#andyushka

Hello everyone! I know, I know, it’s been a while, buuuut, I’m back and to start a new special series of only the gods knows how many episodes to discuss a subgenre that is both equally interesting and… Well, dangerous.

Why dangerous, you might ask, and the reason why, my little grasshopper, is because time travel is the easiest way of creating some major plotholes, and we’ll discuss pieces of media who create this kind of plothole, and we’ll see situations which it doesn’t (Those are much more rare.)

But, first things first, and to start, we need to establish which are the two most used time travel systems in fiction:

1. Whatever you do in past affects and changes the future (Example: “Back to the Future”)

2. Nothing of what you do will mess with this future, because it will just create a new alternative timeline (Example: “Avengers: Endgame”).

So, now that we’ve stablished time travel works, let’s talk about how they can affect the story. The good of Avengers type of time travel is that by essentially creating new timelines, you can always return to the original timeline and use both ways separately, creating a multiverse of different lines of event which are all canon and they may or may not be independent, allowing stories in the mode of Ignition Point from Flash to happen (Side note: I do know that that saga talked about different realities crashing together, but the same idea can be applied to time travel). At the same time that the Back to the Future type is much more tricky, since now whatever you do in past directly affects your character, making situations like cancelling your own birth very plausible and possible, while in the Avengers type, since it’s a new timeline, even if the person who was going back to past actually did something to cancel their own birth, they’d only make it so our said person was never born in that timeline, but that won’t have any effects in the individual who came back, because they’re not from that timeline, and in their timeline they were born and grew up as usually. (Side note number 2: I’m trying really, really hard to put my thought into words that are also in a different language, and I don’t know if anything of what I’m saying makes sense written, but I swear that it does in my head).

I just wanted to register the reason why I always start my texts with this specific sentence, and here’s why:

As always, spoilers under the cut!!