I'm sure we've all read our fair share of time travel stories as a guilty pleasure and what-not, but I think time travel in fanfiction suffers from what a lot of fanfiction tropes suffer from: it can be workable precisely because it's working off a canon base that the reader is assumed to have read or have fair knowledge of, but if the reader hasn't then the fic suffers because there's a lack of context to the story. Take a time-travel Harry Potter story, for instance - the reader is just assumed to know a lot about the magic world, who all these characters popping into the story are, etc. If you didn't know a lick about HP and read a time travel fanfic, you'd be lost.
So I was wondering, how would an original fic time travel story work? I don't mean something along the lines even of Bill & Ted or Dr. Who, as while they use time travel as a major plot element to help move the story along, it isn't THE defining impetus behind the whole story. I'm thinking more along the lines of all the post-apocalyptic stories where an individual or small group travels back in time to save the world from whatever doom is coming. If anybody actually knows of any such stories already in any sort of media (literature, film, etc.) listing them as well would work. I'm sure I know of a couple even, just that aren't coming to mind at all.
A few video games do this already (Tales of Phantasia, To the Moon kinda-sorta), but those I think are boosted by the interactive element, and in ToP's case 40 hours of game yields a lot more story than 2 hours of movie or however many pages of literature.
So I was wondering, how would an original fic time travel story work? I don't mean something along the lines even of Bill & Ted or Dr. Who, as while they use time travel as a major plot element to help move the story along, it isn't THE defining impetus behind the whole story. I'm thinking more along the lines of all the post-apocalyptic stories where an individual or small group travels back in time to save the world from whatever doom is coming. If anybody actually knows of any such stories already in any sort of media (literature, film, etc.) listing them as well would work. I'm sure I know of a couple even, just that aren't coming to mind at all.
A few video games do this already (Tales of Phantasia, To the Moon kinda-sorta), but those I think are boosted by the interactive element, and in ToP's case 40 hours of game yields a lot more story than 2 hours of movie or however many pages of literature.