there is so much horror that comes with being marty mcfly.
in one night he sees his best friend get shot down and die in front of him. then when he tries to get help for him he’s blasted back thirty years and is like instantly shot at. he ends up fucking with his family history by getting hit by a car and his own mother falling for him. the only man who can help him shuts him out at first because he doesn’t know him yet. marty must’ve been terrified to be stuck in a nightmare of a life and scared doc would be gone from his life in more ways than one. if doc hadn’t told him about how he made the flux capacitor that very night and had gone back to the exact day doc came up with it he never could’ve gone back. but even with docs help he has a week to force his parents together and needs to time the delorean to get powered by the lightning PERFECTLY! not to mention how he starts fading from existence on stage and just barely survives. (and that’s only the first movie)
the boy almost dies so many times within the span of a few weeks!!! it’s just a little over a few weeks that he’s jumping through time to try and not die and not lose doc and his universe. he’s shot at so much, jumps off a building, is almost hanged, hit by cars and barely avoids being hit by a car, is locked in a trunk, AND ALMOST FADES FROM EXISTENCE!!! (absolutely forgetting some things because it’s been a bit since i’ve seen the sequels) throughout all of this he’s barely getting rest and is in near constant stress. if he messes up even a little, either he’s dead or someone he loves. marty is still seventeen and has gone through more than any adult ever should. he has so much he needs to work through but who would even believe him besides doc and jen?
marty can never go home. everyone he knew is gone and now he’s in the shoes of a boy he doesn’t know. he has to be the boy that everyone around him knows and not the actual guy he is. his home is gone and marty is all that’s left. his house is full of strangers that don’t know their son is gone and that marty is in his place. even if his home life is better now there is not really a way for him to get back what he lost. he’ll remember it for the rest of his life (unless we have the fun idea that his memories are slowly rewritten to fit the current timeline. but THEN we have to deal with the horror of knowing your memories are going away and being replaced and you can’t do anything to stop it and someday everything you knew is gone and you’re a whole other person).
and don’t forget about the people around marty. the twin pines mcfly family has lost their son forever. we don’t know if another marty ever comes home, but it still won’t be their son. if no marty ever comes then he’ll never come home and they’ll never see him again. he’ll be missing or presumed dead. to them he just went to bed one night and was gone. that combined with docs death and knowing he was close with him wouldn’t seem like great odds. jen will have lost her boyfriend and can never see him again. nobody will ever know what happened to him or where he went. and if someone like lone pines marty ended up in the twin pines timeline somehow it would still be just as tragic. his good homelife is ripped away and doc could still be dead.
his parents don’t have their son anymore, doc won’t have his friend anymore, jen won’t have her boyfriend anymore, but they have a stranger in his place playing the part until he adapts to the timeline. he’ll act off for a while and they won’t know why since they don’t know the horrors he’s gone through in the past two or three weeks. and jennifer finds out about time travel later and marty would probably tell her about everything and letting her know he’s not the same guy. what could she even think? she loves marty, she always will, but something about knowing the man you loved is gone (even if there’s another marty in his place) is still awful to think about.
it would be so strange for doc too. when he first meets marty (in lone pines marty’s life) he’s met him before but also hasn’t. he met twin pines marty thirty years ago and is now meeting a slightly different boy thirty years in the future. he can’t act like he knows him because that could fuck with the timeline. he has to pretend he’s never met him and never missed him so that the timeline can continue smoothly.
i’m including the video game because i want to. marty is barely older and doc has been gone for a whole six months. he loses his best friend for months and then docs stuff is being sold since he’s presumed dead. then the delorean shows up and aparently he’s dead again, putting marty in the position where he needs to save doc yet again. he gets attacked and is almost shot (again) and is held at gunpoint. then when all seems safe and they’re heading home he starts to disappear again. i can’t stress how horrible it would be to see yourself being erased in front of your own eyes, your flesh fading from this timeline and barely holding you together.
episode three of the game has always stuck with me for how frightening it would be to see your best friend fade from existence and you end up in a hellish timeline where you never knew him. he crashes into a billboard (the amount of head trauma is another big thing he goes through) and jen is the only one who can get him down but she hates him. marty’s two friends, the closest people to him either hate his guts or doesn’t even know who he is. he truly loses everything in that timeline. the delorean is wrecked yet again and hill valley is some dystopia disguised as a utopia. the man who helped marty through everything is gone and doesn’t even want to see him, dogs are fucking banned from town so einstein (the most helpful guy in the game istg you couldn’t do it without him) is also gone, and the smallest things can get him in trouble. he can’t even give jen a quick kiss without being given a lot of demerits.
of course he gets out, but he leaves with citizen brown, not doc. citizen brown is forcing emmet to be what he wants and is endangering everything for marty. it gets to the point where marty has to almost suffocate emmet so citizen brown finally gives in and emmet gets away. and even though citizen brown was not doc, he still kind of was to marty. when the timeline is fixed yet again citizen brown fades from existence right in front of marty’s eyes but not before getting hit by a car to save marty. he stays there beside him in his final moments nearly crying and holding his hand desperately trying to assure doc he’ll get him to a hospital and that he’ll be fine before he eventually fades fully. even though citizen brown doc caused so much trouble for marty, he was still doc. his friend. and he lost him again. (until a different doc comes back for marty but he still has seen the death of his best friend WAY too many times)
TL;DR marty will never have his life back and no therapist can help him <3
marty got what he wanted but at what cost? sure his family is better now but he doesn't even know them. he's adjusting to a family who 'knows' him and that has to be horrifying like a nightmare you can't wake up from. it's unnatural almost having these people you used to know do a 180 and turn into someone entirely new. i know there are going to be at least a few times in his life where he thinks back to the twin pines timeline and what he lost. it wasn't good, but it was his. i wonder if he'd miss it even will all of its flaws or if he convinces himself this is better because 'it's the best outcome, right?'
