The idea that time travel can only be detrimental to stories is laughable. Sure, it’s difficult to write well, and sometimes media doesn’t do a very good job of it, but when done well it can make for some very clever, intricate plots and sequences of events.

You might need to suspend your disbelief and accept that yes, this universe allows paradoxes, or maybe this one doesn’t, but that’s hardly different from most sci-fi or fantasy worlds where you have to accept magic works in this way or technology works in that way. It’s only really a problem when the story breaks its own time travel rules without good reason.

When incorporated into a plot from the inception of a story, time travel can add an extra layer to theorizing where the story will go – though sometimes the opposite is true and you spend a lot of the book or movie expecting X character to really be a future/past/alternate version of Y character. I fall prey to that myself, but I can still enjoy stories where this isn’t the main, big twist of the story. Sometimes tipping your hand early enriches the experience.

Some people are opposed to the idea because it gives the heroes an ‘easy out’ of their problems, but, again, that’s not time travel’s problem, that’s a writing problem. You can have a story where the time travel is limited in some way – we only have enough power to do it once – or where the butterfly effect makes it dangers  - every time we change the past, karma stacks against us and makes the ultimate goal more complicated and difficult to reach.

As an aside, I fucking love when I read a book or play a game where a character essentially speed runs their own past to try to improve things. The best example I’ve read is where a character goes back to the start of the previous trilogy and solves all the problems with their future knowledge, bewildering all the temporal locals with their competence – but, again, these quick and easy solutions tend to lead to unforeseen consequences which prevent it simply being a perfect run. I had a smile on my face the entire time. Honestly, when time travel takes you back to events you’ve already read or played through in the series, that’s the good shit. I love that. Give me more.

When time travel is introduced late in a series or at the eleventh hour of a story, that’s where it’s more difficult to pull it off, because it comes across as a deus ex machina. The build up of the story can be ruined if the resolution is a magical reset button in any capacity – again, not necessarily time travel’s inherent flaw, but the application of it. Better for a story to be built from the ground up so any time travel that is used to resolve a matter feels like it’s part of the story as a whole.

Speaking of which, stop calling things ‘time travel stories’ when the time travel is only used as a vehicle to deliver characters to a setting and is then basically never used again. Doctor Who has this problem in the vast majority of its episodes; sure, the Doctor is a time traveler, but most of the series’ episodes aren’t time travel stories. They’re sci-fi stories the Doctor is delivered to via time machine. That is no more a time travel story than Avatar is a movie about space travel – they’re already on the alien planet, there are no plots to do with travel through space nor its consequences.

A time travel story inherently is a story about the time travel and how it’s applied, what its drawbacks are, what the consequences are; not a generic story that could have all time travel replaced with a computer calculating the possibility of a future event, and not a story that’s just an isekai from another time period so we can giggle at a 20th century person trying to adapt to castle intrigue. Back to the Future is a simple example of a time travel story, because the entire film was about the paradoxes, the consequences of the time travel, and you got to see the effects it had on the world around the characters.

Which brings me to another thing – it’s a cop out [ed: ACAB] when we’re told a story is about time travel but we don’t get to see both versions of the future, or the past, or similar – when we don’t get to see the consequences of the hero’s actions. A big example of this is the overabundance of ‘time travel’ stories where people from the future come back in time to the distant year of right the fuck now, where the show doesn’t need to worry about anachronisms in speech or technology and it just plays like a normal thriller except some guy knows about a distant future threat. Yawn. I wanna see different time periods interacting with each other.  I wanna see trees getting run over leading to a change in a town’s future industry. Genuinely, few things turn me off a time travel story faster than seeing today’s era used as the primary setting – it’s even lazier than the Doctor Who style of time-travel-as-a-taxi.

Time travel in media is fine, and honestly I want to see more modern takes on it. I miss Oracle of Ages and Chrono Trigger style seeing vastly distant time periods in the same world – I wanna see that in modern games.

PS:  stop calling things “Chrono” when there’s nothing timey wimey about them. It’s false advertising.