Rachel+Baxter-Green

When it comes to time travel in works of fiction, I have noticed that almost all of them seem to fall into one of three main categories. These categories are based mainly on the results of time travel within this fictional universe, although since results can differ within a single work of fiction these categories are better used in reference to individual cases. Note that these categories refer mainly to time travel to the past, as it is harder to measure the effects of future time travel when the main character inevitably returns to the past.


 * Negation** - This type of time travel is so named because any events that are changed end up cancelling themselves out. Here's an example: Say you go back into the past and kill your father before you were even born. By doing so you end up making it so that you never existed. Since you never existed, you can never go back in time to kill your father, so your father ends up surviving this whole incident and you end up existing anyway.


 * Destiny** - This type of time travel falls along the lines of a self-fulfilling prophesy. The basis of this trope is that by going back in time and doing something you end up creating your reason for doing it. For example: say you decide to go back in time and kill your father because you have major angst issues over the fact that he abandoned you and your mother when you were a baby. However, when you go back and kill him it turns out that the only reason he wasn't around is because he was dead, so not only have you killed your father, you have also given yourself a reason to go back in time and kill your father. This type of time travel creates a sort of perfect loop that can only be broken if the time traveler somehow manages to communicate to their younger self that they shouldn't do the thing.

This theory can be connected to may other similar theories that concern multiverses, but may not involve time travel. The main one, which actually exists outside of fiction but has yet to be proven is multiverse theory. This has many different theoretical causes, but one of the most common ones is that for every choice that someone makes the universe splits to accommodate for these two possibilities which makes the number of possible universe expand in a sort of fractal-like pattern. This multiverse genre also hints at the possibility that there is a way to travel between 'verses, although this is a possibility that in my opinion has not been well explored.
 * Multiverse** - This theory is a bit more complicated than the others, as it intersects with other theories concerning multiverses and even the possibility of the existence of other universes. In its most basic terms multiverse theory assumes that every time something is changed in the past the universe splits into two nearly identical universes, the only differences being that in one universe the change happened and in the other the change did not. Here's an example: Say you go back in time and kill your father, because that's the only example I feel like thinking of right now. When you kill him the universe splits into two different universe, one where your father is alive, and one where he is not.

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