My fundamental problem with Time Travel in fan fiction is that it is too often just the easiest way of hitting perfect wish fulfilment (Perfect, Powerful, Omniscient Harry for example) and the story focuses on how they do everything better instead of looking at how it would change and shape not only the world around them, but the characters themselves. With timetravel you've either got to jump the shark (and this is possible in a good way; Wastelands of Time) or you've got to write about the characters (which the majority of fan fiction authors fail at horribly).

 

Thank you :awesome

 

Fixed.

*stares creepily at Nuhuh*

 

Wastelands of Time - IMO the best time travel story ever, Catharsis coming a close second.

But that said... Yes, most time travel story's suck.

 

I think the problem with the majority of timetravel fics is that they are at the core "fix" fics, the author has the plot device be time travel for the character to go back and fix what the author perceives as flaws. With proper planning and good enough writing, it would be pretty good but sadly... not all of us who write are up to it. So that brings about the jumping of the shark because the author just wants to get at the IT that is to be fixed.

 

Sorry to go to an old post - but fuck yes, Tehan says it well. Apart from also loving Reload (which is definitely my favourite time-travel fic) its important to note that there is a large difference between time-loop and time-travel.

JordanL was talking about a loop fic in the first post, in which a short section of time is looped. The challenge for writers here is to find ways that changes can be affected within that short time that are actually interesting, and to find challenges for a character with full foreknowledge of the next few days.

In Naruto, the Orochimaru fight is perfect for that (and is now almost a cliche) because he is powerful, evil and in there early. Harry Potter really hasn't had a popular fic of this type, but Chunin Exam Day (however crap it is) has really popularized this for Naruto.

But time-travel fics have an almost totally different focus - the long term developments and subtle changes that are a lot harder to write. You can get away with more of an action focus in loop fics, because plot is necessarily repeating. Time-travel really needs to have a really good understanding of what a change will do to a series, otherwise suspension of disbelief is broken.

Thats what ruins time-travel for me. Bad writers that either focus on a loop to just boost their favourite character and repeat canon, or bad writers who try to imagine the ripples one change can make, and fail miserably. So, technically, there are different problems, but the real root of time-travel fics is imagination, and the general lack of it around.

 

Speaking with some authority here, the main appeal of a time-travel story is the fact that the protagonist has foreknowledge on all that has happened before. The trick is making that interesting, as Rin said.

To that end, things have to change. No one wants to read a simple rehash where Harry comes out on top because he knows the cup is a portkey, or the Chamber of Secrets is in a bathroom. Things have to get worse before they get better - its a formula in any good story.

Wastelands, as an example, begins roughly 200 deaths down the line for Harry, each time loop roughly 8 years or so, and the draw of the story is that this time - for reasons unknown - things are different. After a 1,000+ years of looping through time, something has changed where nothing should be able to change. That's the draw of the story.

Lacking a hook like that, or a similar plot device, time-travel stories flounder and become something readable, but for no good reason.

Edit: lol at Rin's signature. Fuck you, Blaise.

 

That and planning you could have the greatest image in your head but with no planning to get to that image... everything goes down the drain.

 

Too true. When I wrote Broken Record, I had two pages full of nothing but charts, indicating what happened originally, what Dresden was going to do his first time through, then the second time, then the third, etc, and how the events would overlap. Without a plan (or at least an idea of what the fuck is supposed to happen, and why) you might as well not bother with time travel.

 

Hell, even for Clouds I spent a couple hours with the books and the Lexicon, sending psychic death beams at Rowling all the while for fucking up the dates. And I've got a bunny tucked away somewhere that involves a stable time loop where Harry's his own father and son that took me hours of hashing out just to get straight. Just launching into a story and trying to work out the details as you go along just sets yourself up for failure.

A hell of a lot of stories die off when the author writes themselves into a corner or realises they've got no idea what to do with the plot, and a hell of a lot more turn to shite when the author finds themselves in the former and botches the job of trying to get out of it.

 

This. Planning is seriously the best thing I'd recommend, most of all for time travel fics. If you don't know exactly what changes happen because of your character messing with stuff, even the smallest ones like Neville getting a haircut, you're halfway to a crappy redo story, and 99% of the time, you don't get out of that pit. Hell, I had plans for a big time travel story, and it was like 20,000 words of solid outlining, with charts listing the different types of time travel and what character does what and how, at what point of the story they do it and when to start the exposition et cetera. Although writing it seems to be a far off idea, I'd know that at least I'd have everything planned out in the most exhaustive way possible (And I left several open bits that I could shove new plot points in as I write along without contradicting previous stuff and creating plot holes).

In short, time travel in fics can be awesome. It's just a shame that not many people can write one that not only has a solid plan, but can still have a good character base to it and just generally be awesome.

 

I want to reference the worst redo story ever here: Star Trek: Generations.
This is one of many horrible plotholes in this movie:
(A sun explodes and) somehow Picard gets the chance to go back in time and avert the disaster.
Instead of going back a few days to arrest the bad guy when he meets him for the first time on the Enterprise, he goes back to the moment when just the two of them have to fight, and because he can't take him alone, he gets Kirk to come with him to help him in a fistfight.
Two old men fighting another old man. Goddammit.


Just... don't ever do that.

 

On that note, it's kind of funny how rampant the time travel story is in fanfiction, but in original media it's pretty uncommon. You have your few sterling examples, and then the rest is shit. Coincidence?

 

I think it has more to do with the following:

1. In HP, we know time travel is possible.
2. Lots of really shitty things happen to people who probably don't deserve it.
3. Ergo, there's a fair number of stories where someone (usually Harry) or several people go back in time to prevent the shitty things from happening.

The key here is (2): We have an entire story full of events to go back and do something about.

Hollywood is a bit different. Not only are we starting at the point that they go back in time (we're starting at (3)), we don't have (2) to work with. Back to the Future was a good movie because despite this, the plot revolved not around altering things on purpose, but fixing the things he altered by accident from erasing him from existence.

I'd say the best time travel movie ever made is probably 12 Monkeys because, like in Harry Potter, it has working time travel, but it you can't alter the past in it because everything you do is something that already happened in the past that led to your doing those things. I.e., paradoxes cannot be created. The best part of the movie, IMHO, is that not only did their attempts to alter the past utterly fail, but they in fact caused the problems they were sent back to solve.

Anyway, if you're going to write a time travel fic, the only way you could really have any alterations that did not create paradoxes is to use the alternate universes theory: you don't just cross time, but you cross dimensions. Unfortunately, you still have a head full of ultra shitty memories from an ultra shitty world that will remain ultra shitty - you might save this dimension some grief (assuming your proposed alterations to make everything worse), but now you realize that there are other worlds that might also be ultra shitty because you're not saving them.

The alternate dimensions theory also brings up the possibility that other Harrys might also leaping into this same dimension to solve a completely different set of ultra-shitty problems they had to deal with. And if that's possible, then it's also possible that in at least one dimension, there is a murder-happy ultra-dark-lord Harry who sees time travel as a means to gain a foothold of power earlier. And so ultra-good Harry and ultra-evil Harry are working, without knowledge of the other towards totally opposite goals and wondering why nothing's like they remembered in the same dimension.

 

Pretty much this. My one (longer) experiment with time travel writing was simple as these things go (Harry went back to the end of 6th year, then finished Voldemort within two chapters), but even such a straightforward tale required planning to get it to work out right.

 

I remember only one movie that done time travel like the most fics - with main character ending in his own body in the past and preventing everything that happened in his future after we already saw it - Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time.

 

This must be written. I don't care who by, it simply must.

 

I was thinking the last night - did anyone wrote a good time travel fanfic with set up from The Butterfly Effect? It gives us interesting opportunity with constant changing only few important scenes from the past (with HP it would probably be his meetings with Voldemort) and then instantly seeing how they changed the future (I think 7th year would be good).

 

Unfortunately, Aekiel, cloneserpents' Crack'd Mirror had a similar plot design in regards to 'Harry Potters from other dimensions leaping into different dimensions and realizing nothing's the same' - and while interestingly written, it was overstuffed with cheap smut and masturbation fantasies. Sure, it was crack, but it got overblown in a big hurry.

So I'd clarify your statement - something GOOD needs to done with this idea.

 

I would love to see Harry v. Harry, and see both Harrys using the little information they can trust against each other i.e. knowledge of themselves (assuming some of their history or base traits stay at least slightly in tact). I would love to see two Harrys playing mental chess against each other.

Also since the universes aren't causally connected to any universe either of the Harrys came from you can avoid the whole Grandfather paradocx which, even when done well can lead to you ass-pulling OoC moments to create a time loop.