Quote:
Originally Posted by Nique
I think Door Mat's point was not that they find the concept distasteful or fearsome, but that it is a ridiculous notion that is used to excuse what would otherwise be a massive plot-hole in fiction. At least that's what it sounded like. This doesn't really have anything to do with your discussion, it's just I'm not sure you're interpreting his post completly accuratley.
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This.
Like, given the logic of a stable time loop, it follows that if you travel back in time, you won't kill your grandfather before he fathers your parent, because then there would never be a you to go back in time. It's not quite the same as saying that you
can't do it, but you
won't, even if for some weird reason you're really, really determined to make it happen. From a narrative standpoint, it would be possible to look back and see a series of arbitrary coincidences that lead to events being what they are, but intuitively it doesn't seem like a person should categorically fail attempting to do something they're physically capable of doing. In fiction, it tends to highlight the fact that the writer is invested in a certain outcome; in discussions of time travel as a legitimate possibility, it comes up as a criticism of Stable Time Loops, because if real-life events played out in that fashion, it would be hard to ignore the suspicion that the universe is also invested in certain outcomes.