Bagheera wrote:It doesn't matter, since he's stuck manipulating people and lying to them no matter what. Think about how you would feel if you found out someone close to you knew shit you probably didn't want them to know, and was using that information to guide your actions "for your own good".
I think that's ready far too much into it uncessarily - perhaps the most bad/gary stu-ish ones can ocassionally come off that way, but in most fics, they rarely really try to "guide" anyone's actions, the focus (and what really motivates ppl to write that stuff) is usually on the character in question fixing their own less than ideal contributions to the plot.
Aquiring [designated love interest] is usually just a side effect of tryin to prevent them from getting exploded/shot/mindraped.
As a previous poster said, more ppl knowing takes away from the dramatic tension (and the idea/cathasis effect of the character in question cleaning out what the author percieves as "their own messes")
Something that is, however, rarely adressed enough (because most turn the time-traver into a reformed badass, which can boringify things if overdone) is the sheer isolation and heaviness of the burden of being the only one who knows about the imminent apocalypse and has only a short time to fix it.
Right off the bat, I can only really name "Unbroken".
You'd think the characters would be a little more shocked at learning that they failed to prevent/possibly even caused
the freakin' apocalypse, especially in those scenarios where they just wake up around eps 8 or 16 and percieved the clusterfuck to come as a random vision.
Wouldn't your first idea be that it's simply the stess/regular ol' fear of screwing up?
Or maybe get tempted to reset it again at the first major setback. Or get too confident too early, e.g. around ep 16 when stuff seems to be geing well and probably will be going even better in the fic.
Personally, I've had Shinji go through some major sort of coping/grieving process once he finds out WTF is really going on, and spends a lot of time just aimlessly despairing about it before he decides to do something about it, after all, [pessimism=Shinji] he just learned that he already failed countless of times, the comfirmation that he, just as he always feared, just isn't cut out for the job [/pessimism](allthoug I've made the overall circumstances a lot less conspicously helpful than they usually are)
I guess that would, to some, defeat the point of having an older wiser versions of the characters have a go at the problems, which wasn't really what I was going for, but... a great amount of the show's appeal comes from the troubles of their characters. Have them have to go through
some degree of a work curve.
Also, how 'bout some timetravelling Rei?
There's more timetravelling
Gendo , or even
Hikari than there is Rei.
Maybe because they usually have Lillith as the one responsible already?
Heck, if anyone HAS some Rei timetravel, however mediocre, give me a link right now.
ElMariachi wrote:Oh, will you make the person coming back having failed so many times/having been broken so badly by the original loop that he or she became a cold and calculating asshole seeing everyone as only levers and relationships as statistics?
That's so common it's become an overused trope of its own, and tends to feed into hispterish notions of what is 'mature'.
It was fun the first few times, but ultimately defeats the point of having your fic contain Shinji/Asuka/woever.