I recently added an entry to my The Role and Proper Usage of Magic Thingamajigs page, and, since it is rather lengthy and brings up several interesting points regarding the Fantasy genre's use of time-travel, deemed it good enough to make a post out of:
The White Chronicle: As Lippti said, "Countless possibilities fade into the darkness. Yet there exists a razor-thin path of light." From the beyond book-worthy game Radiant Historia: Perfect Chronology,
the White Chronicle is/takes a new, simple, and frankly ingenious twist
on the classic old time-machine trope. One will notice, after all, that
time traveling is seriously seldom used in Fantasy because it can give the
protagonists too much power and undermine the seriousness of the story.
Recall the Time-Turner from Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban? If not, stop reading this article for fear of SPOILERS and start the reading J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series
instead. Moving on, Rowling perfectly articulates why time-travel
mechanisms (such as her own Time-Turners) are rarely employed in Fantasy literature, so I will give
her the floor: "I went far too light-heartedly into the subject of time
travel in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. While I do not
regret it (Prisoner of Azkaban is one of my favourite books in the
series), it opened up a vast number of problems for me, because after
all, if wizards could go back and undo problems, where were my future
plots? I solved the problem to my own satisfaction in stages. Firstly, I
had Dumbledore and Hermione emphasise how dangerous it would be to be
seen in the past, to remind the reader that there might be unforeseen
and dangerous consequences as well as solutions in time travel.
Secondly, I had Hermione give back the only Time-Turner ever to enter
Hogwarts. Thirdly, I smashed all remaining Time-Turners during the
battle in the Department of Mysteries, removing the possibility of
reliving even short periods in the future. This is just one example of
the ways in which, when writing fantasy novels, one must be careful what
one invents. For every benefit, there is usually a drawback." Which is exactly why I am writing about the Radiant Historia's White Chronicle
instead of the Time-Turner, because the White Chronicle has a key
limitation that the basically all time-travel thingamajigs lack. That
being that the Chronicle's wielder can only travel back in time to
events they themselves participated in, giving them the opportunity to
remake important past decisions; to act on 20:20 hindsight, as it were.
For example, say you are performing a rescue mission and reach a
crossroads one path of which will likely lead to complete disaster. You
make the wrong choice, take that wrong path, and you and your
friends are toast. However, with the White Chronicle you can cheat death
by slipping into Historia and then time travel back to that
fate-deciding junction where, armed with foreknowledge, you take the
correct path.However,
if your friends in another part of the world are killed because they
made a bad choice (even if it seemed wise at the time of making) then
the White Chronicle is powerless to save them. I will not say whether
this exact rescue-mission situation appears in Radiant Historia: Perfect Chronology,
but the game is built upon this power of the White Chronicle's, the
objective being to use it across multiple possible timelines to save the
world from desertification. As Lippti said, "Countless possibilities fade into the darkness. Yet there exists a razor-thin path of light."
Yet this being the game's objective furthers Rowling and mine's point
about why time-travel thingamajigs are scarce in Fantasy literature. She
said "if wizards could go back and undo problems, where were my future plots?" Nowhere. Which is why Radiant Historia's
plot revolves around being able to do just that in order to move said
plot forward. In short, even time-travel thingamajigs like the White
Chronicle are dangerous, unwieldy literary tools because instead of
being an interesting plot devise their very presence will either
undermine or become your plot. Radiant Historia: Perfect Chronology got around this by deliberately making it the plot, while Rowling saw the literary peril of Time-Turners and destroyed them. |
Lucina from Fire Emblem: Awakening, is a hero I rank alongside Aragorn. (A fact which, alone, should reveal just how highly I regard this game)
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Yes,
I am well aware that Sci-Fi often employs time travel and is generally
unconcerned with temporal paradoxes. In the immortal words of Star Trek: Voyager's
Captain Kathryn Janeway, "My advice in making sense of temporal
paradoxes is simple: Don't even try." I appreciate this but,
interestingly, I have noticed that Fantasy writers tend to avoid
temporal paradoxes like the plague. An avoidance I approve of, for
temporal paradoxes would only add to the already potent list of problems
Time-Turners and the like cause. I fact, I can think of only a single
Fantasy which employs a temporal paradox, that being the game Fire Emblem: Awakening; I am not complaining about it, as Awakening ranks among my favorite
games of all time, but it does further illustrate my point since the
game's plot is literally built around the paradox.