r/CuratedTumblr • u/StraightOuttaOlaphis • 1d ago
Creative Writing Time loops are unfairly maligned
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u/SpaceNorse2020 1d ago
Ok, it's an awesome loop. Sure. Maybe it's pretty long too, like a full year before things loop.
Most people would enjoy the first 100 loops, I bet the majority would enjoy the first 1,000.
And OOP would enjoy a million loops if they are this enthusiastic about it. No, billions of loop, trillions, they would become friends with literally every person alive, they would learn every skill, read every book. They'd overthrow an empire after a billion attempts, they'd end every war after tens of billions.
They'd do everything they can possibly think of, and they would only be a few trillion loops in. Maybe hundreds of trillions.
It's a loop. It doesn't end. Would OP really still like it, a quadrillion years in? Quintillion? Sextillion? Septillion?
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u/extremely-cynical 1d ago
That raises the question, what does happen from the rest of the world's perspective if the person never leaves? Do they just... disappear one day? Do they die? Do they still physically exist but permanently brain-dead or comatose because their mind stayed in the loop?
Or does the person always eventually leave, inevitably, and one day everyone wakes up to find their friend mentally a million years older?
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u/TrioOfTerrors 1d ago
Isn't this like a theme in almost every time loop story? The character grows comfortable with the loop and then slips into madness.
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u/YUNoJump 1d ago
A lot of antisocialites are very confident in their ability to survive with literally zero meaningful social interaction for eternity.
Yeah dude you’ll be totally fine spending a millennium as the only person who doesn’t completely reset every day or so, you’ll totally be fulfilled without the ability to properly engage in one of humanity’s greatest powers.
Oh social media also won’t update by the way, no more doomscrolling once you’ve read every post made in history
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u/Win32error 1d ago
At some point, by pure chance, you'll fulfill the requirements to end the time loop, even if you don't want it. It's like having a single monkey with a typewriter.
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u/Random-Rambling 1d ago
To be fair, in the most famous time-loop story of our modern era, Groundhog Day, Phil does indeed spend a decade or two's worth of days just kinda messing about. Learning to speak French, playing the piano, getting the life stories of every person in town. And he only had a 24-hour-long loop! Imagine what a guy could do with two days! A week! A month!
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u/Prior-Tadpole-1860 1d ago
What if the time loop in question sucks, though? Like, what if it kicks in while you’re traveling and every starts with you waking up on a plane and then ends with you stuck on a layover in Atlanta for a day?
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u/dingalingdongdong 1d ago
Only if the timeloop starts the day after I did all the dishes/laundry/tidying.
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u/Slumunistmanifisto 1d ago
Enters time loop with a painful but easily curable disease like a toothache, std, or an infection.
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u/VengeanceKnight 1d ago
Yeah, but then all the progress on my favorite games would be reset, I wouldn’t have any new comics releasing, and I’d never get to see Man of Tomorrow.
Unfortunately, for as enjoyable as whiling away eternity in a time loop would be, I still have shit to look forward to.
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u/BlatantConservative 1d ago
Yeah ngl, lot of what people are talking in here sounds like depression
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u/TryUsingScience 1d ago
What OP is talking about sounds like classic burnout to me. You wish everything would pause for a while so you can do absolutely nothing while you slowly recover your sanity? You can't imagine ever wanting to be productive ever again? Nothing else matters except this respite, which you fantasize about in increasingly unhealthy ways? That's burnout, buddy.
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u/Boreal-Bison 1d ago
How do you get out of Burnout without a timeloop tho.
Most methods or suggestions I’ve seen only seem to requiere even more effort/time from a person who is already swamped and/or exhausted.
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u/TryUsingScience 18h ago
Find a therapist who will write you a doctor's note to take FMLA, which you can take for severe burnout. Take a couple months off and enjoy your legally protected vacation. This only works if you have a couple months' expenses saved up or diability insurance, but there's a lot more people who can do that than whose jobs would just let them take the time off on a whim.
Or if you live in a civilized country, simply tell your manager that you need some time off and then take it.
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u/rosa_bot 1d ago
The deeper danger is slowly losing your ability to see people as more than scripted automata.
When you've memorized enough of a person's short-term behavior, it'll stop counting as socialization and veer into the territory of either human experimentation or effective mind control.
The moment you start believing nothing you do in the loop matters, in terms of morality or long-term consequences, you're basically doomed to become a monster. You'll need a deep ideological belief that things that happen in the loop are real, even after a reset. You'll need to religiously avoid exploiting your knowledge to manipulate people, and not just intentionally.
There are very good reasons not to trust anyone found to have been in a timeloop.
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u/Peebles8 23h ago
I can't even be mean to NPCs in a video game, that I know isn't real. You think I'd be able to be mean to a person who is right in front of me?
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u/ArcReactor777 21h ago
You will eventually be mean to them. Given infinite time you will eventually get bored and do everything possible within the loop, and what’s worse is that you will still have an eternity more after that
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u/DeadSparker 18h ago
That's because you're only doing one or two runs. Play enough times and you'll eventually want to see all the other dialogue options.
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u/jancl0 1d ago
I'm pretty sure this is a moot point if they aren't leaving it. You're not gonna have to worry about them
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u/PuzzleMeDo 1d ago
How does that work, though?
Let's say I'm stuck in a Groundhog Day and I've figured out how to leave but I don't want to.
At the end of every day, the universe seemingly resets.
Do you ever see tomorrow?
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u/jancl0 1d ago
As a person not in the time loop? Yeah, probably. You just aren't part of the same time line as the participant anymore, or at least not travelling with them
Assuming the time line disappears when the participant is no longer in it is basically solipsism. You might as well assume that every story's universe ceases to exist the second you reach the end. Maybe philosophically an interesting thought, but kind of silly on a practical level
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u/KairAAAAAAA 1d ago
This is basically what they explore in Undertale through Flowey's character. I suggest looking into the game if it's a concept you like
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u/curvysquares 18h ago
Plus, once you've been in the loop for hundreds/thousands/millions of cycles, if you ever do leave it, the shock of suddenly being completely unable to predict what will happen next will break you even more than you already are.
It's being the god of your own world and suddenly being dropped right back into the body of a helpless mortal.
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u/D__M___ 1d ago
If you ever want a really tragic, sad, realistic take on a time loop, just read the Danish series On the Calculation of Volume. Most notably, the time loop estranges the protagonist from her husband almost immediately — she cannot be a part of his life anymore, nor she in his.
Read the first volume and then tell me again that you want to be in a time loop forever, lol
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u/CherrypopIsBestGirl 1d ago
Granted, this is with a fairly quick skim of the first book, but the time loop she finds herself in sounds pretty good? You start each loop where you were when the previous loop ended, so you can travel and do things across the world. She doesn't have perfect memory of previous loops so doesn't have to worry about becoming bored of things. It seems like she ages as well (her hair grows and wounds heal) so there's an eventual end to the looping.
Sucky that she can't be with her husband, sure, but unless you have someone you're deeply committed to and in love with I think a lot of people would be fine being in this kind of a timeloop.
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u/ZarathustraGlobulus 1d ago
What mildly annoyed me in those books was how she was staying in hotels all over but not once did she wake up on the 19th of November in a room that happened to have been occupied that morning.
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u/Jaded-Adagio9057 1d ago
She realises very early on that she's been lucky this hasn't happened and starts making up reasons to get rooms that haven't been used in a couple of days
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u/ZarathustraGlobulus 21h ago
Oh shoot, really? I must have glossed over that part somehow. Thank you.
My belief in Balle being able to craft worlds without loppholes is restored.
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u/TryUsingScience 1d ago
Most notably, the time loop estranges the protagonist from her husband almost immediately
The overlap between the sets of "people who think they want to be stuck in a time loop" and "people who have deep, meaningful relationships with at least one other human" is likely close to zero.
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u/RivetSquid 1d ago
You remember the terrible Ms. Peregrine movie years ago? Time loops were a central mechanic in the books. Not only is it how peculiar society safely survived so long after hollows came into existence, back in the height of their society taking a carefully planned timeloop tour was a right of passage.
You would piggyback through one loop sustaining a pocket of time period where another that no longer existed in your time could be found and work your way clear back into like graeco-roman times.
Unfortunately experimenting with how far time loops could be pushed is what accidentally made the hollows. They were aiming for something close to true immortality without the logistical hurdles of closing a loop (you need a dozen of a particular kind of peculiar and of course, a whole loop has to be closed. Otherwise you age rapidly on returning to the, "present.") but instead the loop collapsed on everyone involved suddenly, leaving anyone inside a, "hollow," a sentient, people eating, invisible zombie basically.
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u/TraceyWoo419 7h ago
Okay this and all the other recs for it has made me start this book on my library app!
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u/Ronnoc527 20h ago
I felt like the movie was actually decent but I was only 13 when it came out. I read the book after the fact.
The scene about them becoming hollows was sort of awful and it wasn't a great adaptation but I think it was fine as a family movie.
God forbid Emma have fire-hands though.
Anyway, I came to the comments just to see if anyone mentioned the book.
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u/RivetSquid 19h ago
That's fair, I was probably more tolerant to the changes before more books were out and the story progressed and we had more worldbuilding. In hindsight it's easier to see how they boxed themselves into one movie before the numbers could come back and I hated adaptations doing that at the time.
There's been a lot of great kids books that could sustain a franchise where they just sort of throw their hands up preemptively and start clumping things into one messier movie that will never recieve a sequel.
It was a better adaptation than the Spiderwick books got.
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u/ZanesTheArgent 1d ago
Sir, this is Lobotomy Corporation, healing IS the way to break the loop
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u/Swimming-Lobster-221 1d ago
“I want to be in a time loop” mfs when the time loop is them trying to survive while others try to forcibly remove their skeleton:
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u/Android19samus 1d ago
breaking one cycle (time loop) by starting another one (generational trauma)
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u/Quiet_Education5918 1d ago
Fuck it, I'll say it:
This Says A Lot About People Today.
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u/MeunsterCheeseMan 1d ago
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u/SeventyTwoTrillion 1d ago
I think "you're in a timeloop where you retain all your memories and you can control both the duration and when it ends" is the perfect middle ground between the existential terror of death ending your consciousness long before you're truly tired of living and experiencing new things (i.e. how everybody lives right now) and the existential terror of immortality leaving you alive for eons, stuck in perpetual misery with (from your POV) meaninglessly short-lived humans who come and go too often to bother trying to befriend them, or, even worse, nobody else at all on a dead planet
When I was a teenager I often thought about how cool it would be if I could just take a month and live like 10 years inside it and do everything I wanted to do, and then a year later, doing it all again with all the new things that happened in that time, and so on. So while I ultimately sided with the people who wanted immortality in the hypothetical questions about whether you'd want it or not, my main issue with it wasn't even really that I would become a sociopath disconnected from my fellow man after thousands of years of being alive, but rather that everything kept developing and happening alongside me, so it would feel even more like I was being overwhelmed by a tsunami of things that I couldn't possibly experience even with infinite time because those things would be damaged and destroyed and lost and become too outdated to run on new hardware/software and so on.
I wanted mastery more than I wanted to just flit from new thing to new thing, and all the things I wanted to master would take too long even if I was immortal. Whereas a time loop really is infinite, and nothing moves on until you're ready (at least in my formulation of it).
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u/OkTime3700 1d ago
Sooo many problems with time loops:
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You don't know when it ends. Do you let your intrusive thoughts win, and risk the time loop ending with that? Scary.
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Your body never changes. This makes any kind of sport or physical activity useless, because you will never improve. Your muscles constantly reset no matter how hard you work. Maybe your muscle memory carries over, but if your muscles aren't used to that...they'll perform poorly eventually.
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You need a good starting point to enjoy it. If the time loop begins on a bad day, you're in for hell.
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Your memories are finite. Eventually, you'll begin to forget things that don't happen on that day. After several decades, you'll remember this day very well, but won't be able to recall anything that came before.
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You will be stuck repeating things over and over again. Got an alarm clock that wakes you up at the start of the time loop? You'll be hearing that forever.
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You have a finite amount of time to accomplish things, severely limiting possibilities. Sure, you can always skip to the next episode or the next chapter in a book...but you can't exactly start up a new game that takes over 24 hours to progress. An MMORPG would lose all of its appeal.
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Nothing you create will last. Try to pick up drawing and make a piece you think turned out amazing? It'll be gone tomorrow. Write a story? You had better remember every word by heart. Write notes or in a journal to plan things out for future loops? Yeah, won't be keeping that either.
There are soooo many reasons why it would suck.
Maybe if you could set a time loop for like 1 year, and you could chose if you wanted to repeat, or start a new loop for the next year. Then that'd be like a dream.
Otherwise? The time loop absolutely hates you. It wants to make your life a living hell.
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u/Mitheral 1d ago
Check out Palm Springs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palm_Springs_(2020_film) if this sort of dystopian story appeals.
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u/PuzzleMeDo 1d ago
1 You don't know if it could end, which keeps you from doing anything too evil.
2 Equally, you can overeat and be lazy as much as you want without consequence.
3 I guess if it's a bad day in the sense that you injured yourself yesterday and are in severe pain. Other forms of bad day, you can learn how to fix.
4 Memories being finite means that you can reread old books and not mind. It fixes the 'infinite boredom' problem.
5 Memory being finite means that an alarm sound that doesn't bother you ever day for ten years probably won't get any worse. Just make sure your alarm sound isn't too bad?
6 Get into roguelikes, I guess?
7 Nothing is eternal. Phil in Groundhog Day, once he gains wisdom, learns ice sculpture, an art form that is inherently transient.
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u/Vexonte 1d ago
I want a time loop movie where the person enjoys the time loop, gets bored and starts treating it like a GTA run causing as much havoc and chaos as possible getting better each and every time just to reset the next day.
The movie ends with him going to bed after a very successful run with dozens of bodies in his wake and other crimes beyond description. Just for him to wake up to discover that the time loop randomly broke and now his massacre his the cannon timeline.
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u/irefusetouseaname 1d ago
They sort of did this in an episode of a TV show that I am not even certain ever existed about a high schooler and his angel friend
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u/CrabonicAcid 19h ago
Teen Angel! I watched that. It only had one season.
I don't remember that particular episode myself but it seems to be S01E15 "Back to DePolo" where the titular deceased adolescent goes back in time to try and prevent his own death.
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u/PamelaOfMosman 1d ago
I'm not sure that's true of Groundhog Day in which the Bill Murray character eventually saves the kid, learns languages; plays in a jazz band, feeds the homeless guy. By the time he resigns himself to the endless loop he's making the most of it.
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u/Niar666 1d ago
Ms. Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children has something like this (I've only read the book, not seen the movie).
The titular orphanage(?) is looping the last day it stood before it was bombed in 1940. The loop is maintained by the woman running the place, everyone inside is aware of the time loop, there is no memory loss. At night when the bombs start falling, they sing Run, Rabbit, Run in synch with the bombs.
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u/BlatantConservative 1d ago
Strong disagree. Wanting to never leave your comfort bubble and nothing ever changing and having nothing to look forward to and no desire to change anything is called clinical depression. That's what those hikikimori types in Japan do. That's what I did from 2017-2018. Didn't leave my room for like a year and a half.
I cannot really express in words how unhealthy this desire is. Unlike being a shut in, the fantasy might seem more palatable because you're not really putting anyone else out, but the fundamental issue, being happy with no future, is A Problem and your brain is not wired to be that way.
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u/GalaxyStar27 1d ago
Can't I look forward to experiencing all the media that exists but is new to me?
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u/Free-Fix-3472 1d ago
I mean you still have a future you just don’t have to worry about aging/mortality. I just think you have to be more imaginative.
No one says you have to do the same thing every day. You could go on a vacation you’ve always wanted to go on. You could pursue things you’re too scared of normally. There’s so many experiences to be had around the world on any given day and so many ways your actions have an influence that it would take an inconceivably long time to actually be bored, or even notice it for that matter. And then you get to redo it all if it doesn’t work out.
You keep all of your friends. You get to tend to all of your hobbies that you don’t have the time for because there’s always a pressure to be making the most of your limited time.
It’s not the most cheerful outlook but living the same day over and over doesn’t necessitate being frozen in place
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u/Gestum_Blindi 1d ago
No one says you have to do the same thing every day. You could go on a vacation you’ve always wanted to go on.
Yes, I would love spending one hour at the airport, 14 hours on a plane, another hour at the other airport just to wake up in my bed at home after the day is finished. Maybe if your dream vacation is the next town over you might, but otherwise you're shit out of luck.
There’s so many experiences to be had around the world on any given day and so many ways your actions have an influence that it would take an inconceivably long time to actually be bored, or even notice it for that matter. And then you get to redo it all if it doesn’t work out.
How many of those experiences are available to you within 24 hours? It's not like you could climb mount everest if you got stuck in a time loop in New York city.
You keep all of your friends. You get to tend to all of your hobbies that you don’t have the time for because there’s always a pressure to be making the most of your limited time.
Yes. You still have your friends. But you're the only one in the time loop. They'll still do the same things everyday. And what's more you'll never get any other friends so I hope that you don't want any.
As for hobbies, any hobby that requires time to pass is out, gardening for an example is pointless if you never get to see it grow. And any hobby that requires materials you can't get in under 24 hours are also out. Furthermore any hobby requiring other people will be next to impossible to pull off. Also, you need to actually be able to finish it in 24 hours, so a lot of video games and things like writing a book is also off limits to you.
It’s not the most cheerful outlook but living the same day over and over doesn’t necessitate being frozen in place
It literally does mean that you're stuck within a radius of however far you can get in 24 hours of wherever you happen to be.
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u/BlatantConservative 1d ago
The flipside of all you are saying is that nothing you do matters consequentially or interpersonally. Which is one of the core feelings in deep major depression.
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u/Intrepid-Progress228 1d ago
Nothing you do matters consequentially or interpersonally on a long enough timeframe.
It's a different take on being an immortal, except in a time loop everything resets except you, and as and immortal eventually everything goes away except you.
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u/notthephonz 1d ago
Time loops don’t always heal you, though. The characters in Happy Death Day and The Incredible Shrinking Wknd carry damage into their next loop
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u/Able_Breadfruit_1906 1d ago
oh boy do I have a game to recommend to people interested in this idea
(play outer wilds. don’t look anything up. don’t even watch the trailer. you’re an alien archaeologist investigating a tiny solar system to uncover the mystery of a long dead alien species that lived there before you. and nothing is going to go wrong.)
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u/evilmexico 1d ago
Its always funny seeing some recommend outer wilds because they all say this exact thing verbatim. My friend who recommended it to me did too. No shade cause its a cool game but like. Its like a hivemind. I've seen in recent memory 3 people excluding you and my friend say this
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u/Unholy_Roman_Empire 1d ago
The reason it’s like a hive mind and they all say the exact same thing is because the game is THAT good. I had the same feelings “yall are being weird about a video game. Why are you gatekeeping the plot but telling EVERYONE to play it blind?” And then I played it blind after a decent bit of nagging from my husband and it was one of the most wonderful video games I’ve ever played in my life. I think it’s the one I’ve enjoyed the most actually.
Go play it for like 30 mins and you’ll understand. Just go in blind and play for 30 mins. It’s SO good.
It’s one of those games where if I had a genie my first wish would be to forget I played the game so I could experience it blind all over again. Unfortunately, this is impossible to do so us fans subject people to it and then watch them play it and experience that joy and awe vicariously.
(Edit: ignore this I read your comment wrong I did not realize that you had played some of it.)2
u/evilmexico 1d ago
My friend said the same thing about wanting to play it again. I tried it for maybe three hours total but it wasn't my thing. I didnt like the time loop mechanic very much. The atmosphere was great though. I have a hard time with games where there's a lot of backtracking and secret-searching because not doing every possible thing mags at me. That's why I havent played silksong yet; i find a lot of metroidvanias have that issue. Outer wilds had me skowering the starting planet for like an hour to make sure I did everything there
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u/helen269 1d ago
I want a time loop where I can choose the start and end points. And when I get bored, I can end one and start another.
I want a time loop where I can choose the start and end points. And when I get bored, I can end one and start another.
I want a time loop where I can choose the start and end points. And when I get bored, I can end one and start another.
I want a time loop where I can choose the start and end points. And when I get bored, I can end one and start another.
I want a time loop where I can choose the start and end points. And when I get bored, I can end one and start another.
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u/Quintuplin 1d ago
Big factor in the time loops is how they end. In Groundhog day, Phil didn't seek to break the loop, he sought to have a good day, and after he finally had the perfect day, the loop broke itself. He had a bunch of hedonistic days and a bunch of wasted days, but the mechanism behind how many days or what conditions end it is never explained. Imagine the loop ended itself right after pulling some heinous shit. That'd suck.
In Edge of Tomorrow, again the guy is doing his best and doing risky stuff, but in the end the time loop was taken from him by chance.
That to say, blessing or curse, the time loops aren't a "I can do this forever" scenario. Sure you can hope that if you do nothing at all, you might get more loops... in which you did nothing at all... but that might not work out in your favor. Maybe the spell in Ghog Day would get bored and drop you. Maybe the aliens in EdgeOT would set up a strike team and hunt you down to take you out of their system after enough loops. Inaction isn't safe.
These loops are half parable and half mechanic, but in all iterations of this type of story, action, not inaction, is necessary to solve the loop, and solving it has stakes greater than simply chilling and living forever. They're all telling you to make the most of your time and live more. It takes a special type of misunderstanding to say that you'd use it to do nothing
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u/marcarcand_world 1d ago
By time loop rules, we would still see OOP, just the version of them that isn't stuck in the time loop
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u/fightingbronze 1d ago
Really depends on the context of the time loop. For example, a day long (or longer) time loop where I’m starting in my home and have full access to utilities, food, a car, and entertainment could be pretty great. But if my time loop is 5 seconds long and the first millisecond of it starts with me being kicked in the balls, well that’s a bit less enjoyable.
In either case you’ve got the whole eternity thing going on too so from a purely philosophical point of view you could argue it’ll be hell regardless of the context.
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u/New-me-_- 1d ago
Literally every time loop story is like:
“Hey this lack of consequences is pretty swell.”
-Thousands of iterations of the same day over and over again later.
“I need away to kill myself permanently.”
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u/Tabelel 1d ago
I keep accidentally finding the thing that breaks the loop on the first cycle :(