#Stable Time Loop (trope)

[arolesbianism]

Sometimes I just look at Isabeau and just know that if isat came out and I got into it when I was like 16 he would be my favorite character and I would've gone absolutely buck wild over this man and feel like he was laser targeting me. But alas Odile has a grip of steel on me rn due to her virtue of being a middle aged woman

[multiheadcanons]

hiya! (distinctly not-in-prison voice) maybe not enough for a full post (or maybe it is?) but what are your favorite things/traits to write about the mercs individually? :0

oooo that’s a good question! i’ll just answer that now and go down the list lol!

scout has never been one of my personal favorites but after comic 7 he really shot up! it’s been more fun to me to think about what shaped him to make these decisions at such a young age… it’s been fun! scout has a very dynamic personality, but he’s almost harder to write for because he is so dynamic! so he’s a character i have to put a little more thought into when i write about him.

soldier is just so goofy to write about in general sometimes i can sit and think “what’s the absolute worst way to handle this? okay that’s how soldier would do it.” and then when i read it back i go “wow… soldier absolutely would do this” but i take a lot of the trauma and i put it on blu soldier bc i watched emesis blue on loop for like a week straight and it permanently changed how i view the blu team tbh

pyro is another fairly easy writing session because pyro is the one that i throw shit at the wall and see what sticks and what doesn’t. pyro’s paragraphs are the ones that get edited the most, because i’ll write something then go “no, i got one better” so pyro, for me, has become quite an interesting character that i… still know hardly anything about! and i really enjoy it! i like that there’s a character im just… slowly carving out of pyro. it’s always a fun writing prompt!

demo is one of the harder mercs to write for, because he’s just so… specific to me. i have a lot of thoughts on demo that i have no idea how to word quite yet, so i always get stuck on him. he’s almost indescribable. but i find ways to do it. he feels like a guy with so much nuance who got such little time, and it’s taking me a while to parse through the little information we have and make something of it that feels right.

heavy has very. quickly. become one of my absolute favorite mercs to write about. i never thought that would be the case. i am the baby of my family, with older brothers, and i have a soft spot for the trope of an older brother character. but heavy feels so weirdly real. like him and snipes are the most regular, mentally stable members of the team, and i love letting it show. i just have grown to really enjoy writing about heavy all around. he’s fun to play with.

engie used to be hard to write about and then i spent a week thinking about him and ever since he has been a very easy guy to write. at least what i decided to take from canon and what i deserted from fanon interpretation. engie, for me, falls under an odd category of having a very particular fanon interpretation that felt hard to remove him from; so i turned towards what we canonically know and grew him out from there. so far, i’ve really enjoyed the dell that has emerged!

if you can’t tell, i…. love the medic. i love writing everything about him. i love making him the evil vicious mastermind. i love making him a stupid brat who got too much freedom and love as a child. i love writing him flustered. i love writing him pissed past the point of accurate perception. i love writing him bored. i love writing him overjoyed, i love writing him inquisitive. i will write and write about him until i am forcibly removed from the keyboard. i seethe over him, i stew over him, i give an occasional stir to the pot, i breathe in the fumes. liquefy that man, put him in an IV bag and hook him up to my arm immediately. i need him. he has overtaken my photos. i have not stopped thinking about him for the past decade. this could become a medic exclusive headcanon blog and i could post three times a day without fail.

snipes is also kind of hard to write about! he’s also very specific to me, and sometimes it’s hard to put down into words. but i really enjoy writing his more casual, easygoing side! it’s fun to imagine snipes in a less professional setting; but writing him as a professional is where i am best with snipes. still love him though!

and finally; spy. spy has also been a surprisingly fun guy to write about! he’s almost like pyro in the sense that i feel like i’m having to carve someone out of him because it feels like we know so little, and he’s like engie in the sense that what we do know is almost set in stone to the fandom, and it’s been fun making him something a little different! he’s fun to make a gremlin! it’s fun to ask myself “you know… where did scout get some of this”

and yeah! that’s all of them! truthfully i just enjoy the entire process of writing about Da Boyz, they’re fun to think about, and it’s been a blast making my own little versions of these guys! and they seem to be well regarded by those who read about them! and that fills me with the good feelings!

and you know what, i wasn’t gonna consider this a post on its own, but…

oh! by the way!

see you in six posts ;)

[mama-qwerty]

What do you think Tom and Maddies's situation regarding children was before Sonic came into their lives? I've seen a lot of people headcanon them as a happy child free couple who were thrown for a loop after they took in three alien boys, but they adjusted to their roles as parents with time and patience. But others I've seen headcanon them as being ready to become parents but either never got round to having kids or were unable to have them, so they were really keen early on to become the guardians of Sonic, Knuckles, and Tails. Either way, Tom and Maddie look equally happy both before and after they became parents. I think that's a really positive message to send about being child free or having (or adopting) children, that you can be happy with either choice ❤️

Honestly, if we base their ages on those of their actors, Maddie's 44 and Tom's 51. If they were gonna have kids, they would have had them by now.

But even if we play with those ages in movie terms, let's say they're in their early/mid 40s. Still an age that if they were going to have kids, they would have.

That's not to say that older people can't have biological children. I myself didn't have my first until I was 34. (Didn't meet my husband until I was 26, and it took us a while to be successful.) But when you're getting to your 40s, it stands to reason that kids would have come along if that was something you wanted.

I could see them as being infertile. They're simply unable to have children of their own. Maybe this was something they discovered early in their relationship and went through the stages of grief for already, and come out the other side accepting their fate and throwing all their love into each other.

Or, maybe they simply never really had the urge for kids. Some people don't, and that's fine. They seemed pretty damn happy in their lives, helping others and being overall good people. They seemed to have a pretty stable and healthy relationship (so refreshing in contrast to the tired 'married couple always making jokes at the expense of the other' or 'smart wife stupid husband' tropes) so they were just living life and being happy with what they had.

Fast forward, and suddenly they're parents to one little blue hedgehog. It wasn't something they went looking for, but how could they turn away this little boy who'd been all alone for his entire life? And then two more little aliens came in, equally alone and in need of safety and love. Of course they joined the family, too.

I don't think that they were excited to bring the boys into their lives as a "YAY we're finally parents!" kinda way, but more in a "this kid/these kids need a stable home, somewhere they can be safe and loved and we're just crazy enough to do it" kinda way. Of course they love all the boys. Of course they're gonna be the best parents they can be. The opportunity fell in their laps, and they eagerly took it, without hesitation.

[killtheaction]

i love time travel for problematic ships it’s great. now that i think about it it’s genuinely a trope ive seen a lot! go back in time + meet worst enemy (and theyre not quite evil yet) try to fix them. sometimes fail and become evil too. accidentally be the impetus that makes them evil via stable time loop. lots of things you can do. most important one is to fall in love

[fefairys]

"Karezi is one of those baseline type of ships that exist in any given franchise. The kind with blinking arrows pointing to it and a neon sign saying "THE TEXT INTENDS FOR YOU TO SHIP THESE TWO." It has endgame written all over it. Which, despite some endearing qualities and some decent conversations in service to the idea, is what makes it a bit boring. To whatever extent Homestuck is capable of serving up a conventional, recognizable morsel of "fairytale intent" on a platter, this might be it. A statement expressing what it considers to be its equivalent to the boy-meets-girl, written-in-the-stars, journey-to-the-white-picket-fence sort of pairing. Which is not an inherently bad thing. There's a always place for arcs like these, and a certain comfort people take from grabbing on to the white-picket-fence outcomes and rooting for them. A lot of people were pretty stoked about Karezi. Stuff like this conversation obviously is going to start shoveling coal into that engine pretty hard. But these features are what give it a predictable quality, and thus make it much less likely to be fully realized in the long run. Instead, later it's given more value as a foil relationship, a thing that threatens to happen often, because it's "supposed" to, but functions as a basis for turbulent departures. A backdrop of stable, comprehensible relationship potential against which some more unpredictable and challenging outcomes for them both start to play out.

Karezi as the male/female lead, meant-to-be sort of ship, is, well, it's obvious. It's obvious to me at least, because I'm dangling it out there, obviously. Therefore I feel it must be obvious to you. And as such, I feel you must know I see it as obvious, and intend it as obvious, in this big feedback loop of self-evidentiary storycraft and trope jockeying. Any time this is true, I think awareness of the circumstance tends to leak into the consciousness of the characters involved. Characters in HS tend to be pretty self-aware (like Striders and Lalondes), but even the ones that aren't as much like these two) still tend to carry a form of subconscious selfawareness. (Feel free to chew on this oxymoron for a moment before continuing.) In other words, on some level, Karkat and Terezi both just sort of know they are the male and female leads in a lengthy heroic tale, and thus their sense of this propels them toward attraction, as if satisfying unspoken narrative obligation. This must especially seem true for Karkat, who lives and breathes the tropes of his romance films." -Andrew Hussie

[besttropeveershowdown]

The Best Trope Ever Showdown: Round 1, Side A

Time Loop

Propaganda:

it's so fun you can do so much with it!! adding little variations within each cycle as the affected characters try different things, the aftermath of everything after they finally manage to get out of a loop they've been trapped in for years, being able to decide weird little triggers for the loop- it's something you can really just go wild with!

So. Much. Angst. Potential. I just love the slowly losing care for anything they do and just not giving a shit anymore, very good at making funny and angsty things happen.

Unreliable Narrator

No propaganda was submitted.

[lightningant]

Hey, have you read Full Circle? If so, how do you think V&V tomarry react to FC tomarry and vice versa?

I have a list of tropes I'm picky about and MoD/Death as a character is one of my 'I won't even click on it' tropes. Which could still be OK as quick opener but I don't find the premise of reincarnation fun or interesting because I like Tomarry for their problems disorders, so a reincarnation loop by nature of its existence negates literally anything I ever found appealing about them. I tried a little bit of it to be fair and it didn't seem fun.

^ not being dismissive I have autism so if I'm not precise in my opinions I will die

Anyway I do have fantasies of VoV tomarry meeting tomarrys of contrasting circumstances at various positions in time and of course canon is the best one. The thing about VoV is that the actual premise is that Harry has gone back in time to be Tom Riddle's abusive stalker boyfriend and the primary antagonist of the story. So there are some great alignments, like Harry is modelling his own manic episode on Sirius (bad), but is stable and functional, so a canon Harry would think he's super cool and not notice his obvious mental illness at all. Voldemort already thinks very little of his Borgin & Burkes era so I'm not sure if he would even notice the state Tom is in. I believe canon Harry and VoV Tom wouldn't get along because Tom is a mean little cunt and Harry is self-occupied and an inherently pessimistic person. I think canon Voldemort and VoV Harry would get along too well, up until Harry takes Voldemort's evil as blanket permission to psychologically torture him and ruin his life

[scenicphoenix]

Is there people actually upset at Zelda for going back in time in tears of the kingdom and supposedly meddling with time? Because she didn't exactly get a choice in that decision, you should take that up with the magic fruit gummy rock. And i don't think that's meddling with time and you should look up the meaning of a stable time loop

That egg in age of Calamity was meddling with time more

Also why are you getting upset at time travel in the time travel series. Does Ocarina of Time and Majoras Mask mean nothing? You're only upset at Totk/botw Zelda doing it instead of oot/mm Link because because she's a girl with actual character development and actually shows emotion when she's upset

Some of you people can't handle a girl upset at her emotionally abusive father. And people lash out at others when living a traumatic life, she didn't hate link in the beginning, she was a traumatized person who felt she got assigned a glorified babysitter by her jack ass father. And they eventually bond over the shared pressure and huge destinies in their lives! They become the most important people in their lives even if it started off rocky. Botw/totk zelink is my favorite version because it has the most development canonically and it really makes use of the two characters stuck in a doomed narrative together and are soul mates trope/s

You cannot separate these two, they are a bonded pair. They don't even necessarily NEED to be romantic, they just need to be together. My favorite Zelink since Skyward Sword and Windwaker/Phantom hour glass

Botw/totk Zelda has to be one of my favorite Zelda's just because she's so relatable. I have/had jack ass parents. The pressure of life can be all consuming. It feels like whatever deity that may exist isn't listening. She's right next to Tetra at number one, they are shaking hands.

[squeakadeeks]

So like the normal guy is in hell, does he deserve to be? Or was there some kinda good place mixup

the normal guy in hell- he doesnt deserve it based on bad behavior but he is in that situation due to his own actions.

the situation is the guy (atlas) and two others are universe hopping from place to place trying to find a stable home. In every world they enter, there is some canned storyline where they have to trigger certain scenes in order to progress and 'save the world'. To reach the happy outcome of saving the world, there are a series of win and lose conditions. If they do any of the lose conditions, the universe will implode and they have to start all over in the next one. If they reach all of the win conditions, then the universe will become stable and saved, and they can settle down and stop hopping.

eventually after like...200 failed attempts, they realize there has been an unknown lose condition this whole time that as soon as Altas steps foot in a universe, it is automatically triggered to fail, his trope/character role is as the foundational lose condition. So he's basically been living in this groundhog's day looping multiverse doomed narrative timeline that is inescapable and anywhere he goes, he's guaranteed to fail and watch everyone die despite his best efforts again and again.

also the state of the universe they tunnel into is based on their mental state so if he lets those 200 failures get to him, they will be stuck in a grim, bleak, terrible cycle so he has to perform this insane uncanny upbeat manic persona to make the storylines they have to live through easier.

thats the hell part, this unending cycle of watching apocalypse after apocalypse and you can never let it get to you, why he and the others are in that situation is the three of them used to work at a regular office park and they were trying to do inventory when they opened a closet and found an interdimensional gate just chilling and thought "may as well-" and went through, thus triggering the multiverse hopping narrative sequence. if he had just closed the door and kept looking for staplers like he was supposed to, none of that wouldve happened.

[bluef00t]

thoughts on the ironhide storyline?

Knights of the Golden Circle: the Atomic Robo arc so peak that it's singled out in the site preview blurb.

Well, I'm assuming you mean that, and there isn't an Ironhide RSA I missed. (I'd read it! I prefer the spinoff genre characters to the real-person teams, which may defeat the purpose of the title Real Science Adventures, but whatever.)

"Thoughts." That's vague. Well, I love the bonkers set-up. There are other arcs that can absolutely only be done once (Ghost of Station X, Savage Sword of Dr. Dinosaur, Vengeful Dead), but only this one has the quality of Brian + Scott leaning in like "Okay. We know. We swore that causality is sacred and there will be NO time shenanigans, and that's STILL true. But just this once we're going to bend our own rule slightly, because we really, really, really want our robot to get to be a cowboy. Thanks for understanding."

The art's fantastic. I'm glad this one made it under the wire for the era of pencil-lined Robo volumes because the subtle textures really complete the grungy dusty look. The colors, too. Robo's electric blue and vril's crystalline pink stand out like alien intrusions in the sepia-toned world. Mwah.

My first time reading, I felt like it was a cop-out on the stable time loop to make Ironhide real in his own right. But since then my opinion has reversed! It cultivates a real air of Old West legend for Robo to be preceded by whispers of a reputation so shrouded in mystery that he doesn't even know it. I now actually think it should've taken Robo until maybe his dozenth public superhuman feat to realize I May Be Contributing To The Legend Somewhat.

Robo's initial interest in Ironhide strikes me as a riff on kids latching onto representation in comics. Especially when characters "like you" are stereotyped or absent, so you imprint on someone who isn't supposed to be like you, but represents your personal experience way more. But I'm probably projecting there.

Paradoxically to my RSA opinions, I like historical cameos in Robo proper. Holliday + Reeves + Robo are a really fun trio. Helsie is a fine "final boss", but I'm glad more time was spent on Caldwell's gang to get our fill of saloon shootouts and train chases first.

As an aside—pulps have a tendency to pick a villain from an "anti-American" political group with little thought put toward their underlying ideologies. (Which is how you get "our blonde superhuman can out-punch the Nazi ubermensch, so there" and incoherent Soviet/Nazi team-ups.) I point this out to say that the writing in Robo is generally better than that. It may tiptoe around historical politics a little (Helsingard is a Nazi collaborator, the Knights used to be Confederates), but the pulpy cyborg plot keeps at least one throughline: these were people in the human trafficking business for power and profit. And of the legends of the old west, Bass Reeves would have some very strong convictions about that.

Honestly a weakness here is that the story gives you a lot of hints in place of explanations and just trusts you'll work it out. Like the FIFTEEN YEAR timeskip. I only NOW, writing this, realized that the dates on the wall (which make no sense as "where am I in history?" guesses) are probably reactor lifespan calculations.

It's a better problem to have than agonizing infodumps or actual plot holes, but in some cases I liked my initial assumptions better than the real answers! Like, I first thought he was using his own heart to power his gadgets, and that's what was killing him so fast. Would've been metal if true. (I guess he did rebuild himself to make that possible later.)

Well, even minus that. It's a tasty cowboy trope for the protagonist to know they're already dying (or I've just listened to Streets of Laredo too many times) and a great time travel trope for the ending to be a foregone conclusion and our protagonist to still fight like hell to the bitter end. Yesssss.

In a way, this is already how readers experience the historical stories, trying to piece together the cost for this preordained victory with scraps of historical knowledge and faith that it will all make sense eventually. But this time Robo's in on it, too.

[badthingshappenbingo]

Hi! For prompts associated with a tvtropes page, should we stick to that interpretation? Examples: 1. In the masterlist, Time Loop links to Groundhog Day in tvtropes. Stable Time Loops can be very angsty, too; can I use that, instead? 2. Chained to a Bed doesn't link to tvtropes, but there is a tvtropes page with that exact name. Should the fill be the kind of thing that’s described there (typically involving a kinky bondage situation)?

You do not need to stick strictly to the description given in the TV Tropes page, just so long as your fill remains in the spirit of the prompt. So, yes, you can use Stable Time Loops to fill the Time Loop prompt, and the Chained to a Bed prompt definitely does not have to involve anything kinky whatsoever (in fact, that's the reason we don't link that prompt to a TV Tropes page, in order to keep from suggesting that it has to be that specific scenario). You're good to go!

Mod J

[inspectorspacetimerevisited]

The Twelfth Inspector’s first appearance in ‘The Space of the Inspector’

was actually a brilliant moment, when the audience is clued in to the fact that the Eleventh Inspector isn’t his/her last incarnation.

[heleentje]

🌪️

🌪️Sum up a WIP with a few fic tropes/Ao3 tags.

Oooh, I like these!

The Corruption

Unperson/Erased from History

Stable Time Loop (maybe, not 100% sure about this one yet)

Laser-Guided Amnesia

[amethyst-geek]

To Keep or Not to Keep, and possible new powers: Rabbit

Canon Power: Burrow (time travel)

Reasons to keep it this way 1) heroes already have a way to deal with a time traveling super-villain if need be 2) it can be hard to think of a new power that both fits Alix and the fact that the rabbit miraculous is a watch 

3) could allow for a running gag where time distortions randomly appear, and Bunnyx has to casually goes deal with it offscreen (possibly taking some other heroes with her, which could be a handy way to write certain temp heroes out of a certain episodes once they do away with the “Ladybug and Chat Noir are the only ones allowed to keep their miraculous full-time after Feast), and if Adrien goes “we’ve never had to deal with time distortions before,” Fluff goes “it only seemed that way because you were never in my presence.”

4) depending on how time travel works here (right now I am leaning towards a mix of multiverse theory and stable time loop), it could lead to a fun scene where Bunnyx shows up asking for a hero (possibly her past self) to come with her a moment and later revealed that it was to give hero sort-of future self an alibi when Hawk Moth begins to suspect the idendites of said hero

5) my plans for Alix’s hero debut involve her dad getting akumatized, and based on my plans regarding the context of said akumatization, I’m not sure if I can justify NOT giving him time travel travel powers (except maybe the ability to bring memories or phots or home videos to life) 

Reasons to change it

1) Time travel can be a pain to write. 

2) might make it harder to justify allowing Alix to directly participate in battles (though as @cornerverse  pointed out, Bunnyx would still have an umbrella, and that could allow Bunnyx to be an example of the “fight like a normal” trope 

Suggestions for new powers one could change it to in either a fanfic or an official reboot in the future  1) inducing flashbacks- works in a similar Burrow does in canon, but the portals takes you into what is a basically a flashback instead of actually taking back or forward in time. I would probably add in a caveat that the flashback will automatically ends if the rabbit user is about to learn the identity of another miraculous user (the Doylist reason being to explain why they can’t use it to learn Hawk Moth’s identity, the Watsonian reason being that mage designed it this way in case the rabbit miraculous fell into the wrong hands)  

2) super speed 

[athleticlamp]

Because I watched Dark, it's funny when I see people confused about a piece of time travel fiction that includes the stable time loop trope, where everything that has happened will always happen and the past can't be changed.

Dark is the guide for understanding time travel fiction, especially pieces of fiction involving stable time loops. As long as you watch Dark, you can pretty much understand any time travel movie, show, etc. Unfortunately, a lot of people don't even realize the stable time loop trope is a thing. They think every time travel fiction out there involves time travel that allows the past to be changed, which isn't true for all TT fiction.

I actually prefer TT fiction where the past can't be changed now, where it's all predetermined. It seems like what time travel would be like if it actually existed, and I can take that sort of time travel more seriously. Time travel fiction where the past can be changed feels so childish now.

[29pageshomestuckeveryday]

Homestuck, page 2,575

Terezi: Get closer look.

Author commentary:

This is just revisiting the ongoing farce at the center of Karkat's life. That is, his blood color being one of the ridiculously worst-kept secrets possible, even as he insists to himself that it's unhackably privileged information, even around someone who he knows operates via some kind of powerful "scent sonar."

Karezi is one of those baseline type of ships that exist in any given franchise. The kind with blinking arrows pointing to it and a neon sign saying "THE TEXT INTENDS FOR YOU TO SHIP THESE TWO." It has endgame written all over it. Which, despite some endearing qualities and some decent conversations in service to the idea, is what makes it a bit boring. To whatever extent Homestuck is capable of serving up a conventional, recognizable morsel of "fairytale intent" on a platter, this might be it. A statement expressing what it considers to be its equivalent to the boy-meets-girl, written-in-the-stars, journey-to-the-white-picket-fence sort of pairing. Which is not an inherently bad thing. There's a always place for arcs like these, and a certain comfort people take from grabbing on to the white-picket-fence outcomes and rooting for them. A lot of people were pretty stoked about Karezi. Stuff like this conversation obviously is going to start shoveling coal into that engine pretty hard. But these features are what give it a predictable quality, and thus make it much less likely to be fully realized in the long run. Instead, later it's given more value as a foil relationship, a thing that threatens to happen often, because it's "supposed" to, but functions as a basis for turbulent departures. A backdrop of stable, comprehensible relationship potential against which some more unpredictable and challenging outcomes for them both start to play out.

Quick off-topic note: Karkat's reference to the forty-eight signs is based on the (fake) forty-eight-player Squiddle session that apocryphally created their universe. Back on topic: Karezi as the male/female lead, meant-to-be sort of ship, is, well, it's obvious. It's obvious to me at least, because I'm dangling it out there, obviously. Therefore I feel it must be obvious to you. And as such, I feel you must know I see it as obvious, and intend it as obvious, in this big feedback loop of self-evidentiary storycraft and trope jockeying. Any time this is true, I think awareness of the circumstance tends to leak into the consciousness of the characters involved. Characters in HS tend to be pretty self-aware (like Striders and Lalondes), but even the ones that aren't as much like these two) still tend to carry a form of subconscious selfawareness. (Feel free to chew on this oxymoron for a moment before continuing.) In other words, on some level, Karkat and Terezi both just sort of know they are the male and female leads in a lengthy heroic tale, and thus their sense of this propels them toward attraction, as if satisfying unspoken narrative obligation. This must especially seem true for Karkat, who lives and breathes the tropes of his romance films.