| abstract
| - You go back in time to Set Right What Once Went Wrong, only to discover that the "changes" you're making to the past were what "already" happened anyway. In other words, there was no "first time around" - the past only happened once, there were no different "versions" of it, and the changes you made to the past ultimately created the very past you read about in the history books before leaving on the trip. It's like being Time's own personal Unwitting Pawn. This does not necessarily mean that You Can't Fight Fate. For example, if Bob wanted to go back in time to stop Alice's death, he could simply convince his past self that Alice still died in the future. Following this logic, Alice never dies at all -- and Bob suddenly remembers how several months ago, some "other" Bob came up to him insisting that Alice was going to die of something and the two of them had to go save her, which they did, so she's still very much alive and well all along. (Do you have a headache yet?) Or to avoid the headache and ensuing paradox, Future Bob could go back and save Alice in such a way that Past Bob still thinks that she died. Needless to add, grammar can sometimes become thoroughly useless at trying to put the point across, as all sense of tense gets thrown of the window. This trope is easier to observe rather than analyze. Note that You Already Changed the Past implies Only One Possible Future, which is the version of fatalism found in many older works, such as Greek Drama, that don't involve time travel. This trope arguably makes the most sense when considering time travel from a scientific point of view, see the Novikov self-consistency principle. However, the number of time-travel plots that it allows for are extremely limited and the logic gets complicated very quickly. This, however, also has the side-effect of creating a 'self-correcting universe' usually by a slew of Contrived Coincidences (ie. if you try to shoot your grandfather the gun will jam; if you try poisoning him he will recover; if you try strangling him you will be overcome; if you wear Power Armor from the future you will have second thoughts; if you try sending a bomb back through time and detonating it directly inside his chest the time machine will break down). This can also lead to a scenario where the only reason why the past is not changed is because someone else says 'you cannot' and you take his advice. Meaning the advice itself is a part of the universe's self-correcting nature. Thus, most time travel stories that involve altering the past will provide some of the characters with Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory. This makes less sense, but it makes for a narrative convenience. If a You Already Changed The Past plot is used, the time travel will probably be a one-off thing, since repeating it would most likely get tedious. The Ancient Greeks and Vikings loved the notion that You Cannot Change the Future, and their works heavily imply that they believed in this specific notion of time (which even the Gods were trapped in). Although they used predictions rather than time travel, the effect is the same. Many first-time readers of the classics who don't buy into this notion of time, or don't realize this is why You Can't Fight Fate in the classics, have a hard time accepting The Fatalist behavior of classical Greek and European heroes. See also Self-Fulfilling Prophecy. Compare Retroactive Preparation, where having changed the past already works to your favor. Related to Stable Time Loop where you go back in time, because you already changed the past.
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