@golguin: I'll begin with congratulating you on 999 posts, mate. As for writing around the concept of time-travel, I believe that it's your fundamental approach to it as a design that determines how difficult it is going to be. Time-Travel is, and I'm sure will remain, complete and utter fiction and as such, any theories we can establish are flawed by the exposure we've had to the topic as each and every author's (or screenwriters) view of what it means varies from the other. Time-travel itself, is usually described as something quite simple; you find a method and so you move through time. It's the consequences, the aftershocks, that tend to lead to complications. Paradoxes, yet these are all the very epitome of individual creativity in writing, because whilst adhering to the law of action and reaction, everything past that point becomes subjective and relative for the author themselves. Let's take a look at the same scenario played out in a number of ways as per how one might interpret "time-travel". Let's assume, for these examples that you travel back in time in order to ensure someone you care for survives an accident.
Option A: you manage to do so, and as such, in the future, you find that this person is alive and well, and life has changed accordingly, with ripple upon ripple of side-effects, many that could force you to reconsider your initial choice as is the tendancy of dramatics.
Option B: you manage to save them initially, but find that, as it so often is, the concept of fate is too tightly interlinked with the concept of time, and as such, said person dies in a similair fashion the moment you let your guard down.
Option C: saving said person causes time itself to, shall we say, break apart until it's own weight, and any number of dramatic consequences occur on a catastrophic scale.
Option D: saving said person works, but upon returning to your own world, you realize they're still dead. Taking yet another trip back, days after you saved them, they are well and good. Here is where the concept of different layers of time, time-lines come into play. You can change the past, but that will not have any consequence on your own present.
Option E: you save said person, and return home once more. On your return, your own memory of the incident has been wiped; after all, if nothing had ever happened to said person in the first place, why on earth would you need to go back in time to remember it?
Now, what if we work under the assumption that time is less of a straight line and more of a spiral, and actions that others have committed through time-travel need to be repeated by their past selves, as it is often seen in media? Options A to D allow for this to theoretically occur and be repeated any number of times; option E however, would completely and utterly ruin that theory as the loss of memory and impulse to save said person would have been gone from you, which means you'd have saved the person and yet you wouldn't have. In other words, it simply wouldn't make sense.
Now this is just skimming the topic; there are so many variables to account for, say, what happens if you meet your past self? Is it even possible to do so? And blah blah, yahdi yahdi. It's horribly contrived, but the point is that in the end, it's personal and subjective to each person. You, yourself, choose how complicated it must be, for time-travel is a dissapointing day-dream and nothing more. Bound to the rational only in that it's tied to our own world and that of a single law.
Also, looper was pretty good.
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