You… WHAT?!
on December 4, 2021 at 1:01 amChapter: Same Planet, Different Dementia
Location: Shortpacked!
Who wins? The knowledgeable scientist or remembering that Back to the Future II claimed if you met your former self the universe might explode and then it didn’t? Checkmate, atheists!
That second panel is one of my favorite Head Alien moments.
He’s the bestest.
Villains gotta be characters too, and Head Alien effortlessly straddled a line where his goofiness was completely interchangeable with vindictive malice. He’d make you laugh and then feel bad for laughing, and that’s my favourite kind of villain.
It really is solid Head Aliening.
I do wish more stories took the “aww, fuck it” approach to time travel. So you accidentally killed one of your ancestors and thus you should no longer exist, it’s fine! The timeline is fine. Don’t worry about it.
I remember aggressively hating a book by a beloved author bc the characters were ridiculously unbalanced, and most of them had the ability to cause instant harm or even death by just looking or w/e
like
while I realise it’s easy to destroy SOME things in an instant, like a reputation, the universe didn’t come into existence by being so fragile that one domino topple would undo years of effort
(if there was a group that could instantly create/bring to life in said universe, I missed it)
That… doesn’t sound like a very good book.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13648.Gifts
Though I find it curious one of the reviews is all “This is a super good book by a super good author, 3/5 stars”
idk I like the slow pace fine, but I can’t get behind the “philosophical struggle” or w/e, for so many people to naturally have the ability to Fuck Shit Up I cannot suspend disbelief
I have my own time travel theories but Steins;Gate gets it closest I think
(sorry)
which is to say paradoxes shmarodoxes
… well fuck me. I just accidentally smack-talked Ursula K Le Guin.
On the other hand, a lot of her stuff reads like original series Star Trek scripts, and those were also known for a large number of random god-like aliens, so…
I did say beloved
I just couldn’t stand reading about human WMDs
And then there’s Sir Terry Pratchett’s approach: “Shoot the dictator and prevent the war? But the dictator is merely the tip of the whole festering boil of social pus from which dictators emerge; shoot him and there’ll be another one along in a minute. Shoot him too? Why not shoot everyone and invade Poland?”
Fry found a solution to that problem.
That’s the brilliance of the Steins;Gate time travel system that allows such tomfoolery while keeping a stable logic.
I think I prefer the kinds of time travel stories where accidentally killing one of your ancestors reveals that the person killed wasn’t actually an ancestor after all.
I also love that last panel of Rachel’s. Why do they never listen?
And so Leslie Bean, non-abductee, decides to fight a supervillain who’s been imbued with godlike powers. It is perhaps not her wisest move. But she’s Leslie Bean, and she’s gonna try her darndest to kick some alien ass.
How can someone be so goofy and yet not be cartoonishly evil but just be one evil, sadistic motherfucker
“Back off, Leslie, I’m a scientist!”