![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
not all timeloops are good
May. 10th, 2025 02:12 pmokay, one thing about me? i fucking love a timeloop. i'd never write it, or even actively seek it out, but when i come across it it's one of my favourite fanfic tropes. it's about the emotional intimacy and coming to terms with your demons of it all. it's about you can't avoid the inevitable and the Truth Will Out. and so awhile ago, i forget exactly how i heard about this, but the book Neverworld Wake by Marisha Pessl was recommended to me as a good timeloop YA book. the basic premise is that five teenagers meet a year after their high school graduation, die in a car crash, and then relive the day of the car crash over and over again because ultimately only one of them can survive and they need to decide which. sounds interesting enough, right? unfortunately pessl absolutely failed at the execution.
i've got two main criticisms with this book: it's overly complicated and it's totally bogged down by metaphor. to the second point, literally i could open up to any page in the book and provide you with wordy, convoluted examples of figurative language. let's see... page 120, "[i remember him] like I remember a hot summer with a water shortage, backed-up sewage, and zero air-conditionin'." (side note: the completely flat, stereotypical, manic pixie YA characterizations are a third but ultimately less important criticism. i could have overlooked them on their own, but...) the whole book is like this, and it starts early on, and that's when i knew i was in for an unhappy ride.
to the first thing: there's just so much plot going on? it's a time loop story where all the characters have to choose who lives and who dies, but this is being enforced by a mysterious wizard dude because the time loop works on magic rules that are informed by the basest parts of all five characters' psyches, so there's a whole spatial travel mini arc where based off the rules of an esoteric lost media book a side character loves they all need to attempt suicide and think really hard about the time and place they want to go, but then there's ALSO a murder mystery situation where the sixth member of their friend group and the MC's boyfriend died a year prior under mysterious circumstances and the entire time loop revolves around them figuring out what happened to him, but then the resolution to that is that one of the guys ran him over with his car while on a drug drop because one of the GIRLS in the group was a drug dealer, but then ALSO the main character accidentally let him fall and gravely injure himself because she was mad at him and thought he was cheating on her, but this information is kept from the other characters by another character in a sort of "lesbian ex machina" situation, and on and on and on. and it distracts from the thing i really actually love about time loops, which is the character study.
which brings us back to the character issue, i guess: all five characters are one-dimensional. there's the gay trailer trash, there's the drug-dealing pharmaceutical heiress, there's the lesbian genius with no feelings, there's the computer prodigy who's been trying to cover up the murder he committed, and there's bee, the main character, who is convinced she's a good person but is completely uninteresting, and even the final reveal that she may or may not have caused her boyfriend's death does nothing to help that. she doesn't learn anything about herself in the loop. she is no less stuck. what i love about time loops is that they force the characters to confront things, whether that's grief or sexuality/feelings or self-confidence issues or some kind of life change. (they also take place in the same place every time and feel like they go on forever, whereas the characters in Neverworld Wake are constantly driving off on missions/teleporting via suicide (?????) and "wakes"/loops are glossed over pretty frequently.) bee spends an absurd about of time tailing her four friends, trying to figure out what they're up to, and those activities--one of them goes hitchhiking, one of them visits a professor and tries to learn social engineering, and the other two party it up on a cruise ship--never really resolve themselves. bee tries to convince whitley and cannon (yes, those are actually their names) to stop ruining the cruise ship and eventually they do but that doesn't reveal anything about whitley and cannon, it doesn't push their characters in any certain direction, they just eventually get bored of it. it's not compelling. overall? i do not recommend and i could give you several works of fanfiction that do it better.
i want to write my own time loop stuff so bad... i've got a 3x09 colin&isaac timeloop fic for ted lasso loosely outlined in my notes app and i'd also love to write an original fiction story where a genre-savvy character gets stuck in a timeloop and thinks they need to fall in love with the other person (and are big mad about it) but the secret the entire time is that they need to gain some self-esteem. but if i'm gonna write it i like stuff like that enough that i want to do it RIGHT, you know?
i've got two main criticisms with this book: it's overly complicated and it's totally bogged down by metaphor. to the second point, literally i could open up to any page in the book and provide you with wordy, convoluted examples of figurative language. let's see... page 120, "[i remember him] like I remember a hot summer with a water shortage, backed-up sewage, and zero air-conditionin'." (side note: the completely flat, stereotypical, manic pixie YA characterizations are a third but ultimately less important criticism. i could have overlooked them on their own, but...) the whole book is like this, and it starts early on, and that's when i knew i was in for an unhappy ride.
to the first thing: there's just so much plot going on? it's a time loop story where all the characters have to choose who lives and who dies, but this is being enforced by a mysterious wizard dude because the time loop works on magic rules that are informed by the basest parts of all five characters' psyches, so there's a whole spatial travel mini arc where based off the rules of an esoteric lost media book a side character loves they all need to attempt suicide and think really hard about the time and place they want to go, but then there's ALSO a murder mystery situation where the sixth member of their friend group and the MC's boyfriend died a year prior under mysterious circumstances and the entire time loop revolves around them figuring out what happened to him, but then the resolution to that is that one of the guys ran him over with his car while on a drug drop because one of the GIRLS in the group was a drug dealer, but then ALSO the main character accidentally let him fall and gravely injure himself because she was mad at him and thought he was cheating on her, but this information is kept from the other characters by another character in a sort of "lesbian ex machina" situation, and on and on and on. and it distracts from the thing i really actually love about time loops, which is the character study.
which brings us back to the character issue, i guess: all five characters are one-dimensional. there's the gay trailer trash, there's the drug-dealing pharmaceutical heiress, there's the lesbian genius with no feelings, there's the computer prodigy who's been trying to cover up the murder he committed, and there's bee, the main character, who is convinced she's a good person but is completely uninteresting, and even the final reveal that she may or may not have caused her boyfriend's death does nothing to help that. she doesn't learn anything about herself in the loop. she is no less stuck. what i love about time loops is that they force the characters to confront things, whether that's grief or sexuality/feelings or self-confidence issues or some kind of life change. (they also take place in the same place every time and feel like they go on forever, whereas the characters in Neverworld Wake are constantly driving off on missions/teleporting via suicide (?????) and "wakes"/loops are glossed over pretty frequently.) bee spends an absurd about of time tailing her four friends, trying to figure out what they're up to, and those activities--one of them goes hitchhiking, one of them visits a professor and tries to learn social engineering, and the other two party it up on a cruise ship--never really resolve themselves. bee tries to convince whitley and cannon (yes, those are actually their names) to stop ruining the cruise ship and eventually they do but that doesn't reveal anything about whitley and cannon, it doesn't push their characters in any certain direction, they just eventually get bored of it. it's not compelling. overall? i do not recommend and i could give you several works of fanfiction that do it better.
i want to write my own time loop stuff so bad... i've got a 3x09 colin&isaac timeloop fic for ted lasso loosely outlined in my notes app and i'd also love to write an original fiction story where a genre-savvy character gets stuck in a timeloop and thinks they need to fall in love with the other person (and are big mad about it) but the secret the entire time is that they need to gain some self-esteem. but if i'm gonna write it i like stuff like that enough that i want to do it RIGHT, you know?
