There is a hugely successful webcomic called Homestuck (maybe you’ve heard of it; it raised over $2 million in one month to make a game out of it) and a significant part of the comic’s events are reliant on time travel. The comic itself is dense and insanely complex, so I will do my best to spoil as little as possible, because to my knowledge there are no plot holes, and in the end it all makes sense if you keep reading through to Act 5 and beyond.
The basic idea is that the four main characters, the Kids, are playing an immersive video game called Sburb, and the game takes place within your universe. In fact, the game takes over the entire timeline of your universe for its own purposes, that is, to create a new universe. In Act 4, Dave is shown in a Bad Future where something happened and made the game unwinnable. At some point he had created time-tables that let him go back and forth in the timeline, became the Knight of Time, and eventually decided to go back and Make Things Right. We then learn that Sburb, the game-universe, encourages the use and abuse of stable time loops, but punishes those who try to change fate by killing the errant traveler. This leads to a handful of dead Daves piling up, the equivalent to Dumbledore discovering his own sticky notes, except more gruesome.
The biggest mystery of Act 4 was the fact that the Dave from the Bad Future came from a Doomed timeline, but his interference in the Alpha timeline was critical to winning the game. In fact, his interference caused a grandfather paradox, as he prevented the events that caused him to go back. Normal causality had to be thrown out the window. This caused a hurricane of argument on the MSPA forums over which time travel theory used Occam’s Razor the best.
My personal favorite was developed by myself and BlastYoBoots, and we called it Wobble Theory. It worked like a turing machine: Sburb steps through the initial seed of the universe and tries to see if certain conditions are met, chief among them being the WIN or LOSE condition, but there are additional caveats such as requiring that all inter-session conversations take place, the planting of the Frog Temple, the passage of Jack Noir and the Crosbytop/Fedora, etc. If these conditions were not met, the universe would mark down places where things had gone right (i.e. adhered to the Alpha timeline as decided), constrain those, and see what else it could tweak. The most-often changed variable would be a Time player’s decisions, as they were literal butterfly effects who could bring huge changes back to the present after their decisions had propagated into a Doomed future. In this way, the Alpha timeline was like a vigorously shaken wet noodle, grabbed from one end and pinched along its length until it stopped wobbling.
Eventually, the comic explained that Immutable Timeline Theory was the winner. Sburb had literally calculated the entire timeline AND all of its off-shoots in one go; that something happened was “AN IMMUTABLE FACT THAT WE ARE STATING FOR THE RECORD.” The various problems with this are explained away with a turtles-all-the-way-down demeanor, and going into those explanations would only spoil more than I want to.
The short version is that Andrew Hussie literally exists in-universe as the author of the comic, and if he says the timeline ought to go this way, it will.
There is a hugely successful webcomic called Homestuck (maybe you’ve heard of it; it raised over $2 million in one month to make a game out of it) and a significant part of the comic’s events are reliant on time travel. The comic itself is dense and insanely complex, so I will do my best to spoil as little as possible, because to my knowledge there are no plot holes, and in the end it all makes sense if you keep reading through to Act 5 and beyond.
The basic idea is that the four main characters, the Kids, are playing an immersive video game called Sburb, and the game takes place within your universe. In fact, the game takes over the entire timeline of your universe for its own purposes, that is, to create a new universe. In Act 4, Dave is shown in a Bad Future where something happened and made the game unwinnable. At some point he had created time-tables that let him go back and forth in the timeline, became the Knight of Time, and eventually decided to go back and Make Things Right. We then learn that Sburb, the game-universe, encourages the use and abuse of stable time loops, but punishes those who try to change fate by killing the errant traveler. This leads to a handful of dead Daves piling up, the equivalent to Dumbledore discovering his own sticky notes, except more gruesome.
The biggest mystery of Act 4 was the fact that the Dave from the Bad Future came from a Doomed timeline, but his interference in the Alpha timeline was critical to winning the game. In fact, his interference caused a grandfather paradox, as he prevented the events that caused him to go back. Normal causality had to be thrown out the window. This caused a hurricane of argument on the MSPA forums over which time travel theory used Occam’s Razor the best.
My personal favorite was developed by myself and BlastYoBoots, and we called it Wobble Theory. It worked like a turing machine: Sburb steps through the initial seed of the universe and tries to see if certain conditions are met, chief among them being the WIN or LOSE condition, but there are additional caveats such as requiring that all inter-session conversations take place, the planting of the Frog Temple, the passage of Jack Noir and the Crosbytop/Fedora, etc. If these conditions were not met, the universe would mark down places where things had gone right (i.e. adhered to the Alpha timeline as decided), constrain those, and see what else it could tweak. The most-often changed variable would be a Time player’s decisions, as they were literal butterfly effects who could bring huge changes back to the present after their decisions had propagated into a Doomed future. In this way, the Alpha timeline was like a vigorously shaken wet noodle, grabbed from one end and pinched along its length until it stopped wobbling.
Eventually, the comic explained that Immutable Timeline Theory was the winner. Sburb had literally calculated the entire timeline AND all of its off-shoots in one go; that something happened was “AN IMMUTABLE FACT THAT WE ARE STATING FOR THE RECORD.” The various problems with this are explained away with a turtles-all-the-way-down demeanor, and going into those explanations would only spoil more than I want to.
The short version is that Andrew Hussie literally exists in-universe as the author of the comic, and if he says the timeline ought to go this way, it will.