Quote Originally Posted by Lunar Latias View Post
@Neo Emolga To be honest, I feel that anything that involves time travel has to be handled particularly carefully. I mean the idea itself has been done time and time again, but it's easy to lose track of things and find reasons to justify what you're doing. I also dislike a lot of those plots that send someone back in time to fix something and ultimately ends up rewriting EVERYTHING to the point when they first began, like the whole story never existed in the first place. To me that seems like a lot of wasted effort. If I write something, I want it to have an effect on the future. I want it to move forward. Not backwards.
Yup, totally agree with everything you said there. Very few movies and stories have pulled off time travel well and like you said, it's a very delicate thing. When I tried to think of ideas for ToJ IV, I should have realized that struggle should have been a sign that it really wasn't meant to be.

And on a similar note, I realized this morning I am truly an optimist.

I had a pretty disturbing nightmare last night that was pretty freaky and gory with quite a few downright twisted things going on. One example was there was this young girl that was looking in a mirror to see in freakish horror that she had become a sickly and disfigured anthropomorphic rabbit, and everything she touched just withered, died, and decayed, including plants and even a wooden fence post she leaned against. There was another scene where a boy suddenly had his arms fall off, then his legs, and then his head separated from his body, and he was forced to get around as nothing more than a head that had to bop and up and down to get from one place to another. There were several other things that I only remember faintly, such as an old ballroom full of skeletons and one of them was a person I needed to find (I don't quite remember the reason), which suddenly became a reality that said hey, no matter which skeleton it is, they're dead, it doesn't matter anyway now. And then there was a part where some monks and some priestly guy lead the way down a hill with a stone staircase to an underground chamber, and I thought they were the good guys until they were doing some kind of demon summoning or dark ritual. As soon as I realized things were getting dark and they weren't who I thought they were, bam, I ran my butt out of there and looking back, they tried to hunt me down, but I managed to outrun them.

I woke up this morning, unfazed about it, and began to think of ways to make what happened in the dream a neat horror story that might be intriguing and suspenseful given the right plot implementation, context, and mechanics (not to mention there was a lot of stuff that seemed out of sequential order). Halfway through the brainstorming process, I suddenly realized what I was doing and began to think "wow, talk about taking a bad thing and making it work for you!" Writing horror is usually out of my comfort zone, but hey, you don't learn anything new unless you try something different.