Absurdist time loop where a guy gets stuck in a time loop for absolutely no apparent reason and tries all this crazy shit and dies a bunch of times and completely reforms his life and then suddenly gets spat out the other side on a completely average loop with no idea what he did that finally fixed it and the answer is like. There was this one (1) ant that he kept stepping on every cycle without even noticing and he doesn’t notice on the last one either he just stopped for an extra three seconds bc he dropped something or whatever. And then didn’t step on the ant. Either the ant is a wizard or a wizard enchanted it to live forever just to see what would happen. The point is the man never knows about it. As far as this guy is aware time just stopped working for six months and then just as randomly started again. He can speak Portuguese and play the viola now.
Alternatively world where time loops are not uncommon as just like, random natural magical phenomena where major ones are prone to coalesce around a Big Event—preventing someone’s death, a love confession, saving the world, etc—but occasionally you’ll get mini versions that just swirl up like a localized rain shower, especially as aftershocks of a Big One, so it’s not uncommon for you to wake up to your roommate looking addled and telling you it’s been Monday for two weeks. “Hey I just got stuck in the time loop and took up crafting, we need to buy crochet supplies now” is a common occurrence. College students frequently make deliberate efforts to snare themselves in time loops to get extra time to study. Athletes and writers hate it because you suddenly have all the time in the world but none of the fruits of your effort will stick around.
Favorite way of dealing with time travel paradoxes?
Predestination paradox / causal loop
Multiverse
Timeline protection
Rewriting history
Other / See Results
Predestination paradox / causal loop: The timeline is fixed and anything that happens due to time travel interference has always happened. A man goes back in time and accidentally introduces his parents resulting in his birth. Nothing changed.
Multiverse: Any interference / paradoxes that arise from time travel result in an infinite number of universes created. A man goes back in time and results in his parents never meeting. He is never born but continues to live out his life in this new timeline.
Timeline protection: There is only one timeline and all / major events are fixed. The Universe will interfere and stop any changes from happening. A man goes back in time and tries to keep his parents from meeting. Through a series of shenanigans they wind up meeting regardless and he is conceived and born as expected.
Rewriting history: There is only one timeline but it is changeable. But watch out. A man goes back in time and prevents his parents from meeting. Because he is never born, he vanishes from existence.
Interpret the question however you like, whether it’s how you prefer media to interpret it or how you think it would actually work!
“Part of why they’re regaining popularity is because the world is a mess and we either don’t know how or don’t have the power to fix it.”
Games highlighted: The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask, Elsinore, Outer Wilds, Undertale, Inscryption, The Stanley Parable, The Forgotten City, Twelve Minutes
“I eventually came to realize, if I’m going to do this all again, if there are few real consequences for failure… why would I play in a way that’s so boring?”
Games highlighted: DEATHLOOP, Dishonored, Hitman 3, Bloodborne, Twelve Minutes
“Every decision you make matters because you’re always spending your most precious currency: time.”
Games highlighted: Outer Wilds, Dead Rising, The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask, The Sexy Brutale, Elsinore, Minit, Vision Soft Reset, Twelve Minutes, DEATHLOOP, Hitman 2, Deus Ex: Human Revolution
“Its black-and-white design and funny writing make this one memorable way longer than the minute it takes to complete a loop.”
Games highlighted: DEATHLOOP, Outer Wilds, The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask, Minit, Elsinore
I’m glad this is still going around because I think about that Game Maker’s Toolkit quote constantly:
“Every decision you make matters because you’re always spending your most precious currency: time.”
Those Oppenheimer trailers keep reminding me that I don’t follow Christopher Nolan movies because I like him as a filmmaker, but because he’s so consistently obsessed with our concept, perception, measurement, translation, ignorance, contraction and expansion, and helpless understanding of time and how we must be of time and experience it in one form or another, and very few works I’m familiar with try to tease apart time in this way.
The term predestination paradox is used in the Star Trek franchise to mean “a time loop in which a time traveler who has gone into the past causes an event that ultimately causes the original future version of the person to go back into the past.”[16] This use of the phrase was created for a sequence in a 1996 episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine titled “Trials and Tribble-ations”,[17] although the phrase had been used previously to refer to belief systems such as Calvinism and some forms of Marxism that encourage followers to strive to produce certain outcomes while at the same time teaching that the outcomes are predetermined.[18] Smeenk and Morgenstern use the term “predestination paradox” to refer specifically to situations in which a time traveler goes back in time to try to prevent some event in the past, but ends up helping to cause that same event.[10][19]
Ds9 really said, twice, one metaphorical and one literal, that grief ties you to a specific place and time and disrupts the usual linear pattern of the universe. And that when you are grieving you are revolving your life around that one specific spot, and it is so very difficult to escape but you can make a life for yourself despite it. And it makes me fucking cry every time
