The Order of the Stick

That or an outright lie, such as a The Chosen One prophecy that proves to be complete bull. Like in The Lego Movie.

Indeed. Which is why it should not be applied carelessly.

An arc of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. applied You Already Changed the Past to the future, with the characters discovering an apocalyptic future where the Earth had been completely destroyed, then had to wrestle with the revelation that they were in a Time Loop where their attempts to save the world from this fate in the present brought it about in the future.

Despite milking the time loop for drama several times and greatly amping up the tension surrounding the fact that the Earth's destruction was unavoidable because the very actions taken to avoid it were responsible for it, and despite fulfilling the events of the past that bring it about over and over again throughout the season, the protagonists ultimately thwart You Already Changed the Past and the endless time loop recursions by just changing the past differently.

"Whoops, never mind!" is the lazy writer's way out of the trope.

Edited by TobiasDrake on Nov 1st 2018 at 1:11:30 PM

I wonder if meeting Odin here will have any point besides Durkon finding out about why he was exiled. Maybe Thor will ask Odin about what he said at the Godsmoot or something.

Eh, I never liked stable time loops where the person from the future causes the very thing they remember happening because it fails to answer the question of how that thing happened in the first place, before anyone time traveled.

For me, I don't see any reason to try to apply standard causality logic to time travel. Time travel is, quite literally, an event preceding its own cause. It follows to me that if time travel is possible, then it doesn't matter what changes to the timeline this event will create, even if it precludes its own creation.

As soon as you travel into the past, you have *already* become something that exists without a prior reason from any standpoint but your own. If that reason no longer happens, well, that's irrelevant. It was something that hadn't happened yet anyway. You had to violate the laws of causality just to get to the past in the first place.

In a proper You Already Changed the Past story, there is no "before" the time travel. There's only one timeline, and the traveler's effect on the timeline has always been a part of it.

But I have seen stories that fudge the details somewhat. If the story allows time travelers to change the past sometimes, but other times shows them cause the past to happen as it originally did... then that inconsistency does imply that there was a "first time" without the traveler's intervention, and raises the question of how things happened then.

That's what I call the "time spiral." There was an original timeline where there was no time travel, then someone went back in time and made changes. Those changes led to a similar situation where someone went back in time, over and over again, until eventually the loop stabilized so that the future led to the past perfectly. It's statistical averages applied to changes in the timeline.

"In a proper You Already Changed the Paststory, there is no "before" the time travel. There's only one timeline, and the traveler's effect on the timeline has always been a part of it."

Not according to the research papers referenced in that wikipedia article that was linked up above. The original billiard ball went back in time and struck itself because someone decided to shoot it into a wormhole. Its fictional works that seem to have added that particular element.

I prefer fictional universes where time is a single moment in space. The past can be viewed by the right magic, but the future does not yet exist.

Prophecy is the communication of a goal by a supernatural spirit rather than a recording of something that hasn't happened yet.

I like prophecies that work on an "if X, then Y" scenario, because that gives mortals some agency on if they want the prophecy to unfold and if they think it's worth it.

Can also allow a who-done-it, when the end point of a publicly known prophecy happens and then people are tasked with figuring out who triggered it.

Or faking the requirements so everyone thinks the prophecy is going to happen, but you know it's not, so you can run a convoluted real estate scam.

Anybody who claims to understand how Time Travel that isn't The Slow Path works is lying. A good time travel story only cares about the details of time travel enough to get to the actual message/point of the story and not one iota more.

Something something diagrams with straws.

Edited by Wackd on Nov 1st 2018 at 12:01:49 PM

A good time travel story is capable of doing both. Time Travel is like magic, in the sense that Magic A Is Magic A: it's a very fantastical concept with no real life equivalent, but because of that if you're going to use it the rules have to be well defined (even if only the author is aware of all of them) and line up, otherwise nothing makes sense.

You can make time travel work however way you want it to, but that way has to have rules and be consistent. A subpar time travel series or story will simply change the rules on the fly for the sake of the plot, akin to a wizard showing up to give the characters what they need in any given situation because the writer is done with the status quo. But that's not a consequence of time travel as a concept. That's a consequence of bad writing.

The problem with applying Magic A Is Magic A to time travel is that it involves so many corner cases, it's hard to make a system that can't be broken while remaining consistent and reasonably simple. You Already Changed the Past comes close, but it has its own problems with free will and closed causal loops.

Yeah, You Already Changed the Past carries a strong notion of You Can't Fight Fate.

Indeed, any story with time travel must reconcile, at least call into question, the issue of determination versus free will.

The same of course can be said for any story that uses prophecies. Greek myth and Norse myth went the route that You Can't Fight Fate...not that it stops anyone, mortal or god, from trying.

Edited by M84 on Nov 5th 2018 at 10:41:13 PM

In a way, prophecies are a form of backwards Time Travel, limited to transferring knowledge from the future to the present.

If you have a Stable Time Loop, then metting a time traveller from the future is the same as having a prophecy and You Cannot Fight Fate. So technically, You Already Changed the Past is the same as a prophecy, but from the point of view of the prophet.

There's also the "it is written" form of prophecy. Everything is a story, and prophecy is just peeking ahead in the book. Everyone can make their own choices and do whatever they want, but it's all accounted for. It's going to happen the way it is written because of course it will.

The Matrix did this, and explained free will as everyone has already made their choices, now we're just seeing what the results of those choices are.

That's actually always been my interpretation of prophecy. It's You Already Changed the Past but from the perspective of the past.

There's a bit in TOPIC TOPIC Order of the Stick where the Oracle notes that he can look ahead to the paperback collections of the comic and just read those. That's pretty much the best explanation for prophecy I've seen in media.

It's effectively time-traveling to the future for a brief moment. The prophecy itself falls into the category of You Already Changed the Past because the prophet is witnessing the outcome of the prophecy that they, themselves, are creating by witnessing it. The future exists at a point in time where the prophecy has already been created.

It's not that your choices have already been made for you. It's that the prophet can see the outcome of the choices that you made after the prophet saw their outcome.

Edited by TobiasDrake on Nov 5th 2018 at 10:29:39 AM

I like prophesies that arent exact and certain, but instead highlight factors which will influence the future, often in very powerful ways, but the ultimate outcome remains uncertain. The Troll's prophesy in "Frozen" is a good one: "Fear will be your enemy." That turned out to be 100% true, yet at the same time constrained no one's choices.

Edited by DeMarquis on Nov 5th 2018 at 2:07:17 PM

The big problem with prophecies is that they offer zero context in which the prediction will come to pass. They are functionally useless since they predict that a thing will happen without informing you of why or how it will happen.

Edited by M84 on Nov 6th 2018 at 3:13:31 AM

Thats because you're supposed to notice them as they are happening. They arent meant to give one pwer or leverage over the future, they are meant to help one increase in wisdom.

Never mind that in every Greek myth with a prophecy, some chucklefuck always tries to avert it and fails. The real lesson is that You Can't Fight Fate.