Quote:
Originally Posted by quigonkenny
Actually, it was meant to be a tongue-in-cheek hint that people may be overthinking the minor details in what is, at its core, only a story. When you get down to it, as long as it's logical for the audience, it's fine for the story as long as you don't overthink it. As long as it's externally consistent, internal consistency is just a bonus. Plus I'm not too sure yet whether I put any truck in the "observer theory", at least in the Haruhiverse (I'm leaning toward more overthinking). And don't worry, your post was sufficiently condescending...
|
That's fair. The issues I currently have weren't glaringly obvious upon my first watchings of the time travel events, so I guess it has that going for it. It's kind of like in Star Wars, when you realized that the ruins of the second Death Star have to go somewhere, and they're very likely to fall and crash into Endor, killing all the Ewoks. Of course, that doesn't occur to most people watching it, so everyone decides it has a happy ending. Of course it does.
As for the condescending part, yeah, that was my fault and I'm sorry. I was just so stunned by the claim, and your smooth transition from it to an example of a legitimate observer masked that the first part wasn't entirely serious. It's just that I've learned from my time on the internet that "no one can be THAT stupid" is (sadly) rarely true, so, you know...my bad.
Quote:
Originally Posted by quigonkenny
And "logical repercussions" might not be the right phrasing, but it refers to the fact that when you add time travel to the equation, the very laws of logic have to change to accomodate. Things that were not possible before are now, simply due to the ability to travel in time. I likened it previously to the existence of imaginary numbers. Without acknowledging their existence, the square root of a negative, or a negative result of a square, is illogical.
|
Logic doesn't HAVE to change when time travel is introduced. There's some "self-consistency principle" out there that says that, when time travelling, you can't take actions would would cause a paradox. If you tried to shoot your ancestor, for example, your gun would jam, or it wouldn't be a fatal wound, or something like that. Time travel can work, and work well, even when retaining traditional logic.
Problems like the bootstrap paradox are simply not required for time travel. While applications exist that require the use of imaginary numbers (such as some circuit logic, IIRC), nothing in time travel requires that objects and ideas can exist without an origin, other than an author's desire for something "cool." Just because something can be abused doesn't mean it should be, or that it's justifiable to do so.
In fact, many paradoxes that come up from time travel CAN still be logically explained away. The grandfather paradox, for example, can be fixed as I said above, or by saying that the ancestor only died in one of two parallel universes, and that the time traveler came from the other. It's when such logical solutions are actively ignored and people seek refuge in the notion of "it's time travel so it doesn't have to make sense" that I begin to see a problem.