Why is Time Travel in almost everything so confusing?

[TheGoldenToon]

Seriously, someone please explain because it's impossible for me not to question things when it comes to a plot in any show, movie, or game I experience. Even when it's as simple and straight forward as traveling to the past then back to the present, it still confuses me, like how did that one minor change like accidentally squishing a bug from the past that didn't seem to have anything to do with anything causes things to go to crap in the present (I'm referencing The Simpsons Treehouse of Horror short: "Time and Punishment" btw as an example). If anyone could please help me understand or give their take on this confusing thing in fiction I'd be most appreciative.

 

[PrimalIvysaur]

Seriously, someone please explain because it's impossible for me not to question things when it comes to a plot in any show, movie, or game I experience. Even when it's as simple and straight forward as traveling to the past then back to the present, it still confuses me, like how did that one minor change like accidentally squishing a bug from the past that didn't seem to have anything to do with anything cause thing to go to crap in the present (I'm referencing The Simpsons Treehouse of Horror short: "Time and Punishment" btw as an example). If anyone could please help me understand or give their take on this confusing thing in fiction I'd be most appreciative.

The simplest answer would be 'sloppy writing'. The wordier one would be that writing time travel into a story is, at best, incredibly complicated and requires some pretty tight control of continuity in a story. As for The Simpsons that was more likely than not a reference to something commonly referred to as 'The Butterfly Effect' which is best summed up as "Seemingly insignificant choices made can lead to unforeseen consequences".

 

[omahanime]

Seriously, someone please explain because it's impossible for me not to question things when it comes to a plot in any show, movie, or game I experience. Even when it's as simple and straight forward as traveling to the past then back to the present, it still confuses me, like how did that one minor change like accidentally squishing a bug from the past that didn't seem to have anything to do with anything causes things to go to crap in the present (I'm referencing The Simpsons Treehouse of Horror short: "Time and Punishment" btw as an example). If anyone could please help me understand or give their take on this confusing thing in fiction I'd be most appreciative.

The killing of a bug comes from A Sound of Thunder - Wikipedia

In Futurama Fry is own grandfather Temporal paradox - Wikipedia

 

[Nil]

The difficulty with time travel writing is there's so many different interpretations about how it should work, and it inherently breaks the standard chronological ordering of a story. It's also very easy to end up in a nest of paradoxes and plot holes, because, by its very nature, all simple time travel interpretations are inherently paradoxical. Here's a few:

• Passive Observer - you can travel backwards or forwards in time, but you cannot interact with anything, nor can anything interact with or see you. This lets you run around Ancient Rome, but it's difficult to build a story out of because you can't do anything whilst you're there. It's good for a sight-seeing tour but not much else.
• Chaos Theory (Butterfly Effect) - This is what that Simpsons episode uses, the idea that the precise state of the world now is due to every precise event that happened in the past. So if you went far enough back and changed a tiny thing (killed a butterfly that would have otherwise wiped out the dinosaurs), that tiny change will, like a line of falling dominos, result in enormous changes in the present day. This seems to be the most common interpretation but also the one most riddled with plot holes - Back To The Future warns that any change will result in huge differences in the present day, but only a few selected events end up actually mattering at all. The impact of the rest are quietly ignored.
• Grandfather Paradox - You go back in time and kill your grandfather before he has children - one of your parents. Because your parents were never born, you were never born... which means you didn't go back in time to kill your grandfather. Wait huh? So... then your parents would have been born, and so would you! So you do kill your grandfather! Agh! The universe is stuck in an endless loop. You ruined everything.
• Multiple Timelines - Oh boy. This is how you resolve the paradoxes caused by the above whilst also making everything orders of magnitudes more confusing. Instead of time being a single road from past to future, there are potentially infinite subtly different timelines, all merging into and branching off each other. This resolves the Grandfather Paradox, for eg - there's simply one timeline where your grandfather was killed and one where he was not. The universe isn't ended by your folly. But it makes following an already complex story even harder - you don't have to worry about just separate points in time now, but different versions of all those points. Given this interpretation is the closest to actual science, they tend to be the ones that will roll in a lot of real-world scientific jargon about quantum theory and such. Get your notebook out if you want to follow along with a show that uses this interpretation, like Steins;Gate.

So yeah, that's why time travel tends to be confusing. It's hard to write in the first place and then there's like a dozen different ways it could work. I love it though.

 

[Silktree]

A predestination approach where nothing is contradicted, but the casual loops are hard to grasp, has the most potential if the story has philosophical elements. Multiple timelines make it harder to care about the characters, because they're ultimately disposable (if they die, no biggie). Using one alternate universe could dodge this bullet, though.

 

[King Robert]

sheepishly hides his DVD of the "Back to the Future" trilogy

 

[Nicolas721]

There are three reasons, The first one is that it interrupts the natural flow of the story, showing up the causes or the consequences of an event.

The second one is that sometimes the writers doesn't follow their own rules or create strange new ones. There are two ways the stories are written: "Predestined time travel" where time travel was necessary for the things to happen and "Corrective time travel" where a change in the past results in a better present, and some shows like Pokemon or the Fairly Oddparents shows examples of both. Other crazy rules include "Only your conscience travels" from X-men and "Time takes a while to adjust after making a change" from Legends of Tomorrow.

The third one is because it should be impossible it creates a bunch of paradoxes.

I suggest not to think much when watching a story with time travel, but sometimes analyzing it is fun.