How do you feel about time manipulation powers?

[ButterflyEmpress]

I have a character who's a time god.
His powers include:
- Future Vision
- Retro Cognition
- Controlling the flow of time (ex. fast forward, pause, and slow down)

In the current story he's an amnesiac living as a human college student, using his power to sleep in and not be late for class.

While writing my story I realized I had to nerf his powers a bit since all the conflicts can be solved by him alone.

Instead of him knowing the exact future, he can see multiple possible futures (similar to Garnet), having to use his best judgement to decide which future will most likely occur or having to struggle to make sure the good future happens.

One thing I really don't want him to do is travel back in time/move time backwards. If a character can travel back in time with no consequences, then there's really no story. The problem is that I'm not sure what's a good reason for him not to have this ability or not use it, especially when things go sour in the plot.

Some possible reasons I came up with:

• Time can only move forward/ it's simply impossible to travel to the past
• Moving time backwards causes major distortions in space and matter
• He's afraid that he might plunge the universe into an eternal time loop

What's your opinion?

[SleepingPoppy]

Since he's an amnesiac, he might not remember how to use his powers. If he's unlocking them bit by bit you have a pretty simple explanation for why he doesn't know how to do certain things. That said, I agree that the future should either be seen as branching paths, or be affected by say, if a person hasn't made up their mind yet. You can't see a future where X murders Y until X decides something that leads to said murder. Just two options, but they're nice because they address free will and our ability to determine our own future.

My opinion? Watch all the cool time travel stuff you can with a note pad. Pick and choose the rules you like!

Dr Who is really good at having a near god like time traveler as the title character, andstill finding reasons why the characters can't just wave their problems away. Some times the bad thing is a fixed point in time, and now that it's happened, it can't be changed. Sometimes someone does change something that can't/shouldn't be, and BAM, we're in a time loop and time reapers are erasing people until time is set back on track. Often times the rule is simply once you're part of Whatever Is Happening you can no longer use time travel to change it.

Personally, I like FAQ About Time Travel, Minority Report, and.. haven't actually seen The Time Traveler's Wife all the way through, but it seems interesting! And there are tons of good and bad movies about time travel that might give you an idea or two.

And just throwing it out there that Shadow of Destiny is an amazing older video game about time travel that few people seem to have heard of. XD

Sorry, you may have already done plenty of research/binge watching of awesome time travel stuff. I don't have any specific suggestions. But I love time travel stuff, and I wish you lots of luck!

[shazzbaa]

I feel like it's also possible, instead of explaining why He Can't Go Backwards, to make it a really costly or even just less useful thing to do.

For example, let's say he can rewind and fast-forward time around him, but can't actually affect himself. (For starters, he might look weirdly older than he should, on account of using his power to sleep in over and over again and ageing just a little bit more than everyone else...)

But what if things that happen to HIM aren't undone when he moves time backwards? So if someone stabs him, he can't just rewind and not be stabbed.... he'd rewind and then be back in a different point in time, carrying the stab wound back with him (a la Echo, short video). What if he can only travel forward and backward across the amount of time he's been alive for, which cuts down significantly on the things he can affect? Plus, he has no spacial powers -- if something catastrophic happened, and he found out about it and wanted to stop it, he'd have to (a) go back pretty far in time, (b) skip whatever he had originally been doing that day, which changes history significantly and might not be something he can afford to do (c) somehow get himself into a position where he can change or influence or convince someone to stop the catastrophic thing.

If you make it harrowing and complicated and SHOW that it's harrowing and complicated, then we won't see time travel as an easy fix. We'll probably want him to try, but if we've seen going back in time mess things up before, then there could even be times where a character asks him to go back in time to fix something and the audience is yelling "NO!! THATS A BAD IDEA DONT DO IT!!" It could be a really interesting element of the plot if it's something you would enjoy working with.

ALL OF THAT SAID, if you feel like that would distract from the story you actually want, then I'd go with option one -- just go ahead and say it can't be done, and we'll accept that it can't be done. If you have a character who has a power but is afraid to use it because What If It Does Something Bad?? then we're going to be waiting for a cross-the-streams moment where he uses it anyway, so if you don't want it to come up, then I think it's best to just say it can't be done.

[J.Z.Castillo]

You can just write it as a "written in stone" past, meaning no matter what you do you can't change it. Like if someone dies from a gunshot wound and you go back to prevent their death you can only prevent the gunshot wound but they will die some other way regardless because it has been written, you know? So going back in time is kind of pointless because no matter what you do you cannot change the past because it already happened.

The only thing he can change is the present, he can travel forwards in time but the moment he decides a future to travel to he cannot go back and choose a different one. I think this way you can limit his powers (and almost cripple him, really) and you can focus on his other powers, like precognition, and stopping and speeding time.

[PopChromatic]

I want to say that there's one description of time travel that argues that you can't change the past because if you changed the past you would change the chain of events leading up to the choice you make to change the past. In broad terms, I can't go back to stop someone's death because stopping their death would would make me forget they had ever died and so I would have no need to stop the death, and so they would end up dead anyway. This implies only one time line with a complete causal relationship between events, so that removing one event would remove all the events that follow. In practice, your character could go back in time but if he changed anything he'd poof right back to where he started. (The dorm room?) That could be an interesting plot on its own, actually.

[SynergyEclipse]

Any of those possible reasons for not going back in time are justifiable. It'd depend on how much of the story would you want to dedicate to explaining why he doesn't use his powers to change the past. If you decide in the story that it's possible to go back in time and change the past, he could decide to refuse to use his power that way, and it could be justified with him not wanting to take the risks that would come with changing the past.

In works where the past can be changed, it's been shown that it has an impact on the future. Changing a few things in the past could lead to the present and future changing drastically, and changing in ways that weren't intended. Other problems could unintentionally rise up in the place of the ones that were prevented. Because your character wants to make sure the good future happens, it seems like he wouldn't want to risk doing anything that has a chance of causing disaster to happen.

[shaylafarley5]

I think it's a neat idea, I have two characters with similar powers. One can rewind time but when she does the event from before will still happen (example: character gets into an accident she rewinds time and prevent her self from the accident but someone else will have to take her place no matter how many time she rewinds)

The second can see into the future but they can see multiple futures so they have to be very careful of which future there in gaging in. And the first character interferes with the second because of the rewinds.

I'm still thinking this out at I write as to not confuse my self and to make the story not confusing