One of my favorite tragic moves in time travel is when someone *chooses* to remain in the past and takes the slow lane to age through to either meet up with home time zone characters or due naturally. Like Captain America in Endgame. Amy Pond final plot in Doctor Who too.
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Thing is, multiverse strands that mix must inevitably separate for the plot to make sense. Hence tragedy. People who meet and grow close must separate forever, perhaps even forget the encounter. Clean merges just seem lame.
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Time travel is different. There’s only 1 true timeline in time travel, and everything else is transient confusion to be resolved. So it’s an elaborate do-nothing contraption, ultimately. The people in the transients never quite come alive.
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Futurama was excellent at playing normal aging for tragedy in a few poignant episodes, like the Seymour dog episode, or the Lars episode.
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Futurama had one episode with Bender spending thousands of years buried, aging through time. HHG had the same thing with Marvin. But robots waiting ages is tragedy turned farce.
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Gonna start calling my extra low energy days “multiverse days”
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Side quests
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In the multiverse every quest is a side quest
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Before H. G. Wells invented the time travel story (odd that it had to be invented), there were only slow-time stories (Rip Van Winkle etc) and 2 parallel universes (heaven and hell)
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Before that you didn’t even have separate heaven/hell. The gods just lived on some mountain. Hell was just underground caves near an active volcano.
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Time travel and multiverse fiction are highly advanced religious mythologies. I’m ironically hyper-religious.
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I’ve noticed that practical, ambitious, competitive people don’t really care for them. They are all-in on this life, this world. They aren’t interested in possible worlds or what ifs unless they are practical contingencies to plan for or bet on.
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Interesting that slow time/fast time fiction fell out of fashion. In Brahma’s realm 1 day is eons on earth. I think the ancients got that from dream time. You can dream “hours” in minutes.
Only modern thing like that I know of is Inception dream time.
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And I think True Blood had fairy land being slow time.
Of course Interstellar had black hole slow time.
Time rate distortion is both physically plausible (relativity) and psychologically familiar (dreams) but not as much fun as discrete time travel and multiverses
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the duality between multiverse manifold multiplicity and here-now local particular consciousness as the basic metaphysical rift
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Replying to @arlynculwick and @disconcision
yeah, that's an aspect of it! the intuition is about more than inference and signs, I think, but probably that's the most direct translation
it's always seemed like a central problem: why must experience be some kind of local little hole when the cosmos is a multiverse manifold?
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Spoiler alert!
"Excession" - Iain M Banks.
Slipping to another dimension to avoid the heat-death of THIS universe.
It doesn't happen.
"Nope, they're still fighting . Come back in a few millenia." :D


