also this one is more of a personal nitpick than a genuine gripe but if a guy doesn't generate any body heat I don't think more blankets will make him warmer. because there's no heat. to trap under them.
and you miss out on the golden opportunity for the character to instinctively wrap themself in blankets that won't help because they still feel the urge for that comfort even if they know it's useless (or if they're too out of it to realize it's useless). OR, if there is another character involved, the classic huddling for warmth trope
Just finished Finally listening to the Magnus Archives finale after I originally dropped off a couple dozen episodes from the end in 2021. The end itself was of course incredible but I've discovered that as far as I can tell, there is approximately zero fic dealing with the aftermath of the apocalypse in the TMA universe. There's a ton of stuff about Jon and Martin in whatever other place they end up, and a billion time travel fix-its, but no one has written about the recovery of the TMA universe after the apocalypse was reversed, at least not that I can find. Not even an AU where the precious main characters managed to stick around there. Zilch. I'm sure there must be something out there, but I can't find it.
why even bother having a time travel "fix-it" au if you're not going to meaningfully change any canon events.
Instead of being increasingly desperate, terrified, and overwhelmed as the story goes on, the main character (Jon, it's a tma fic) now starts out mysteriously knowledgeable and world-weary and stays that way the whole time, or at least until I stopped reading, which was about a third of the way through. He does get to drop a lot of ominous hints and vague warnings while completely failing to pass on any useful information which is very enriching for him I'm sure. edit: to be fair it looks like the author does eventually get around to changing events somewhat. But I'm pretty sure they do so by mangling the hell out of the worldbuilding, so it's not exactly an improvement.
"Time travel do it mostly the same" can work, if the character has motivation to try that and it's a short enough span of time they could plausibly memorize things, but the longer the span with the more obviously changed attitude really should cause others to perceive them differently and thus think and act differently too... to say nothing of, what is the smug one's motive for keeping it the same, anyway? Does the story even give an explanation?
My understanding is that they are allegedly not trying to keep everything the same, they're just... being smug and languishing in their foreknowledge instead of doing anything that might be helpful.
Yeah. And when the other characters catch on that something is definitely weird after a couple chapters of mysterious knowingness, he does collect everybody for a worldbuilding infodump... and still absolutely no specific knowledge about upcoming events. He doesn't even mention one EXTREMELY IMPORTANT bit of worldbuilding knowledge that would save multiple lives because I'm pretty sure the author forgot it. And the other characters don't ever press him for information, they just tiptoe around being impressed by his time traveler mystery. As though there are not multiple of them who would threaten him with a baseball bat if he didn't spill.
the author I just found, who wrote all this fanfiction I like, has made a very sudden and abrupt turn into a fandom I have negative interest in and I'm over here like "Mister Frodo, don't you go where I can't follow!"
Oh my god, an old-school character bashing fic untagged, featuring The Ship I Like? What is this, 2007?
