What's the deal with time travel in anime? With only a couple of exceptions, this concept doesn't seem to get explored too often in anime but when it does it's almost always done in the exact same way. Some character travels back in time to fix some mistake, fails, and keeps going back over and over until they eventually get it right. It strikes me as odd because in western media you see a lot of time travel stories and they explore it from all kinds of perspectives and styles. From the simple stories of character's going back in time, fucking up the past, and trying to fix it. To stories in which the mob sends people back in time to be killed by assassins who will eventually have to kill their future selves too. You've got movies that end the way they start with an infinite loop, or characters who travel billions of years into the future and fight off mutated decedents of humans. They might even play around with the very format of the media and have the story all told backwards. Just the other day I saw one mind fuck of a movie in which a character travels back in time to impregnate themselves after getting a sex change to become their own father/mother while trying to stop a mad bomber who also turns out to be an older version of themselves. Ground hog day and edge of tomorrow are the only examples of western media doing the endless loop thing, yet edge of tomorrow was based on a Japanese manga. So why doesn't anime play around more with time travel from other perspectives? The likes of higurashi and steins;gate were great and all, but they can do so much more with the concept. Hell, Time Travel Shoujo was garbage but at least they did things differently which makes it note worthy.
it only seem like that to you because you haven't watched much anime you saw both seasons of the very recent and popular dr. pepper commercial and that seems like a lot to you, but you'll need to make amore complete survey of the topic before you can draw the kinda of conclusions you came to without being considered someone who saw 1 data point and picked out a pattern from it
>>29881 My mal puts me at 850+ completed bro, so how about being a little less dismissive?
Natsu no Arashi dealed with it slightly differently, as did Inuyasha. Gunbuster and Diebuster took a more realistic approach. I’m sure there are others that I’m not thinking off off the top of my head.
Maybe it's an easy type of time travel story to write. There might be a technical side too, in a limited repeating loop there's less characters and environments to take care of. Kind of breaking the rules here (delete this post if I'm going too far) but I gotta refer to western films. You mention Predestination- it wasn't very good in my opinion. To me most of the incoming twists were obvious from the beginning, though it could have been better if the hermaphrodite time traveler's backstory was revealed gradually and not in a boring, bizarre exposition dump. Also the actress looked very silly as a man, they should have used at least 3 different people to play different versions of the main character. The movie feels "unbalanced" and I think what it attempted to do would work much better in anime. The strange parts that stand out in a jarring way could benefit from going into Japanese craziness mode. Visually cartoon form also acts as a disbelief filter for me, I'm much less sensitive to stories turning outlandish when animated than when done in live action. I think anime treatment would do wonders to many western stories that fail in 3D.
>>29883 Those are good examples. I somehow managed to forget about them. Although gunbuster feels like it only 'technically' counts as time travel as the progression of time was still linear and unchanging. Same as something like interstellar doesn't really 'feel' like a time travel movie, even if it technically is. If you're going to count that style of time travel, wouldn't that also include eveything which involves cryosleep or suspended animation? Weren't the ghosts in Natsu no Arashi simply stuck there for eternity? (It's been a while since I've seen it). Was their an episode in which they took the main characters back to their own time for a vision or something like that? I'd appreciate it if you could refresh my memory. >>29884 I completely agree about Predestination, but if nothing else I thought it was an interesting concept. As for this repeating loop thing, it could also have something to do with Japanese culture.
>>29887 In the second season Hajime did jump back with Arashi to the time where they died. I don’t remember exactly how it all played out though. Unfortunately, it was one of Crunchyroll’s worst subs they ever put out, and to my knowledge, no one ever redid the second season.
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