this is why time travel stories always make my head hurt...

[ratcreature]

I've been thinking about the ST:AOS timeline. Presumably it is like the TOS reality until the Kelvin is destroyed by Nero. But when I thought about that, how do the timetravel events work that have various future crews (from the regular timeline) interact with the past pre-split? Like how did the events of Star Trek: First Contact happen in the AOS reality? I mean, which version of the future characters have now ended up in the past? Or am I approaching this wrong? This makes my head hurt.

Comments

[liviapenn.livejournal.com]

I totally saw someone write up a meta about this but I can't remember who-- seperis, maybe? Anyway, yes-- and it's kind of a clever way to explain away any changes to the timeline that *can't* be explained by Nero's incursion. Like, why does Sarek have blue eyes and Amanda have brown eyes instead of the reverse? Clearly it's because Nero changed Kirk and Spock's destinies which means that now, when this new rebooted Kirk and Spock go *back* in time to the 1950s or whatever, they do things slightly differently and that causes changes to ripple *forward*. :D

[ratcreature]

I think I even read that meta... was that the one that also talked about Vulcan being different die to the earlier revelation of the Romulans?

But yeah, there is a sort of handwavy elegance to this explanation as long as you don't try to follow any causality too closely.