I want to just say this video impressed me so much that I literally dreamed of it today 1 year after watching it. I just woke up thinking about the part "through the flash". In my dream I was the killer and after an eternity stopped be violent, only for another person to start doing what the killer did and such continue the cycle but with me as the victim now. It was... an experience.
I don't know if you're still following this, but I recently heard of a little RPG game called "In Stars and Time", that came out not too long ago, that I believe does the time loop thing pretty well.
I'm gonna be the guy who brings up Undertale and say that Jacob's ruminations on what happens when the looper spends so much of their time being evil and finally gets out of the loop reminds me of the consequences of murdering everyone in the Underground, where the True Pacifist ending is forever spoiled because the player demonstrated that they see the characters for their gameplay functions and not their personalities by displaying zero empathy toward them.
You know what's a revelatory moment in Deathloop? When you're playing multiplayer with a friend, and you realise *nothing is forcing you to kill the other player* And suddenly you decide to turn the game into a cooperative experience with Julianna and colt working together to set up fun things.
I recently picked up Deathloop and I had this experience with a much more seasoned Julianna that "invaded" my game. I don't want to give any spoilers so I won't go into details I would otherwise, but basically the Julianna invaded me, shot at me a few times, then ran off. I was assuming she was off hiding to ambush me later, but she actually ran to the visionary of the level and waited for me. When I got there, she just killed him for me and then (when I was unsure of what I should do since she was being friendly) kept lightly shooting me every few seconds and staring at the ground. When I finally realized she wanted me to kill her, I did and she dropped some really good gear. It felt like some far future Julianna coming back to help a fledgling Colt at the beginning of his time loop journey. But then the next Julianna was back to trying to kill me. Something about how Deathloop creates in-universe lore to how time loops and parallel universes affect the gameplay styles of different players is so interesting to me. It's like... This version of Julianna plays differently because she is only on her twentieth loop rather than her two-hundredth. This one is experimenting with befriending Colt rather than antagonizing him. This one just experienced some charity and wants to pay it forward. It turns player agency into additional opportunities character building.
@ashy Team Fortress 2 has a large subculture of "Friendlies" who use taunts, voicelines, killbinds and non-lethal weapons to peacefully communicate and have fun with everyone on the server regardless of which team they're on.
That happened to me the other day. I shot at her a bit but they she started nodding and teabagging so I stopped shooting. Then she led me to the reactor room and killed a lot of the eternalnists and took down the visionary for me. Then she showed me all the clues I had to pick up. Then she led me to the reactor and I cut the wrong wire so I blew up and she completed her mission by killing me. I had no idea what was going on at the time but she must have known I couldn't have the wire code considering she led me to the other objectives. That Julianna was in character the entire time...
"I could kill all one hundred and sixteen people on my cluster in one hour and twenty-two minutes." That wording is chillingly reminiscent of a speedrun.
This comment especially struck a chord with me; I enjoy playing Hitman “wipe out the whole level” sort of runs, scouring the map from top to bottom, sometimes with a meticulously honed strategy of gradual buildup, picking off stragglers and the isolated, sometimes just going in guns blazing. It wasn’t out of service to a goal like in speedrunning, it just felt good.
Now I wish there was a game where killing everyone as quick as possible was the objective but the npcs addapted, since the loop happened for everyone, one hour and twenty two minutes might not be the most optimal time, but doing it any faster might be impossible since everyone else could also addapt. There would be a time where everyone just gave up, giving you the quickest time, but would you really count that?
@@bbittercoffee There is a game kinda like this, basically when the lights are on the AI learns what you do (shooting, running, jumping, vaulting over knee high obstacles) but if the lights are off they don't learn shit so taking it slow while the lights on makes the game easy but fuck off with that shit coz I'm bored lmao. So every time you do shit and die they learn and the game gets progressively harder. It's called Echo and I'd highly recommend giving it a go.
@@bbittercoffee SCP-1733 goes in a similar way. Not a videogame, but a story. It was meant to be a recording to show the multiple ways a basketball game would go, but then things become... really, really, really disturbing. Not only do the basketball players all remember the time loop, but so do the commentators, but the audiences and all workers as well. It devolves at first into stalemale matches, then into fearful distress, then into suicides, then into sacrifices and fanaticism, and... into a red light.
The worst part about a time loop is, you don’t know if it will stop. If the loop stops on the one time where you commit a mass genocide or the time that you killed your loved ones, how could you possibly live with yourself? And what if you don’t know if the loop has even ended or not? The only way to know - is if you die.
i thought this was going to be a bigger thing on the deathloop ending considering it would actually be bad for colt to murder everyone on that island. but the whole thing resets and everyone on the island seems wake up knowing the loop is over so the violence immediately comes to an end. i found that ending to be just a little too clean and convenient.
The author of the novel Edge of Tomorrow is based on was also heavily inspired by his experiences dying in video games over and over again. So the comparison is perfectly apt.
I always thought Edge of Tomorrow was good, but the tension at the end of the movie was dumb. Like bro, they know where to find an Alpha to get the time powers back, the water place he got ambushed at when they tried to take his power from him. Just go there again but this time knowing about the ambush and specifically targeting the ambush to get it back, then do the finale with lower stakes.
It hasn't been mentionned, but undertale talk about time loop nihilism. Flowey and Chara are reflections of the player dealing with time loop nihilism. One of the best example is the first boss, Toriel. A new player, used to how games usually works will kill her. Then flowey appears, mocks the player for having murdered her. A clever new player will reload his last save and repeat until he finds out how to spare her and continue his adventure. Then flowey appears again and say "I know what you did. You murdered her.".
That moment when Flowey told me he knew that I had originally murdered Toriel was when I realized just how much I had underestimated Undertale at first.
The best time loop story I've experienced was a tabletop RPG game my best friend ran. We were a group of normal people who happened to be returning to the small remote town (in the south-western USA in 1947) we grew up in on the same train. Things went fairly normally, with us catching up with our families, making progress on the various tasks that brought us back to town (my character was an architect returning home to execute his parent's estate, another was a soldier home on leave, another was a reporter following a hot story, another a travelling salesman). The next day was the yearly town harvest festival with a fete, party etc, which we all attended. There was an unseasonable fog which worsened over the course of the evening, until just as the party was due to start in earnest great tentacles and mouths made of solid mist materialised from the sky and started killing everyone in town. Beckoned by a strange hooded figure we fled to the town's clock tower, where we found an incongruous piano, which the monk played for us as the mist creatures came crashing in and killed us....then we found ourselves stood on the train platform on the morning of the previous day as if nothing had happened. Over about 6 months of play we killed people and saw them killed, uncovered horrific secrets about the town going back generations, had our loved ones wiped from existence by a monster that preyed on loneliness, uncovered a cult that worshipped that monster, found their lair under the town, saw the hundreds of thousands of human teeth that they had ripped from the screaming mouths of their sacrifices that now covered the floor of the cave like gravel. What really made it work was the system the GM had picked- we were playing Unknown Armies 3rd edition, which is completely focused on mechanically representing how your characters changed when exposed to horrible stimuli. You don't have stats like in D&D, you have seven 'meters', which are like little progress bars for different types of trauma. Each meter has a 'healthy' and 'unhealthy' skill attached, which are inversely proportionate to each other based on how full that trauma meter is- for example, one of the meters is Violence. Its associated skills are Connect (empathy, persuasion) and Struggle (aptitude for physical violence). As your characters experience/commit more violent events their violence meter will fill, raising their Struggle and lowering their Connect skills. In other words in the actual mechanics of the game the more violence you witness and commit the better you get at solving problems with violence and and the worse you get at talking things out like empathetic human beings. Our characters were completely different people when we finished, not just in roleplay but actually in the mechanics of the game. My character had fled the town decades ago to escape his family's obsession with the occult, but by the time we were done he had become quite the scholar of forgotten lore at the expense of losing the reputation, status and prestige that he had enjoyed at the start of the game. The soldier character had started with a few violence notches already ticked- by the end of the game he had filled his violence meter and basically couldn't function in normal society. Unfortunately for Jacob, we made some bad choices and believed the wrong people and while we were able to break the loop and save the town our characters ended up getting unpersoned like the monster's victims so we didn't get to find out how they coped with the post-loop world. I remember saying it was for the best that my character had been erased because his wife back in New York would never have taken back the man he had become.
Dude. That's incredible. The genius that is poured into TTRPGs for the benefit of a few friends around a table is insane, without parallel in any other medium. Sometimes it feels like the Mona Lisa is painted, flipped round for the subject to enjoy, then shelved, and the world never finding out.
You have awesome friends and a great DM. I have always wanted to DM a campaign and this helps motivate me to start writing and planning for the day I do.
Hey Jacob! I just came back from an interview with the author of the Through the Flash story! It was one of the books selected for us to read for one of our english classes. He mentioned your video in the interview and how much he loves your work. I just wanted you to know that the person whose work you love, also loves your work. Cheers and keep it up!
One of the most interesting aspects of Deathloop is actually the fact that at some point, Juliana has to have realized that she's doomed to fail. It doesn't matter if she achieves victory millions of times across what would've been millions of years; there is no scenario in which she can successfully protect the loop because in protecting the loop, Cole is given another chance to break it. Meanwhile, Cole only has to break it once.
Fun facts tho.... You don't have to be you for the rest of your life. Fair warning tho, it's not easy and things get crazy sometimes.... But you can change yourself every day if ya wanna
Jacob, I'm sorry, but you couldn't pad an extra 10 seconds to the first half to make it so you say "12 minutes" at exactly 12 minutes into the video? I'll never forgive you
"At first, I used my powers for good. I became 'friends' with everyone. I solved all their problems flawlessly. Their companionship was amusing... For a while. As time repeated, people proved themselves predictable. What would this person say if I gave them this? What would they do if I said this to them? Once you know the answer, that's it. That's all they are. It all started because I was curious. Curious what would happen if I killed them. 'I don't like this', I told myself, 'I'm just doing this because I HAVE to know what happens.' Ha ha ha... What an excuse. Nowadays, even that's grown tiring. You understand, I've done everything this world has to offer. I've read every book. I've burned every book. I've won every game. I've lost every game. I've appeased everyone. I've killed everyone. Sets of numbers... Lines of dialogue... I've seen them all..." -an evil flower.
I actually think the idea of someone being stuck in a death loop kinda situation by the government as a way to forcefully train him into being a super soldier would be an interesting idea for a story.
This reminds me of that one episode of Stargate SG:1 where Teal'c gets suck in a training simulation that is effectively a time loop. But it's not quite a perfect time loop since the difficulty progressively increases making progress incredibly challenging.
i don't think it will work, because the reason he got so good is that everything is predictable, when out of the loop you insert unpredictability again... this would have the same effect as the time chamber for dragon ball as, you would have infinite time to train a specific skill, but it wound't work like you are thinking
@@VictorTheLegend Then you can insert randomness into the time loop. Make the simulation random (which can be done by utilizing a tracker to track Teal'c's body movements then using the data to formulate "randomness").
My personal favourite type of time loop is one introduced to me in a Creepypasta: Each day can repeat any number of times, so any given day could be the last time that particular one is repeated, which will be the "real" one going forward, so there is always a chance that your actions could have lasting consequences
I think Outer Wilds is a really interesting contrast to the games mentioned here - in deathloop you have to become the perfect murderer, figure out how to precisely weave your way through a bloody battlefield and execute your targets. In 12 minutes the mystery is different, but the methods are much the same. You become callous and content with killing or torturing your way through the conundrum, doing horrible cruelty in the hopes that you might get a scrap of new information. In Outer Wilds, there's a mystery, but to solve it you have to become the perfect scholar. You need to be a historian, an explorer, a pilot, but not once does the game ask you (or, indeed, allow you) to kill. And I think because of this, instead of seeing the loop as a playground I started to see it as a kind of meditation. I explored all of the planets, seeing every island on Giant's Deep, every building on Brittle Hollow, every nook and cranny of Ember Twin. There is death present, sure, but it's in the form of the Nomai skeletons laying around in almost random places. I grew to be attached to the Nomai in a way, even being a species wiped out thousands or millions of years ago. Some of the skeletons I could name, some I could only guess. I mourned these people, rich with culture and thoughts and feelings of their own, who I would never get to meet. Instead of figuring out which ways I could best kill people, I had to figure out which parts of the planets I was yet to explore, which records I hadn't read. And in all of these, I couldn't help but become enamoured with the tiny little slice of the universe I was confined to. All of these little planets and moons and buildings were brimming with details, and I learned all of them eventually. The time loop gave me freedom to appreciate the world in all of its little parts, the parts that we often have to skip over and ignore, pushed ever forwards as we are. If the end music started while I was on one of the Hourglass Twins, I'd go and comfort Chert, roasting a couple marshmallows by the fire before watching the supernova. If I was on Brittle Hollow, I'd often jump through the black hole to watch it happen. I usually only had about 3 minutes of oxygen left and little fuel, but 3 minutes of oxygen might as well be a hundred years for all that it would change. I'd sit there, out by the white hole, and just watch the sun expand and consume, in a kind of contented, complacent way. SPOILERS: I think that's partially why, in the ending, I was so able to die. I had explored the loop to its fullest, had seen all there was to see. I had become one of the only living people bearing the memory of the Nomai, and I was sort of... done? Having seen all I could, I was happy to simply pack up and leave all of it to whoever came next.
I was about to comment that Outer Wilds feels like an almost-direct address to this problem. It encourages you to live life to the fullest, and when you have literally done that, it gives you the keys to the metaphorical cell. "You've solved the puzzle, you're free to go. There's nothing else for you here. You've learned it all." It even takes on a meta quality where you, the PLAYER, are now the sole repository for the history of 2 species, both long since erased from the galaxy. Instead of the protagonist learning to deal with it, the player grapples with the enormity of what they've done, and what it's done back to them.
@@herpderptheshep believe it or not the philosophy behind time loops called "eternal recurrence" basically says that once you understand your life is on rails and part of an endless loop, you can stop worrying about deeper more complex issues and just focus on the present, the now. and what brings you personal joy. this comes from that most upbeat of philosophers.....Nietzsche lol
I love Outer Wilds. At first I found myself becoming frustrated when I'd mess up: I often miscalculated my jumps, or allowed my spaceship to drift away, faster than I could hope to follow. But slowly I came to realise that there was no need for frustration. Whether I discovered a whole new planet or stumbled into ghost matter, the loop would end the same way. I would always have a chance to try again. And it was so relaxing in a way. It made me push myself further, take more risks, race the sands, all because I couldn't fail. It's wonderful.
I played OW and it's a decent time loop but i really wish the game had given better directions for what to do. I was so confused about what I should do next and was very angry about the time loop that I just started using a walkthrough guide to tell me everything that i should do next. The ending was also kind of a downer. I'm saying it's a bad game, don't @ me. I just didn't like parts of it. The quantum stuff annoyed me because it isn't at all how quantum mechanics works and the time loop being 22 minutes was agonizingly restrictive. My BF kept asking me what I thought of this or that or how pretty a place was. But I'm the kind of person who will spend an hour or real world time staring at a skybox because the textures are pretty. Or looking at a mountain or something. OW just didn't give me the time I needed to enjoy it. I felt rushed and pushed and as a result I rushed and pushed through it yo such a degree that i barely even remember anything about the game beyond the broad strokes. Next time I play it though i think I'll use cheat software or something to make sure the time loop never happens.
"When they cry," the anime is a time loop with a girl that's lived thousands of years of seeing her family and friends killed in horrific ways. After the time loop is stopped at the end of the series, there is an extra ova of her life after. She suffers from ptsd and the anime trys to see if it's possible to restore her childlike innocence.
I remember hearing the OPs and Endings. The comments for them made me so sad, especially seeing some clips where it’s really depressing. I couldn’t find the anime name, so I just know the soundtracks.
@@bobroctopus2210 Yeah, I feel like it deals with the ramifications of time loops in a very interesting way. He loses all sense of self-love because he sees himself not as Subaru, but rather as return by death because he thinks he's nothing without this power. He takes everyone's pain because he has this power. Probably one of my favorite ways of seeing a time travel story show the ramifications of someone who's suffered that much because of time loops.
Sometimes i forgot how little media reflects on the aftereffects of time loops. I’ve been spoiled by the hundreds of time loop fanfics that deal with those ramifications so if anyone ever gets that desire then that’s where I’d recommend you go. It’s all the nihilism, trauma, horror, and introspection you could ever want and usually at least 50k words!
Something like this maybe: In a second person perspective in one of these iterations, an average guy of no particular repute or distinction suddenly seems to develop borderline inhuman aptitude in a broad array of skills, many mundane, others totally unexpected given their background, and a personality change on top, practically out of the blue. This person also seems suspiciously aware of the consequences of their actions, but appears to totally lack any emotional connection to them, to the extent of effectively having precognition. For a single day, this man wreaks indescribable havoc with total abandon, racking up a vast list of charges and becoming an overnight legend for the worse. Once the day is through, that same man of two days ago is back, as if nothing has happened. He is promptly dealt with by police/military, and this person (if they survive) and those around them (family, coworkers, employer/ees and victims have to both come to terms with this incident and clean up the fallout.
The ur-example of timeloop fics is "The Infinite Loops", of which I've only read some of Innortal's original universes and can't therefore recommend anything else. Another one I've been reading recently is "Not this time, Fate", by Coeur Al'Aram, a RWBY fic about Jaune trying to get things right, failing every time and after a few thousand years finally deciding to take a vacation (it doesn't work too well). And one that's basically finished but the author still hasn't posted the last chapter is the aptly-named "Dialogue Options and Perfecting Endings", by alohaflower, a BnHA fic about Aizawa reliving the week before USJ. I haven't read too many fanfics with timeloops, but that's what I could remember right now Edit: as a bonus, a fic that's not about a time loop but might as well be is "See you soon" by PurpleDragon6. It's an Infinity Train fic about Grace (a girl who lived basically as if she was inside a loop anyway) and her life after she got out and met someone suspiciously similar to her best friend who died.
"Through the Flash unlike Deathloop, unlike Twelve Minutes, is a story about how your actions create an impression upon you, ALWAYS, even if no one else remembers it or yesterday is the same as tomorrow, being a person who performs great violence or cruelty means you are a person capable of performing great violence or cruelty " After watching almost all of your videos I think this is the best messages you have ever said and one of the best I have ever heard.
Theres a fantastic story that covers this in the SCP mythos called "The Last Things Dr. Darryl Loyd Ever Did, in Chronological Order". It treads similar ground of 12 Minutes, but it explores how two people can spend their last 24 hours alive while also escaping a compromised SCP laboratory. It's a must read from me if you enjoy time loop stories about planning against the impossible, alongside some actual character development.
There was a line from Julianna where she inferred on some level that Colt might enjoy his rampages. At this point I'd developed a real affinity for clearing levels primarily using the machete, so it really resonated with me. Her routine affirmations that there was nothing truly like the Loop also kept recurring in my mind at which point I realized that Julianna had begun to feel like a vessel for the developers to address the player directly. In that context a lot of the game felt like a metanarrative on the nature of play and game completion. After breaking the loop I still felt an urge to explore the game narratively and mechanically which I think fit perfectly with having enough comfort with the system to start invading other players. My goals now better aligned with Julianna's and I had her understanding of Black Reef. I knew exactly what Colts goals were and I was eager to disrupt them as mine had been disrupted time and time again. I wanted the loop to continue - I wanted to keep hunting. I was good at it. My mechanical journey with Deathloop had essentially carried me to the same narrative point that Julianna had reached by the time the game starts.
The view of Colt/Juliana as the sibling desires to complete a game and to keep playing it coming into conflict is a really interesting one - there's a lot of the game that is very unabashedly meta (and specifically in ways that turn the loop itself into a game space), so the core conflict also being about the way we play games feels only appropriate. Very good addition to the discussion.
@@vavakxnonexus i love that concept, since developers are often players themselves, so the internal styles and methods of gamers becoming commentary and a theme within a game is super cool. shows how far gaming has come
I've always felt that everything about Deathloop's setting was thought up with the explicit goal of getting the player accustomed to its hyperviolence, since so many people complained about feeling pressured away from high-chaos runs in Dishonored.
This video presents an interesting foil in my mind to "Dark Souls 3 is Thinking of Ending Things". In that video, we explore worlds which are dying, and what it means to even just exist in those worlds. This is a different kind of meaninglessness, one without finality, but still ultimately one where one's actions have no consequences. It's interesting how the removal of a time limit can cause much the same reaction in us as the strict enforcement of one.
this video is the question of "If nothing i do matters, what's stopping me from becoming a monster?" Dark Souls three is the question "If nothing i do prevents the end, what's stopping me from taking the monsters down with us?"
I was thinking the same thing @Zander M ! Both the video "Dark Souls 3 is Thinking of Ending Things" and this one I feel like deal with coming to grips with inevitable change. In dark souls 3, the world itself is in a time loop and we are shown how it has changed around us, instead of how we are changed personally because of it. Meanwhile, this video focuses on the individual's psyche changing through repetition in a fixed environment. I'm still stewing on how I want to interpret some of the bigger implications of this revelation, but I feel deep down that they might relate to the deconstruction of the idea of immortality in media. I want to watch the Simpsons video over again too because I also think it would provide another interesting perspective.
a game came out somewhat recently called "In Stars and Time". its a great example of "time loop nihilism", i think, in an interesting sort of way; id elaborate, but its best played blind. HIGHLY recommend, i played it recently and it changed me fundamentally i think. it has been on my mind constantly since. it is an amazing game. a work of art. the best thing ive ever experienced. the only video game to ever make me cry. i have so many thoughts about it and i dont know how to say them so ill just recommend it with passion. id love to see jacob talk about it, if it piques his interest.
Since this video's release, In Stars and Time came out!!! It's an RPG time loop game that REALLY delves into the psychological effects on the protagonist, memory loss, playing god, what happens after, etc. I HIGHLY recommend it!
Another spin on killing in a time loop can be found in the Arknights event "What Is Real?". The characters in this story are trapped in a painting where a small mountain village has one Very Bad Day and everyone is attacked and killed by monsters. The monsters only attack the fictional painted villagers, and when the day ends it loops back to the beginning and none of the villagers remember what happened. On the surface, it is pointless and even counterproductive to take the time every day to defend the village; the heroes trapped in the painting are under no threat and if they simply ignored the destruction of the village they could use that time to figure out how to escape. But they do it anyways, because even if its futile and pointless they just can't let people die when they could have saved them. It speaks strongly to the game's wider themes of how even in a doomed world that will constantly punish you for doing the right thing you should do the right thing anyways.
I agree, but the truly scary thing about time loops is that they'll probably break even the most resolute and good-hearted people. In Arknights they were only trapped there for... what, a week? Imagine being trapped through thousands - no, MILLIONS of loops. Anyone would try murdering people once. Timeloop Nihilism would be unavoidable, it's only a matter of time. It's a scary reminder that our brains aren't _designed_ to last forever. We need things to end, we need people and relationships to die eventually, or else they lose most of their meaning. I would love to see a story that mixes cosmic horror with Timeloop Nihilism, I think they're a perfect match. The unfeeling reality that not even our minds - not even emotions like love - can truly withstand infinity. And also that it's a _mercy_ that we can cope with things like death by giving life meaning. Imagine if we were immortal and death was meaningless. Everything we cared for would eventually becoming boring to us. Finality is blessing in that regard. Sorry for getting so deep.
@@bugjams I have to partly disagree here. It isn't death or the end of things per say that keeps things interesting, thus meaningful. It is change. The thing that makes everything boring in a time loop is that you are the only one in it, so only you change and everything else becomes stale and predictable. Were several people to get in the loop (provided they aren't terrible people and/or just hate each other's guts), would it really become boring for the ones involved? I think maybe the outside world would, but not the people in the loop, because they are all experiencing it so they all change. We don't NEED things to die, we need then to change, to renew themselves in some way. That is why I think people and relationships could, theoretically, remain interesting for indefinite amounts of time. Because those can change, thus remaining interesting. Of course, that is a bit oversimplified. That are plenty of people who refuse to change and relationships can easily end because of said change, so those are probably only lasting that long under VERY specific conditions (provided the people are open minded and reflective enough and that the changes into the relationship don't go a way that distances the parties? Maybe that is what it would take?). Sorry for kinda of ranting out. It is just that I REALLY dislike the narrative that death gives life meaning, mainly because (in my opinion) it doesn't and the vast majority, if not all, points that people make for that idea are founded on (again, in my opinion) weak assumptions. I do agree however that the conventional time loop (one person alone and looping on a scenario) does break anyone eventually (can't help but think about the ending of Doctor Strange where Strange literally pins his own resolve against Dormmamu's and uses the time loop to see who relents first when faced with the endless repetition and successfully makes even a interdimensional disaster type being like Dormmamu bend through this) and that time loop cosmic horror story sounds like a great mix.
I just went here to see Deathloop and Jacob Geller's top-tier Ted talk only then to be jumpscare by shut-in painter dragon event~ now I can't escape the Terra...
23:05 "it's you, it's you, it's you." ...despite everything, it's still you. I can't BELIEVE you made it through this video without bringing up undertale and the reset, which functionally IS a timeloop, and the way that Chara represents that state of timeloop nihilism you're talking about here :B
What I don't like about that game is how it tries to insinuate that the player is a bad person because they "don't care about the characters and just see them as fictional videogame code" but like that's exactly what they are, it's like if you wrote a book and the second half of that book would have everyone dying and in the end it'd be like "y did u read this book reader, now everyone is dead". (I personally only ever did a pacifist run because that storyline just doesn't interest me)
@@happyfullfridge I don't think genocide route tries make you feel like a bad person saying that is doing huge disservice to that route but I think toby fox wants you think about the violence and the pain your causing the characters kinda like hotline Miami and how often we can get desensitized towards it you have to remember these characters don't treat their lives like a game they treat it like lives and you killing all the life that made undertale feel great you make the characters terrified of you not to mention that undertale is about choices choices you made you chose to kill everyone choices matter and you will suffer the consequences. Plus if you really care about the characters of undertale the game doesn't have to make you a monster for killing them cause you probably already feel like one thanks for coming to my tedtalk
@@happyfullfridge Difference is you can't control a book's plot (for the most part) whereas you have to actively choose to do genocide. So a more accurate comparison would be if the book had an optional alternate ending that it explicitly warned you not to do and you did it anyway. And yeah, Undertale is still a game at the end of the day, but the Genocide Route is designed to make you reflect on your actions and it's the kind of direct self introspection only a game could inspire due to its interactivity. If a book or movie blamed you for the characters deaths it'd feel cheap, but when you actively have to kill them to progress the route, when it's your choices that bring about that ending, it actually carries some weight. Obviously they are still fictional video game code, but when you're playing the game you're meant to suspend that reality just like when you're watching a movie you suspend the reality that it's just random LEDs on a screen in order to get immersed into the world. I can never bring myself to complete Genocide personally. Closest I came was doing it up to the end of Sans and then resetting, I don't care about seeing the endings. I don't want to corrupt that world forever. (This is no judgement against people who do complete it. It's still a game at the end of the day)
@@theoncomingstorm7903 another factor is how distinctly the world changes with every action you take. When you kill everyone in genocide, you really *feel* the lack of monsters. Like how grilby's is completely empty (except sans or whatever).
I played this as background noise while doing chores, but your reference to Through the Flash had me dropping everything to borrow a copy of Friday Black. I couldn't put it down. This is literally the first book I've finished reading in months of pandemic slump. I'm noticing a lot of comments suggesting Undertale as an alternative example of a story that challenges time loop nihilism, but I'm so glad that you let Through the Flash take the spotlight and I love how both stories handle young protagonists committing cyclical violence. imo Ama's agonizing attempt to reclaim a sense of human accountability almost feels like a refutation of the finality of Undertale's No Mercy run - her interactions with Carl and the comfort she learns to find in her loved ones paint a slightly more hopeful picture for Chara and Flowey. Your content is always so forthright about referencing other mediums of fiction and scholarship and it really enriches your video game analyses. Thank you so, so much for exposing your audience to Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah's work. I can't wait to read more.
is through the flash the name of the mentioned short story in Friday Black? I realized a bit into his description of the time loop story where the protagonist indulged in hyperviolence to cope that i totally missed what it was called.
I just finished Friday Black myself. Through The Flash is by far my favorite story. I didn't expect the shocking violence but I get it. In Groundhog Day, the time loop lasted an estimated 35 years. Through The Flash seems to have been going on for much longer than that and I can't stop thinking about it.
22:50 this reminds me of a quote from undertale "despite everything its still you". its also funny cuz the premise of that game is the reseting of time to try to get the desired good end. its also poignant that even if you get the perfect pacifist route, if you even tried to get a genocide route, the game will give a jumpscare right and the end of the game to remind you that you did terrible things in an "alternate time line"
I feel like I had the opposite reaction to what Deathloop expected from me- I got absorbed into this world, the characters, the story, but once I learned everything about this place I got bored, extremely quickly. The playground of violence held to appeal to me. I really desperately wished that I could just walk through this world without people shooting at me on sight. I experienced that same lessening of caution, to the point where I would just walk around capping people in the head whenever I saw someone, but it didn't feel like the more interesting alternative- I found it really, really boring. When the ending choice came, I ended the loop without hesitation, because the loop held nothing of value to me. The prospect of eternal violence- What kind of life is that?
I ended the loop for the same reason, but on top of that I have a habit of picking the choice the character was working towards the whole time when it's offered. Like at the end of Life is Strange I continued to save Chloe because I spent the whole game doing just that and I wasn't going to give up.
@@JacobGeller It was especially hard to imagine preserving the loop after coming off of Echoes of the Eye, which in its own way (Going to be very vague here for anyone who hasn't played it yet) was all about the existential hollowness that comes from retreading the same thing over and over and over again and refusing to move on because you're afraid of experiencing what comes next... Julianna felt like the [REDACTED], exchanging meaningful existence so that she could be god of a consequentless playground forever
@@thrandompug2254 Yeah. I liked it too. And what better place to share a small comment-sized philosophy dissertation, than in the comments under a larger philosophy dissertation video? Let's all receive our doctorates now.
Edit; Thanks to David Hunt; ua-cam.com/video/dmLaoCImhjM/v-deo.html The quote isnt quite right below but! This feels so appropriate. "If nothing matters, why not just stab a bloke at the bar?" "Well, you know, maybe he wants to survive it. Maybe to him, it isnt the end of the world. Isnt it a bit selfish to assume that just because yours is ending, he will be fine dying for it?"
@@lorissantarsiero5849 i honestly cant remember, and it is paraphrased but.. i think its one of Jacobs other videos. Or a pyrocynical one. Its a quote from a documentary about what people would do in the end of the world. Hope it helps.
@@fuzzletheslime9423 ahh ok thanks. Yeah I thought this sounds like from a video game or something. Love pyrocynicals content. Sounds like something he'd probably quote considering his production value.
Even if time loops are physically impossible, I still think this video is a relevant discussion because time loops do serve a metaphorical purpose (typically, the innate value of goodness even if bad actions are consequence-free) and it can be relevant to a work's themes to see how the time loop is handled. At this point I have to say I've played neither game, but having read about both games and the discourse surrounding them, but it looks like Deathloop's "good ending" is Arcane acknowledging a common criticism that their stories aren't too good and distract from the gameplay, making the game more of a mission statement than a satisfying self-contained story. The criticisms of Twelve Minutes' time loop, meanwhile, sort of loop around to broader thematic criticisms that the game has received: that the game is pretentious and overly-self interested, where characters besides The Main Dude are treated as disposable props for The Dude's personal growth. So, spoilers for both games and Bioshock Infinite, but what's up with the incest thing? Did Bioshock Infinite open up a pandora's box where every game with time-travel shenanigans now needs to have weird incest themes? Sidenote: Burial At Sea centering itself around Elizabeth's guilt over killing a Little Sister makes it better at handling personal consequences through time loops/universe hopping than either of these games. I can't believe in the year 2021 I just said "Bioshock Infinite did this better" but here we are I guess. Either way, Through the Flash sounds incredible and I've got to read it.
There... Wasn't any incest in Infinite, though? The Lutece Twins are practically the same people with different faces and behave as such. Elizabeth was portrayed as the naïve, sheltered girl that had to be protected - your actions were far more like that of a mentor figure, if not an older sibling or father figure, than a knight-in-shining-armor that was saving their princess from the tower. Time-travel stories have used incest for deliberate squick/shock value for quite a while. Back To The Future and Futurama are two easy examples, and among the more humorous. Twelve Minutes actually treated incest pretty seriously and originally, even outside of the time-travel context.
@@TheUltimoSniper o yea there isnt like actual incest and more like,, weird vibes. this is anecdotal but i remember when the game came out a BUNCH of people shipped booker and elizabeth when they were half way through the game, usually accompanied by like a snarky comment along the lines of 'oh u havent finished the game huh'. plus it certainly is a Choice to make elizabeth the femme fatale to booker's noir detective in burial at sea. the thing that i found weird tho is how deathloop and infinite had, like, the same family twist, and 12 minutes, a game that doesn't actually involve time travel (and so doesnt have to do the comedy incest routine of something like back to the future) still involves incest. all im saying is that there was a solid month's worth of time where 2 games involving time loops and incest came out and thats a weird thing to happen twice
I'm not a fan of how Burial at the Sea concludes with the idea that the solution to a cycle of abuse, real or time-dimensional, is to sacrifice yourself (at the hand of another horrible person) so that someone might come and solve it all on your behalf. That one ought to pay for their sins in blood and call it fixed. I felt starkly aware that, no matter what they wanted to say, what they wanted to call canon, that the savior hero may turn out to be a horrible abuser. Burial at Sea puts its hopes upon Bioshock 1, a game where the protagonist might still choose to kill children and become a tyrant warlord.
@@TheGlooga The fact that people ship Booker and Elizabeth isn’t the game’s fault. People just saw a pair of opposite-gender protagonists and immediately thought “I want to see them fuck” but that doesn’t mean the game itself had incest vibes.
I think a critically underexplored aspect of time loop stories is the fear a character may feel that they will mess up this time and then time simply won't loop. What if a character started to feel that detachment from consequence, killed someone important, or just in any way invited some drastic consequence, and then just as they were expecting to wake up again, every action undone, it isn't. Time continues as it normally should, and they have to live with consequences they were expecting to be able to shirk.
Outer wilds have a moment like that. In order to end the game, you must stop the time loop and the evil part is that to complete the game, you must get passed 3 unkillable enemies afterward. If you die, there is no loop to bring you back. I mean, it's a video game so they don't actually delete your save and this loop is simply not saved but still...
Colt's amnesia and him repeating the loop in order to break out is him becoming a better person: on the course of actions you discover that Colt was a monster, while he was helping Frank, possibly only Aleksis, Weinje and Frank being worse. It is his salvation! One could even think that he regressed to before the first loop, ashe even doesn't remember where RAK was and what where the passwords.
I love Colt. This isn't really related (I think) but he's such a goofy main character, that I can't help but laugh and smile at his goofiness and his interactions with Julianna. Maybe that's partially because, like Colt, I'm very easily roasted and baited into trying to roast back.
Throughout this whole video, and my (admittedly brief) readthrough of the comments, there's one example that I think makes a strong addition to the discussion: Homura Akemi from Madoka Magica. And the reason she stands out in my mind is simple (slight spoilers for the show, but seriously, go watch it if you haven't yet. At the very least, watch episode 10): the loop isn't something forced upon her by fate or circumstance or what-have-you. For Homura, the time loop is a deliberate and conscious choice that she repeatedly takes in an effort to save her friend (the titular Madoka) from...a lot of things, but mostly self-sacrifice and the consequences thereof. All fate did was hand her a reset button, and she keeps pressing it out of a sheer stubborn refusal to confront and move past the death of her best friend. On the one hand, that sense of hedonistic nihilism you describe really isn't a factor for her, partly because any run could be the one where she saves Madoka (and thus, doesn't reset), and partly because the time loop is the longest I've seen in media (around a month and a half), so the consequences for "cutting loose" have a lot more time to set in. But at the same time, Homura's mind clearly decays over the course of her many runs, which is best exemplified in episode 10. Granted, we only see five of the over-a-hundred loops she's been in, but watching even the first two episodes knowing that she used to be a shy and depressed girl who once cared about the other characters enough to sacrifice her life for them...the difference speaks volumes. It's why I think Madoka Magica is among the best examples of a time-loop story ever written: it sidesteps that feeling of the character living consequence-free in an infinite playground, while still delving into the unimaginable trauma and emotional detachment that would stem from looping so many times. She doesn't kill anyone out of frustration or curiosity, because not even the insane trauma of her time as a Magical Girl can drive her to that point (though not for lack of trying), but she still doesn't spare any love or have much empathy for them, because she's watched them die horribly a hundred times now and NEEDS to lock those feelings away in order to function. She's basically in that pre-nihilistic, "this-time-it'll-work-for-sure" phase, just...permanently so. It's how I would probably react to being in a time loop, and how I THINK most video-game authors intend to have their protagonists react to a time loop, player behavior not withstanding. My thoughts on the subject are kinda half-baked, if I'm being honest, but I thought I'd contribute them anyway. I thought Homura made for an interesting point of comparison to the protagonists of Deathloop and Groundhog Day, and I didn't see her brought up anywhere else in the comments section. If anyone has any thoughts to add, please do so, I'm curious to hear them. In any case, thanks for reading! ^^
And then there's the movie (well, the "third" movie). But that's an interesting point about her never (or at least we're not given reason to believe) killing without need sure to succumbing to psychological degradation given that in at least one of the lips we do see one of the other mahou shoujou lose it (without having to deal with time loops but there's still plenty of trauma to go around) and start killing her allies.
One of the things that gets me about timeloops which I never see explored is "what happens to the universe after you loop"? Some stories like "Edge of Tomorrow" and "Higurashi: When They Cry" show people reacting to the looper dying, which kind of implies that they continue to exist even after each reset. So this means that for every time the main character does something fucked up or dies, they leave behind a universe that will have to bear the consequences of those actions. This is very odd, since most death-loop stories seem to end on the character arriving at the "good timeline", which is considered official and everyone lives happily ever after - which would be completely undermined if we believe that the previous loops keep existing. I wish there was a story where a death-looped person eventually encounters someone who can hop between parallel universes, and is urged to stop exploiting their "immortality", because it just keeps creating more and more "bad" timelines, all so that the main character can selfishly end up in the "good" timeline.
this concept is explored on an old college humor (I think?) video where some guy has a reset button and tries to take some girl home -- every time he presses it he's actually killing himself edit: so I actually searched for it, it's not a college humor short. It's just a short called "One-minute Time Machine". It's here on youtube: ua-cam.com/video/vBkBS4O3yvY/v-deo.html
Rick and Morty played with this idea in one of the more recent episodes. Though I think the looping person didn't realize this until after they'd stuck to a timeline.
What would also be cool would be, starting the story with a time looper they decent into chaos yada yada, but then we refocus on one of the bad universes, even just an episode or a level that focuses not on the progression of the looper but the consequences of the looper world they left behind, seeing how the well know characters suffer from the Loopers actions, seeing the differences between this incredibly "bad" world and a regular one, it just sounds like an interesting concept, what happens to the normal people after you murder everyone in the most traumatic ways then simply leave / die in that timeline
I think the extension to this I'm just now thinking about is where our Looper, who realizes the scale of the bad timelines he has created, tries not to break the loop, but to balance the cosmic scales by making things better. By making a thousand new "good" timelines. Of course, that's not atonement, the bad was still made, but exploiting the looper's position as the ultimate cosmic fulcrum, might make for an interesting story! Maybe then the quandary becomes "do I ever end the loop when I have the potential to make so many good timelines?" or like a butterfly effect type "is this helping at all?" Don't stop exploiting your "immortality", start exploiting it for "good" as it were.
there is an online story i finished last year that did address that. the ending is somewhat bittersweet after everything the main protagonist goes through. it's a favorite of mine and it's pretty decent and a fun read.
Y'know, I always find it interesting that the focus of time loop stories tends immediately towards "things you couldn't do outside a time loop" and "acquiring mastery of the looping environment". It's always about the externalities, and not the extra time in and of itself. One consequence of this is the assumption that the looper isn't affected by the events, that they're consequence-free, but it goes deeper than that; Groundhog Day features the protagonist learning ice sculpture but it's mostly just implied offscreen and used as a payoff for the actual plot. There are a few web serials like Mother of Learning and The Menocht Loop that I've seen where the protagonist's process of learning and self-refinement is central...but it's still about learning in order to escape the loop, not for its own sake. I dunno. I feel like the first thing I'd do in this sort of situation is take advantage of the infinity to add to myself as far as I could, and THEN start looking at the externals, and it feels weird to me that every other time this comes up it's the externals first and then the internals only as a way of better interfacing with them.
yeah if i was in a time loop id probably build up skills as much as i could in the time-loop. all my obligations are effectively on pause so i could spend all my time practicing art or whatever.
I think it also says A LOT about how some of the authors view human nature that a surprising number of time loop stories include people jumping to mastering violence just because. Like, if I was in this situation, there's a LONG list of things (including "go back to bed and spend the entire day sleeping") that I'd go for first.
Not to be a shill, and I don't know your opinions on musicals, but Groundhog Day happens to also be a musical, whose script is written by Danny Rubin, the original co-screenwriter for the movie. It's very good and essentially Danny revisiting and revising his old work. There's a good amount of refurbishing to the old writing of the arc. Point is, there's a song that sounds like exactly what you're describing: "If I Had My Time Again," sung by the co-producer Rita Hanson where she describes all the self-bettering and checking off of bucket list items she'd do given the opportunity, like learning to dance and reading a lot and opening every door, which is what gets Phil to do the same and gets him out of his suicide spiral. He stops looking for a way out and starts just doing stuff for its own sake. GHD does of course result in Phil's escape, but by the time that happens, he'd long since committed himself pretty fully to just... doing things and having hobbies and and trying to be good to other people, because that's what gives him sustainable happiness, more than any personal conquests of stealing money and having a lot of lays. Not to escape. Not even to try and woo Rita--in this edition, that comes along by accident, he'd stopped trying by that point but it's still a nice surprise. We see him actively learn piano from scratch seemingly for no reason except that he wants to. It's all just to adjust to his situation and be happier. (Also the score is written by Tim Minchin! If that's any incentive.)
In Stars and Time does this extremely well. The protagonist never kills anyone (exept generic fantasy RPG monsters) but does slowly get more and more depressed as he loops, and stops seeing his friends as people but instead as actors to be manipulated. Also, when he breaks the loop, he does so not on the loop where he solves everyone's problems, but on the one where he alienates everyone close to him, which is the worst loop.
I played a lot of time loop games in the summer that I played ISaT, so making the time loop feel like hell the way it wanted to was going to be an uphill battle, but ISaT pulled it off. And the moment that it pulled it off was the moment that we did everything right, helped everyone and beat the king together, got that perfect loop and then it took away that version of events from us too, just like it did all the others. Everything brought back to zero. And so it makes it even worse when the version you have to stick with is the one where you fuck everything up. Yeah they forgive you, and they empathize with what you were going through now that they know what happened, but that doesn’t change the fact that they remember you trying to callously use the most vulnerable sides of themselves for your personal gain, and what they can never remember now is how you first discovered those vulnerable sides of them through genuine connection.
i'd argue that the stanley parable is an excellent time loop, one in which you the player/stanley has full knowledge of the time loop, and the narrator only partial, which creates an interesting dynamic in that respect. it's another good example of "what if i do this instead?", and also legitimately...never ends. the end is never the end. it leaves you wondering.
I think this video is a perfect response that I often see on Reddit discussing Outer Wilds DLC. In the DLC you could kill your enemies and even through the time loop they would be alive again and wouldn't remember it, so a lot of people would chose that. But our protagonist doesn't. They doesn't kill anybody, because they aren't like that. And so surprisingly without even mentioning the game, you made Outer Wilds just bit more interesting.
In outer wilds dlc , echoes of the eyes, you dont really have any ways of killing the "antagonist" ( i mean sure if our protagonist had the in game liberty to take a bucket thing would be a lot more grim ) , they "die" during the loop but not because of you action or the consequences of anything we do but because of event happening in the loop even if we were not here, i think the fact that event if our protagonist could choose to try killing them , the fact that no matter what some of them are still gonna "die" anyway is more in part with the nihilistic way timeloop impact the way we look at death and the way outer wilds adress death, the whole game has a theme a accepting death as part of the process of life ( and the fact that the " enemies" of the dlc are in denial of death and the importance of it make the theme stronger in my opinion), i think outer wilds message goes in the opposite direction of deathloop and is profoundly anti nihilistic,for outer wilds death has meaning because it's inevitable and it should not loose this meaning because of this inevitability
@@nemesis4081 If the main character wanted to make the choice they could very easily blow out your pursuers lanterns. I actually stealthily came up beside one of them in the forest, eye-level with their lantern and the option never presented itself, even though if you look down, you aren't wearing a space suit/helmet and definitely could blow out the flame like they do to you. I agree with what you're saying about it being more in line with the themes, but this is a choice made for you by the character out of preference and not necessity in my opinion.
@@ZedAmadeus i did not look at it much from the the in game perspective of our character but now that you said it, i agree it's a things our character had many opportunities to do and they take the decision for us to be kind towards the "strangers" by they own accord not because it's necessary to dont cross the line of killing them but because our character prefer not to let themself take this decision, i kinda agreed with you it is a decision our protagonist take out of preference, a preference to stay kind and not givin in to the killing ( even if it would make the progression of our protagonist more easy to just blow them out for one loop and that nobody else would known it had happen )
An interesting look into the mental ramifications of time loops would be Re:Zero and Steins;Gate. There's a point in Re:Zero where the main character dies so much, he adopts the mentality that he can just keep resetting to take the pain of everyone else away because he isn't Subaru, the only thing that makes him valuable is his power and if he doesn't have that, he is nothing. One of the ending in Steins;Gate visual novel is how the main character goes insane, he starts going insane and contemplates things like murder and rape. I just feel like oftentimes, lots of time loop stories don't delve into the mental aspect of it nearly as much as they should. Although these aren't games lmao.
I mean, Steins;Gate was a game before an anime. It was adapted into an anime years later, and is definitely worth the play for all the new content and routes to find, especially since the Elite remake animates the entire game like the anime.
@@Veristelle- well yes it is a game, but it's basically a novel. Putting a character as complex as Okabe into a time looping fps wouldn't be impossible, but it'd be a feat.
@@DanielLopez-ob9jz I just realized you brought up it's a visual novel in your comment, missed it while watching the video, my bad. True, packing all the narative of the visual novel into a standard fps or other game would be a hell of a feat that noone would be likely to attempt. But if there is a game with that much story in it on top of it's gameplay, I'd be down for it.
On the topic of time loops, personally one of the most interesting spins I've seen on the concept was addressed in the anime Puella Magi Madoka Magica, a deconstruction of the magical girl genre, because it makes both the protagonist and the audience an outsider to the time loop. At the start of the show, we're introduced to Homura, who (unbeknownst to the audience) is a late-stage time looper, and when the reveal finally happens 10 episodes into the 12 episode series the sudden recontextualization of all her previous stadoffish and sometimes brutally pragmatic actions as but the latest iteration among immumerable others is stunning. Plus, you also get the satisfaction of watching her pull of an amazing Rube-Goldberg machine of attacks and ordinance that she's learned to scrape together over her month-long loop, perfectly coordinated down to the second. And then, the despair when even that isn't enough, the desolation when even all the time in the world isn't enough to best her foe and save her friend.
One thing that we notably never see Homura do, or even really attempt to do, is actually try to get the other 3 on board to sort out Walpurgisnacht and keep Madoka from contracting. While she is part of the group at first, it only takes a few time loops for her to revert to being alone, and that strikes me as a fatal flaw (though admittedly her failed efforts did lead to the whole karmic stuff allowing for the ending, but that was kinda contrived IMO as a source of power, Madoka's wish made sense for her enough just by being prevented from wishing up to that point and seeing everything that happens without the loops being a source of her power). That is, everything she does to try to win on her own probably would have worked with help from the others, given how just her and Madoka beat Walpurgisnacht phyrrically in one loop, having just Mami and Sakura survive to that point would probably have tipped the balance, but she would have had to let them in on the realization of witches gently (and, you know, have them on suicide watch for the rest of the loop). However, she also never would have thought of that, given her difficulties socially.
I was wondering if someone would bring this up. Though the funny thing is: in the end after stopping to loop, she's so powerful her actions still have no consequence.
@@dominiccasts Sorry for the weird late response, but actually, the PMMM spinoffs cover a lot of that! There's a crapton of loops Homura did that aren't covered in the TV series, but ARE shown in other media like the Another Story or Oriko Magica mangas, so there's presumably some loops where Homura DID try to get help that we just don't see onscreen. More importantly though Magia Record the mobile game features an alternative, branching timeline where a combination of glasses-era Homura keeping her mouth shut about witches (preventing the events that broke her and turned her into the Homura we know) and wider plot circumstances derails the usual PMMM plot - Homura and friends wander off to investigate the neighboring city of Kamihama and get involved in the magical girl war going on there. Things escalate to the point where Walpurgisnacht shows up at Kamihama instead of Mitakihara, but Kamihama has a massive population of magical girls who are already used to working in teams, and everybody is able to team up and take Walpurgisnacht down as a literal raid boss. Because of all of this, the MagiReco timeline versions of Homura and friends ARE able to get their happy ending. The point here is you're absolutely right that Homura could've beaten Walpurgisnacht if she actually got a team together to do so, and if she tried to put out a call to neighboring cities warning about Walpurgisnacht and asking for help fighting it she might've been able to win the fight without Madoka having to go literal god mode. The bigger problem is that Mitakihara has very few magical girls in the first place (I'm actually not sure if the main five are the only ones there???), and that a LOT of what helped the MagiReco Walpurgis fight fall into place is exclusive to the MagiReco timeline, ex. the gang wouldn't normally be in Kamihama. Without those wider circumstances it would still probably be difficult for Homura to get enough people to fight Walpurgisnacht properly.
I was looking for so long to mention this: as Jacob seems to be really interested in the affects of the time loop on a person and this show is remarkable on how it explores that concept
Rebellion, then, is where we get to see the kind of person Homura has become once freed from the time loop. Broken and obsessed with the goal she never truly got to achieve before someone else freed her from the loop. Unable to let go of that thing she pursued for so long and uncaring of anything and anyone else.
I’m a similar vein, I’d like to recommend The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North. Harry is an Ouroboran, someone who lives out the entirety of his life, dies, and is born again at the beginning of his life over and over again. He and others like him retain memories from his previous lives, but non-Ouroborans do not. The writing is excellent, the plot is compelling, and there are some fascinating space-time implications. It’s one of my favorite books and I hope you check it out :)
I had a couple of paragraphs here about all the problems with that premise, but it appears Ms. North changed at least a few of them into potential plot devices. I'm still not sure how you can have "backwards information travel" and "more than one time-traveler with heritable abilities." Every movement of information back to the eldest traveler should cause a reset of the timeline due to the butterfly effect changing which children are conceived, and eventually when those children get conceived. There are a lot of dice rolls in determining who is living and who is merely potential.
There's a little game called "In Stars and Time" that came out not too long ago that you might want to check out that does the time loop thing pretty well.
Re: Zero is another story about death loops, and what is interesting to me is that, after Subaru has died several times, he actually starts embracing death and killing himself to be strategic. And it shows a different kind of consequence, in which Subaru’s already low opinion of himself becomes worse and worse as he begins to believe that he should be the only one that suffers. Each death he experiences is painful and traumatizing to him, and yet he keeps trying to solve the problems that cause him to die alone, and the trauma just stacks up. Every time he sees someone he care about die in a loop, there is a consequence to witnessing that. I think Re: Zero is the best death loop story, as there is a sense of progress, both character wise, and plot wise. Plot wise because where the death loop starts updates every once and a while, and so Subaru isn’t always started back on day 1. Character wise because Subaru is constantly fighting with his depression.
// spoilers ahead God it even hurts with that scene where he witnesses every alternate self where he died or killed himself in order to reset "his" timeline, only to find out the timeline where he died is continuing on, having to witness the people around him at the time weep and wonder why he ever did such a thing. I never got to finished the anime due to IRL stuff taking priority but after seeing this comment and this video, I might just pick up where I left off.
Absolutely! In the back of my head throughout every point he made in the video, I was always thinking back to Re:Zero, and how it portrays the humanity in someone who is separated from humanity as a whole. Its a perfect story with time looping built in, in my opinion.
you're the only other person I've seen post about Re:Zero. I also posted about it as well. This needs to be brought to the attention of more people. It's probably the best time loop story I know.
@@midknightshade330 110 percent, honestly one of the greatest time loop stories and greatest coming of age stories I've watched and read(web novel). The way it deals with these things as a coming-of-age story is kind of brilliant and as someone who's read up to the 6th arc of the web novel, the author introduces another popular trope into the mix that just makes the story even better than it was before. How it deals with relationships and how it subverts a lot of expectations, especially right now in the seventh arc is also amazing and the way it handles mystery and buildup is also fantastic. I could go on and on, but damn, it's my favorite piece of media and the message it conveys(especially to lost teenagers like so many) is communicated so well and can make you think on yourself.
In steins gate, a visual novel, it is implied that the main character spins probably thousands of years anytime loop trying to get an exact Rube Goldberg sequence of events to play out perfectly. By the end of it all that he's able to walk away with is a profound tiredness and a clear brokenness.
I dont think it was 'thousands of years'. From what I remember it was just several tries and the help of technology invented after he was already an adult that helped him math this exact sequence, then send instructions to himself in the past when he was free to do it. Edit: Forgot to mention Stein Gate is a great VN. But if this comment makes someone interested, just watch the anime, it's much shorter and almost as good, I can guarantee you aren't losing much, the anime is probably the best adaptation that could be made in so little episodes.
@@denodagor I certainly got the impression of thousands of years, or at least thousands of tries, he's markedly traumatized by the event by the end of it I would agree with the anime statement though, they're both great, but you get the exact same story in a much much MUCH BRIEFER TIME
Saying that you feel like Colt doesn't discover anything about himself was pretty jarring to me. He finds out literally everything about himself. He comes into the game with a completely fresh, blank-slate perspective, not even immediately recalling his own name. He learns about his past, what his beliefs are, his friendships and interpersonal relationships, all being divorced from their first person agency and context due to amnesia. We as Colt discover terrible things he did in the past for the AEON program- Colt even refers to his former self as a monster at one point. This ultraviolence he's linked to perpetually is practically the crux of his desire for finality and escape. We see the effects of infinity without consequences perfectly in seeing what's essentially his permanently compromised relationship with his daughter. We're lead to believe Colt did reconcile with Julianna in the earliest years of Black Reef's loop, before the widespread memory loss started to occur due to sheer quantity of time having elapsed. We know from the game's lore, audio logs, and notes that Julianna was very affable and friendly figure going into the loop, who had likely never hurt anyone in her life. The state of her eventually being the only one keeping her memories lead to an infinity without consequence, which corrupted her character to the point we see in game of her being enthusiastically murderous, bragging about killing all the other visionaries for fun and having complete mastery anbd dominion over the island and it's denizens. We're explicitly told that she's done every evil action imagineable for fun, and that hunting Colt is out of boredom and morbid curiosity (she is capable of killing him every single morning before he wakes up should she choose to.) Ultimately this factors into the core decision at the end of the game. Having learned so much about Colt and how his mistakes (killing Julianna repeatedly to "snap her out" of the memory loss) are directly responsible for the hellish state Black Reef exists in. Julianna is a monster largely of Colt's own creation. By breaking the loop, Julianna makes it clear that the relationship between the two of them will be forever ruined. While she is an unrepentant mass murderer, we learn that Colt had a large hand in making her that way and leading her down the complete and total decay of morality that comes from eternal life without consequences. The player, now knowing everything they need to know, has to directly decide whether or not freedom from the timeloop is worth permanently destroying any chance of reconciling with his daughter, or if the player ultimately abandons their goal of breaking the loop to seek some kind of forgiveness with someone he clearly once did care deeply about. Great video, however I very much disagree when it comes to Colt's character progression.
Was looking for this comment. Weighing heavy on the final choice was the implied apocalypse beyond the loop in my mind. Breaking the loop meant Colt would have nothing left, preserving it meant that he could still be with his daughter.
@@pooperdooper3576 Because the current status quo of the loop has turned her into a Godlike being and she would never want her power over everyone else taken away.
@@xthewated oh well then she's just evil. The only way to reconcile with that is to help her be evil. The right choice imo would be to leave the loop then, unless I'm misunderstanding something
@@pooperdooper3576 I completely agree. There's probably some message about "If your child became an evil psychopathic murderer, you would still love them," but I'm not a parent nor do I ever plan to be, so that kind of message is lost on me. I think some parents are the bad guys for still trying to excuse their horrible children's behaviors. Is love still a good thing to have if the person you love is a terrible person? Probably not. Emotions are manipulative in that sense.
someone already commented about undertale but GODDD I truly cannot believe it wasn't in here. A time loop where another character reveals to you that they are fully aware of your actions in all of the previous loops, but only after its too late. "despite everything it's still you" when you look in the mirror.
another great example of time loop nihilism in games is majora’s mask. for the entire game you live out the same three days as you can see the moon get closer and closer, and eventually crash into the planet and destroy everything. you can run around this world, attempting to help the scared, remorseful people in it find peace with the end of the world, but by the end of that three day cycle it all gets reset. the people you helped, the lives you saved, it all goes back to zero. everyone is back in the same place they were when you first got there. sad, bitter, scared. no matter what you do, none of it matters. you can try to cheat death by completing your main quest and stopping skull kid from pulling the moon down, but he, too, seems to be disillusioned with everything around him. corrupted by the mask, he tries to destroy everything around him and end the lives of countless people with no remorse for their regrets or their guilt. at the end of the day, he’s just as scared as everyone else.
I find surprising that nobody else is mentionning the Endless 8 from Haruhi Suzumia, and how it cannonically leads to The disapearance of Haruhi Suzumia, because of the effect it had on Yuki Nagato who was the only person to remember the loop
endless 8 was brilliant. Kyoto Animation using the same synopsis but reanimating it over and over again gave me such an uncomfortable feeling. Each episode of the eight is slightly more unnerving than the last, especially since Kyon is actually the one responsible, putting off his summer homework, inadvertently ruining Haruhi's plans.
This has probably become one of my favorite channels on the entire platform. You lead such a rich life and being able to share your thoughts and allow us to contemplate with you is something I treasure dearly!! Thank you for another wonderful video, they're always worth the wait.
I didn't know you had an internet connection in that SPP Pod O.o I thought you would be watching Homage through the Cameras all day. o.o Oh wellz, thanks for the Sunshine and Rainbows :D
19:55 this moment shocked me in the absence of information. Well done redacting whatever it was these people did to eachother, while keeping the tone fittingly heavy.
I am legally obligated to bring up In Stars And Time as a counter example. The main character never actually lets go of their morality, but the loop and its effects on them is *extremely* well fleshed out.
I love how an ost from Asura's Wrath is in this video. The fact that he also experiences multiple deaths makes it so much better. Absolute masterpiece of a video
When you brought up Through the Flash I literally jumped and started fist pumping. Such a good story and I had extremely similar thoughts re: time loop games.
@@stardustorchard9316 I believe it is a short story featured in Friday Black by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah. I think I'll be diving into it as well some time in the near future.
"I didn't stab my wife because I hated her or thought she was evil, I stabbed her because I was out of other things to try." Truly, wiser words were never spoken
Imagine taking the words out of context, like that one Breaking Bad meme with Jesse with a gun with the caption "Me when I have to shoot my dog because I'm bored"
Fantastic video as always - your thoughts on 12 Minutes remind me a bit of classic point and click or text adventure games, not because those games involved a loop but because it's almost the inverse. Time in those games often doesn't move forward until you find the right action, so a common way to play is to the familiar "try every verb with every visible object, in every known location until you get the right one." Each individual action becomes sort of meaningless, because the games are simple enough none of the characters will remember you tried to bribe the guard with your half eaten fish bones before eventually offering his favorite cake. Because only the "correct" actions feel permanent it's easy to just ignore the others. In those games this results in the main character feeling less competent than they're supposed to be. You're not a brilliant detective you're a bumbling fool who just happened to find the right answer eventually. Between the loop and the "incorrect actions are ignored" mechanics they both seem to make the story less real in the same way. Anyways thanks again for the video, and thank you for giving me some new ideas to look at my favorite old genre with.
@@TheCreepyLantern YES Those old adventure games would often have sensible answers to some puzzles, but generally they were toward the senseless end of the spectrum. In some series it's way more likely to bribe the guard with fish bones just because of the perverse humor of the writers. A counterargument could be that if the puzzles have sensible solutions, there's less gameplay. Although I'd propose that you can take more steps to get the key through the obstacle. For example the guard saying he likes cake, but you actually have to bake the cake. Or if you need to replace some wires in a door's electronic lock, you could make a tool, open some other electronic object's panel, get some wires, and use them on the door. Overall, the most satisfying puzzle solutions I've experienced have been ones that in retrospect seem obvious, but required some lateral thinking and outside knowledge to get there in the process. But when a puzzle doesn't have an obvious solution, and I feel like I've explored the reasonable possibilities in finding a solution, the only thing left is to try every combo. And when I get to that point I'm completely out of the game's immersion and just trying to get past this part that feels broken so I can start enjoying the game again. The designer can also offer multiple solutions (which is very rare in point-and-click adventure games, but standard for something like tabletop D&D), which means the player is far more likely to pick a working solution in the first few tries just because there are more working solutions available. In a tabletop-style game there are also a variety of failure and success states. One good example is a locked door. You might have the key if you found it elsewhere, which is the best option. If your party has a Magic-User and he knows the Knock spell AND he memorized it that day, he could cast that and pop open the lock instantly and quietly. But that's a resource he can't use again that day. If your party has a Thief he can try to pick the lock, which takes time but is quiet, and has a chance of failure. Your party could kick down the door, which is loud and has a failure chance, and additionally you need to decide how many people will kick at once: more people raises the success chance, but those people used their action that round and can't immediately jump into the room like everyone else. Failing that you could always chop the door down, which is loud and takes a long time and gives whatever is on the other side of the door time to prepare for you, making it impossible to surprise them. In the door example, a game could definitely model all of that. But that's just one fundamental type of puzzle, and a well-run D&D game is absolutely stuffed to the gills with things like that. This complexity is possible because of the human referee managing the game instead of a pre-programmed computer. If the referee wrote the adventure, there's no wiki or walkthrough on it, so success and failure is entirely in the hands of the players, which is exciting. No save-scumming means the game's consequences are permanent, which raises the stakes like permadeath or Ironman modes in video games do. It's well-trodden at this point to emphasize how games like Rogue, text adventures like Zork, and point-and-click adventure games are just the industry's best attempt at using very limited resources to simulate D&D or any other tabletop RPG. With such limited resources it should be expected that the game experience becomes a little frustrating.
this is exactly why i hate old LucasArts point and clicks. Monkey Island is a charming series and all, but the puzzles never make sense and logic is thrown out the window, making each solution potentially meaningless as the only way to solve it is through random circumstance. Compare that to the modern, Telltale approach. No puzzle in The Walking Dead or Tales from the Borderlands is contrived as they are built around basic logic. in TWD for example, theres a puzzle in episode 2 of season 1 where you need to get out of a locked room and you need a screwdriver to disassemble an AC unit. Well, earlier you heard a character mention they have some coins, and i think most people who have been caught without a screwdriver have tried a coin, a knife, etc.
While I understand the 12 Minutes comparison with old Lucas Arts games, I found 12 Minutes REALLY intuitive. I only got stuck at the "flower", and even then I figured out on my own after maybe 15 minutes tops.. probably less. And I have absolutely no patience with adventure games like that. But 12 Minutes is one of my favorites games of the year now, although the ending is could be better. Geller's experience where he tried many things before trying the sleeping pill is really strange for me. I was probably the first thing I tried when I thought of when I saw the sleeping pills. Thought it was really obvious.
@@diegocm8636 Yeah that's kind of just how these puzzles work - what's obvious for one person isn't going to be obvious for everyone. I'm certain in all those classic adventure games the devs thought it wasn't as hard as it was.
This reminds me of Start Again Start Again Start Again and In Stars And Time (the former is the prologue and experimental version of the latter), which are a pair of games that propose a time loop where the subject is in a JRPG adventuring party trying to save the world from a bad guy and starts during the final dungeon leading up to the final fight. You have history with party, established relationships, in-jokes and so on and no matter what you seem to do you will die, whether by accident, a wrong choice or simply in combat with the final boss. However. This isn't the first loop. Your character is the group's scout who loves making puns and having an upbeat personality however the toll of many loops has already had an effect on them. They internally acknowledge when conversations will start, get progressively more depressed about putting up facades to their friends so they don't suspect anything unusual, remember information about where to go to optimise their path and this starts happening to the player too. After the first loop the player experiences, they start optimising things to get everything done faster like knowing the fastest route to items. The party comments on this so you intentionally have to go the long way to avoid their suspicion. The player starts skipping combat by running away and can even skip entire conversations but skipping too often will make your party suspicious. It's a neat look at a time loop that tackles the psychological toll on being trapped with friends you love, who you can't show you've experienced this all a thousand times and get to watch everyone die regardless of your choices. In a way it's like Undertale if Frisk could comment on the things that happened across playthroughs.
... Now I want a story (maybe just a short story) that is solely about the after effect. At no point does the story start before or during the time loop, but only at the end, the day the loop is broken. It would be a story where the Protagonist isn't the person who's been in the loop for likely decades or centuries, But the last person who interacted with them before the loop finally breaks, The only person they've been able to prove that they've been in a time loop to. They would meet, go about their day as the Looper would point out everything happening with such foresight it would be impossible for it to be anything other then a time loop, and then at the end of the day, when whatever blast them back to the start would happen, They just sit down and enjoy it... The clock ticks down, They say their goodbyes, lament the fact that it'll all reset and the protag will have never known any of it, and wait for the nuke, or the car, or whatever does the Looper in. Seconds pass. Then minutes. Then an hour. Finally it hits them, They haven't looped back. The event never happens. They're out, free to continue, free to live again. But how can they now? They've done everything they could ever want, committed acts that the Protag would never- no, COULD never know of. They now have lifetimes of knowledge weighing them down; The reality that now? Now they are vulnerable, weak, once again insignificant against the greater schemes of the universe that for so long they believed was under their greater will from the countless loops. But now they have nothing but the knowledge that whatever happens next, that's it. They can't rely on set circumstances, or manipulate things to their favor, because now it is a new day. It is the unknown once again pouncing on him with nothing but vengeance in mind for the fool who thought he could be above all. A realization like that? It could drive anyone mad. And all the Protag can do is watch as the Looper is crushed by the weight of all his sins, of all his knowledge, of all his actions, being for naught. How could anyone live knowing all of that?
Upcoming indie film Again Again, written, directed by and starring Mia Moore, starts at the end of a time loop and explores the consequences of, well, suddenly having consequences again. Look out for it, seems like you'd enjoy it.
Favorite time loop is majoras mask, and is genuinely emotional, and it has something beyond simple nihilism. It has a certain hopefulness that everytime we get an item or complete a quest we are more sure of our ames but can see a real impact on the world around us.
MM is kinda interesting because its whole thing is sorta the inverse of the way most time loop stories seem to go, where it basically turns into "i need to help everyone even if they won't remember me the day after". Even if you just do the main dungeons and only what's strictly necessary you're still a stranger going through hell to save people that might not even remember your name by the end of it.
@@xanious3759 Impactful is the word i use to describe how the things you do in mm, its how it is vastly different. In the normal loop stories the impact is largely on the beginning then fades into a sea of almost mundanity. Whereas mm starts slow but as all of your decisions mount up up it becomes extremely momentous. Afterall, who is supposed to care if you(the player) don't?
One other aspect of consequence that time loops rarely touch on is trauma itself. As you repeat, your actions towards everything else is impermanent and consequence-free, but like you mentioned it still sticks with you. It's what allows you to learn, to get better in those situations, but also what makes you this pragmatic, efficient monster devoid of empathy. Those two things make a character god-like in their power, but there's a balancing aspect that's almost never explored: For every failure, every death, every moment of pain or traumatic image you either stumble upon or subject yourself to by your own volition, your ability to face adversity weakens. You build fear, trauma, pathos, a crippling web of psychological illness that inhibits you for eternity. Escaping a time loop isn't about having all the time in the world, it's a race against an unclear limit; how much you can suffer before you pass the point of no return, where no matter how much knowledge you have, you lack the ability to use it.
I paused the video and went and read Through the Flash after you mentioned it and WOW does this video hit harder having read the whole thing. I don't think I've ever genuinely wept at how beautiful and nihilistic a video on UA-cam is before, but this one did it. Jacob Geller, it's truly something special that I found your channel and I can't wait to see what your beautiful mind comes up with next.
There's something I've been thinking about through this whole video, and as soon as you said that Through The Flash used the term "waking up" I simply couldn't *not* mention it any more. In the past, I've been both an avid reader and very occasional contributor to a project simply called The Infinite Loops, a sprawling fanfic universe connecting every piece of media one can think of, built upon a single person's original concept by hundreds more. In The Infinite Loops, all realities, all fictional universes, are simulations run on Yggdrasil, the world tree, and the most advanced supercomputer of all time, maintained by those we would recognise as gods. I believe this concept is in fact attributed to some kind of anime from the 2000's, though I can't recall the name. This world computer suffers some kind of apocalyptic malfunction and crashes, and The Infinite Loops are created as a way to stabilize each individual universe as the gods fix it all. This manifests as each universe being given a designated "Anchor", typically the protagonist of whatever story that universe tells. Naruto, for example, is one of the original Anchors. As is Twilight Sparkle, of My Little Pony. These Anchors are the patient zero of the time loop each universe is shifted into - reliving the events of their story over and over again. As time goes on, other people in each loop - secondary characters, usually - "wake up" and become Loop-aware, though interestingly not every Awoken individual is "awake" in each Loop, which is a cool concept that should be explored in more media with multiple loop-aware characters. Anyway, in the Loops, one of the first non-anchors to awake is Sakura from Naruto, and she is also one of the first to fall victim to this consequence-free nihilism that you're describing in this video. She becomes, like Ama, a murderer, empowered by the Loops to infinite levels of cruelty. She does, like Ama, eventually recover, but her actions are remembered throughout the Loops and this nihilism you're talking about is, in-universe, known as "Sakura Syndrome". I just thought that was neat. The Loops, being created by multiple contributors even within individual universes, vary in quality significantly, but there are Loops for damn near everything that's ever been popular. I highly reccomend looking them up some day.
holy SHIT this blasted me back in time..... i was super into the idea of the infinite loops back as a teenager even tho i never really interacted w/ it much.... gotta go dig up a 5 year old google doc now
This is the second time Jacob has used "sneaky driver" song from the "Katana zero" soundtrack. I hope it's foreshadowing for a Katana zero analysis. It's dripping with lore and interesting philosophical topics.
@@JetStream0509 Still tho, by all means it is a time loop for characters. Zero even mentions how minutes would stretch to hours and days and how he spent 28 years in the jungle while being 22 during the game, 15 at the time of war.
I always felt that the intention of deathloop was the caution of blind determination. That through the loop Colt has exactly 1 goal. Everything he does is for that 1 goal, every step he takes is to get to that 1 goal, and every bit of knowledge learned is for that 1 goal. This is even to the point that he still remembers that 1 goal even when his memory had been lost. We never get a reason for why Colt wants to break the loop, and whatever reason we make to stop it from learning about the world is only our own. In the end Colt has no reason to break the loop other than that is his 1 goal. This mentality is fervent in Black Reef. So many people set with just 1 goal, blind to the rest of the world because of it (and the fact that their memory gets wiped at the end of the day), and forever stuck in that 1 goal. This was even the case before the time loop with the visionaries being so blinded by the 1 goal of eternal life that they didn’t realize the biggest flaw of the loop that people won’t remember the next day. I feel like this style of cautionary tale wouldn’t work with the idea you bringing in since that would require reflection on a character that’s not suppose to be reflective at least while in the loop. You can’t really have a moment of clarity when the character is so blinded by determination they have no reason for doing what they’re doing beyond they have to do it, and having the game go past the loop onto the next would be a bad idea I’m general, and also get rid of the gray zone of if the loop was good or bad which this game tries really hard to keep gray. Also maybe this was just my play style, but I didn’t really become a god of death, or the perfect murderer like you talked about rather I became the perfect assassin. I realized somewhat early on that for the golden loop I didn’t have much of reason to kill anyone but the visionaries so because of that I stopped killing the random thugs and just moved around them, and I got really good at doing just that. It was to the point where I could get into a level, kill everyone on my list, wait for Julianna and trap kill her, and then escape with the reward from my fights. I never really became the murder king Colt that you created, rather I became a single minded assassin that didn’t care for the rest of the world.
Oh man the concept for the flash is incredible. I googled the book its from and the other stories also sound extremely interesting so i guess thats another book to add to the list of things i want to read.
This was a really interesting topic! And I always love when you use more well-known media as a jumping off point to reccomend something I have never heard of before, that's always a lovely discovery to have. :D Time loops really are just pressure cookers that boil away morality, consequence and care over time, a frankly horrifying fate to be trapped within. Even if it's fun and good at first, the very nature of their infinity will erode someone down eventually. Great work in any case! ^w^
I know this is a year old comment but I felt like I wanted to reply anyway. I honestly think the idea that timeloops will boil away morality, consequence, and care is a pretty pessimistic way of looking at human nature. It seems most of these time loop stories are about someone almost immediately focusing on what they can get away with, something I don't like and something's that really stopped me from enjoying timeloop stories.
Watching this video I have a recommendation to give. I've been reading a light novel lately called "Omniscient Reader's Viewpoint". The idea at the core of it is that the light novel the protagonist reads in this fictional universe, becomes reality. Of course this in-universe novel itself has its own protagonist. The protagonist of this in-universe novel is a character that has the ability to "regress" upon death, keeping all his memories, and the length of time he has spent reliving the same story over and over again is one of the focal points of his character progression. It's really interesting and the actual protagonist also comments on his psychopathy. The character is someone that's become utilitarian to a point, kind of like those Bloodborne speedrunners you've mentioned and that's really interesting as what he's dealing with are actual humans. I can highly recommend it. It's really good.
0:17 The Arkane A-Pose in action. For some reason in their games the NPCs don't know what to do when falling so their bodies try their hardest to return to a default A-pose. Seen it in Dishonored 2 with falling and floating in water, seen it in Deathloop, seen it in Prey during the zero G sections.
Here is some recommendation of a criminally underrated story about a time loop: "The empty box and the zeroth Maria" is excellent, it's a serie of 7 novels, the first volume is standalone but if you continue to the 7th volume that ending is brilliant
I would say the same, it has a lot of interesting ideas, but I think the overall message was toxically extreme. But if that was done on purpouse and it wasn’t meant to showcase a Gary Stu, then kudos!
I keep coming back to this as my favorite time loop video essay, because it is the one that best captures the consequences of their consequencelessness. You can see another "time loop nihilism survivor" like the one in Through the Flash (excellent recommendation, thank you) in Flowey from Undertale. Flowey went through so many loops, and became so monstrous during them, that it has desensitized him to the point he wants the power to save and reset back, so he can continue living a life where anything can be taken back. It feels like a very apt take on how people with depression can be afraid of breaking out of their vicious habits, because they fear the pain they will get from failure more than the meaningless loop they're trapped in.
Time loops are my absolutely favourite type of story. I've always been drawn to the time loop fantasy, so I was really happy to see this in my notifications. Thanks, Jacob.
"I think if you're creative, it is really important to expose yourself to art that feels better than you could ever make." I know that this line is part of the ad, not the theme of the video, and that the sentiment I'm about to share has already been communicated in other comments in _several_ other videos of yours, but Jacob, you and your works are that to me, and to many other people too. I owe (at the very least) several semesters worth of A's on college papers to you, and probably quite a bit more. I'm absolutely thrilled to have the privilege of being touched by your work, and grateful for how it has transformed my own. (also, that transition with the jump and roll at 0:24 is so damn _smooth_ I'm freakin' out here man)
Jacob, I only recently stumbled upon your channel and I just wanted to say I absolutely adore your content. I've so far rarely disagreed with your opinions and even when I haven't your arguments are so well constructed it offers me an additional insight I otherwise wouldn't have. Keep up the superb work.
Depression has done a number on me, as it does on anyone who experiences it, and I want to add some optimism to your nihilism. To me, depression can feel like a loop. You wake up, you struggle to get out of bed if at all; you eat, you work, you sleep. All the while you don't just feel numb, but you feel bad for no reason. Well, you make up reasons to feel bad. You feel like talking or complaining about how you feel is dumb, so you don't. Why waste the time and breath. Even if you do, it doesn't help. You feel the same except now you've shared it with someone else who likely can't help you anymore than you can help yourself. I see it as a mental time loop, searching for any way to break this cycle you're in and to stop feeling like how you do. You can change routine, change your looks, meet new people; anything you want, but none of it helps. One year ago this month, I was fired and struggled to find a job in my small town. I lost my apartment and moved in with my brother who said not worry about rent. He ended up changing his mind and told that I had to have a job by Thanksgiving or else I was out. I had a very promising interview at a bank that I got really excited for, but then my brother told me he wanted me out of his house regardless. The next day, the bank tells me that they're going with someone else. I just broke down, started laughing in my truck. I ended up moving back home where I finally started working fast food, however that's soon to end because I've been dropped down to one day a fucking week working. My mom kicked me out for a weekend a month ago because she didn't approve of some of the stuff I did when I lived alone (smoking weed and being gay) and she still threatens it again occasionally. All the while the depression lingered strong in the background, getting better and worse depending on the day. I'm 22 and I've attempted twice: once years ago and the other before I even moved in with my brother... I feel like every day gets worse and that there isn't a whole lot I can do to stop it except one single thing; one lone belief that I cling onto. "Nothing truly matters; anything can happen, and anything can be given a reason." I believe we exist in a universe where on the micro and macro scales, nothing inherently has any meaning or purpose. Us and everything we do has just as much inherent meaning as the shit we flush. YOU give things a reason, YOU give yourself a reason. It doesn't have to be a good reason as long as it's good enough for you. Things have as much meaning as you want to give them, not other people. If you care about that game or that photo, then that's what matters to you and you shouldn't let other's take that away because it has no meaning to them. I feel like I'm staring down the barrel of a gun called Life that can go off at any minute, but I got tired of worrying about it. I want to actually live my life, I don't want to die, but if it happens then I want to go having at least being happy with myself. I don't have my happiness right now, but I know I can have it back. I know I can break my cycle of depression and I believe this belief is what will help me. Maybe this is something I'll have to deal with my whole life, but my depression isn't meaningless now at least. It's a part of me and I need to find my peace with it, give it some meaning as a way to improve myself. I think maybe it can help others too to think this way, to not view the world as something inherently positive or negative, but as something inherently neutral until people decide to give it meaning in their own way.
Listening to this video reminded me of Planescape: Torment. It's not a timeloop, but the player character has lived basically forever, been every type of person and done basically everything. Of course, you have amnesia and don't remember any of it, but the people you meet sure do. Seeing the ramifications of your past actions and coming to terms with them was an rpg experience I'll never forget. Thanks for the video Jacob!
I was gonna write a whole thing about Steins;Gate, Re:Zero, and Madoka Magica but then soon realized that these shows are not exactly time loops. I mean they are still looping through time but they are not in these loops against their will. They chose to repeat the loops because they have a goal in mind. They could stop whenever they want but they won't obviously. The thing that makes time loops so different is that there's no clear way to just stop it. Things have less meaning because they'll just reset anyway. The probability of just killing someone just to see what would happen becomes way higher. Reaching insanity is way higher. Anything that you do, good or bad, won't stick and most likely never will for the rest of eternity.
"... being a person who performs great violence or cruelty means you are a person capable of performing great violence or cruelty. ... there's no such thing as consequenceless actions ... No matter how many times the sun rises, no matter if it's the same sunrise or a new one, it's you. It's you. It's you." And nothing is more terrifying to any of us than that.
"...it's you. It's you. It's you." I know this video is mostly about time loops and humans in time loops and humanity within time loops, but as someone who used to suffer from severe low self esteem issues and self loathing, this last part really hit me. There have been so many times in my life where I wish I could go back in time and fix my mistakes. There are so many times I wish I could simply stop time, just so I could have more time. Sleep more cause I stayed up. Finish homework because I procrastinated. Prepare for a big test or presentation just a little longer because I didn't start earlier. Some of these extended time wishes or time rewinding wishes were also for more severe mistakes of my life, ones where I've irreversibly hurt someone or something or myself. But after watching this video, you've really changed my perspective on it all, even though I don't suffer from the same issues anymore. Had I truly gotten what I wished for, I likely would have become addicted and abused the power a few times. I may rewind a moment over and over again, convinced there's an exact solution to a problem but knowing I could just rewind time again, and knowingly say or do the most abhorrent decision just to glean as much information as I possible can. For extending time, I wouldn't be surprised if I extended it indefinitely, to the point where I've become so detached from the world that I simply get stuck in my own little timeloop/frozen timeframe...forever. I can edit people's perceptions of myself, rewrite parts of my life, I could do everything to make my life seemingly perfect and make every decision I've ever made be the right one. But I'd also hold the weight that every iteration of me is still me, even if others can't see it due to my time control. And as you said, if I can make a horrible choice then that means I'm capable of doing it again. And it's because of this time limit that forces me to be confrontational of myself and who I am, to not delay my growth and compassion for myself and people. Time is so short that I don't want to lose my humanity to the claws of my mental issues anymore. Time control would just allow me to stew, to become neurotic, to lose my humanity, to learn what it feels like to lose me. I don't want to do that. I like being me.
In Stars and Time is also a small looping game that while it didn't really strike me for its mechanics it did do a good portrayal of time loop fatigue. Spoilers ahead. You play as the rogue of a typical RPG party, together with a hero, mage and bruiser, and they're venturing in the final dungeon of your quest. Except when he dies he returns to the beginning of the day before entering the dungeon. First he feels great because he can prevent his party from dying or failing the quest by knowing in advance where the traps and important items are. Then when they defeat the final boss and complete the quest...he still loops. He tries several things: he tries talking the boss down, hunting for secret knowledge, makes a "perfect loop" where he helps all his comrades through their problems, but it still does nothing. So he eventually goes mad. In the final loop he verbally attacks the other party members and decides to complete the quest alone, ad through the loops he's become strong enough to do so. And then the ending just solves everything via the power of friendship or something. It kinda dropped the ball at that point.
I feel like (at least, going off your description) Through The Flash is actually not a very good example of the kind of story you're looking for here - Ama WASN'T living a consequence-free life, since she wasn't the only one trapped in the loop. Other people (apparently) remember the loops where she was Knife Queen, and she has to live with that. She HAS external consequences to her actions, in a way that, say, Phil Connors or the protagonist of Twelve Minutes don't. I feel like the scenarios are incredibly different here. In general, I feel like the "consequence-free" nature of time loop stories vanishes if more than a handful of people are involved, unless literally everyone in the time loop is on the same wavelength vis-a-vis stuff like "stabbing a guy is a-ok if they won't remember it in the morning".
The fiction podcast The Adventure Zone has a time loop arc, where everyone, not just the three people experiencing the loop, remembered every loop, as soon as the time loop got brocken. Made things pretty akward. Also earlier in the story there is a guy they don't know about, who also remembers every loop, while the time loop is still going on. He observes how they act and that influenced if he was going to help them or not.
The thing about Through the Flash that I think is an important detail (which Jacob only really briefly mentioned), is that initially no one remembers they're looping at all. Ama is one of the earliest people to remember, so when she does and no one else has yet-- or very few people have-- she feels that she IS living consequence-free. When she hurts people, or kills them, no one knows. Some people to this day in the loop have not yet fully realized they are looping, and might be stuck like that forever. The problem is that it's a slippery slope, and by the time people start to "wake up" and realize they're trapped, she's already done so many horrible things that she can't bring herself to stop. Not for a long while anyway. Really it's a story about coming to terms with the fact that your whole frame of reference for life has changed, and that you have to live with the consequences regardless. Through the Flash starts out the same as something like Twelve Minutes or Death Loop, but then changes (or rather, has changed by the start of the actual plot), which is what makes it so great.
Wow, as always I am so, so impressed by your work Jacob. It boggles my mind how you consistently find and choose such mind bogglingly intersting and unique topics, and explore them in a multifaceted way. Bravo 👏
One of the things that are always on my mind in these kinda "loop worlds", is the philosophy of memory. In Deathloop, and Through the Flash, the memory of the inhabitants of the loop is shared, while in stories like Groundhog Day, the loop concerns a single person. In the shared memory loops, the actions of its inhabitants are remembered by everyone present to witness them, which creates a consequence for the actions taken within the loop, but no such consequence exists in the single person loops assuming it doesn't break. In Groundhog day, the protagonist is the only person who is aware of his actions in previous loops, and therefore the is no consequence since no one can hold him accountable, but in Through the Flash, that is not the case. The protagonist is somewhat held to account by the fact that the other inhabitants of the world can judge the protagonist for her actions. The question then becomes, if you are the only person that can remember the atrocities you've committed against people that no longer remember you did it, then did it actually happen? If the victims can remember then yes, but if they can't then it could be argued that it didn't. Sorry if that was incoherent. Just wanted to share my ramblings with the wonderful people here in the comments. Lovely video once again Jacob!
Oh yeah. I like how in Undertale you can tell Toriel you've watched her die. Imagine killing your best friend after years in a time loop, simply because you've got nothing better to do, and then breaking the loop and trying to tell him you've killed him before. I love when timeloop characters try to _prove_ to other people that they're in a timeloop, or have been in one. That's where the writing becomes genius. Like a timeloop guy telling someone they've never met exactly what that person is going to do for the next 30 minutes, granted they don't let the action of being _told_ what they're about to do affect it. Or telling a person you've never met exactly what's inside their kitchen cupboards - even better if there's something weird that isn't normally in a cupboard. And then the next day, they have to convince that person all over again. Eventually they're running through an entire town telling everyone exactly what they're all going to do. From their perspective, this is the first time he's ever said that. It must seem weird as hell. But it's immensely rewarding for the reader.
@@williamjenkins4913 the differnce is that you actually went and did the murder. you now know what you are capable of doing to someone else. that is something you will have to carry with you from now on. same thing with other crimes like rape and theft. thanks to the reset the damage you did to the world around you becomes undone, but the knowledge remains as a scar in your mind.
Your videos are so moving. So passionate. I enjoy them so much even though I'd probably never even play most of the games you talk about. And this one, posted on my 21st birthday, is among my favourites. Thank you
One of the endings to Steins Gate VN explores this in a way I find interesting, guy repeats same day infinitely to avoid people dying and it begins to completely warp his personality
[Deathloop Spoilers] I think information about Cole's character relevant to the video's questions can be found, among other locations, in the boathouse near Frank's club. Comparison of Deathloop and Groundhog Day, speculation about the "missed opportunity" of examining the impact the loop would have on Cole's psyche, misses one important thing: Cole Vahn was not snarky Groundhog Day Man before he entered this iteration of the loop. He was as violent and selfish and half-mad as the rest of the visionaries. Security Chief Cole, as the player can find out, *literally gassed traitor eternalists to death in a secret interrogation chamber hidden near Frank's club*. The loop can't turn Cole into a sociopath who kicks people off cliffs. It can't show him anything he hasn't seen/done already in the endless spiral of consequenceless violence and degradation that was Cole's career in the Army of the Motherland. All the loop does is (likely, depending on player choice) turn Cole *back* into a sociopath who kicks people off cliffs every time he loses his memory. The game provides, for the attentive or dedicated player, a lot of content about what kind of person he was/will be, from the Boathouse to the memos recorded by the Motherland spies about his Updaam fuck pad, to the other him confirming that he was cynically using the Aeon program for his own, hidden purposes (as a means of returning to the 1930s, attempting to re-enter the loop and figure out a way to break out at his original entry time.) Deathloop does, IMO, contain an epilogue that explores the questions you raise. It's the one where you, the player, poke around for more secrets, find the above information, and realize for yourself what kind of person Cole already was, that he was already that guy before the loop. This knowledge recontextualizes how we understand the drift in his personality during the 130-whatever previous years. (In, in my opinion, a not-totally-negative direction!)
Time Loops are my favorite narrative device. A work that I feel does justice to the permenant effects actions inside a loop can have on the loop-ee is "Hard Reset" and its two sequels. They are a My Little Pony fanfic trilogy where the actual time-loop only makes up around 20% of the story. The rest of the story is the time loop-ee dealing with various consequences and PTSD from being in that loop. How long does it take to deprogram the impulse to kill yourself when you run into a minor inconvenience? What happens if you run into someone you killed in the loop? What if they killed you? Would you forgive them for something they never did? What if you saw what you'd become if you never escaped the loop? Seeing the horrors that you would end up committing after a few more centuries of Time Loop Nihilism, how does that shape your self-image as "A good person"? There aren't many fanfics I'd recommend to people outside the MLP fandom, but if you're looking for more nuanced looks into this after "Through the Flash", Hard Reset might interest you.
I have a story idea that's centered on a time loop, and the person experiencing the loop trying to save her friends from dying. She makes a deal with a supernatural being to start the loop after she and her friends go on a dangerous but necessary adventure and they all die but her. She is able to end the loop whenever she wants, but she refuses to until everyone makes it out alive. The problem is, the loops aren't exactly the same. People make different decisions each time, even when they have the same information. Because of this, she can't accurately predict what will happen and develop a perfect strategy to get through it. She can only estimate the chance of which choices someone will make. It's immensely stressful and exhausting for her. I'm proud of this idea, as far as I know it's never been done before. And if it has, well, great minds think alike.
If I may; I think your idea fundamentally clashes with time loop concepts, unless you introduce a reason for actions and events not being completely deterministic. 2 possibilities that come to mind are: -A 3rd party is also aware, and influences the loop in ways the main character can't completely foresee. -The main character is forced into an action that cannot be perfectly replicated and has chaotic ripple effects. Could be something as simple as having to throw a couple of dice whose results have wildly different consequences or ripple effects. Even if you have 1 million attempts, you're unlikely to learn to control the results, and if there are enough different possible outcomes, you can't create a perfect plan, only optimize for the results you get.
This is one of the most encouraging and humbling readings of a story I've written ever. I remember watching some of these movies listed and thinking about how I could push the conceit a little further. Also playing 12 Minutes now lol so it's almost surreal to see the same conversation I've been having with my friends and myself represented in this elevated and polished way. Once again, thank you truly for this brilliant consideration. Definitely subscribed lol.
Hey Jacob, just wanted to say that I really appreciated your mentioning of Friday Black, I really loved how you described "Through the Flash" so I decided to go ahead and grab the kindle edition and thoroughly enjoyed the book.
I think time loops are so interesting as narrative devices- There's so many ways you can alter the basic formula, and each lets you tell a new, thematically important story. Your protagonist gets really stab-happy in the loop? You can use that to examine guilt- examine redemption. Can your character change the end of the loop? You can tell the story of how every action matters, how kindness can change the future, how there's no such thing as fate. There's so much you can do with it! A time loop can symbolize whatever you want it to. Regret, an inability to move on from trauma, grief, consequence, etc. and all of those options can be explored at the same time, at different times, you name it. Hell, time loops are even good for worldbuilding and character interactions- if you have a setting you want to explore, a well-utilized time loop can let you show off all of it without getting stale. You can have characters hate each other one loop, and be friends the next- you can have cause and effect chains that change the entire loop. There's so much variety in them, both from how you use them and the rules you give them. I wish I had more time loop stories to read. If anyone has any good reccomendations, let me know.
I'll go first- - Omniscient reader's viewpoint, Webnovel. The main character isn't in a time loop, but the secondary character is. It's also REALLY well written, and I recommend it to everyone ever. - Saike Mata Shitemo, Manga. The main character has time loop powers- if he drowns in a specific pond he can restart the day. He uses this to save people's lives, but watch out! There's other people, with more combat focused powers. and he has to fight them. (I like this one sosososo much) -Re:zero- anime/manga. This one's really popular. It's set in a fantasy world with spirits, nobility, death cults, and the like. The main character is a really shitty person at first, and the story focuses on him growing as a human being, forming relationships with the people in this new world (it's an isekai), and dying painful horrible deaths and then going back in time. -room of swords- webtoon. An intricately crafted labyrinth of twists and turns, that I can't say like ANYTHING about without spoiling it. read it. read it now. do it.
I was thinking the same thing. You after endless days maybe a distilled version of you but it’s still you. I like how Undertale has Sans. He’s not just a judge. He can see you. He can see how you played the game and REACTS to YOUR game play. I was thinking about that during your video. You continue to challenge my thinking. Thank you.
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I'd just like to say that Palm Springs isn't the best movie or anything, and I rather dislike Andy Samberg, but the movie was still great.
Leaching this to say go read "mother of learning" (for free on royal road) its a magic time loop that executes it's loop Flawlessly,
I want to just say this video impressed me so much that I literally dreamed of it today 1 year after watching it. I just woke up thinking about the part "through the flash". In my dream I was the killer and after an eternity stopped be violent, only for another person to start doing what the killer did and such continue the cycle but with me as the victim now. It was... an experience.
I don't know if you're still following this, but I recently heard of a little RPG game called "In Stars and Time", that came out not too long ago, that I believe does the time loop thing pretty well.
@@JohnSmith-xv1tpabsolutely! It’s the best written time loop based game ever in my opinion
I'm gonna be the guy who brings up Undertale and say that Jacob's ruminations on what happens when the looper spends so much of their time being evil and finally gets out of the loop reminds me of the consequences of murdering everyone in the Underground, where the True Pacifist ending is forever spoiled because the player demonstrated that they see the characters for their gameplay functions and not their personalities by displaying zero empathy toward them.
ooooh that's an excellent connection, yes!
Co-signed, glad I wasn't the only one who thought of Undertale. 😄
The "it's you" repeated at the end makes me think of the mirror at the end of undertale where the dialogue says "despite everything its still you"
YES! Thank you!
Had the exact same thoughts! "Despite everything, it's still you."
You know what's a revelatory moment in Deathloop?
When you're playing multiplayer with a friend, and you realise *nothing is forcing you to kill the other player*
And suddenly you decide to turn the game into a cooperative experience with Julianna and colt working together to set up fun things.
this is exactly why i love tf2 so much
I recently picked up Deathloop and I had this experience with a much more seasoned Julianna that "invaded" my game. I don't want to give any spoilers so I won't go into details I would otherwise, but basically the Julianna invaded me, shot at me a few times, then ran off. I was assuming she was off hiding to ambush me later, but she actually ran to the visionary of the level and waited for me. When I got there, she just killed him for me and then (when I was unsure of what I should do since she was being friendly) kept lightly shooting me every few seconds and staring at the ground.
When I finally realized she wanted me to kill her, I did and she dropped some really good gear. It felt like some far future Julianna coming back to help a fledgling Colt at the beginning of his time loop journey. But then the next Julianna was back to trying to kill me.
Something about how Deathloop creates in-universe lore to how time loops and parallel universes affect the gameplay styles of different players is so interesting to me. It's like... This version of Julianna plays differently because she is only on her twentieth loop rather than her two-hundredth. This one is experimenting with befriending Colt rather than antagonizing him. This one just experienced some charity and wants to pay it forward. It turns player agency into additional opportunities character building.
@ashy the "friendly" phenomenon
@ashy Team Fortress 2 has a large subculture of "Friendlies" who use taunts, voicelines, killbinds and non-lethal weapons to peacefully communicate and have fun with everyone on the server regardless of which team they're on.
That happened to me the other day. I shot at her a bit but they she started nodding and teabagging so I stopped shooting. Then she led me to the reactor room and killed a lot of the eternalnists and took down the visionary for me. Then she showed me all the clues I had to pick up. Then she led me to the reactor and I cut the wrong wire so I blew up and she completed her mission by killing me.
I had no idea what was going on at the time but she must have known I couldn't have the wire code considering she led me to the other objectives. That Julianna was in character the entire time...
"If I had more time, I would've written a shorter letter" is an interesting quote because it's applicable to time loops.
Abraham Lincoln slowly figures out how to fit his letter into a perfectly efficient symbol over 900 years which was a day in real time
@@gremlinman9724 All I can see is the Spongebob episode where he spends an entire night to write the word The.
@@gremlinman9724 *Pascal
@@SingeStheos I heard it was Twain?
It's been attributed to many people over the years lol
@@theregalproletariat its Pascal, trust me
"I could kill all one hundred and sixteen people on my cluster in one hour and twenty-two minutes."
That wording is chillingly reminiscent of a speedrun.
This comment especially struck a chord with me; I enjoy playing Hitman “wipe out the whole level” sort of runs, scouring the map from top to bottom, sometimes with a meticulously honed strategy of gradual buildup, picking off stragglers and the isolated, sometimes just going in guns blazing. It wasn’t out of service to a goal like in speedrunning, it just felt good.
Now I wish there was a game where killing everyone as quick as possible was the objective but the npcs addapted, since the loop happened for everyone, one hour and twenty two minutes might not be the most optimal time, but doing it any faster might be impossible since everyone else could also addapt.
There would be a time where everyone just gave up, giving you the quickest time, but would you really count that?
@@bbittercoffee There is a game kinda like this, basically when the lights are on the AI learns what you do (shooting, running, jumping, vaulting over knee high obstacles) but if the lights are off they don't learn shit so taking it slow while the lights on makes the game easy but fuck off with that shit coz I'm bored lmao.
So every time you do shit and die they learn and the game gets progressively harder. It's called Echo and I'd highly recommend giving it a go.
@@smells109 Thanks for the suggestion, big ol' poo poo head
@@bbittercoffee SCP-1733 goes in a similar way. Not a videogame, but a story. It was meant to be a recording to show the multiple ways a basketball game would go, but then things become... really, really, really disturbing. Not only do the basketball players all remember the time loop, but so do the commentators, but the audiences and all workers as well. It devolves at first into stalemale matches, then into fearful distress, then into suicides, then into sacrifices and fanaticism, and... into a red light.
The worst part about a time loop is, you don’t know if it will stop. If the loop stops on the one time where you commit a mass genocide or the time that you killed your loved ones, how could you possibly live with yourself? And what if you don’t know if the loop has even ended or not? The only way to know - is if you die.
It's The Halting Problem gone rogue
i thought this was going to be a bigger thing on the deathloop ending considering it would actually be bad for colt to murder everyone on that island. but the whole thing resets and everyone on the island seems wake up knowing the loop is over so the violence immediately comes to an end. i found that ending to be just a little too clean and convenient.
@@JewTube001 but its easy to understand the loop is broken, everybody realized the loop was broken and came to their senses
Me when the game autosaves right before I’m about to die and then it loads the most recent autosave. I’m literally stuck in a *_DEATHLOOP_*
maybe it'd be interesting if deathloop had different endings depending on who you killed, or rather, how many people you killed.
The author of the novel Edge of Tomorrow is based on was also heavily inspired by his experiences dying in video games over and over again. So the comparison is perfectly apt.
The book is called All You Need Is Kill for those curious! It's one of my favorite books! (The japanese one)
All you need is kill! I've never read the novel but I have the manga version that the creator of death note made and I love it! One of my faves
im so happy Jacob shouted out Edge of Tomorrow AND named it properly. I loved that movie and Im really tempted to go back and watch it again.
Art imitates life imitates art
I always thought Edge of Tomorrow was good, but the tension at the end of the movie was dumb.
Like bro, they know where to find an Alpha to get the time powers back, the water place he got ambushed at when they tried to take his power from him. Just go there again but this time knowing about the ambush and specifically targeting the ambush to get it back, then do the finale with lower stakes.
It hasn't been mentionned, but undertale talk about time loop nihilism. Flowey and Chara are reflections of the player dealing with time loop nihilism.
One of the best example is the first boss, Toriel. A new player, used to how games usually works will kill her. Then flowey appears, mocks the player for having murdered her. A clever new player will reload his last save and repeat until he finds out how to spare her and continue his adventure. Then flowey appears again and say "I know what you did. You murdered her.".
haha! at 18:00 I was on the edge of my seat expecting undertale
I think the "It's you" refrain at the end was him basically saying, "Also this video can be about Undertale if you want it to be."
@@Narokkurai Anything can be about anything if you want it to be.
@@googiegress Truth. That's life.
That moment when Flowey told me he knew that I had originally murdered Toriel was when I realized just how much I had underestimated Undertale at first.
The best time loop story I've experienced was a tabletop RPG game my best friend ran. We were a group of normal people who happened to be returning to the small remote town (in the south-western USA in 1947) we grew up in on the same train. Things went fairly normally, with us catching up with our families, making progress on the various tasks that brought us back to town (my character was an architect returning home to execute his parent's estate, another was a soldier home on leave, another was a reporter following a hot story, another a travelling salesman). The next day was the yearly town harvest festival with a fete, party etc, which we all attended. There was an unseasonable fog which worsened over the course of the evening, until just as the party was due to start in earnest great tentacles and mouths made of solid mist materialised from the sky and started killing everyone in town. Beckoned by a strange hooded figure we fled to the town's clock tower, where we found an incongruous piano, which the monk played for us as the mist creatures came crashing in and killed us....then we found ourselves stood on the train platform on the morning of the previous day as if nothing had happened. Over about 6 months of play we killed people and saw them killed, uncovered horrific secrets about the town going back generations, had our loved ones wiped from existence by a monster that preyed on loneliness, uncovered a cult that worshipped that monster, found their lair under the town, saw the hundreds of thousands of human teeth that they had ripped from the screaming mouths of their sacrifices that now covered the floor of the cave like gravel.
What really made it work was the system the GM had picked- we were playing Unknown Armies 3rd edition, which is completely focused on mechanically representing how your characters changed when exposed to horrible stimuli. You don't have stats like in D&D, you have seven 'meters', which are like little progress bars for different types of trauma. Each meter has a 'healthy' and 'unhealthy' skill attached, which are inversely proportionate to each other based on how full that trauma meter is- for example, one of the meters is Violence. Its associated skills are Connect (empathy, persuasion) and Struggle (aptitude for physical violence). As your characters experience/commit more violent events their violence meter will fill, raising their Struggle and lowering their Connect skills. In other words in the actual mechanics of the game the more violence you witness and commit the better you get at solving problems with violence and and the worse you get at talking things out like empathetic human beings. Our characters were completely different people when we finished, not just in roleplay but actually in the mechanics of the game. My character had fled the town decades ago to escape his family's obsession with the occult, but by the time we were done he had become quite the scholar of forgotten lore at the expense of losing the reputation, status and prestige that he had enjoyed at the start of the game. The soldier character had started with a few violence notches already ticked- by the end of the game he had filled his violence meter and basically couldn't function in normal society. Unfortunately for Jacob, we made some bad choices and believed the wrong people and while we were able to break the loop and save the town our characters ended up getting unpersoned like the monster's victims so we didn't get to find out how they coped with the post-loop world. I remember saying it was for the best that my character had been erased because his wife back in New York would never have taken back the man he had become.
Dude. That's incredible. The genius that is poured into TTRPGs for the benefit of a few friends around a table is insane, without parallel in any other medium. Sometimes it feels like the Mona Lisa is painted, flipped round for the subject to enjoy, then shelved, and the world never finding out.
My goodness that sounds good 👀
That sounds absolutely incredible!
Dude that sounds incredible… I wanna try playing this fr
You have awesome friends and a great DM. I have always wanted to DM a campaign and this helps motivate me to start writing and planning for the day I do.
Hey Jacob! I just came back from an interview with the author of the Through the Flash story! It was one of the books selected for us to read for one of our english classes. He mentioned your video in the interview and how much he loves your work. I just wanted you to know that the person whose work you love, also loves your work. Cheers and keep it up!
that is really cool and wholesome
Did she say that she based her story on the Immortal Loops shared fanfic universe?
Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah is actually a dude
One of the most interesting aspects of Deathloop is actually the fact that at some point, Juliana has to have realized that she's doomed to fail. It doesn't matter if she achieves victory millions of times across what would've been millions of years; there is no scenario in which she can successfully protect the loop because in protecting the loop, Cole is given another chance to break it.
Meanwhile, Cole only has to break it once.
True, but she's talked Cole out of ending everything before. I think she's pretty confident that she can keep it going indefinitely.
I sometimes lay awake at night and think "I have to be me for the rest of my life, huh?" and this video got that exact feeling in by the end.
That's often how I feel when I wake up.
Fun facts tho.... You don't have to be you for the rest of your life. Fair warning tho, it's not easy and things get crazy sometimes.... But you can change yourself every day if ya wanna
@@cameronjadewallace hmmm but it's still you, just a version of you that you honed and created, a version of you that you may like better etc etc
@@kriskros4900 fair enough
@@kriskros4900 But is it still you if everything that you were no longer is?
Jacob, I'm sorry, but you couldn't pad an extra 10 seconds to the first half to make it so you say "12 minutes" at exactly 12 minutes into the video? I'll never forgive you
NOOOOO
How is this 1 day old when it was dropped less than an 1 hour ago...
@@markstevenson280 patereons get early access to his videos
Because you're in a time loop
Lol
"At first, I used my powers for good. I became 'friends' with everyone. I solved all their problems flawlessly. Their companionship was amusing... For a while. As time repeated, people proved themselves predictable. What would this person say if I gave them this? What would they do if I said this to them? Once you know the answer, that's it. That's all they are.
It all started because I was curious. Curious what would happen if I killed them. 'I don't like this', I told myself, 'I'm just doing this because I HAVE to know what happens.' Ha ha ha... What an excuse.
Nowadays, even that's grown tiring. You understand, I've done everything this world has to offer. I've read every book. I've burned every book. I've won every game. I've lost every game. I've appeased everyone. I've killed everyone. Sets of numbers... Lines of dialogue... I've seen them all..."
-an evil flower.
And a good goat.
And a great son
flowey is every RPG player ever
I was surprised he didnt mention undertale in the video as that was one of my first thoughts.
@@michal_king478 Definitely
I actually think the idea of someone being stuck in a death loop kinda situation by the government as a way to forcefully train him into being a super soldier would be an interesting idea for a story.
This reminds me of that one episode of Stargate SG:1 where Teal'c gets suck in a training simulation that is effectively a time loop. But it's not quite a perfect time loop since the difficulty progressively increases making progress incredibly challenging.
i don't think it will work, because the reason he got so good is that everything is predictable, when out of the loop you insert unpredictability again... this would have the same effect as the time chamber for dragon ball as, you would have infinite time to train a specific skill, but it wound't work like you are thinking
@@VictorTheLegend i think it's more about the mental effects it would have
That plot sounds like a tom cruise movie
@@VictorTheLegend Then you can insert randomness into the time loop. Make the simulation random (which can be done by utilizing a tracker to track Teal'c's body movements then using the data to formulate "randomness").
My personal favourite type of time loop is one introduced to me in a Creepypasta: Each day can repeat any number of times, so any given day could be the last time that particular one is repeated, which will be the "real" one going forward, so there is always a chance that your actions could have lasting consequences
That's seems very interesting. What's the title of this creepypasta?
What’s the title of the creepy pasta?
*What's the title of the creepypasta, please?*
I think Outer Wilds is a really interesting contrast to the games mentioned here - in deathloop you have to become the perfect murderer, figure out how to precisely weave your way through a bloody battlefield and execute your targets. In 12 minutes the mystery is different, but the methods are much the same. You become callous and content with killing or torturing your way through the conundrum, doing horrible cruelty in the hopes that you might get a scrap of new information.
In Outer Wilds, there's a mystery, but to solve it you have to become the perfect scholar. You need to be a historian, an explorer, a pilot, but not once does the game ask you (or, indeed, allow you) to kill. And I think because of this, instead of seeing the loop as a playground I started to see it as a kind of meditation. I explored all of the planets, seeing every island on Giant's Deep, every building on Brittle Hollow, every nook and cranny of Ember Twin.
There is death present, sure, but it's in the form of the Nomai skeletons laying around in almost random places. I grew to be attached to the Nomai in a way, even being a species wiped out thousands or millions of years ago. Some of the skeletons I could name, some I could only guess. I mourned these people, rich with culture and thoughts and feelings of their own, who I would never get to meet.
Instead of figuring out which ways I could best kill people, I had to figure out which parts of the planets I was yet to explore, which records I hadn't read. And in all of these, I couldn't help but become enamoured with the tiny little slice of the universe I was confined to. All of these little planets and moons and buildings were brimming with details, and I learned all of them eventually. The time loop gave me freedom to appreciate the world in all of its little parts, the parts that we often have to skip over and ignore, pushed ever forwards as we are. If the end music started while I was on one of the Hourglass Twins, I'd go and comfort Chert, roasting a couple marshmallows by the fire before watching the supernova. If I was on Brittle Hollow, I'd often jump through the black hole to watch it happen. I usually only had about 3 minutes of oxygen left and little fuel, but 3 minutes of oxygen might as well be a hundred years for all that it would change. I'd sit there, out by the white hole, and just watch the sun expand and consume, in a kind of contented, complacent way.
SPOILERS: I think that's partially why, in the ending, I was so able to die. I had explored the loop to its fullest, had seen all there was to see. I had become one of the only living people bearing the memory of the Nomai, and I was sort of... done? Having seen all I could, I was happy to simply pack up and leave all of it to whoever came next.
I was about to comment that Outer Wilds feels like an almost-direct address to this problem. It encourages you to live life to the fullest, and when you have literally done that, it gives you the keys to the metaphorical cell. "You've solved the puzzle, you're free to go. There's nothing else for you here. You've learned it all."
It even takes on a meta quality where you, the PLAYER, are now the sole repository for the history of 2 species, both long since erased from the galaxy. Instead of the protagonist learning to deal with it, the player grapples with the enormity of what they've done, and what it's done back to them.
@@herpderptheshep believe it or not the philosophy behind time loops called "eternal recurrence" basically says that once you understand your life is on rails and part of an endless loop, you can stop worrying about deeper more complex issues and just focus on the present, the now. and what brings you personal joy. this comes from that most upbeat of philosophers.....Nietzsche lol
I love Outer Wilds.
At first I found myself becoming frustrated when I'd mess up: I often miscalculated my jumps, or allowed my spaceship to drift away, faster than I could hope to follow.
But slowly I came to realise that there was no need for frustration. Whether I discovered a whole new planet or stumbled into ghost matter, the loop would end the same way. I would always have a chance to try again. And it was so relaxing in a way.
It made me push myself further, take more risks, race the sands, all because I couldn't fail. It's wonderful.
I played OW and it's a decent time loop but i really wish the game had given better directions for what to do. I was so confused about what I should do next and was very angry about the time loop that I just started using a walkthrough guide to tell me everything that i should do next.
The ending was also kind of a downer. I'm saying it's a bad game, don't @ me. I just didn't like parts of it. The quantum stuff annoyed me because it isn't at all how quantum mechanics works and the time loop being 22 minutes was agonizingly restrictive.
My BF kept asking me what I thought of this or that or how pretty a place was. But I'm the kind of person who will spend an hour or real world time staring at a skybox because the textures are pretty. Or looking at a mountain or something. OW just didn't give me the time I needed to enjoy it. I felt rushed and pushed and as a result I rushed and pushed through it yo such a degree that i barely even remember anything about the game beyond the broad strokes.
Next time I play it though i think I'll use cheat software or something to make sure the time loop never happens.
I am a simple man I hear “time loop” and think outer wilds
"When they cry," the anime is a time loop with a girl that's lived thousands of years of seeing her family and friends killed in horrific ways. After the time loop is stopped at the end of the series, there is an extra ova of her life after. She suffers from ptsd and the anime trys to see if it's possible to restore her childlike innocence.
Higurashi?
Wow, that's kinda sad that the whole series is her suffering
I remember hearing the OPs and Endings. The comments for them made me so sad, especially seeing some clips where it’s really depressing. I couldn’t find the anime name, so I just know the soundtracks.
re zero also has a main character that suffers from ptsd using a death loop
@@bobroctopus2210 Yeah, I feel like it deals with the ramifications of time loops in a very interesting way. He loses all sense of self-love because he sees himself not as Subaru, but rather as return by death because he thinks he's nothing without this power. He takes everyone's pain because he has this power. Probably one of my favorite ways of seeing a time travel story show the ramifications of someone who's suffered that much because of time loops.
"i've felt silly...spending so much time thinking about the ramifications of a situation that none of us will ever face." Isnt that just philosophy?
"none of us will face" … if we're lucky D:
Some philosophy is about the ramifications of situations that everyone faces whether they like it or not.
Plato once asked, would you rather fight a horse-sized duck or 50 duck-sized horses
@@gremlinman9724 put me in a ring with all of them
@@gremlinman9724 you think I don’t know how to fuck up a duck?
Sometimes i forgot how little media reflects on the aftereffects of time loops. I’ve been spoiled by the hundreds of time loop fanfics that deal with those ramifications so if anyone ever gets that desire then that’s where I’d recommend you go. It’s all the nihilism, trauma, horror, and introspection you could ever want and usually at least 50k words!
Do u mind recommending one of the fanfics you've read with time loops in them?
Late but please do share
im also late but i wanna see them too
Something like this maybe:
In a second person perspective in one of these iterations, an average guy of no particular repute or distinction suddenly seems to develop borderline inhuman aptitude in a broad array of skills, many mundane, others totally unexpected given their background, and a personality change on top, practically out of the blue. This person also seems suspiciously aware of the consequences of their actions, but appears to totally lack any emotional connection to them, to the extent of effectively having precognition. For a single day, this man wreaks indescribable havoc with total abandon, racking up a vast list of charges and becoming an overnight legend for the worse. Once the day is through, that same man of two days ago is back, as if nothing has happened. He is promptly dealt with by police/military, and this person (if they survive) and those around them (family, coworkers, employer/ees and victims have to both come to terms with this incident and clean up the fallout.
The ur-example of timeloop fics is "The Infinite Loops", of which I've only read some of Innortal's original universes and can't therefore recommend anything else.
Another one I've been reading recently is "Not this time, Fate", by Coeur Al'Aram, a RWBY fic about Jaune trying to get things right, failing every time and after a few thousand years finally deciding to take a vacation (it doesn't work too well).
And one that's basically finished but the author still hasn't posted the last chapter is the aptly-named "Dialogue Options and Perfecting Endings", by alohaflower, a BnHA fic about Aizawa reliving the week before USJ.
I haven't read too many fanfics with timeloops, but that's what I could remember right now
Edit: as a bonus, a fic that's not about a time loop but might as well be is "See you soon" by PurpleDragon6. It's an Infinity Train fic about Grace (a girl who lived basically as if she was inside a loop anyway) and her life after she got out and met someone suspiciously similar to her best friend who died.
"Through the Flash unlike Deathloop, unlike Twelve Minutes, is a story about how your actions create an impression upon you, ALWAYS, even if no one else remembers it or yesterday is the same as tomorrow, being a person who performs great violence or cruelty means you are a person capable of performing great violence or cruelty " After watching almost all of your videos I think this is the best messages you have ever said and one of the best I have ever heard.
Fr, i had to pause the video and dwell on that for a couple minutes
@@joshuamorrow8863 your comment made me rewatch the video and oh my god that phrase still goes extremely hard
Theres a fantastic story that covers this in the SCP mythos called "The Last Things Dr. Darryl Loyd Ever Did, in Chronological Order". It treads similar ground of 12 Minutes, but it explores how two people can spend their last 24 hours alive while also escaping a compromised SCP laboratory. It's a must read from me if you enjoy time loop stories about planning against the impossible, alongside some actual character development.
ooh thanks for the recommendation! i'm getting into SCP really late but have really enjoyed what i've read so far!
Okay, so I just finished reading that and damn it was good!
Thank you for the recommendation! That really blew me away!
Just finished reading it, that was nice :)
It was really good :)
There was a line from Julianna where she inferred on some level that Colt might enjoy his rampages. At this point I'd developed a real affinity for clearing levels primarily using the machete, so it really resonated with me. Her routine affirmations that there was nothing truly like the Loop also kept recurring in my mind at which point I realized that Julianna had begun to feel like a vessel for the developers to address the player directly.
In that context a lot of the game felt like a metanarrative on the nature of play and game completion. After breaking the loop I still felt an urge to explore the game narratively and mechanically which I think fit perfectly with having enough comfort with the system to start invading other players. My goals now better aligned with Julianna's and I had her understanding of Black Reef. I knew exactly what Colts goals were and I was eager to disrupt them as mine had been disrupted time and time again. I wanted the loop to continue - I wanted to keep hunting. I was good at it. My mechanical journey with Deathloop had essentially carried me to the same narrative point that Julianna had reached by the time the game starts.
The view of Colt/Juliana as the sibling desires to complete a game and to keep playing it coming into conflict is a really interesting one - there's a lot of the game that is very unabashedly meta (and specifically in ways that turn the loop itself into a game space), so the core conflict also being about the way we play games feels only appropriate. Very good addition to the discussion.
@@vavakxnonexus i love that concept, since developers are often players themselves, so the internal styles and methods of gamers becoming commentary and a theme within a game is super cool. shows how far gaming has come
I've always felt that everything about Deathloop's setting was thought up with the explicit goal of getting the player accustomed to its hyperviolence, since so many people complained about feeling pressured away from high-chaos runs in Dishonored.
This video presents an interesting foil in my mind to "Dark Souls 3 is Thinking of Ending Things". In that video, we explore worlds which are dying, and what it means to even just exist in those worlds. This is a different kind of meaninglessness, one without finality, but still ultimately one where one's actions have no consequences. It's interesting how the removal of a time limit can cause much the same reaction in us as the strict enforcement of one.
this video is the question of "If nothing i do matters, what's stopping me from becoming a monster?" Dark Souls three is the question "If nothing i do prevents the end, what's stopping me from taking the monsters down with us?"
I was thinking the same thing @Zander M ! Both the video "Dark Souls 3 is Thinking of Ending Things" and this one I feel like deal with coming to grips with inevitable change. In dark souls 3, the world itself is in a time loop and we are shown how it has changed around us, instead of how we are changed personally because of it. Meanwhile, this video focuses on the individual's psyche changing through repetition in a fixed environment. I'm still stewing on how I want to interpret some of the bigger implications of this revelation, but I feel deep down that they might relate to the deconstruction of the idea of immortality in media. I want to watch the Simpsons video over again too because I also think it would provide another interesting perspective.
a game came out somewhat recently called "In Stars and Time". its a great example of "time loop nihilism", i think, in an interesting sort of way; id elaborate, but its best played blind. HIGHLY recommend, i played it recently and it changed me fundamentally i think. it has been on my mind constantly since. it is an amazing game. a work of art. the best thing ive ever experienced. the only video game to ever make me cry. i have so many thoughts about it and i dont know how to say them so ill just recommend it with passion.
id love to see jacob talk about it, if it piques his interest.
I LOVE IN STARS AND TIMEEE
In Stars And Time mention! :D
big vouch for isat
huge vouch!!
Humongous vouch
Since this video's release, In Stars and Time came out!!! It's an RPG time loop game that REALLY delves into the psychological effects on the protagonist, memory loss, playing god, what happens after, etc. I HIGHLY recommend it!
Another spin on killing in a time loop can be found in the Arknights event "What Is Real?". The characters in this story are trapped in a painting where a small mountain village has one Very Bad Day and everyone is attacked and killed by monsters. The monsters only attack the fictional painted villagers, and when the day ends it loops back to the beginning and none of the villagers remember what happened. On the surface, it is pointless and even counterproductive to take the time every day to defend the village; the heroes trapped in the painting are under no threat and if they simply ignored the destruction of the village they could use that time to figure out how to escape. But they do it anyways, because even if its futile and pointless they just can't let people die when they could have saved them. It speaks strongly to the game's wider themes of how even in a doomed world that will constantly punish you for doing the right thing you should do the right thing anyways.
I agree, but the truly scary thing about time loops is that they'll probably break even the most resolute and good-hearted people. In Arknights they were only trapped there for... what, a week? Imagine being trapped through thousands - no, MILLIONS of loops. Anyone would try murdering people once. Timeloop Nihilism would be unavoidable, it's only a matter of time.
It's a scary reminder that our brains aren't _designed_ to last forever. We need things to end, we need people and relationships to die eventually, or else they lose most of their meaning. I would love to see a story that mixes cosmic horror with Timeloop Nihilism, I think they're a perfect match. The unfeeling reality that not even our minds - not even emotions like love - can truly withstand infinity. And also that it's a _mercy_ that we can cope with things like death by giving life meaning. Imagine if we were immortal and death was meaningless. Everything we cared for would eventually becoming boring to us. Finality is blessing in that regard.
Sorry for getting so deep.
@@bugjams Saga was actually in the painting for years. She is an exceptionally wholesome person though.
@@bugjams I have to partly disagree here. It isn't death or the end of things per say that keeps things interesting, thus meaningful. It is change. The thing that makes everything boring in a time loop is that you are the only one in it, so only you change and everything else becomes stale and predictable.
Were several people to get in the loop (provided they aren't terrible people and/or just hate each other's guts), would it really become boring for the ones involved? I think maybe the outside world would, but not the people in the loop, because they are all experiencing it so they all change. We don't NEED things to die, we need then to change, to renew themselves in some way.
That is why I think people and relationships could, theoretically, remain interesting for indefinite amounts of time. Because those can change, thus remaining interesting. Of course, that is a bit oversimplified. That are plenty of people who refuse to change and relationships can easily end because of said change, so those are probably only lasting that long under VERY specific conditions (provided the people are open minded and reflective enough and that the changes into the relationship don't go a way that distances the parties? Maybe that is what it would take?).
Sorry for kinda of ranting out. It is just that I REALLY dislike the narrative that death gives life meaning, mainly because (in my opinion) it doesn't and the vast majority, if not all, points that people make for that idea are founded on (again, in my opinion) weak assumptions.
I do agree however that the conventional time loop (one person alone and looping on a scenario) does break anyone eventually (can't help but think about the ending of Doctor Strange where Strange literally pins his own resolve against Dormmamu's and uses the time loop to see who relents first when faced with the endless repetition and successfully makes even a interdimensional disaster type being like Dormmamu bend through this) and that time loop cosmic horror story sounds like a great mix.
Actually Saga was probably in there for a few months at most, her old fashion talk is just because she's Like That TM
I just went here to see Deathloop and Jacob Geller's top-tier Ted talk only then to be jumpscare by shut-in painter dragon event~ now I can't escape the Terra...
23:05 "it's you, it's you, it's you." ...despite everything, it's still you. I can't BELIEVE you made it through this video without bringing up undertale and the reset, which functionally IS a timeloop, and the way that Chara represents that state of timeloop nihilism you're talking about here :B
What I don't like about that game is how it tries to insinuate that the player is a bad person because they "don't care about the characters and just see them as fictional videogame code" but like that's exactly what they are, it's like if you wrote a book and the second half of that book would have everyone dying and in the end it'd be like "y did u read this book reader, now everyone is dead".
(I personally only ever did a pacifist run because that storyline just doesn't interest me)
@@happyfullfridge if that was my reading of that ending I'd be dissatisfied with the game as well!
@@happyfullfridge I don't think genocide route tries make you feel like a bad person saying that is doing huge disservice to that route but I think toby fox wants you think about the violence and the pain your causing the characters kinda like hotline Miami and how often we can get desensitized towards it you have to remember these characters don't treat their lives like a game they treat it like lives and you killing all the life that made undertale feel great you make the characters terrified of you not to mention that undertale is about choices choices you made you chose to kill everyone choices matter and you will suffer the consequences. Plus if you really care about the characters of undertale the game doesn't have to make you a monster for killing them cause you probably already feel like one thanks for coming to my tedtalk
@@happyfullfridge Difference is you can't control a book's plot (for the most part) whereas you have to actively choose to do genocide. So a more accurate comparison would be if the book had an optional alternate ending that it explicitly warned you not to do and you did it anyway.
And yeah, Undertale is still a game at the end of the day, but the Genocide Route is designed to make you reflect on your actions and it's the kind of direct self introspection only a game could inspire due to its interactivity. If a book or movie blamed you for the characters deaths it'd feel cheap, but when you actively have to kill them to progress the route, when it's your choices that bring about that ending, it actually carries some weight.
Obviously they are still fictional video game code, but when you're playing the game you're meant to suspend that reality just like when you're watching a movie you suspend the reality that it's just random LEDs on a screen in order to get immersed into the world.
I can never bring myself to complete Genocide personally. Closest I came was doing it up to the end of Sans and then resetting, I don't care about seeing the endings. I don't want to corrupt that world forever.
(This is no judgement against people who do complete it. It's still a game at the end of the day)
@@theoncomingstorm7903 another factor is how distinctly the world changes with every action you take. When you kill everyone in genocide, you really *feel* the lack of monsters. Like how grilby's is completely empty (except sans or whatever).
I played this as background noise while doing chores, but your reference to Through the Flash had me dropping everything to borrow a copy of Friday Black. I couldn't put it down. This is literally the first book I've finished reading in months of pandemic slump.
I'm noticing a lot of comments suggesting Undertale as an alternative example of a story that challenges time loop nihilism, but I'm so glad that you let Through the Flash take the spotlight and I love how both stories handle young protagonists committing cyclical violence. imo Ama's agonizing attempt to reclaim a sense of human accountability almost feels like a refutation of the finality of Undertale's No Mercy run - her interactions with Carl and the comfort she learns to find in her loved ones paint a slightly more hopeful picture for Chara and Flowey.
Your content is always so forthright about referencing other mediums of fiction and scholarship and it really enriches your video game analyses. Thank you so, so much for exposing your audience to Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah's work. I can't wait to read more.
is through the flash the name of the mentioned short story in Friday Black? I realized a bit into his description of the time loop story where the protagonist indulged in hyperviolence to cope that i totally missed what it was called.
@@quinnmarchese6313 Friday Black is a collection of short stories, and Through the Flash is its concluding piece!
@@sourcitrine Appreciate it, thanks!
I just finished Friday Black myself. Through The Flash is by far my favorite story. I didn't expect the shocking violence but I get it. In Groundhog Day, the time loop lasted an estimated 35 years. Through The Flash seems to have been going on for much longer than that and I can't stop thinking about it.
the feelings and experiences talked about around 17:20 is quite literally the plot of 'In Stars and Time'.
22:50 this reminds me of a quote from undertale "despite everything its still you". its also funny cuz the premise of that game is the reseting of time to try to get the desired good end. its also poignant that even if you get the perfect pacifist route, if you even tried to get a genocide route, the game will give a jumpscare right and the end of the game to remind you that you did terrible things in an "alternate time line"
I feel like I had the opposite reaction to what Deathloop expected from me- I got absorbed into this world, the characters, the story, but once I learned everything about this place I got bored, extremely quickly. The playground of violence held to appeal to me. I really desperately wished that I could just walk through this world without people shooting at me on sight. I experienced that same lessening of caution, to the point where I would just walk around capping people in the head whenever I saw someone, but it didn't feel like the more interesting alternative- I found it really, really boring.
When the ending choice came, I ended the loop without hesitation, because the loop held nothing of value to me. The prospect of eternal violence- What kind of life is that?
yeah I can't imagine making any choice other than that at the end!
I ended the loop for the same reason, but on top of that I have a habit of picking the choice the character was working towards the whole time when it's offered. Like at the end of Life is Strange I continued to save Chloe because I spent the whole game doing just that and I wasn't going to give up.
@@JacobGeller It was especially hard to imagine preserving the loop after coming off of Echoes of the Eye, which in its own way (Going to be very vague here for anyone who hasn't played it yet) was all about the existential hollowness that comes from retreading the same thing over and over and over again and refusing to move on because you're afraid of experiencing what comes next... Julianna felt like the [REDACTED], exchanging meaningful existence so that she could be god of a consequentless playground forever
congratulation on your philosophy dissertation
@@thrandompug2254 Yeah. I liked it too. And what better place to share a small comment-sized philosophy dissertation, than in the comments under a larger philosophy dissertation video? Let's all receive our doctorates now.
Edit; Thanks to David Hunt;
ua-cam.com/video/dmLaoCImhjM/v-deo.html
The quote isnt quite right below but! This feels so appropriate.
"If nothing matters, why not just stab a bloke at the bar?"
"Well, you know, maybe he wants to survive it. Maybe to him, it isnt the end of the world. Isnt it a bit selfish to assume that just because yours is ending, he will be fine dying for it?"
Where'd you get that from. I'd like to know
@@lorissantarsiero5849 i honestly cant remember, and it is paraphrased but.. i think its one of Jacobs other videos. Or a pyrocynical one. Its a quote from a documentary about what people would do in the end of the world. Hope it helps.
@@fuzzletheslime9423 ahh ok thanks. Yeah I thought this sounds like from a video game or something. Love pyrocynicals content. Sounds like something he'd probably quote considering his production value.
I agree its such a selfish way to think! It's becaus of this that i only speed near pediatric oncology clinics!
@@thesaddestdude3575 ayy. That's the spirit
Even if time loops are physically impossible, I still think this video is a relevant discussion because time loops do serve a metaphorical purpose (typically, the innate value of goodness even if bad actions are consequence-free) and it can be relevant to a work's themes to see how the time loop is handled. At this point I have to say I've played neither game, but having read about both games and the discourse surrounding them, but it looks like Deathloop's "good ending" is Arcane acknowledging a common criticism that their stories aren't too good and distract from the gameplay, making the game more of a mission statement than a satisfying self-contained story. The criticisms of Twelve Minutes' time loop, meanwhile, sort of loop around to broader thematic criticisms that the game has received: that the game is pretentious and overly-self interested, where characters besides The Main Dude are treated as disposable props for The Dude's personal growth.
So, spoilers for both games and Bioshock Infinite, but what's up with the incest thing? Did Bioshock Infinite open up a pandora's box where every game with time-travel shenanigans now needs to have weird incest themes? Sidenote: Burial At Sea centering itself around Elizabeth's guilt over killing a Little Sister makes it better at handling personal consequences through time loops/universe hopping than either of these games. I can't believe in the year 2021 I just said "Bioshock Infinite did this better" but here we are I guess. Either way, Through the Flash sounds incredible and I've got to read it.
There... Wasn't any incest in Infinite, though? The Lutece Twins are practically the same people with different faces and behave as such. Elizabeth was portrayed as the naïve, sheltered girl that had to be protected - your actions were far more like that of a mentor figure, if not an older sibling or father figure, than a knight-in-shining-armor that was saving their princess from the tower.
Time-travel stories have used incest for deliberate squick/shock value for quite a while. Back To The Future and Futurama are two easy examples, and among the more humorous. Twelve Minutes actually treated incest pretty seriously and originally, even outside of the time-travel context.
@@TheUltimoSniper o yea there isnt like actual incest and more like,, weird vibes. this is anecdotal but i remember when the game came out a BUNCH of people shipped booker and elizabeth when they were half way through the game, usually accompanied by like a snarky comment along the lines of 'oh u havent finished the game huh'. plus it certainly is a Choice to make elizabeth the femme fatale to booker's noir detective in burial at sea. the thing that i found weird tho is how deathloop and infinite had, like, the same family twist, and 12 minutes, a game that doesn't actually involve time travel (and so doesnt have to do the comedy incest routine of something like back to the future) still involves incest. all im saying is that there was a solid month's worth of time where 2 games involving time loops and incest came out and thats a weird thing to happen twice
I'm not a fan of how Burial at the Sea concludes with the idea that the solution to a cycle of abuse, real or time-dimensional, is to sacrifice yourself (at the hand of another horrible person) so that someone might come and solve it all on your behalf. That one ought to pay for their sins in blood and call it fixed.
I felt starkly aware that, no matter what they wanted to say, what they wanted to call canon, that the savior hero may turn out to be a horrible abuser. Burial at Sea puts its hopes upon Bioshock 1, a game where the protagonist might still choose to kill children and become a tyrant warlord.
@@twilightvulpine o yea my "defense" of infinite only goes so far as "they acknowledged a thing" because wow infinite was kinda a Mess top to bottom
@@TheGlooga The fact that people ship Booker and Elizabeth isn’t the game’s fault. People just saw a pair of opposite-gender protagonists and immediately thought “I want to see them fuck” but that doesn’t mean the game itself had incest vibes.
I think a critically underexplored aspect of time loop stories is the fear a character may feel that they will mess up this time and then time simply won't loop. What if a character started to feel that detachment from consequence, killed someone important, or just in any way invited some drastic consequence, and then just as they were expecting to wake up again, every action undone, it isn't. Time continues as it normally should, and they have to live with consequences they were expecting to be able to shirk.
Steins:gate kinda brushes this concept. i suggest giving it a watch as it isnt a timeloop but timetravel based Anime.
Outer wilds have a moment like that. In order to end the game, you must stop the time loop and the evil part is that to complete the game, you must get passed 3 unkillable enemies afterward. If you die, there is no loop to bring you back.
I mean, it's a video game so they don't actually delete your save and this loop is simply not saved but still...
Colt's amnesia and him repeating the loop in order to break out is him becoming a better person: on the course of actions you discover that Colt was a monster, while he was helping Frank, possibly only Aleksis, Weinje and Frank being worse. It is his salvation! One could even think that he regressed to before the first loop, ashe even doesn't remember where RAK was and what where the passwords.
I love Colt. This isn't really related (I think) but he's such a goofy main character, that I can't help but laugh and smile at his goofiness and his interactions with Julianna. Maybe that's partially because, like Colt, I'm very easily roasted and baited into trying to roast back.
Throughout this whole video, and my (admittedly brief) readthrough of the comments, there's one example that I think makes a strong addition to the discussion: Homura Akemi from Madoka Magica. And the reason she stands out in my mind is simple (slight spoilers for the show, but seriously, go watch it if you haven't yet. At the very least, watch episode 10): the loop isn't something forced upon her by fate or circumstance or what-have-you. For Homura, the time loop is a deliberate and conscious choice that she repeatedly takes in an effort to save her friend (the titular Madoka) from...a lot of things, but mostly self-sacrifice and the consequences thereof. All fate did was hand her a reset button, and she keeps pressing it out of a sheer stubborn refusal to confront and move past the death of her best friend.
On the one hand, that sense of hedonistic nihilism you describe really isn't a factor for her, partly because any run could be the one where she saves Madoka (and thus, doesn't reset), and partly because the time loop is the longest I've seen in media (around a month and a half), so the consequences for "cutting loose" have a lot more time to set in. But at the same time, Homura's mind clearly decays over the course of her many runs, which is best exemplified in episode 10. Granted, we only see five of the over-a-hundred loops she's been in, but watching even the first two episodes knowing that she used to be a shy and depressed girl who once cared about the other characters enough to sacrifice her life for them...the difference speaks volumes. It's why I think Madoka Magica is among the best examples of a time-loop story ever written: it sidesteps that feeling of the character living consequence-free in an infinite playground, while still delving into the unimaginable trauma and emotional detachment that would stem from looping so many times. She doesn't kill anyone out of frustration or curiosity, because not even the insane trauma of her time as a Magical Girl can drive her to that point (though not for lack of trying), but she still doesn't spare any love or have much empathy for them, because she's watched them die horribly a hundred times now and NEEDS to lock those feelings away in order to function. She's basically in that pre-nihilistic, "this-time-it'll-work-for-sure" phase, just...permanently so. It's how I would probably react to being in a time loop, and how I THINK most video-game authors intend to have their protagonists react to a time loop, player behavior not withstanding.
My thoughts on the subject are kinda half-baked, if I'm being honest, but I thought I'd contribute them anyway. I thought Homura made for an interesting point of comparison to the protagonists of Deathloop and Groundhog Day, and I didn't see her brought up anywhere else in the comments section. If anyone has any thoughts to add, please do so, I'm curious to hear them. In any case, thanks for reading! ^^
And then there's the movie (well, the "third" movie).
But that's an interesting point about her never (or at least we're not given reason to believe) killing without need sure to succumbing to psychological degradation given that in at least one of the lips we do see one of the other mahou shoujou lose it (without having to deal with time loops but there's still plenty of trauma to go around) and start killing her allies.
One of the things that gets me about timeloops which I never see explored is "what happens to the universe after you loop"? Some stories like "Edge of Tomorrow" and "Higurashi: When They Cry" show people reacting to the looper dying, which kind of implies that they continue to exist even after each reset. So this means that for every time the main character does something fucked up or dies, they leave behind a universe that will have to bear the consequences of those actions. This is very odd, since most death-loop stories seem to end on the character arriving at the "good timeline", which is considered official and everyone lives happily ever after - which would be completely undermined if we believe that the previous loops keep existing. I wish there was a story where a death-looped person eventually encounters someone who can hop between parallel universes, and is urged to stop exploiting their "immortality", because it just keeps creating more and more "bad" timelines, all so that the main character can selfishly end up in the "good" timeline.
this concept is explored on an old college humor (I think?) video where some guy has a reset button and tries to take some girl home -- every time he presses it he's actually killing himself
edit: so I actually searched for it, it's not a college humor short. It's just a short called "One-minute Time Machine". It's here on youtube: ua-cam.com/video/vBkBS4O3yvY/v-deo.html
Rick and Morty played with this idea in one of the more recent episodes. Though I think the looping person didn't realize this until after they'd stuck to a timeline.
What would also be cool would be, starting the story with a time looper they decent into chaos yada yada, but then we refocus on one of the bad universes, even just an episode or a level that focuses not on the progression of the looper but the consequences of the looper world they left behind, seeing how the well know characters suffer from the Loopers actions, seeing the differences between this incredibly "bad" world and a regular one, it just sounds like an interesting concept, what happens to the normal people after you murder everyone in the most traumatic ways then simply leave / die in that timeline
I think the extension to this I'm just now thinking about is where our Looper, who realizes the scale of the bad timelines he has created, tries not to break the loop, but to balance the cosmic scales by making things better. By making a thousand new "good" timelines.
Of course, that's not atonement, the bad was still made, but exploiting the looper's position as the ultimate cosmic fulcrum, might make for an interesting story! Maybe then the quandary becomes "do I ever end the loop when I have the potential to make so many good timelines?" or like a butterfly effect type "is this helping at all?"
Don't stop exploiting your "immortality", start exploiting it for "good" as it were.
there is an online story i finished last year that did address that.
the ending is somewhat bittersweet after everything the main protagonist goes through.
it's a favorite of mine and it's pretty decent and a fun read.
Y'know, I always find it interesting that the focus of time loop stories tends immediately towards "things you couldn't do outside a time loop" and "acquiring mastery of the looping environment". It's always about the externalities, and not the extra time in and of itself. One consequence of this is the assumption that the looper isn't affected by the events, that they're consequence-free, but it goes deeper than that; Groundhog Day features the protagonist learning ice sculpture but it's mostly just implied offscreen and used as a payoff for the actual plot. There are a few web serials like Mother of Learning and The Menocht Loop that I've seen where the protagonist's process of learning and self-refinement is central...but it's still about learning in order to escape the loop, not for its own sake.
I dunno. I feel like the first thing I'd do in this sort of situation is take advantage of the infinity to add to myself as far as I could, and THEN start looking at the externals, and it feels weird to me that every other time this comes up it's the externals first and then the internals only as a way of better interfacing with them.
yeah if i was in a time loop id probably build up skills as much as i could in the time-loop. all my obligations are effectively on pause so i could spend all my time practicing art or whatever.
@@xanious3759 infinite progress on anything would be isolating
I think it also says A LOT about how some of the authors view human nature that a surprising number of time loop stories include people jumping to mastering violence just because.
Like, if I was in this situation, there's a LONG list of things (including "go back to bed and spend the entire day sleeping") that I'd go for first.
Not to be a shill, and I don't know your opinions on musicals, but Groundhog Day happens to also be a musical, whose script is written by Danny Rubin, the original co-screenwriter for the movie. It's very good and essentially Danny revisiting and revising his old work. There's a good amount of refurbishing to the old writing of the arc. Point is, there's a song that sounds like exactly what you're describing: "If I Had My Time Again," sung by the co-producer Rita Hanson where she describes all the self-bettering and checking off of bucket list items she'd do given the opportunity, like learning to dance and reading a lot and opening every door, which is what gets Phil to do the same and gets him out of his suicide spiral. He stops looking for a way out and starts just doing stuff for its own sake.
GHD does of course result in Phil's escape, but by the time that happens, he'd long since committed himself pretty fully to just... doing things and having hobbies and and trying to be good to other people, because that's what gives him sustainable happiness, more than any personal conquests of stealing money and having a lot of lays. Not to escape. Not even to try and woo Rita--in this edition, that comes along by accident, he'd stopped trying by that point but it's still a nice surprise. We see him actively learn piano from scratch seemingly for no reason except that he wants to. It's all just to adjust to his situation and be happier.
(Also the score is written by Tim Minchin! If that's any incentive.)
@@laurelcrown9293 That sounds like a fun time, honestly.
In Stars and Time does this extremely well. The protagonist never kills anyone (exept generic fantasy RPG monsters) but does slowly get more and more depressed as he loops, and stops seeing his friends as people but instead as actors to be manipulated. Also, when he breaks the loop, he does so not on the loop where he solves everyone's problems, but on the one where he alienates everyone close to him, which is the worst loop.
I LOGE ISAT
I played a lot of time loop games in the summer that I played ISaT, so making the time loop feel like hell the way it wanted to was going to be an uphill battle, but ISaT pulled it off. And the moment that it pulled it off was the moment that we did everything right, helped everyone and beat the king together, got that perfect loop and then it took away that version of events from us too, just like it did all the others. Everything brought back to zero. And so it makes it even worse when the version you have to stick with is the one where you fuck everything up. Yeah they forgive you, and they empathize with what you were going through now that they know what happened, but that doesn’t change the fact that they remember you trying to callously use the most vulnerable sides of themselves for your personal gain, and what they can never remember now is how you first discovered those vulnerable sides of them through genuine connection.
i'd argue that the stanley parable is an excellent time loop, one in which you the player/stanley has full knowledge of the time loop, and the narrator only partial, which creates an interesting dynamic in that respect. it's another good example of "what if i do this instead?", and also legitimately...never ends. the end is never the end. it leaves you wondering.
I think this video is a perfect response that I often see on Reddit discussing Outer Wilds DLC. In the DLC you could kill your enemies and even through the time loop they would be alive again and wouldn't remember it, so a lot of people would chose that. But our protagonist doesn't. They doesn't kill anybody, because they aren't like that. And so surprisingly without even mentioning the game, you made Outer Wilds just bit more interesting.
In outer wilds dlc , echoes of the eyes, you dont really have any ways of killing the "antagonist" ( i mean sure if our protagonist had the in game liberty to take a bucket thing would be a lot more grim ) , they "die" during the loop but not because of you action or the consequences of anything we do but because of event happening in the loop even if we were not here, i think the fact that event if our protagonist could choose to try killing them , the fact that no matter what some of them are still gonna "die" anyway is more in part with the nihilistic way timeloop impact the way we look at death and the way outer wilds adress death, the whole game has a theme a accepting death as part of the process of life ( and the fact that the " enemies" of the dlc are in denial of death and the importance of it make the theme stronger in my opinion), i think outer wilds message goes in the opposite direction of deathloop and is profoundly anti nihilistic,for outer wilds death has meaning because it's inevitable and it should not loose this meaning because of this inevitability
@@nemesis4081 If the main character wanted to make the choice they could very easily blow out your pursuers lanterns. I actually stealthily came up beside one of them in the forest, eye-level with their lantern and the option never presented itself, even though if you look down, you aren't wearing a space suit/helmet and definitely could blow out the flame like they do to you.
I agree with what you're saying about it being more in line with the themes, but this is a choice made for you by the character out of preference and not necessity in my opinion.
@@ZedAmadeus i did not look at it much from the the in game perspective of our character but now that you said it, i agree it's a things our character had many opportunities to do and they take the decision for us to be kind towards the "strangers" by they own accord not because it's necessary to dont cross the line of killing them but because our character prefer not to let themself take this decision, i kinda agreed with you it is a decision our protagonist take out of preference, a preference to stay kind and not givin in to the killing ( even if it would make the progression of our protagonist more easy to just blow them out for one loop and that nobody else would known it had happen )
An interesting look into the mental ramifications of time loops would be Re:Zero and Steins;Gate. There's a point in Re:Zero where the main character dies so much, he adopts the mentality that he can just keep resetting to take the pain of everyone else away because he isn't Subaru, the only thing that makes him valuable is his power and if he doesn't have that, he is nothing. One of the ending in Steins;Gate visual novel is how the main character goes insane, he starts going insane and contemplates things like murder and rape. I just feel like oftentimes, lots of time loop stories don't delve into the mental aspect of it nearly as much as they should. Although these aren't games lmao.
You also forgotten Doki Doki Literature club the dlc.
I mean, Steins;Gate was a game before an anime. It was adapted into an anime years later, and is definitely worth the play for all the new content and routes to find, especially since the Elite remake animates the entire game like the anime.
@@Veristelle- well yes it is a game, but it's basically a novel. Putting a character as complex as Okabe into a time looping fps wouldn't be impossible, but it'd be a feat.
@@DanielLopez-ob9jz I just realized you brought up it's a visual novel in your comment, missed it while watching the video, my bad.
True, packing all the narative of the visual novel into a standard fps or other game would be a hell of a feat that noone would be likely to attempt. But if there is a game with that much story in it on top of it's gameplay, I'd be down for it.
@@freelanceart1019 the side stories isn't canon according to dan salvato, the creator
On the topic of time loops, personally one of the most interesting spins I've seen on the concept was addressed in the anime Puella Magi Madoka Magica, a deconstruction of the magical girl genre, because it makes both the protagonist and the audience an outsider to the time loop. At the start of the show, we're introduced to Homura, who (unbeknownst to the audience) is a late-stage time looper, and when the reveal finally happens 10 episodes into the 12 episode series the sudden recontextualization of all her previous stadoffish and sometimes brutally pragmatic actions as but the latest iteration among immumerable others is stunning.
Plus, you also get the satisfaction of watching her pull of an amazing Rube-Goldberg machine of attacks and ordinance that she's learned to scrape together over her month-long loop, perfectly coordinated down to the second. And then, the despair when even that isn't enough, the desolation when even all the time in the world isn't enough to best her foe and save her friend.
One thing that we notably never see Homura do, or even really attempt to do, is actually try to get the other 3 on board to sort out Walpurgisnacht and keep Madoka from contracting. While she is part of the group at first, it only takes a few time loops for her to revert to being alone, and that strikes me as a fatal flaw (though admittedly her failed efforts did lead to the whole karmic stuff allowing for the ending, but that was kinda contrived IMO as a source of power, Madoka's wish made sense for her enough just by being prevented from wishing up to that point and seeing everything that happens without the loops being a source of her power). That is, everything she does to try to win on her own probably would have worked with help from the others, given how just her and Madoka beat Walpurgisnacht phyrrically in one loop, having just Mami and Sakura survive to that point would probably have tipped the balance, but she would have had to let them in on the realization of witches gently (and, you know, have them on suicide watch for the rest of the loop). However, she also never would have thought of that, given her difficulties socially.
I was wondering if someone would bring this up. Though the funny thing is: in the end after stopping to loop, she's so powerful her actions still have no consequence.
@@dominiccasts Sorry for the weird late response, but actually, the PMMM spinoffs cover a lot of that! There's a crapton of loops Homura did that aren't covered in the TV series, but ARE shown in other media like the Another Story or Oriko Magica mangas, so there's presumably some loops where Homura DID try to get help that we just don't see onscreen.
More importantly though Magia Record the mobile game features an alternative, branching timeline where a combination of glasses-era Homura keeping her mouth shut about witches (preventing the events that broke her and turned her into the Homura we know) and wider plot circumstances derails the usual PMMM plot - Homura and friends wander off to investigate the neighboring city of Kamihama and get involved in the magical girl war going on there. Things escalate to the point where Walpurgisnacht shows up at Kamihama instead of Mitakihara, but Kamihama has a massive population of magical girls who are already used to working in teams, and everybody is able to team up and take Walpurgisnacht down as a literal raid boss. Because of all of this, the MagiReco timeline versions of Homura and friends ARE able to get their happy ending.
The point here is you're absolutely right that Homura could've beaten Walpurgisnacht if she actually got a team together to do so, and if she tried to put out a call to neighboring cities warning about Walpurgisnacht and asking for help fighting it she might've been able to win the fight without Madoka having to go literal god mode. The bigger problem is that Mitakihara has very few magical girls in the first place (I'm actually not sure if the main five are the only ones there???), and that a LOT of what helped the MagiReco Walpurgis fight fall into place is exclusive to the MagiReco timeline, ex. the gang wouldn't normally be in Kamihama. Without those wider circumstances it would still probably be difficult for Homura to get enough people to fight Walpurgisnacht properly.
I was looking for so long to mention this: as Jacob seems to be really interested in the affects of the time loop on a person and this show is remarkable on how it explores that concept
Rebellion, then, is where we get to see the kind of person Homura has become once freed from the time loop. Broken and obsessed with the goal she never truly got to achieve before someone else freed her from the loop. Unable to let go of that thing she pursued for so long and uncaring of anything and anyone else.
I’m a similar vein, I’d like to recommend The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North. Harry is an Ouroboran, someone who lives out the entirety of his life, dies, and is born again at the beginning of his life over and over again. He and others like him retain memories from his previous lives, but non-Ouroborans do not. The writing is excellent, the plot is compelling, and there are some fascinating space-time implications. It’s one of my favorite books and I hope you check it out :)
I had a couple of paragraphs here about all the problems with that premise, but it appears Ms. North changed at least a few of them into potential plot devices. I'm still not sure how you can have "backwards information travel" and "more than one time-traveler with heritable abilities." Every movement of information back to the eldest traveler should cause a reset of the timeline due to the butterfly effect changing which children are conceived, and eventually when those children get conceived. There are a lot of dice rolls in determining who is living and who is merely potential.
There's a little game called "In Stars and Time" that came out not too long ago that you might want to check out that does the time loop thing pretty well.
ISATTT
Re: Zero is another story about death loops, and what is interesting to me is that, after Subaru has died several times, he actually starts embracing death and killing himself to be strategic. And it shows a different kind of consequence, in which Subaru’s already low opinion of himself becomes worse and worse as he begins to believe that he should be the only one that suffers. Each death he experiences is painful and traumatizing to him, and yet he keeps trying to solve the problems that cause him to die alone, and the trauma just stacks up. Every time he sees someone he care about die in a loop, there is a consequence to witnessing that.
I think Re: Zero is the best death loop story, as there is a sense of progress, both character wise, and plot wise. Plot wise because where the death loop starts updates every once and a while, and so Subaru isn’t always started back on day 1. Character wise because Subaru is constantly fighting with his depression.
// spoilers ahead
God it even hurts with that scene where he witnesses every alternate self where he died or killed himself in order to reset "his" timeline, only to find out the timeline where he died is continuing on, having to witness the people around him at the time weep and wonder why he ever did such a thing. I never got to finished the anime due to IRL stuff taking priority but after seeing this comment and this video, I might just pick up where I left off.
Yeah, Re:Zero handles this themes very well
Absolutely! In the back of my head throughout every point he made in the video, I was always thinking back to Re:Zero, and how it portrays the humanity in someone who is separated from humanity as a whole. Its a perfect story with time looping built in, in my opinion.
you're the only other person I've seen post about Re:Zero. I also posted about it as well. This needs to be brought to the attention of more people. It's probably the best time loop story I know.
@@midknightshade330 110 percent, honestly one of the greatest time loop stories and greatest coming of age stories I've watched and read(web novel). The way it deals with these things as a coming-of-age story is kind of brilliant and as someone who's read up to the 6th arc of the web novel, the author introduces another popular trope into the mix that just makes the story even better than it was before. How it deals with relationships and how it subverts a lot of expectations, especially right now in the seventh arc is also amazing and the way it handles mystery and buildup is also fantastic. I could go on and on, but damn, it's my favorite piece of media and the message it conveys(especially to lost teenagers like so many) is communicated so well and can make you think on yourself.
In steins gate, a visual novel, it is implied that the main character spins probably thousands of years anytime loop trying to get an exact Rube Goldberg sequence of events to play out perfectly.
By the end of it all that he's able to walk away with is a profound tiredness and a clear brokenness.
A bit like speedrunning
Nagato in Haruhi Suzumiya too..
I dont think it was 'thousands of years'. From what I remember it was just several tries and the help of technology invented after he was already an adult that helped him math this exact sequence, then send instructions to himself in the past when he was free to do it.
Edit: Forgot to mention Stein Gate is a great VN. But if this comment makes someone interested, just watch the anime, it's much shorter and almost as good, I can guarantee you aren't losing much, the anime is probably the best adaptation that could be made in so little episodes.
@@denodagor I certainly got the impression of thousands of years, or at least thousands of tries, he's markedly traumatized by the event by the end of it
I would agree with the anime statement though, they're both great, but you get the exact same story in a much much MUCH BRIEFER TIME
He gets a waifu too.
Saying that you feel like Colt doesn't discover anything about himself was pretty jarring to me. He finds out literally everything about himself. He comes into the game with a completely fresh, blank-slate perspective, not even immediately recalling his own name. He learns about his past, what his beliefs are, his friendships and interpersonal relationships, all being divorced from their first person agency and context due to amnesia. We as Colt discover terrible things he did in the past for the AEON program- Colt even refers to his former self as a monster at one point. This ultraviolence he's linked to perpetually is practically the crux of his desire for finality and escape.
We see the effects of infinity without consequences perfectly in seeing what's essentially his permanently compromised relationship with his daughter. We're lead to believe Colt did reconcile with Julianna in the earliest years of Black Reef's loop, before the widespread memory loss started to occur due to sheer quantity of time having elapsed. We know from the game's lore, audio logs, and notes that Julianna was very affable and friendly figure going into the loop, who had likely never hurt anyone in her life. The state of her eventually being the only one keeping her memories lead to an infinity without consequence, which corrupted her character to the point we see in game of her being enthusiastically murderous, bragging about killing all the other visionaries for fun and having complete mastery anbd dominion over the island and it's denizens. We're explicitly told that she's done every evil action imagineable for fun, and that hunting Colt is out of boredom and morbid curiosity (she is capable of killing him every single morning before he wakes up should she choose to.)
Ultimately this factors into the core decision at the end of the game. Having learned so much about Colt and how his mistakes (killing Julianna repeatedly to "snap her out" of the memory loss) are directly responsible for the hellish state Black Reef exists in. Julianna is a monster largely of Colt's own creation. By breaking the loop, Julianna makes it clear that the relationship between the two of them will be forever ruined. While she is an unrepentant mass murderer, we learn that Colt had a large hand in making her that way and leading her down the complete and total decay of morality that comes from eternal life without consequences. The player, now knowing everything they need to know, has to directly decide whether or not freedom from the timeloop is worth permanently destroying any chance of reconciling with his daughter, or if the player ultimately abandons their goal of breaking the loop to seek some kind of forgiveness with someone he clearly once did care deeply about.
Great video, however I very much disagree when it comes to Colt's character progression.
Was looking for this comment. Weighing heavy on the final choice was the implied apocalypse beyond the loop in my mind. Breaking the loop meant Colt would have nothing left, preserving it meant that he could still be with his daughter.
Why can't he reconcile with Julianna and then break the loop?
@@pooperdooper3576 Because the current status quo of the loop has turned her into a Godlike being and she would never want her power over everyone else taken away.
@@xthewated oh well then she's just evil. The only way to reconcile with that is to help her be evil. The right choice imo would be to leave the loop then, unless I'm misunderstanding something
@@pooperdooper3576 I completely agree. There's probably some message about "If your child became an evil psychopathic murderer, you would still love them," but I'm not a parent nor do I ever plan to be, so that kind of message is lost on me. I think some parents are the bad guys for still trying to excuse their horrible children's behaviors. Is love still a good thing to have if the person you love is a terrible person? Probably not. Emotions are manipulative in that sense.
someone already commented about undertale but GODDD I truly cannot believe it wasn't in here. A time loop where another character reveals to you that they are fully aware of your actions in all of the previous loops, but only after its too late. "despite everything it's still you" when you look in the mirror.
another great example of time loop nihilism in games is majora’s mask. for the entire game you live out the same three days as you can see the moon get closer and closer, and eventually crash into the planet and destroy everything. you can run around this world, attempting to help the scared, remorseful people in it find peace with the end of the world, but by the end of that three day cycle it all gets reset. the people you helped, the lives you saved, it all goes back to zero. everyone is back in the same place they were when you first got there. sad, bitter, scared. no matter what you do, none of it matters.
you can try to cheat death by completing your main quest and stopping skull kid from pulling the moon down, but he, too, seems to be disillusioned with everything around him. corrupted by the mask, he tries to destroy everything around him and end the lives of countless people with no remorse for their regrets or their guilt. at the end of the day, he’s just as scared as everyone else.
I find surprising that nobody else is mentionning the Endless 8 from Haruhi Suzumia, and how it cannonically leads to The disapearance of Haruhi Suzumia, because of the effect it had on Yuki Nagato who was the only person to remember the loop
Watching it was quite an experience. I felt so much relief when it’s ended, finally breaking out of repetition like I was stuck in the loop myself.
my wife
Came here to mention it.
Yeah, poor Yuki...
endless 8 was brilliant. Kyoto Animation using the same synopsis but reanimating it over and over again gave me such an uncomfortable feeling. Each episode of the eight is slightly more unnerving than the last, especially since Kyon is actually the one responsible, putting off his summer homework, inadvertently ruining Haruhi's plans.
This has probably become one of my favorite channels on the entire platform.
You lead such a rich life and being able to share your thoughts and allow us to contemplate with you is something I treasure dearly!! Thank you for another wonderful video, they're always worth the wait.
I didn't know you had an internet connection in that SPP Pod O.o I thought you would be watching Homage through the Cameras all day. o.o Oh wellz, thanks for the Sunshine and Rainbows :D
19:55 this moment shocked me in the absence of information. Well done redacting whatever it was these people did to eachother, while keeping the tone fittingly heavy.
I am legally obligated to bring up In Stars And Time as a counter example. The main character never actually lets go of their morality, but the loop and its effects on them is *extremely* well fleshed out.
I love how an ost from Asura's Wrath is in this video. The fact that he also experiences multiple deaths makes it so much better. Absolute masterpiece of a video
When you brought up Through the Flash I literally jumped and started fist pumping. Such a good story and I had extremely similar thoughts re: time loop games.
Did he just say 'Fed him to his mother while he was still alive' W..what?
@@stardustorchard9316 yep
@@stardustorchard9316 yeah it gets worse
@@JoelBonasera Goodness lord. I think I need to read this story. Any idea where to acquire it?
@@stardustorchard9316 I believe it is a short story featured in Friday Black by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah. I think I'll be diving into it as well some time in the near future.
"I didn't stab my wife because I hated her or thought she was evil, I stabbed her because I was out of other things to try."
Truly, wiser words were never spoken
Imagine taking the words out of context, like that one Breaking Bad meme with Jesse with a gun with the caption "Me when I have to shoot my dog because I'm bored"
Fantastic video as always - your thoughts on 12 Minutes remind me a bit of classic point and click or text adventure games, not because those games involved a loop but because it's almost the inverse. Time in those games often doesn't move forward until you find the right action, so a common way to play is to the familiar "try every verb with every visible object, in every known location until you get the right one."
Each individual action becomes sort of meaningless, because the games are simple enough none of the characters will remember you tried to bribe the guard with your half eaten fish bones before eventually offering his favorite cake. Because only the "correct" actions feel permanent it's easy to just ignore the others.
In those games this results in the main character feeling less competent than they're supposed to be. You're not a brilliant detective you're a bumbling fool who just happened to find the right answer eventually. Between the loop and the "incorrect actions are ignored" mechanics they both seem to make the story less real in the same way.
Anyways thanks again for the video, and thank you for giving me some new ideas to look at my favorite old genre with.
"you've solved the puzzle"
Me: i've banged my head against your wall of insane troll logic is what i've done.
@@TheCreepyLantern YES
Those old adventure games would often have sensible answers to some puzzles, but generally they were toward the senseless end of the spectrum. In some series it's way more likely to bribe the guard with fish bones just because of the perverse humor of the writers. A counterargument could be that if the puzzles have sensible solutions, there's less gameplay. Although I'd propose that you can take more steps to get the key through the obstacle. For example the guard saying he likes cake, but you actually have to bake the cake. Or if you need to replace some wires in a door's electronic lock, you could make a tool, open some other electronic object's panel, get some wires, and use them on the door.
Overall, the most satisfying puzzle solutions I've experienced have been ones that in retrospect seem obvious, but required some lateral thinking and outside knowledge to get there in the process. But when a puzzle doesn't have an obvious solution, and I feel like I've explored the reasonable possibilities in finding a solution, the only thing left is to try every combo. And when I get to that point I'm completely out of the game's immersion and just trying to get past this part that feels broken so I can start enjoying the game again.
The designer can also offer multiple solutions (which is very rare in point-and-click adventure games, but standard for something like tabletop D&D), which means the player is far more likely to pick a working solution in the first few tries just because there are more working solutions available. In a tabletop-style game there are also a variety of failure and success states. One good example is a locked door. You might have the key if you found it elsewhere, which is the best option. If your party has a Magic-User and he knows the Knock spell AND he memorized it that day, he could cast that and pop open the lock instantly and quietly. But that's a resource he can't use again that day. If your party has a Thief he can try to pick the lock, which takes time but is quiet, and has a chance of failure. Your party could kick down the door, which is loud and has a failure chance, and additionally you need to decide how many people will kick at once: more people raises the success chance, but those people used their action that round and can't immediately jump into the room like everyone else. Failing that you could always chop the door down, which is loud and takes a long time and gives whatever is on the other side of the door time to prepare for you, making it impossible to surprise them.
In the door example, a game could definitely model all of that. But that's just one fundamental type of puzzle, and a well-run D&D game is absolutely stuffed to the gills with things like that. This complexity is possible because of the human referee managing the game instead of a pre-programmed computer. If the referee wrote the adventure, there's no wiki or walkthrough on it, so success and failure is entirely in the hands of the players, which is exciting. No save-scumming means the game's consequences are permanent, which raises the stakes like permadeath or Ironman modes in video games do.
It's well-trodden at this point to emphasize how games like Rogue, text adventures like Zork, and point-and-click adventure games are just the industry's best attempt at using very limited resources to simulate D&D or any other tabletop RPG. With such limited resources it should be expected that the game experience becomes a little frustrating.
this is exactly why i hate old LucasArts point and clicks. Monkey Island is a charming series and all, but the puzzles never make sense and logic is thrown out the window, making each solution potentially meaningless as the only way to solve it is through random circumstance. Compare that to the modern, Telltale approach. No puzzle in The Walking Dead or Tales from the Borderlands is contrived as they are built around basic logic. in TWD for example, theres a puzzle in episode 2 of season 1 where you need to get out of a locked room and you need a screwdriver to disassemble an AC unit. Well, earlier you heard a character mention they have some coins, and i think most people who have been caught without a screwdriver have tried a coin, a knife, etc.
While I understand the 12 Minutes comparison with old Lucas Arts games, I found 12 Minutes REALLY intuitive. I only got stuck at the "flower", and even then I figured out on my own after maybe 15 minutes tops.. probably less. And I have absolutely no patience with adventure games like that. But 12 Minutes is one of my favorites games of the year now, although the ending is could be better.
Geller's experience where he tried many things before trying the sleeping pill is really strange for me. I was probably the first thing I tried when I thought of when I saw the sleeping pills. Thought it was really obvious.
@@diegocm8636 Yeah that's kind of just how these puzzles work - what's obvious for one person isn't going to be obvious for everyone. I'm certain in all those classic adventure games the devs thought it wasn't as hard as it was.
This reminds me of Start Again Start Again Start Again and In Stars And Time (the former is the prologue and experimental version of the latter), which are a pair of games that propose a time loop where the subject is in a JRPG adventuring party trying to save the world from a bad guy and starts during the final dungeon leading up to the final fight. You have history with party, established relationships, in-jokes and so on and no matter what you seem to do you will die, whether by accident, a wrong choice or simply in combat with the final boss.
However.
This isn't the first loop.
Your character is the group's scout who loves making puns and having an upbeat personality however the toll of many loops has already had an effect on them. They internally acknowledge when conversations will start, get progressively more depressed about putting up facades to their friends so they don't suspect anything unusual, remember information about where to go to optimise their path and this starts happening to the player too.
After the first loop the player experiences, they start optimising things to get everything done faster like knowing the fastest route to items. The party comments on this so you intentionally have to go the long way to avoid their suspicion. The player starts skipping combat by running away and can even skip entire conversations but skipping too often will make your party suspicious.
It's a neat look at a time loop that tackles the psychological toll on being trapped with friends you love, who you can't show you've experienced this all a thousand times and get to watch everyone die regardless of your choices.
In a way it's like Undertale if Frisk could comment on the things that happened across playthroughs.
HAYGAHAHAHSHS ISATTT
... Now I want a story (maybe just a short story) that is solely about the after effect. At no point does the story start before or during the time loop, but only at the end, the day the loop is broken.
It would be a story where the Protagonist isn't the person who's been in the loop for likely decades or centuries, But the last person who interacted with them before the loop finally breaks, The only person they've been able to prove that they've been in a time loop to.
They would meet, go about their day as the Looper would point out everything happening with such foresight it would be impossible for it to be anything other then a time loop, and then at the end of the day, when whatever blast them back to the start would happen, They just sit down and enjoy it...
The clock ticks down, They say their goodbyes, lament the fact that it'll all reset and the protag will have never known any of it, and wait for the nuke, or the car, or whatever does the Looper in.
Seconds pass. Then minutes. Then an hour. Finally it hits them, They haven't looped back. The event never happens. They're out, free to continue, free to live again.
But how can they now? They've done everything they could ever want, committed acts that the Protag would never- no, COULD never know of. They now have lifetimes of knowledge weighing them down; The reality that now? Now they are vulnerable, weak, once again insignificant against the greater schemes of the universe that for so long they believed was under their greater will from the countless loops.
But now they have nothing but the knowledge that whatever happens next, that's it. They can't rely on set circumstances, or manipulate things to their favor, because now it is a new day. It is the unknown once again pouncing on him with nothing but vengeance in mind for the fool who thought he could be above all.
A realization like that? It could drive anyone mad. And all the Protag can do is watch as the Looper is crushed by the weight of all his sins, of all his knowledge, of all his actions, being for naught.
How could anyone live knowing all of that?
Upcoming indie film Again Again, written, directed by and starring Mia Moore, starts at the end of a time loop and explores the consequences of, well, suddenly having consequences again. Look out for it, seems like you'd enjoy it.
Favorite time loop is majoras mask, and is genuinely emotional, and it has something beyond simple nihilism. It has a certain hopefulness that everytime we get an item or complete a quest we are more sure of our ames but can see a real impact on the world around us.
MM is kinda interesting because its whole thing is sorta the inverse of the way most time loop stories seem to go, where it basically turns into "i need to help everyone even if they won't remember me the day after".
Even if you just do the main dungeons and only what's strictly necessary you're still a stranger going through hell to save people that might not even remember your name by the end of it.
@@xanious3759 Impactful is the word i use to describe how the things you do in mm, its how it is vastly different. In the normal loop stories the impact is largely on the beginning then fades into a sea of almost mundanity. Whereas mm starts slow but as all of your decisions mount up up it becomes extremely momentous. Afterall, who is supposed to care if you(the player) don't?
One other aspect of consequence that time loops rarely touch on is trauma itself. As you repeat, your actions towards everything else is impermanent and consequence-free, but like you mentioned it still sticks with you. It's what allows you to learn, to get better in those situations, but also what makes you this pragmatic, efficient monster devoid of empathy. Those two things make a character god-like in their power, but there's a balancing aspect that's almost never explored: For every failure, every death, every moment of pain or traumatic image you either stumble upon or subject yourself to by your own volition, your ability to face adversity weakens. You build fear, trauma, pathos, a crippling web of psychological illness that inhibits you for eternity. Escaping a time loop isn't about having all the time in the world, it's a race against an unclear limit; how much you can suffer before you pass the point of no return, where no matter how much knowledge you have, you lack the ability to use it.
"At first I went mad, of course, but after a few millennia I got bored with that too and went very sane"
The rhythm of your speech, how smoothly you change subjects, they all contribute to me being mesmerized at your videos man, beautiful work, thank you!
I paused the video and went and read Through the Flash after you mentioned it and WOW does this video hit harder having read the whole thing. I don't think I've ever genuinely wept at how beautiful and nihilistic a video on UA-cam is before, but this one did it. Jacob Geller, it's truly something special that I found your channel and I can't wait to see what your beautiful mind comes up with next.
i think In Stars and Time would be a perfect example in a sequel to this video
There's something I've been thinking about through this whole video, and as soon as you said that Through The Flash used the term "waking up" I simply couldn't *not* mention it any more.
In the past, I've been both an avid reader and very occasional contributor to a project simply called The Infinite Loops, a sprawling fanfic universe connecting every piece of media one can think of, built upon a single person's original concept by hundreds more.
In The Infinite Loops, all realities, all fictional universes, are simulations run on Yggdrasil, the world tree, and the most advanced supercomputer of all time, maintained by those we would recognise as gods. I believe this concept is in fact attributed to some kind of anime from the 2000's, though I can't recall the name. This world computer suffers some kind of apocalyptic malfunction and crashes, and The Infinite Loops are created as a way to stabilize each individual universe as the gods fix it all. This manifests as each universe being given a designated "Anchor", typically the protagonist of whatever story that universe tells. Naruto, for example, is one of the original Anchors. As is Twilight Sparkle, of My Little Pony.
These Anchors are the patient zero of the time loop each universe is shifted into - reliving the events of their story over and over again. As time goes on, other people in each loop - secondary characters, usually - "wake up" and become Loop-aware, though interestingly not every Awoken individual is "awake" in each Loop, which is a cool concept that should be explored in more media with multiple loop-aware characters.
Anyway, in the Loops, one of the first non-anchors to awake is Sakura from Naruto, and she is also one of the first to fall victim to this consequence-free nihilism that you're describing in this video. She becomes, like Ama, a murderer, empowered by the Loops to infinite levels of cruelty. She does, like Ama, eventually recover, but her actions are remembered throughout the Loops and this nihilism you're talking about is, in-universe, known as "Sakura Syndrome". I just thought that was neat.
The Loops, being created by multiple contributors even within individual universes, vary in quality significantly, but there are Loops for damn near everything that's ever been popular. I highly reccomend looking them up some day.
That sounds interesting. I may look it up eventually. Thanks for the recommendation!
Lmao, Sakura being mad pissed at her loop ( and by extension kishimoto ) makes mad sense
Yup.
Space Battles is a great place to read it.
holy SHIT this blasted me back in time..... i was super into the idea of the infinite loops back as a teenager even tho i never really interacted w/ it much.... gotta go dig up a 5 year old google doc now
cringe
This is the second time Jacob has used "sneaky driver" song from the "Katana zero" soundtrack. I hope it's foreshadowing for a Katana zero analysis. It's dripping with lore and interesting philosophical topics.
I was expecting him to talk about Katana Zero, even though it’s not a typical time-loop.
@@JetStream0509 Still tho, by all means it is a time loop for characters. Zero even mentions how minutes would stretch to hours and days and how he spent 28 years in the jungle while being 22 during the game, 15 at the time of war.
I'm probably the only one who noticed he used a song from The Norwood Suite. Very cool indie music dev game.
I always felt that the intention of deathloop was the caution of blind determination. That through the loop Colt has exactly 1 goal. Everything he does is for that 1 goal, every step he takes is to get to that 1 goal, and every bit of knowledge learned is for that 1 goal. This is even to the point that he still remembers that 1 goal even when his memory had been lost. We never get a reason for why Colt wants to break the loop, and whatever reason we make to stop it from learning about the world is only our own. In the end Colt has no reason to break the loop other than that is his 1 goal. This mentality is fervent in Black Reef. So many people set with just 1 goal, blind to the rest of the world because of it (and the fact that their memory gets wiped at the end of the day), and forever stuck in that 1 goal. This was even the case before the time loop with the visionaries being so blinded by the 1 goal of eternal life that they didn’t realize the biggest flaw of the loop that people won’t remember the next day.
I feel like this style of cautionary tale wouldn’t work with the idea you bringing in since that would require reflection on a character that’s not suppose to be reflective at least while in the loop. You can’t really have a moment of clarity when the character is so blinded by determination they have no reason for doing what they’re doing beyond they have to do it, and having the game go past the loop onto the next would be a bad idea I’m general, and also get rid of the gray zone of if the loop was good or bad which this game tries really hard to keep gray.
Also maybe this was just my play style, but I didn’t really become a god of death, or the perfect murderer like you talked about rather I became the perfect assassin. I realized somewhat early on that for the golden loop I didn’t have much of reason to kill anyone but the visionaries so because of that I stopped killing the random thugs and just moved around them, and I got really good at doing just that. It was to the point where I could get into a level, kill everyone on my list, wait for Julianna and trap kill her, and then escape with the reward from my fights. I never really became the murder king Colt that you created, rather I became a single minded assassin that didn’t care for the rest of the world.
love this!! you break it down so well dawg!! felt these exact feelings watchin the video
Oh man the concept for the flash is incredible. I googled the book its from and the other stories also sound extremely interesting so i guess thats another book to add to the list of things i want to read.
Just got this video in my feed after finishing Outer Wilds. I cried at the finale, so i'd definitely recommend it
This was a really interesting topic! And I always love when you use more well-known media as a jumping off point to reccomend something I have never heard of before, that's always a lovely discovery to have. :D
Time loops really are just pressure cookers that boil away morality, consequence and care over time, a frankly horrifying fate to be trapped within. Even if it's fun and good at first, the very nature of their infinity will erode someone down eventually.
Great work in any case! ^w^
I know this is a year old comment but I felt like I wanted to reply anyway.
I honestly think the idea that timeloops will boil away morality, consequence, and care is a pretty pessimistic way of looking at human nature. It seems most of these time loop stories are about someone almost immediately focusing on what they can get away with, something I don't like and something's that really stopped me from enjoying timeloop stories.
Watching this video I have a recommendation to give. I've been reading a light novel lately called "Omniscient Reader's Viewpoint". The idea at the core of it is that the light novel the protagonist reads in this fictional universe, becomes reality. Of course this in-universe novel itself has its own protagonist. The protagonist of this in-universe novel is a character that has the ability to "regress" upon death, keeping all his memories, and the length of time he has spent reliving the same story over and over again is one of the focal points of his character progression. It's really interesting and the actual protagonist also comments on his psychopathy. The character is someone that's become utilitarian to a point, kind of like those Bloodborne speedrunners you've mentioned and that's really interesting as what he's dealing with are actual humans. I can highly recommend it. It's really good.
0:17 The Arkane A-Pose in action. For some reason in their games the NPCs don't know what to do when falling so their bodies try their hardest to return to a default A-pose. Seen it in Dishonored 2 with falling and floating in water, seen it in Deathloop, seen it in Prey during the zero G sections.
Here is some recommendation of a criminally underrated story about a time loop: "The empty box and the zeroth Maria" is excellent, it's a serie of 7 novels, the first volume is standalone but if you continue to the 7th volume that ending is brilliant
YES I was looking for this one! The last novel has a really interesting take on infinite loops, even if it is a bit edgy.
I would say the same, it has a lot of interesting ideas, but I think the overall message was toxically extreme. But if that was done on purpouse and it wasn’t meant to showcase a Gary Stu, then kudos!
I keep coming back to this as my favorite time loop video essay, because it is the one that best captures the consequences of their consequencelessness.
You can see another "time loop nihilism survivor" like the one in Through the Flash (excellent recommendation, thank you) in Flowey from Undertale. Flowey went through so many loops, and became so monstrous during them, that it has desensitized him to the point he wants the power to save and reset back, so he can continue living a life where anything can be taken back.
It feels like a very apt take on how people with depression can be afraid of breaking out of their vicious habits, because they fear the pain they will get from failure more than the meaningless loop they're trapped in.
Time loops are my absolutely favourite type of story. I've always been drawn to the time loop fantasy, so I was really happy to see this in my notifications. Thanks, Jacob.
"I think if you're creative, it is really important to expose yourself to art that feels better than you could ever make."
I know that this line is part of the ad, not the theme of the video, and that the sentiment I'm about to share has already been communicated in other comments in _several_ other videos of yours, but Jacob, you and your works are that to me, and to many other people too. I owe (at the very least) several semesters worth of A's on college papers to you, and probably quite a bit more. I'm absolutely thrilled to have the privilege of being touched by your work, and grateful for how it has transformed my own.
(also, that transition with the jump and roll at 0:24 is so damn _smooth_ I'm freakin' out here man)
Jacob, I only recently stumbled upon your channel and I just wanted to say I absolutely adore your content. I've so far rarely disagreed with your opinions and even when I haven't your arguments are so well constructed it offers me an additional insight I otherwise wouldn't have. Keep up the superb work.
HA! You used music from LA Noire - remember working on that years ago!
Depression has done a number on me, as it does on anyone who experiences it, and I want to add some optimism to your nihilism. To me, depression can feel like a loop. You wake up, you struggle to get out of bed if at all; you eat, you work, you sleep. All the while you don't just feel numb, but you feel bad for no reason. Well, you make up reasons to feel bad. You feel like talking or complaining about how you feel is dumb, so you don't. Why waste the time and breath. Even if you do, it doesn't help. You feel the same except now you've shared it with someone else who likely can't help you anymore than you can help yourself. I see it as a mental time loop, searching for any way to break this cycle you're in and to stop feeling like how you do. You can change routine, change your looks, meet new people; anything you want, but none of it helps.
One year ago this month, I was fired and struggled to find a job in my small town. I lost my apartment and moved in with my brother who said not worry about rent. He ended up changing his mind and told that I had to have a job by Thanksgiving or else I was out. I had a very promising interview at a bank that I got really excited for, but then my brother told me he wanted me out of his house regardless. The next day, the bank tells me that they're going with someone else. I just broke down, started laughing in my truck. I ended up moving back home where I finally started working fast food, however that's soon to end because I've been dropped down to one day a fucking week working. My mom kicked me out for a weekend a month ago because she didn't approve of some of the stuff I did when I lived alone (smoking weed and being gay) and she still threatens it again occasionally. All the while the depression lingered strong in the background, getting better and worse depending on the day.
I'm 22 and I've attempted twice: once years ago and the other before I even moved in with my brother... I feel like every day gets worse and that there isn't a whole lot I can do to stop it except one single thing; one lone belief that I cling onto. "Nothing truly matters; anything can happen, and anything can be given a reason." I believe we exist in a universe where on the micro and macro scales, nothing inherently has any meaning or purpose. Us and everything we do has just as much inherent meaning as the shit we flush. YOU give things a reason, YOU give yourself a reason. It doesn't have to be a good reason as long as it's good enough for you. Things have as much meaning as you want to give them, not other people. If you care about that game or that photo, then that's what matters to you and you shouldn't let other's take that away because it has no meaning to them. I feel like I'm staring down the barrel of a gun called Life that can go off at any minute, but I got tired of worrying about it. I want to actually live my life, I don't want to die, but if it happens then I want to go having at least being happy with myself. I don't have my happiness right now, but I know I can have it back. I know I can break my cycle of depression and I believe this belief is what will help me. Maybe this is something I'll have to deal with my whole life, but my depression isn't meaningless now at least. It's a part of me and I need to find my peace with it, give it some meaning as a way to improve myself. I think maybe it can help others too to think this way, to not view the world as something inherently positive or negative, but as something inherently neutral until people decide to give it meaning in their own way.
Listening to this video reminded me of Planescape: Torment. It's not a timeloop, but the player character has lived basically forever, been every type of person and done basically everything. Of course, you have amnesia and don't remember any of it, but the people you meet sure do. Seeing the ramifications of your past actions and coming to terms with them was an rpg experience I'll never forget. Thanks for the video Jacob!
I was gonna write a whole thing about Steins;Gate, Re:Zero, and Madoka Magica but then soon realized that these shows are not exactly time loops. I mean they are still looping through time but they are not in these loops against their will. They chose to repeat the loops because they have a goal in mind. They could stop whenever they want but they won't obviously. The thing that makes time loops so different is that there's no clear way to just stop it. Things have less meaning because they'll just reset anyway. The probability of just killing someone just to see what would happen becomes way higher. Reaching insanity is way higher. Anything that you do, good or bad, won't stick and most likely never will for the rest of eternity.
"... being a person who performs great violence or cruelty means you are a person capable of performing great violence or cruelty. ... there's no such thing as consequenceless actions ... No matter how many times the sun rises, no matter if it's the same sunrise or a new one, it's you. It's you. It's you."
And nothing is more terrifying to any of us than that.
I love the use of the Katana Zero OST, because that is a really interesting "time loop" game that i'd love to see you cover.
"...it's you. It's you. It's you."
I know this video is mostly about time loops and humans in time loops and humanity within time loops, but as someone who used to suffer from severe low self esteem issues and self loathing, this last part really hit me. There have been so many times in my life where I wish I could go back in time and fix my mistakes. There are so many times I wish I could simply stop time, just so I could have more time. Sleep more cause I stayed up. Finish homework because I procrastinated. Prepare for a big test or presentation just a little longer because I didn't start earlier.
Some of these extended time wishes or time rewinding wishes were also for more severe mistakes of my life, ones where I've irreversibly hurt someone or something or myself.
But after watching this video, you've really changed my perspective on it all, even though I don't suffer from the same issues anymore. Had I truly gotten what I wished for, I likely would have become addicted and abused the power a few times. I may rewind a moment over and over again, convinced there's an exact solution to a problem but knowing I could just rewind time again, and knowingly say or do the most abhorrent decision just to glean as much information as I possible can. For extending time, I wouldn't be surprised if I extended it indefinitely, to the point where I've become so detached from the world that I simply get stuck in my own little timeloop/frozen timeframe...forever. I can edit people's perceptions of myself, rewrite parts of my life, I could do everything to make my life seemingly perfect and make every decision I've ever made be the right one.
But I'd also hold the weight that every iteration of me is still me, even if others can't see it due to my time control. And as you said, if I can make a horrible choice then that means I'm capable of doing it again. And it's because of this time limit that forces me to be confrontational of myself and who I am, to not delay my growth and compassion for myself and people. Time is so short that I don't want to lose my humanity to the claws of my mental issues anymore. Time control would just allow me to stew, to become neurotic, to lose my humanity, to learn what it feels like to lose me.
I don't want to do that. I like being me.
In Stars and Time is also a small looping game that while it didn't really strike me for its mechanics it did do a good portrayal of time loop fatigue.
Spoilers ahead.
You play as the rogue of a typical RPG party, together with a hero, mage and bruiser, and they're venturing in the final dungeon of your quest. Except when he dies he returns to the beginning of the day before entering the dungeon. First he feels great because he can prevent his party from dying or failing the quest by knowing in advance where the traps and important items are. Then when they defeat the final boss and complete the quest...he still loops. He tries several things: he tries talking the boss down, hunting for secret knowledge, makes a "perfect loop" where he helps all his comrades through their problems, but it still does nothing.
So he eventually goes mad. In the final loop he verbally attacks the other party members and decides to complete the quest alone, ad through the loops he's become strong enough to do so.
And then the ending just solves everything via the power of friendship or something. It kinda dropped the ball at that point.
YAYAYAYAY ISAT (i'm going through all of the isat related comments in this video hi
I feel like (at least, going off your description) Through The Flash is actually not a very good example of the kind of story you're looking for here - Ama WASN'T living a consequence-free life, since she wasn't the only one trapped in the loop. Other people (apparently) remember the loops where she was Knife Queen, and she has to live with that. She HAS external consequences to her actions, in a way that, say, Phil Connors or the protagonist of Twelve Minutes don't. I feel like the scenarios are incredibly different here.
In general, I feel like the "consequence-free" nature of time loop stories vanishes if more than a handful of people are involved, unless literally everyone in the time loop is on the same wavelength vis-a-vis stuff like "stabbing a guy is a-ok if they won't remember it in the morning".
The fiction podcast The Adventure Zone has a time loop arc, where everyone, not just the three people experiencing the loop, remembered every loop, as soon as the time loop got brocken. Made things pretty akward.
Also earlier in the story there is a guy they don't know about, who also remembers every loop, while the time loop is still going on. He observes how they act and that influenced if he was going to help them or not.
The thing about Through the Flash that I think is an important detail (which Jacob only really briefly mentioned), is that initially no one remembers they're looping at all. Ama is one of the earliest people to remember, so when she does and no one else has yet-- or very few people have-- she feels that she IS living consequence-free. When she hurts people, or kills them, no one knows. Some people to this day in the loop have not yet fully realized they are looping, and might be stuck like that forever. The problem is that it's a slippery slope, and by the time people start to "wake up" and realize they're trapped, she's already done so many horrible things that she can't bring herself to stop. Not for a long while anyway.
Really it's a story about coming to terms with the fact that your whole frame of reference for life has changed, and that you have to live with the consequences regardless. Through the Flash starts out the same as something like Twelve Minutes or Death Loop, but then changes (or rather, has changed by the start of the actual plot), which is what makes it so great.
@@raphdoods Ah, that makes sense! Thanks for clarifying.
@@LadyMapi Through the Flash is a short story you can find for free online. It's worth the 20 minute read
Wow, as always I am so, so impressed by your work Jacob. It boggles my mind how you consistently find and choose such mind bogglingly intersting and unique topics, and explore them in a multifaceted way. Bravo 👏
One of the things that are always on my mind in these kinda "loop worlds", is the philosophy of memory. In Deathloop, and Through the Flash, the memory of the inhabitants of the loop is shared, while in stories like Groundhog Day, the loop concerns a single person. In the shared memory loops, the actions of its inhabitants are remembered by everyone present to witness them, which creates a consequence for the actions taken within the loop, but no such consequence exists in the single person loops assuming it doesn't break.
In Groundhog day, the protagonist is the only person who is aware of his actions in previous loops, and therefore the is no consequence since no one can hold him accountable, but in Through the Flash, that is not the case. The protagonist is somewhat held to account by the fact that the other inhabitants of the world can judge the protagonist for her actions.
The question then becomes, if you are the only person that can remember the atrocities you've committed against people that no longer remember you did it, then did it actually happen? If the victims can remember then yes, but if they can't then it could be argued that it didn't.
Sorry if that was incoherent. Just wanted to share my ramblings with the wonderful people here in the comments. Lovely video once again Jacob!
Oh yeah. I like how in Undertale you can tell Toriel you've watched her die. Imagine killing your best friend after years in a time loop, simply because you've got nothing better to do, and then breaking the loop and trying to tell him you've killed him before.
I love when timeloop characters try to _prove_ to other people that they're in a timeloop, or have been in one. That's where the writing becomes genius. Like a timeloop guy telling someone they've never met exactly what that person is going to do for the next 30 minutes, granted they don't let the action of being _told_ what they're about to do affect it. Or telling a person you've never met exactly what's inside their kitchen cupboards - even better if there's something weird that isn't normally in a cupboard.
And then the next day, they have to convince that person all over again. Eventually they're running through an entire town telling everyone exactly what they're all going to do. From their perspective, this is the first time he's ever said that. It must seem weird as hell. But it's immensely rewarding for the reader.
Is telling someone you killed them in a past loop any more valid then telling them you had a dream?
@@williamjenkins4913 the differnce is that you actually went and did the murder. you now know what you are capable of doing to someone else.
that is something you will have to carry with you from now on. same thing with other crimes like rape and theft.
thanks to the reset the damage you did to the world around you becomes undone, but the knowledge remains as a scar in your mind.
20:50 Made his mother pick whether she preferred his arm well-done or medium-rare. While he watched.
Your videos are so moving. So passionate. I enjoy them so much even though I'd probably never even play most of the games you talk about.
And this one, posted on my 21st birthday, is among my favourites.
Thank you
One of the endings to Steins Gate VN explores this in a way I find interesting, guy repeats same day infinitely to avoid people dying and it begins to completely warp his personality
[Deathloop Spoilers] I think information about Cole's character relevant to the video's questions can be found, among other locations, in the boathouse near Frank's club.
Comparison of Deathloop and Groundhog Day, speculation about the "missed opportunity" of examining the impact the loop would have on Cole's psyche, misses one important thing: Cole Vahn was not snarky Groundhog Day Man before he entered this iteration of the loop. He was as violent and selfish and half-mad as the rest of the visionaries. Security Chief Cole, as the player can find out, *literally gassed traitor eternalists to death in a secret interrogation chamber hidden near Frank's club*.
The loop can't turn Cole into a sociopath who kicks people off cliffs. It can't show him anything he hasn't seen/done already in the endless spiral of consequenceless violence and degradation that was Cole's career in the Army of the Motherland. All the loop does is (likely, depending on player choice) turn Cole *back* into a sociopath who kicks people off cliffs every time he loses his memory. The game provides, for the attentive or dedicated player, a lot of content about what kind of person he was/will be, from the Boathouse to the memos recorded by the Motherland spies about his Updaam fuck pad, to the other him confirming that he was cynically using the Aeon program for his own, hidden purposes (as a means of returning to the 1930s, attempting to re-enter the loop and figure out a way to break out at his original entry time.)
Deathloop does, IMO, contain an epilogue that explores the questions you raise. It's the one where you, the player, poke around for more secrets, find the above information, and realize for yourself what kind of person Cole already was, that he was already that guy before the loop. This knowledge recontextualizes how we understand the drift in his personality during the 130-whatever previous years. (In, in my opinion, a not-totally-negative direction!)
Time Loops are my favorite narrative device. A work that I feel does justice to the permenant effects actions inside a loop can have on the loop-ee is "Hard Reset" and its two sequels. They are a My Little Pony fanfic trilogy where the actual time-loop only makes up around 20% of the story. The rest of the story is the time loop-ee dealing with various consequences and PTSD from being in that loop.
How long does it take to deprogram the impulse to kill yourself when you run into a minor inconvenience?
What happens if you run into someone you killed in the loop? What if they killed you? Would you forgive them for something they never did?
What if you saw what you'd become if you never escaped the loop? Seeing the horrors that you would end up committing after a few more centuries of Time Loop Nihilism, how does that shape your self-image as "A good person"?
There aren't many fanfics I'd recommend to people outside the MLP fandom, but if you're looking for more nuanced looks into this after "Through the Flash", Hard Reset might interest you.
Aaaaah there she is. I was hoping someone would talk about this fic.
Straight from nihilism to existentialism! Love that beautiful progression!
I have a story idea that's centered on a time loop, and the person experiencing the loop trying to save her friends from dying. She makes a deal with a supernatural being to start the loop after she and her friends go on a dangerous but necessary adventure and they all die but her. She is able to end the loop whenever she wants, but she refuses to until everyone makes it out alive.
The problem is, the loops aren't exactly the same. People make different decisions each time, even when they have the same information. Because of this, she can't accurately predict what will happen and develop a perfect strategy to get through it. She can only estimate the chance of which choices someone will make. It's immensely stressful and exhausting for her.
I'm proud of this idea, as far as I know it's never been done before. And if it has, well, great minds think alike.
Puella Magi Madoka Magica
it's exactly that, but also kinda sailor moon too.
If I may;
I think your idea fundamentally clashes with time loop concepts, unless you introduce a reason for actions and events not being completely deterministic.
2 possibilities that come to mind are:
-A 3rd party is also aware, and influences the loop in ways the main character can't completely foresee.
-The main character is forced into an action that cannot be perfectly replicated and has chaotic ripple effects. Could be something as simple as having to throw a couple of dice whose results have wildly different consequences or ripple effects. Even if you have 1 million attempts, you're unlikely to learn to control the results, and if there are enough different possible outcomes, you can't create a perfect plan, only optimize for the results you get.
@@Powersd451 madoka magica
This is one of the most encouraging and humbling readings of a story I've written ever. I remember watching some of these movies listed and thinking about how I could push the conceit a little further. Also playing 12 Minutes now lol so it's almost surreal to see the same conversation I've been having with my friends and myself represented in this elevated and polished way. Once again, thank you truly for this brilliant consideration. Definitely subscribed lol.
Hey Jacob, just wanted to say that I really appreciated your mentioning of Friday Black, I really loved how you described "Through the Flash" so I decided to go ahead and grab the kindle edition and thoroughly enjoyed the book.
I think time loops are so interesting as narrative devices- There's so many ways you can alter the basic formula, and each lets you tell a new, thematically important story. Your protagonist gets really stab-happy in the loop? You can use that to examine guilt- examine redemption. Can your character change the end of the loop? You can tell the story of how every action matters, how kindness can change the future, how there's no such thing as fate.
There's so much you can do with it! A time loop can symbolize whatever you want it to. Regret, an inability to move on from trauma, grief, consequence, etc. and all of those options can be explored at the same time, at different times, you name it. Hell, time loops are even good for worldbuilding and character interactions- if you have a setting you want to explore, a well-utilized time loop can let you show off all of it without getting stale. You can have characters hate each other one loop, and be friends the next- you can have cause and effect chains that change the entire loop. There's so much variety in them, both from how you use them and the rules you give them. I wish I had more time loop stories to read. If anyone has any good reccomendations, let me know.
I'll go first-
- Omniscient reader's viewpoint, Webnovel. The main character isn't in a time loop, but the secondary character is. It's also REALLY well written, and I recommend it to everyone ever.
- Saike Mata Shitemo, Manga. The main character has time loop powers- if he drowns in a specific pond he can restart the day. He uses this to save people's lives, but watch out! There's other people, with more combat focused powers. and he has to fight them. (I like this one sosososo much)
-Re:zero- anime/manga. This one's really popular. It's set in a fantasy world with spirits, nobility, death cults, and the like. The main character is a really shitty person at first, and the story focuses on him growing as a human being, forming relationships with the people in this new world (it's an isekai), and dying painful horrible deaths and then going back in time.
-room of swords- webtoon. An intricately crafted labyrinth of twists and turns, that I can't say like ANYTHING about without spoiling it. read it. read it now. do it.
I was thinking the same thing. You after endless days maybe a distilled version of you but it’s still you. I like how Undertale has Sans. He’s not just a judge. He can see you. He can see how you played the game and REACTS to YOUR game play. I was thinking about that during your video. You continue to challenge my thinking. Thank you.