ways_back_room | DE: Great, but let's try that once more

Most of mine wouldn't change something in their past, they would think for a long time about it but in the end wouldn't.

If Will were to change anything, it would be having his siblings stay alive, maybe not getting captured. Though that would come later in his mind or something that would make life better in Nottingham.

Charles would have a hard time because he'd want to help Erik or Raven or Hank, but he's aware of how dangerous that can be. Since our experiences make us who we are and if he found a way to help either of them then he might not meet them.

Moist wouldn't change anything, that's big and dangerous magic.

Jane would have a hard time with this because if she could change things just enough to be with Tom, she would.

Demeter, Demeter doesn't like this question, its too close to what the Fates do and she doesn't want to make them angry.

Sameth wouldn't change anything, he'd hope that he could be braver in the past but unless he knows exactly how the spell works, he wouldn't. If someone explained all the specifics of it in a way that made sense to him, he might try and change something around the cricket attack.

William would make it rain more before Wade intersected with his family's life, maybe then they wouldn't have needed that money that much.

Tumnus wouldn't be sure since its big magic and he wouldn't want to change things enough that Lucy doesn't come to Narnia.

The Pirate King wouldn't change a thing.

Oh and Gen's username is genarti, you've got an extra t in there.

Edited 2012-09-06 14:10 (UTC)

Oh and Gen's username is genarti, you've got an extra t in there.

Oh thanks! See what happens when I post without coffee?

Ray: His wife is a Time Lord. If he went with this offer, he'd do it after discussing it with Romana for a good few months first. He's got enough time for that, there's a TARDIS involved.
Gordon: Is very quietly going to go back in time to when young Wallace Breen was looking at his educational options and convince the kid to go into art or music or theater or something instead. The Black Mesa Incident was just the culmination of a lot of work on Black Mesa's part- Gordon found how many bodies in HEV suits when he went to Xen?- so changing that one day would only postpone the inevitable, but Black Mesa has a chance (albeit a small one) at sanity without Breen- and Aperture Science might not be quite as insane without Black Mesa as a competitor.
Adrian: …. I don't think I should say what he'd do in a public forum.
Ellen: BAD THINGS HAPPEN WHEN YOU TRY TO CHANGE HISTORY
ALWAYS
ALWAYS ALWAYS
DON'T YOU PEOPLE READ COMIC BOOKS
CHANGING HISTORY JUST MAKES IT WORSE AND THEN SOMEONE FROM THE CHRONO-PATROL SHOWS UP TO FIX WHAT YOU DID AND PROBABLY WIPE YOU OUT OF EXISTENCE IN THE PROCESS
ALWAYS
… but, um, she might possibly try really hard to get cheap transistors onto the market sometime in the 1930s or 1940s. Lots and lots of them.
Mordin: Considers that possibility every time he tries to sleep, and every time he sees a krogan. He's never been able to come up with an answer.
Medic: Nah, he's good.
Arcade: Oh, God, get back to me in about a month and maybe I'll have an answer. He reads too much history and sociology to rush into this kind of thing one way or another.
Varric: The concept is completely unknown to him. This is…not something that has ever come up in stories in his world.
Thalestris: Would have her clan stay away from the Maeotian Lake for about a month during a certain time so she didn't go to Crete. Simple enough, no?

Ahahaha. Aha. WHERE DO I START.

Let's begin with Emma. Who would change the fact that she was abandoned as a child. Knowing the truth might change the nature of that wish, but the basic premise is there. And it would change, well, her entire canon. Had she grown up with one or both of her parents (or anyone else in the know, like in the goddamn PLAN) she would have grown up knowing she was the savior and believing in the curse. Oh, and she'd be a whole lot less jaded.

Danny's backstory is going to get clarified a little further this season, and though I'm not sure he'd admit it, ever, he would probably try to change things so he and Rachel never split up. Which would take him out of canon entirely, since he'd have no reason to be in Hawaii.

Caspian would save his parents from being murdered by his uncle. Thanks, Miraz. Of course, that would probably mean he'd never meet the Pevensies, and Old Narnia might never have resurfaced. He'd still be king, but not a king who needs to reunite and rebuild a country.

Jack would go back to that moment he saw Ennis walking away in his rear view mirror and turn that truck right the fuck around. It woul probably mean no Lureen, no Alma. Maybe him and Ennis working on his dads ranch. Or it could still have ended in tragedy. Either way, that's the one moment he regrets.

Wolfwood would go back further and make sure the colonists never crashed at all. If that means killing Knives as a child, so be it. He'd wipe out their whole history on Gunsmoke, give them a chance to make a haven for themselves in some paradise somewhere far away.

Edited 2012-09-06 13:46 (UTC)

All I have to say about poor Emma's situation is: SERIOUSLY, GEPETTO? (I can't blame Pinocchio too much. He was a scared kid. His dad, however...)

My thoughts on ~~yaoi~~ Brokeback Mountain: A lot less people would have ended up broken if Jack and Ennis had tried to stick it out on their own, even if it ended in tragedy. (I want there to be a vid of "Where Have All the Cowboys Gone?" about Alma.)

Felix hates time travel. However. The post-canon Milliversion of him would change a specific thing: he'd save Sheba's life.

I have absolutely no idea for Kain or Fluttershy. But Cranky would give his younger self the chance to see Matilda's note. (Seriously? You leave it on the inside of the door to the room where you're staying, and expect him to see it?)

Meg and Lily both reject the idea immediately, out of hand. That's not how it's supposed to work.

I can't think of anything Amy really wants to have be all that different about now, which means leaving then alone.

Remus would think very very very hard about trying to prevent his being bitten, and spend a lot of time telling himself that he really, really shouldn't. (He'd still want to, though, I think.)

And, canonically, Anna decides to do just this to go back in time and try to prevent Dean's and Sam's ever having been born. It, um, doesn't take. Or work out so good for her. :)

Ben is just shaking his head and doesn't want to answer. A very tiny voice does say he'd make it so he saw how much Sharon Ventura was hurting far before she ever gained real powers to he could stop her.

Kate Kane says she'd get armored gauntlets, at least ones that are knife resistant in the forearm.

Beast Boy says he'd save his mom.

Thalia is scowling at me but says she'd make sure she saw how much Luke was hurting and figure out a way to stop him from turning to Khronos.

Hank isn't there yet but he'd take back the awful things he said to Raven when he offered her the "cure".

Edited 2012-09-06 14:34 (UTC)

Claudia wouldn't change anything from her own life; canon events made her actually think through the consequences of the one thing she would have considered. Given that MacPherson gave Joshua the compass that got him stuck in the interdimensional space in the first place, and in light of the rest of the dude's style, he probably would have made off with the thing and gone on a reign of teleporting terror, if Joshua had gotten it to work all the way the first time. That? No so good.
If she changed anything at all, because she can be a romantic sometimes, she'd want to give Rebecca and Jack a shot at a proper happy ending, instead of this 'now he ded from Spine' bullshit.

While Red would be very tempted to want to stop the attack on her grandmother, there's a chance she'd give up sorting out three generations' worth of curse in favor of 'so whatever made Her Majesty so heartless? undo that.'

For the others:

Cata would cheerfully stop at never having ended up whitewashed; Sam would be tempted to either stop Mizzamir much, much sooner or at least prevent his mother's first rape (as he doubts she'd be in any position to get raped the second time, without the first), until Kaylana yelled at him about how stupid either would be. Not least because either of those things would, you know. PREVENT SAM'S CONCEPTION.

Apollo wouldn't bother, though he'd briefly be tempted to make sure the Daphne incident didn't happen.

I don't think Imp would bother. The music's tied up in how he got out of Llamedos, and from there he's working on making it in his own right; that's worth it.

Regulus would research the heck out of it before he made any sudden decisions, but he just might go back and let the Sorting Hat go ahead with its first pick for him (Ravenclaw). As things stand now he's fairly certain his father would've kept his mother from killing him his first Christmas hols home.

Edited (cleanin' up the whitetext) 2012-09-06 15:29 (UTC)

There really is only one obvious thing that Tommy would change in his world's history.

But if not that, then he'd go back to before it, and not be such a shitty dad and husband. And so that maybe down the line, it would make everything else relatively easier to deal with.

My déja vu sense is tingling, though I can't pin it to a specific DE.

Anyhow, I thought I knew the answer for Amascut; If she could, if she knew better at the time, she would have done everything she could have to keep her brother home all those centuries ago. They both were involved, back then, in a war against a rival god and his followers. Her brother left to wander the multiverse for help while she stayed and held the line. Help was found, and they saved their lands, but the help her brother had found were the Mahjarrat. Things went downhill from there.

But if she had kept him home, they might have lost the war. It is when she gets to this point that she starts vacillating between keeping her brother home and wishing she was never born. She could have shown him what humanity was capable of doing, especially with divine help, but would it have been enough?

Augh, now I have feels.

It hasn't happened to Mark yet. You'll know it when you see it.

Henry: the curse never happened, he grew up with Emma, or he grew up with anyone not Regina. (Canon plot is destroyed by any of these.) (I swear I will write his app today.)

Lois: her mom lived. (Canon is more or less unchanged, she just grows up happier.)

Tavi: has actually discussed this with Max, in the Bar. Abstractly, academically, he knows he shouldn't because he can't predict or control all the variables. (Both he and Max mean an implicit 'even he.') Deep down, though, he wishes Septimus had lived so Alera would be more stable; that he had known his parents (hello, irony); that his cousins (and their mom) had lived; that his crafting would behave normally; and that he hadn't accidentally woken the Vord. And each of these would destroy some or all of canon plot.

Yes, he'd change something. He wouldn't walk into that farmhouse on his own. Because all things considered, he'd rather not be dead.

ETA: I should really state the obvious and say, YES for both Bruce and Harry. Obviously. Both of whom are not so much cool with the parents being dead.

Edited 2012-09-06 17:59 (UTC)

I feel like a horrible person for thinking, "But Joe Chill is arguably one of three people to save the DCU."

I'll have to take your word for it! He was cool for the few minutes he was in the movie...and that's all I know about him.

Belatedly: Joe Chill killed Thomas and Martha Wayne. This led to Batman's existence.

He and Jonathan and Martha Kent are the reasons that universe doesn't explode messily.

...

I would do my best to make sure Mrs Wayne was aware of just what her son had been through, and the way it had affected him.

<3333333333333 ALFRED.

[OOC: SQUEEE]

Hmmm...

Archie and Gus I'm not sure on.

Henry would have fought harder to keep Madeline, he still blames himself for the divorce even though she's the one that walked away. I think ultimately they still would have divorced, but he can't help but think there was something he could do to fix things.

Michael would go back and stop himself from getting burned, obviously. Which would functionally eliminate canon.

*points down to Shawn's*

ALL THE FEELS. Dang show. XD

Gaeta, hands-down, would make sure the Colonies were never destroyed. You don't even have to ask. Even if things wound up worse for him personally, twenty billion other people would still be alive.

Bolin would be pretty cool with having his parents back -- even if, by this point, he's lived almost twice as long without them as he did with them. He may not remember them too well, but come on: they're his parents.

The Trickster knows it's pretty damn pointless to try and go back to change anything. It's been written the way it played out for way too long.

And Olivia? Yeah, she assumes the risks outweigh the reward; her childhood was rough, but she coped with it fine in the end. Changing it for the sake of a maybe, especially when she's seen what kind of damage such a change might cause (HI, WALTER AND PETER), doesn't seem like the best idea.

Most of my characters are for some reason really zen about the whole 'things I cannot change' notion, either because that's just their disposition (Asami), or they're really cynical and jaded (Manny). They all go to great lengths to change the things they can, but for whatever reason, they seem to have a good sense distinguishing among those things. The only exception is Leslie, as she really likes to think she can fix anything.

So most of them are just making 'well, I can't' responses to me on this. Like, Asami would like to save her mother – or maybe less selfishly, prevent the Hundred Year War or something – but she knows that's not going to happen. Her mother's death may become a lot more pertinent as she gets through canon, but if anything, it sort of strengthens the notion for her that she has to make peace with it rather than think she can do anything to change it. Because, well, she can't, and taking out her anger about it on people who had nothing to do with it isn't going to change that.

Manny also supposes he should say his death, or that he'd make it so Domino Hurley didn't exist, or that he'd undo whatever he did that means he has to work for the Department of Death, but it doesn't really seem like something worth considering.

Elle is kind of strange, considering time travel is possible in her world and changing the future is a pretty huge part of her canon, but she has a lot of difficulty... processing the idea of changing something that has already happened. She'll spout out all that stuff about how time travel is complicated and how you can mess things up and etc., but when it comes down to it, she just has difficulty fathoming the notion of things being different from how they are for her now. Her mind just doesn't let it compute very easily. I mean, she'd sure like it if her father's response to her manifesting her powers hadn't been to let her be tortured in a lab and then mindwiped about it, and she can understand the value of what that cost her, but at the same time, she just can't really comprehend what her alternative life would have been like, because it's so foreign to her. It's like she can sort of see it, but there's this big glass partition between her and it, and that makes her feel that no matter what, she can never really be part of it.

Leslie, however, tends to be determined and not always focused on the big picture, so she's the only one of mine that would actively consider such a thing. While her father's death is the most obvious thing in her own life she'd want to change, she'd probably make up a whole mess of charts and binders and other assessments trying to decide what thing in the whole of history she could change that would have the greatest positive result and least number of unintended consequences. Of course, Leslie, the problem with unintended consequences is that you don't intend them! But she doesn't always... get that.

And now to actual tagging! Yes.

Edited 2012-09-06 18:20 (UTC)

Funny how this DE coincided with Elle and Tommy's conversation. (Sorry if he's being a bummer, though -- he is made of angst.)

...Oh hell.
When do you ask? 'Cause her willingness and the point she'd reach for swing around so, so much depending on where you are in canon.

Time it right and she'd probably risk getting rid of Vandal Savage. Most of her life though, Artemis would be oh so willing to keep her Mom from falling and from there things change.

...Hylia eradicates Demise completely the first time. So he can still be living in Skyloft with Zelda.

Stuart wishes he had insisted he get on that bike instead of Irwin, because even if nothing else went unchanged, he really rather would have Hector still alive.

With my others, they haven't reached their lowest points of canon yet; but Merlin will have regrets about his father, and Steve about Bucky, and Bilbo about Lake Town and the war of the seven armies.

When it comes to big, world-changing events, it's hard to say how to prevent or fix them. To prevent WWII you'd need to prevent WWI, and preventing that goes back so long into so many countries' rivalries and territorialism...

The green man is smiling wisely and playing cat's cradle. Take that how you will.

Twilight has been there and done that and discovered that she couldn't change diddly-squat, so she will politely decline.

Edited 2012-09-06 21:38 (UTC)

Having asked this question, I don't have good answers for a lot of mine!

River... once upon a time, she'd have opted in a heartbeat to not go to the Academy. But she's made her peace with that, and with the upsides as well as the downsides of what it gave her. I'm not sure if she'd go back further to prevent the Academy from ever being created or the can-toi from crossing over, but she'd definitely think hard about it. (Well, she probably wouldn't really because she learned really well from Roland Deschain that changing the past leads to bad stuff, and she might be willing to bring that cost on herself but not on the other people affected. But if you gave her some sort of assurance that this was exempt from that time-split effect.)

Regan, however, has no such qualms. She'd undo sending River to the Academy without a second thought.

Thor would change whatever drove Loki to become a family-denying vicious supervillain. Except he's not sure what that is -- even in his heart, deep down where any disloyal thoughts like "maybe Dad should have told Loki that he was an adopted frost giant...?" are buried, he's not sure. Lacking that certainty, he'd change it so Loki didn't fall from the Bifrost. In that case, well... maybe they'd have reconciled, or maybe Loki would have spent a lot of time lashing out in Asgard in pettier ways, or maybe he'd have fled Asgard anyway and somehow ended up in the void. He probably wouldn't have fallen into the Chitauri world in the same way, though, and that would change canon.

Trowa... hrm. He has a lot of regrets, secretly, but a lot of good came out of the way things went down, and he wouldn't want to change that. If he changed anything, it would be farther back in his world's history, to de-escalate some of the Earth-vs-colonies conflict, but honestly I think Trowa's enough of a cynic that he'd figure that would have good odds of turning out worse. He probably wouldn't change anything.

Although he'd ask if he could hold the option in reserve for potential later use.

Clare would undo Teresa's death. In a heartbeat.

Uzura is pretty okay with her world, and has very little personal history before you get back to a time when she was genuinely a different person. So she wouldn't do anything.

Alanna would have used her Gift to save her friend Francis. She was afraid to use it, afraid she would lose control, and Francis died.

Jim would not have suggested capturing the brumbies. Instead he would have gone along with his father's plan to hire out in the flats, and thus his father would still be alive.

Thayet would have stayed and tried to save her mother.

Grace would have managed to stay sober that one night so she wouldn't have had to call her sister hungover and beg off babysitting Clay. Her sister wouldn't have had to wait a day to go get Clay's Social Security card. Her sister would still be alive.

*looks at list*

...I'm sensing a theme.

Fry actually got a choice like this in canon (details here, because I'm slightly addicted to the Futurama wiki >.>) and basically decided that he likes his life as it is.

(ETA: It sort of amuses me how often I answer a DE for Fry with "Hey, that happened in canon!" >.>)

Shawn doesn't have many regrets, but the whole estrangement thing between him and his dad weighs on him a bit now that he's got some perspective on it. If he could do it over again, he'd try to leave on slightly better terms. (... and then he'd stop by 1989 and ask Gus where they buried that time capsule...)

Brisco has too much experience with weirdness to want to meddle with the past, but if he COULD change something, it'd be his mom's death.

Edited 2012-09-07 06:03 (UTC)

He could at least bring Seymour back. ._.

WHYYYYY THAT EPISODE

The movie makes it better!

.... sort of. >.>

I AM THE LATEST

But Sam would have kept his dad from disappearing, no contest.

Jack...

Jack probably wouldn't change anything, right now.

If he had the option, though, he'd go back and watch these events as an external observer.

Clementine would avoid community college and thus her debt. She'd also avoid Steed, who turned out to be a huge disappointment as a romantic partner.

Juliet would heal her relationship with her father earlier. And she'd avoid getting captured by Yang.

Dixie wouldn't change a thing, except maybe her time with Doc. But generally, no regrets.

Pinkie would only change the way she freaked out over Gummy's party.

DE: Great, but let's try that once more

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Re: Bruce

Re: Bruce

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