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Tuesday, May 14, 2019

Super Silly Superpower Splatfest: Time Travel vs. Teleportation!

By LUDWIG VON KOOPA - I already have a large body of work on KoopaTV about the horrors of time travel, so...

I really just want to defer to my many already-published time-related articles for this question posed by Splatoon 2 for the Splatfest taking place this Saturday, May 18:

Splatoon 2 Splatfest superpower time travel vs teleportation
“What superpower would you rather have? Time travel or teleportation?”
 

If you put the word “superpower” into KoopaTV's search bar, you'll get a pretty similar Splatoon 2 Splatfest from 2017 that asked “Which superpower would you choose? The power of flight? Or the power of invisibility?”

If you put the phrase “time travel” into KoopaTV's search bar, you'll get a Splatoon Splatfest from 2016 that asked, “Where would you go [between the Past and the Future] if you could travel through time?”

I'm not saying Nintendo is running out of ideas, but, you know. Eh, it's better than asking about pulp in orange juice.

Anyway, I'll go ahead and first say why time travel is a terrible idea, and then briefly give the virtues of teleportation. However, just the fact that time travel is so bad should be enough for anyone to just anti-vote it, no matter what its opponent actually is.

I have been contending for a very long time now that Daylight Savings Time is a horrible, rotten thing. I've equated it to dooming the world and being the plot of Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Time with the Time Gear theft. Then I spent a couple of years joining petitions and writing letters to politicians. Eventually, I wrote about the root cause of how Daylight Savings Time came to be: an incident with time travel.

Specifically, Mario, enemy of Koopa kind, stole a time machine, went back in time to the American revolution, and inspired founding father Benjamin Franklin to invent Daylight Savings Time.

Splatoon 2 Marina Splatfest time travel vs teleportation worried about changing past messing up future
Mario wasn't worried at all about messing up the future. In fact, that was his goal.

Time travel only creates problems. I wrote a whole article called Yoshi's New Problems in 2014 about Yoshi's New Island, citing how time travel, introduced thanks to the morons at Artoon/Arzest with that game and Yoshi's Island DS, have ruined the whole timeline. You play around with that and it just creates nonsense and untold suffering.

Just ask how The Legend of Zelda has to have three different timelines because of one act of time travel. Total disgrace.

Now, the Splatfest question asks what power you'd rather have. Maybe you enjoy ruining the very fabric of time because you're actually a megalomaniac politician like those found in the United States. In that case, yes, time travel is more powerful than teleportation. With time travel, you can escape any situation and repeat it over and over until you succeed.

...But that might be a curse. There is such a thing as fate and destiny, and for some people, they might be fated to be a loser. The late Dahlia Hawthorne is one example. You might create a bunch of timelines where you try over and over again, but while each timeline only has you doing something for the first time, your memories aren't erased. You have to live with the burden of being a failure.

Teleportation doesn't delve into any of that. Rather than retrying situations, you can just warp to something entirely new. It's a super on-demand witness protection program. Just ask the Black Knight, who could warp around and live multiple successful lives simultaneously with teleportation. No drawbacks!

By the way, teleportation raises a question about how it fits into KoopaTV's transportation philosophies. I can say that teleportation is the highest-tier of transportation. It's instantaneous. I suppose if you enjoy scenic rides, you can teleport into the scenery itself and then warp to where you really need to be once you're bored.

Sissel wouldn't need to turn back the clock in Ghost Trick if the story participants could just freely teleport. That would have prevented and solved all of the problems that happened. The details are a spoiler, but... it's absolutely true. But then the problems were exacerbated by the use of time travel and time loops where they couldn't change fate.

Update May 15: Was just playing Culdcept Revolt and realised that it embodies the message of this article perfectly. There's a point in the half-assed story that there's a time travel moment where the characters decide to travel to the past and kill someone to make their current world better, which they decide is the only possible solution. They do so and return to the present, and find out their world has literally turned to Hell because they killed the wrong dude based on faulty information. Terrible outcome due to time travel. Meanwhile, the enemies all teleport in the storyline to escape capture or their own death, heal up, and then come back to harass you or whatever. Teleportation is clearly overpowered and the heroes have absolutely no ability to counteract it. /endupdate

Clearly, you shouldn't pick Team Time Travel. Or you'll be wishing you would go back in time and choose Team Teleportation. Just pick the right choice the first time. 


Ludwig doesn't want to change his sense of what time it is, so time travel is a non-starter. Just think about how useful teleportation could be, though. Safety. Privacy. Making the most out of the time you have by not having to calculate when you need to leave the house to get to your appointment on time. Living life as it's meant to be lived. If that's appealing to you, then maybe you'd be interested in taking a bit of that extra time to fill out KoopaTV's latest feedback form? You can supplement that with a fun quiz!


If only the tortoise could teleport...
Excellent news: Team Teleportation won!
The next Splatfest involves unicorns and narwhals.

4 comments :

  1. I 100% agree, like, I LITERALLY couldn't agree more, on time travel being a Very Bad Thing. Even in fiction, it tends to create hackneyed plots, unsatisfying resolutions, and pure confusion! I could, but don't WANT to even imagine what effect it would have if it became a real thing in my world!

    And yes, teleportation is FTW as well.

    ReplyDelete
  2. A comment on r/Splatoon said this is Dialga vs Palkia because it is if you want to travel through time or spacial dimension. I did choose the Pearl version so it is Team Teleportation for me.

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    Replies
    1. I thought about that briefly (not a time pun), but Palkia can't even learn Teleport, so...

      Though we know that Palkia can rip holes in space to warp through dimensions, so I'm not sure why Palkia can't learn Teleport.

      (I chose Diamond version; still would rather Teleport.)

      Delete

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