there is a future.
But if someone goes back, and stays...
look, I know they're applying magic, but if you have some character die, and there's a big funeral, and they're really definitely dead, and then someone walks out of their own life to be with them?
There's a real world version of that, that people mostly do not come back from.
So like, I can understand wanting to fix things, but deciding to live in the past or among the dead is not the fix, it is the problem.
Also if you apply a layer of time travel logic you get people choosing to unmake their friends and loved ones and, basically, the entire planet, for however many years, with no way of knowing how that works out until they do it
often in exchange for one person.
Just trash free will and causality, erase the lives people chose for themselves, just to wedge this person back into it.
And it's not necessary? Not for the sake of the lost.
Like I said, I like planning how to rescue ghosts. But then you bring them home and show them how the world is in your now. No twisty temporal messes, no fuss, just alive.
But no, people want to change their own pasts and have the bad have never happened
meaning they want to unmake themselves.
That is not okay. That is not an okay story. That is again looking at trauma and deciding the only way out is to not be you.
Screw all of that.
So I like using time travel like it's never-too-late space travel that can dive in to the burning building or whatever
but I kind of hate using it to change the whole history
because what kind of use is that story?
Exploring alternate stories is interesting, yes, but doing so as time travel keeps things so past focused everything just loops around impossibilities instead of seeking a way out.
We need the story with a future in it. For every one.
... so I might need to stop reasing about time travel...
but
I am very, very, tired of certain patterns in them.
Like, I have all these elaborate plans for saving characters at the last second or secretly having faked their deaths, yes, so time travel fixit fics are of win.
But I cannot be having with those stories where
someone who is struggling to rebuild their life after trauma
works hard, does all the right things, really tries
and then the story tells them that secretly the only way to get better
is to have the bad thing never have happened.
I just... I've seen stories that were very explicitly that, the only way to be okay is to undo the original bad
and I hate that.
The difference is which direction people go in to like stay? And live?
Like, if the story has someone travel forwards, and get new opportunities, and make friends, and build a life
then yaay
that's recovery!
Got to love that, the basic idea there is a future.
But if someone goes back, and stays...
look, I know they're applying magic, but if you have some character die, and there's a big funeral, and they're really definitely dead, and then someone walks out of their own life to be with them?
There's a real world version of that, that people mostly do not come back from.
So like, I can understand wanting to fix things, but deciding to live in the past or among the dead is not the fix, it is the problem.
Also if you apply a layer of time travel logic you get people choosing to unmake their friends and loved ones and, basically, the entire planet, for however many years, with no way of knowing how that works out until they do it
often in exchange for one person.
Just trash free will and causality, erase the lives people chose for themselves, just to wedge this person back into it.
And it's not necessary? Not for the sake of the lost.
Like I said, I like planning how to rescue ghosts. But then you bring them home and show them how the world is in your now. No twisty temporal messes, no fuss, just alive.
But no, people want to change their own pasts and have the bad have never happened
meaning they want to unmake themselves.
That is not okay. That is not an okay story. That is again looking at trauma and deciding the only way out is to not be you.
Screw all of that.
So I like using time travel like it's never-too-late space travel that can dive in to the burning building or whatever
but I kind of hate using it to change the whole history
because what kind of use is that story?
Exploring alternate stories is interesting, yes, but doing so as time travel keeps things so past focused everything just loops around impossibilities instead of seeking a way out.
We need the story with a future in it. For every one.
... so I might need to stop reasing about time travel...
no subject
Date: 2019-05-15 05:14 pm (UTC)(not talking about Marvel, that just sucked in general)
would be an interesting bunny, to deal with depression by jumping a short time into the future, "maybe in a few months I'll feel better. Maybe in a year or two". I haven't seen that done.
I think I did see done, but can't remember where, the idea that people can be "stolen" into the future if you arrive just a few seconds before they die, thus preventing the problem of changing your own future - they would not have been a part of the timeline. Where was it?... Grr, I have such a clear concept
Hm, here's an idea: if you change the time stream... Okay, let's try this way: someone runs to you and says they're from now, but went back in time and now everything's different! And they think the other world was better! but you don't want to undo all the kids born in the meantime, you don't want to undo everything and everyone. Is there a way to... re-merge somehow in the near future, so that both "worlds", both alternates, will regroup somehow? like those trees that have their trunk split and kept apart but meet again at a higher point for decorative purposes. You know the ones? Like that, but time.
no subject
Date: 2019-05-15 05:17 pm (UTC)