i'm going to ramble about time travel in supernatural and how it's shown and established and about a post that i read once and can no longer find and because i have no idea how long this is going to end up being i'm going to put it all under the cut bc i don't want people to get stuck scrolling past if they don't care
so, i go through phases of putting on familiar video essays and trope talks on in the background while i play online games or do sudoku's or cryptograms or whatever thing has caught my attention that week, and i recently fell back into that phase, so i rewatched a bunch of overly sarcastic productions' trope talk videos because i enjoy them
and i rewatched the one on time travel because i was debating adding time travel to a project so i wanted to refresh myself on the kinds and types of time travel that appears in fiction, and broadly there are two types, three if you count the combined as one
there's "stable time loop" and what i call "butterfly effect and paradox playground".
so what do these mean, really?
well, remember that old paradox? the "if you go back in time and kill your own grandfather how could you go back in time to kill him in the first place?" well, when a piece of media runs off the stable time loop type, if you go back in time and kill your grandfather, that wasn't really your grandfather, think, uh, that one episode of futurama where fry goes back in time and kills his grandfather, then sleeps with his grandmother and discovers that he's his own grandfather (side note, i haven't watched futurama in a while and i don't remember if it fully runs on stable time loop logic but that moment is a good showcase of when it does). then, of course, in media that runs on the butterfly effect and paradox playground type, you activate the paradox and then it's a whole thing
so, broadly a lot of media that centers around time travel plays around in the middle of these two, think doctor who and how the doctor tells people about things they shouldn't mess with, how big events aren't to be messed with, not because they can't be, but because bad things happen if they go off track.
there isn't that much time travel in supernatural, but they still manage to establish the rules of time travel and how it works very quickly, with one scene in the first episode it's introduced: the scene with the impala.
so, in 4x03 we get a scene that shows that time is a stable loop almost immediately. dean finds john again in a car lot, and john says that he's been sent to get a van (or whatever that car was idk), but dean convinces him to get the impala instead. now, if spn was running off of butterfly effect paradox playground rules, this scene wouldn't work, because if dean had gone back for the first time then, obviously dean wouldn't have the impala in his timeline.
this adds to cas' thesis statement of "you would never have been able to stop it", because time works on a stable loop so of course dean wouldn't be able to change anything, because anything he did was already done.
and now onto the post i saw
so, it was a post about the concept of having everything dean liked about john actually being from mary, and the op mentioned "when he's back in time, dean tells john to get the impala but john still gets the van, and when he goes to mary's house later, dean sees the impala in her driveway" and while i absolutely love that concept, the thing with the car would have to be replaced with something else to show us that time works on a stable loop, because we need an example to show that there is no way dean would have been able to stop it, no matter what he did, which is the point of the entire episode.
so, yeah, this post is just because i couldn't stop thinking about that one post and why stuff would have to be shuffled for it to work, and, uh, that's it pretty much
(and yes, i know that spn doesn't continue to run on totally stable timeloop logic, the episode about the titanic with balthazar is a great example and so is endverse broadly, though it's still not totally clear if that was real or something cooked up by zachariah. [though it's interesting to note that the titanic stuff happens in season six, the gamble era, while 4x03 happens in the kripke era, which is similar to how the terminator movies changed their time travel rules when a different director took over on movie three] but for 4x03 the thesis statement is added to by establishing that time is a stable loop and that no matter what dean did, nothing would have changed)
