10965
« on: February 24, 2014, 03:17:06 AM »
[spoiler]A long post of mine on this just got obliterated. Short version: No, it was not sloppy writing. It's just that any story of any kind involving changing history is impossible to tell logically, because of the paradoxes. You see, not only should the 1969 Collins family not remember the hauntings that now have never happened.... but Barnabas and Julia should now have no awareness of them either. No one should remember things that never happened.
It was the hauntings which prompted Barnabas to use the I Ching. If no haunting was happening to prompt that, Barnabas never changed history, so presto, the hauntings are back on again. But if the hauntings are going on in 1968-9, Barnabas does go back to change things, so the hauntings now never happened again, so Barnabas never used the I Ching....
And so on and so on, back and forth, to infinity. Before you call remembering Q's hauntings sloppy, what un-sloppy way could there have been to write it? There's no logic whatsoever to having the present day family remember no hauntings, while Barnabas and Julia do. That's no less sloppy or irrational. The fact is, there's just no rational way to write it. For the sake of the story, someone has to remember the stuff that never happened, and you can never make that make any sense. [/spoiler]