Current Events > Has there ever been a time travel story

(+) Yeah! (+)

Where a character goes back in time to fix a bad future, but it's shown in-depth that all they've done is create a separate, new timeline, and that the old timeline is still fucked up and everybody from that timeline is still pissed?
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Papa peepers
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dbz

the new star trek films
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Has there ever been any of these stories that has produced an antagonist, maybe even an evil version of the hero? Something like: "You went back in time to fix the future. Guess what? All you did was create a new branch where you got to live happily ever after and forget about us, while the rest of us were left to pick up the pieces as if we ceased to exist."
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Trunks from DBZ returns to his messed up future after changing the current timeline.

One of the Back to the Future comics had a story where future erased Martys were pissed off on current Marty because he had erased them ...or so he thought...
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Eh, I'll never understand the "travel back in time to change the future" plot. If time travel exists, doesn't that mean that the ability for someone to travel back and alter the past has always existed since the dawn of history?

I think Final Fantasy 8 actually has the most tantalizing time travel plot I've seen. You can't "change the past" and everything is a big loop dependent on something else. In the end, Squall goes back in time to Edea's Orphanage the moment she's possessed by Ultimecia after the later is defeated by the party and Squall's presence in that scene inspires child Squall to become like the man he sees, all while implanting the idea of SeeD in the past so it'll exist for him to become a member of in the future.

Edea, possessed by Ultimecia, goes on to create the create the events that drive the plot in the game proper out of fear of her death at the hands of SeeD.

Everything is an infinite loop and time isn't a straight progression.

Or is the entire argument that there's an infinite amount of parallel universes and not simply one?
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I was thinking for my story that:

> Hero lives in a shitty timeline, witnesses the death of all of his friends and family (except for his sister)

> Hero learns about the ability to time travel, but it requires him to basically murder a lot of people (including his sister). He reasons that these deaths are not only necessary, but inconsequential since they'll just be brought back once he gets the "good timeline" anyway.

> He successfully gains the ability, goes back in time, helps his past self get the "good" future and then fades out of existence, figuring that his conscience (uncorrupted) will be merged back with his past self once he reaches his age....or so he thinks.

> Turns out he's simply placed back into his own timeline (which has continued on without him this entire time), where he learns that in order to prevent a paradox, time simply created a new branch, rather than having the new timeline outright overwrite the original one.

> Now he's forced to live with the knowledge that he killed so many people, including his own blood, and it literally means nothing, because he didn't fix his future.
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This is the issue I had with Bio shock infinite
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Eh, I'll never understand the "travel back in time to change the future" plot. If time travel exists, doesn't that mean that the ability for someone to travel back and alter the past has always existed since the dawn of history?

Eh, it depends on what interpretations of time you adhere to - mankind still understands so little about it compared to most other grand concepts like matter and life. Maybe we're currently on the "bleeding edge" of forward time, so until time travel technology exists in our linear forward time it can't have happened yet.

SolKarellen posted...

Eh, I'll never understand the "travel back in time to change the future" plot. If time travel exists, doesn't that mean that the ability for someone to travel back and alter the past has always existed since the dawn of history?

Most forms of time travel come in three different ways:

Fixed history: Any time travel would be part of history therefore it cannot be changed, as it were.

Plastic time: Changes to history are possible, so much so that the smallest, most unnoticeable changes could have a tremendous impact (a butterfly effect, so to speak). This model creates paradoxes like the Hitler's Murder Paradox. There are many different ways people attempt to explain it (another person simply takes his place, etc), but no one correct viewpoint.

Alternate timelines/multiverse: Multiple versions of history exist and time travel establishes entirely new timelines (time travel is sort of viewed by Doc Brown in Back to the Future as being in this model, except that these alternate timelines can cease to exist when things are changed - sort of a hybrid of 2 and 3 I suspect). This would account for the Hitler's Murder Paradox and simply state that a new timeline is established for the person doing the time travel.

tl;dr -

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DBZ
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The Proteus Operation by James Hogan.

Great book, horrible human being (Hogan).

They don't actually create the alternate timeline, but close enough.
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Sariana21 posted...

The Proteus Operation by James Hogan.

Great book, horrible human being (Hogan).

They don't actually create the alternate timeline, but close enough.

Ah, that reminds me of when I realized that Orson Scott Card was an asshole. That was my first "celebrity fall from grace" moment of my life when I was a teenager that read a lot of his work.
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That one Rick and Morty episode kinda
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SolKarellen posted...

Sariana21 posted...

The Proteus Operation by James Hogan.

Great book, horrible human being (Hogan).

They don't actually create the alternate timeline, but close enough.

Ah, that reminds me of when I realized that Orson Scott Card was an asshole. That was my first "celebrity fall from grace" moment of my life when I was a teenager that read a lot of his work.

Yeah, him too. :-( Both are good writers but very, very flawed human beings.
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RchHomieQuanChi posted...

Where a character goes back in time to fix a bad future, but it's shown in-depth that all they've done is create a separate, new timeline, and that the old timeline is still fucked up and everybody from that timeline is still pissed?

DBZ movie with future trunks

also is the new future trunks in Dragon ball super the same one from the cell saga?
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Yeah that happened in Cool Runnings
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Ocarina of time is basically what you're saying except in they go forward instead of back.
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