Josh Susser on Nostr: There are ways to write a good time-travel story. There are ways to write a good ...

There are ways to write a good time-travel story. There are ways to write a good multiverse story. But most #SciFi time-travel or multiverse stories are not good stories, because they follow no actual rules and/or have nothing at stake. Stories in these settings eventually converge on always being about saving the entire multiverse, because that is the only way to have stakes that matter. Soon every MCU story will be about that - we're nearly there already. And DC's Crisis on Infinite Earths, anyone? Even EEAAO goes that route, though they make it work because the real stakes are personal and the multiverse comes after that. The Star Trek franchise is getting dangerously close to that threshold with all its various timelines and mirror universes, and it already is already screwing around with rewriting long-established canon and changing histories.

And don't get me started on how #StarTrek has about 18 different ways to time-travel and they all work differently with different repercussions, so there's no way to make sense of what happens or understand how it relates to anything else. And we occasionally get stories that only happen on a branched timeline where everyone dies and things revert to the previous timeline and no one remembers anything and the entire episode could be trashed and no one would even notice it. Voyager's "Year of Hell" is probably the most egregioius example. They made a whole two-parter to tell a story that has no effect on anyone or anything because no one has any way to remember it since it never actually happened.