[00:00] Time travel in fiction is normally like the ultimate shortcut. Want to get 50 years into the future? Push a button, fall through a portal, go 88 miles per hour. Or, you know, get hit by whatever magical bullshit that the story has invented.
[00:13] But occasionally, a narrative will do something just a little bit meaner. A thing where one character will get the wonderful time travel shortcut, and another has to take the long way around. That person might live the 50 years, or 500 years,
[00:28] for apparently 2,000 freaking years? And right now, at time of recording, we have at least two animes that are doing this trope at the exact same time. But Mushoku Tensei does it in a way that reminds me why I love this trope,
[00:41] and that season 4 of That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime reminds me of why I hate it. Although hate is probably a strong word here. Incredibly frustrating is what it is, and that is what we are discussing today.
[00:53] So ladies, gentlemen, and others, welcome to Glass Reflection, where today we're discussing The Long Way Around. Let's jam. So what do I mean by The Long Way Around?
[01:05] Well, I'm taking this description from a wonderful episode of the live-action British television series Doctor Who. So the way The Long Way Around is when a lot of characters, normally the main character, travels from time A to time B.
[01:17] But with The Long Way Around, you have somebody that doesn't make that trip with them. or gets sent back in time and can't use the time travel to return to the future, and therefore has to go the long way around.
[01:29] You have a character that experiences all of that time in between. When everybody else in the story only experiences, like, minutes or hours or possibly a few days, you have this one character, or potentially this group of characters,
[01:42] that instead experiences decades or centuries before people meet again. To clarify, though, this is not just a regular time skip. This is not a matter of where someone gets put into suspended animation,
[01:55] and they wake up, and it's been a thousand years, and one of their best friends happens to be an elf or something who just happened to live those thousand years. Like, I mean, maybe I can make an argument that this trope applies to that, but it's not really what I'm going for today.
[02:07] And continuing on that point, this is not time travel where you're just passing through time because you were thrown into suspended animation or frozen in time or put into a giant ice block. The whole point of the long way around is that you need to have two characters minimally,
[02:20] and the difference between those two characters is their subjective experience. Well, one has actually lived through everything. Well, the other one's got to skip out on it. Where I have problems with The Long Way Around is when it is, like, mid-story, mid-narrative,
[02:35] or possibly near the end, and it takes a character, and it gives them all of these years, decades, centuries of experience. And then the story still continues on a bit after that. Because it's supposed to ask the question, right,
[02:49] What does that amount of time do to a character? It doesn't need to necessarily destroy them mentally, because now they have all of these hundreds of years of extra experience. It doesn't need to, like, make them evil or change their character massively.
[03:03] But if you have a character now who has suddenly experienced, like, decades or centuries that nobody else in the cast has, that needs to leave a mark. And where I have a problem with The Long Way Around is when it doesn't.
[03:17] when someone experiences all of that time, and then we move to the next episode, and it's like it never happened. Let's talk about some examples where it's done well, because, you know, that's a good baseline. Uh, Steins Gate.
[03:29] This is gonna be, like, minor spoilers for a couple of things. So, like, Steins Gate's been around for a while. You should watch and or play it. I don't have much experience with the new Steins Gate reboot game myself, but I've heard reasonably okay things.
[03:41] Though, really, you should probably just pick up the OG or just watch the show. It's fine. Anyway, within Steins Gate, we have the character of Suzuha. Now, this is where we get the cruel version of the long way around, because Suzuha is already a time traveler.
[03:53] She has come to 2010 from the future, and this was just supposed to be a mid-stopping point on her journey further into the past, but she ended up crash-landing into a building and had to stay there for a little while.
[04:05] The characters of the story end up helping her and sort of repairing or fixing her time machine, and her goal is to continue her trip further back. She jumps back into her time machine and she goes back to like 1975 But in this version of the story her time machine wasn repaired all the way correctly and it crashes again In 1975 yes but the crash causes Suzuha to lose her memories and make her
[04:32] unable to actually fulfill her goal of going into the past. Instead, she lives the history, the long way around, as a woman named Suzu Hashida, because she doesn't have her memory. Eventually, though, she does get her memories back when she's a lot older
[04:48] and she realizes that she already failed her mission. Not only that, but then she dies in the year 2000. And our main character, Sankye Okabe, finds out about this in 2010. And this is an example of the trope working really well.
[05:02] Because from Okabe's perspective, Suzuha had just left. He learns about her next, like, 25-ish years of life, even though to him, barely any time has passed at all. But for her, it's like an entire adult life has occurred.
[05:15] And, you know, it's not a very good one. And even though this is just a small segment of the story, and then Okabe goes forward with an attempt to essentially make sure that none of that ever happened, for the brief period of time where it exists in the narrative,
[05:28] those years that Susaha had to go through matter. It showcases that going the long way around has its consequences and its effects on the future. Now, it does have the benefit that we don't meet old Susaha in this little venture part of the narrative,
[05:41] so we don't actually have to deal with showcasing how different of a character she has become. But now we can also talk about the other good example of this, which is the Mushoku Tensei. Spoiler warning for the current season of Mushoku Tensei.
[05:54] I'm not going to say, hey, you should go watch Mushoku Tensei, because it's Mushoku Tensei. There's a lot of reasons why you shouldn't and wouldn't want to. But let's add on to the massive pile of reasons why Mushoku Tensei is good to help balance out the one gigantic reason of why it's garbage.
[06:08] And that's its use of the long way around. In Turning Point 4, our wonderful protagonist, Rudy, ends up meeting an old man who randomly appears in his study. This old man is him from the future.
[06:21] This is an example of the long way around, but sort of in reverse, because it shows us a future version of our character who has already taken the long way around, or rather the long way forward, and has come back explicitly to warn his younger self and tell him,
[06:36] don't do the shit that I did. His story matters, because without this, this would not be a turning point. Mugio Patense has several turning points, and all of them are fairly massive to the overall narrative of this story.
[06:48] And old Rudeus and his journey through the rest of his life, up until he's essentially an old man, affects so many things, because it is the warning signs, the bellwether, the,
[07:00] hey, this is what could happen if you go down the path that you're currently going down. Fix it. Now. And the thing that I love about this use of the trope here is that Old Rudy is not just, you know, the same Rudy-ness that we know, slightly older with gray hair.
[07:16] No, this is a completely different character. This is a different man. This is a man who has gone through several decades of horrible hardship and loss and anger.
[07:28] And has been, like, essentially driven to this point by just this need of revenge. and I don't know if retribution is a good way of describing his goals here, but the old Rudeus that we meet is not a version of Rudeus that we have ever seen before
[07:42] and hopefully is never a version we will meet again. That's kind of his whole point. He is a walking spoiler for the rest of Rudeus' life, assuming things go the same way and it's not supposed to. The reason why I really love this version is because old Rudeus doesn't really escape his future.
[07:58] He doesn't escape the consequences of choices that he has made. He is still dying. He is almost literally falling apart in young Rudeus' steady. He's not actually falling apart. That would be a bit too gruesome. And there's not much to fall apart left, to be fair.
[08:12] But him going the long way around has a narrative purpose. He went the long way around, and he wants to make sure his younger self doesn't. But then, now we get to Slime. This is going to be spoilers for Season 4 of Reincarnated as a Slime.
[08:25] And the thing is, is that Slime has gone much, much bigger, and is the primo example of what I don't like about this trope. So, in Slime, in near the end of season 4, only a couple of episodes ago, a character named Chloe, she grabs the
[08:40] soul of Hinata and ends up getting forced 2 years into the past And not only does she go 2 years into the past with the soul of another character but then she informs said character that this is not the first time that
[08:54] she has done this. She has looped these 2,000 years multiple times before. And the thing that bothers me with this is that 2,000 years is a stupid amount of time. This is not like she missed
[09:08] college. This is not, oh, well, we jumped ahead like 50 years or something. 2,000 years is entire civilization's worth of time. This is like her entire life, 20 to 25 times over, in a single
[09:21] loop, and we've been told she's done this loop multiple times. Kind of the worst part about how Slime handles this is that it actually acknowledges the problem. There is a quick blink-in-your-mistak line where Chloe mentions, yeah, hey, I have done this 2,000-year loop multiple times, but I really
[09:38] only remember a lot of the most recent Luke. She doesn't actually remember the 10, 15, 20, 50,000 years that she's actually potentially lived, because I don't know how many times her Luke has actually occurred. I don't remember if they've actually stated that. And Hinata
[09:53] explicitly states that if she could remember all of that time, that would be an experimental strain on her. And, you know, completely fair. Repeatedly remembering thousands upon thousands
[10:05] of years, we'll probably destroy any useful version of this character or any other. But, you know, bringing that up creates a new problem, right? So she doesn't remember all of her loops. Cool, got that. But you've established that she remembers her most recent one,
[10:19] and as she progresses through, quote-unquote, this loop, this 2,000 years, she remembers all of that, right? Which brings us with memory and experience of 2,000 years. That is still an
[10:31] incomprehensibly long time for a human to live. My problem is that you have a character now who has experienced this 2,000 plus year of time, and essentially, it's the same character at the end of it.
[10:45] You've given this human character all of this extra time, but we don't actually, in interacting with them, see the fingerprints of that time. How is the Chloe that we now see in this 2,000 year old plus future
[11:00] meaningfully different from the girl who was whisked away because she had to live through all of that. And that's kind of the thing where I'm fairly certain we're not really going to get the answer to that because Slime already has characters within its narrative
[11:12] that are very long-lived. This world is full of beings who are thousands of years old, between, like, demons and demon lords and true dragons and other beings that are just essentially operating at godlike levels.
[11:24] You have all of these characters that live all of this time. In fact, we see several of them. We see some long-lived characters in slime that keep their fashion sense over 2,000 years. And for the most part, when it comes to those characters,
[11:36] I don't really have the same problem with them because they are long-lived. If Guy Crimson wants to go and live 1,000 years being Guy Crimson, okay. Diabolo is a primordial demon. He's been around a long time. Okay, Veldora, giant dragon, has done a lot of shit over the decades and centuries. Okay.
[11:52] But the thing with all of those characters, at least with how I process them, is that their relationship with aging and time is not fundamentally human. They are characters who, because they know they have that exceedingly long lifespan
[12:07] and their biology is kind of wired for that, they handle the passage of time differently, and this includes how much time and events and things affect them as people. And it's why I can believe that you have a thousands-year-old character
[12:21] who doesn't really change all that much personality-wise over the course of those years. I don't expect Lord Elrond of Rivendell to be all that exceptionally different, even if we jump a thousand years plus or minus in his timeline.
[12:33] He's still Lord Elrond. And so the reason why this is a problem with me and Chloe is because she is human. She starts off as human. She's a human child with human relationships. She has a human frame of reference for time and existence.
[12:46] She isn't introduced to us as some kind of ancient, uh, immortal character, the kind of whom which centuries feel like a drop in the bucket, the ancient lifespan that she ends up living is something that happens to her,
[12:59] unnaturally And that the distinction for me Guy Crimson being ancient is like part of what Guy is Chloe becoming ancient is something that she has experienced And I have this expectation that something that she has experienced should affect her in some way
[13:16] And here's the thing. Being long-lived doesn't mean you have to be static. I know slime does that a lot. A lot of the long-lived characters are the exact same when they're talking to a yamuru as they were in flashbacks from thousands of years ago.
[13:30] It's just something that slime does. But in narrative, you don't need to do that. Freyrin here is a very useful example, because she is an elf. She is at least over a thousand years old, we don't know exactly how old she is,
[13:42] and part of the story of Freyrin is that she experiences time differently. A whole part of her narrative is just how insignificant ten years normally is for her, but this specific block of ten years of her past keeps coming up and means more and more to her as the narrative progresses.
[14:01] Even with that, she does change. It is slow. It is sometimes painfully slow. So slow that characters she meets in that ten year span of time are long gone now, even though she's only just realizing how important that span of time was for her.
[14:16] But because she is an elf, because she lives for so long, it doesn't mean that she doesn't change, it just means that the change happens slowly. Having a long lifespan doesn't mean that nothing affects them anymore.
[14:29] What it means is that change still happens, just at a different scale. I don't need Chloe to come back and start acting like some old ancient wise wizard or something. I don't need her to stop liking Rimuru as a character and our protagonist.
[14:44] And I don't want her to become, like, cold, detached, or, like, traumatized and miserable because of the time that she's had to experience. But I just want them to give me literally anything. I want there to be times where Chloe will casually remember something
[14:57] that someone else would consider ancient history. I want her going forward to have an odd amount of patience for a human, because, you know, essentially waiting months for something to happen should mean little to her. Or, you know, maybe even the opposite.
[15:09] Have her be incredibly impatient because she's waited 2,000 years to get here. Or at the very least, if we're going to be doing offhanded lines to try and explain things, you can have her say that she's doing her best to act like old Chloe
[15:22] because she desperately wants that life back, or something to that effect. Plain and simple is I want Chloe as a character to have something that can only exist within her character because she has lived those 2,000 years.
[15:39] That's kind of the thing. Mushoku Tensei gives me decades and makes them feel enormous as far as how much time this man has lived. Slime and Chloe give me millennia, and it somehow makes it feel so small.
[15:52] And so to sum up, my problem with going the long way around is that time needs to leave a mark. I don't want to say that there is necessarily a correct way to write the trope, as long as it does that.
[16:04] If you remove those 2,000 years from her personal history, how much about this future Chloe would actually have to change? If the answer is not very much, then those 2,000 years don't really feel necessary.
[16:20] they don't feel like the lived experience of this character at that point they just feel like a number in her lore and I want it to be more than that and that's it for our show today
[16:32] thanks for watching and a very special thank you to all of our patrons whose names are currently scrolling next to my face if it weren't for people like you I couldn't talk about this small anachronistic part of time travel stories that I hate and despise
[16:45] this is actually something that I've been like twiddling around in the back of my head that wanted to do like a whole hour-long video of, but it would end up getting into so many things that aren't even anime-related that I kind of had to scrap it for the sake of, you know,
[16:57] an anime channel. So I was also happy that both Mushoku Tensei and Slime happened to have a duplass in them that makes it somewhat slightly relevant for at least a small video like this. And so thank you to the people that allow me to be able to do that, especially to patrons like
[17:10] Gitwig, Aiden, CityAmago, Rison, BornAbout, Omar Shoman, and Ross Emerson. can't do this without your guys' support so however much you are able to help I'm eternally grateful and until next time
[17:23] when we're getting to the end of this anime season and the start of a new one with new seasons, new shows, new adventures watch more anime and stay frosty