The unacknowledged Infinite Worlds timeskip

[SilvercatMoonpaw]

Originally Posted by Varyon

I've never really thought of it as a case of them treating other civilizations as "not ready." Rather, it's a combination of the fact that a) overt time travel is likely to screw up the timeline - not just "Oh, I interfered with the way things were meant to be" (which kinda comes back to those haughty aliens) but rather the fact that comparatively subtle manipulations can cause time quakes, quantum shifts, and all other assorted bits of badness, so who knows what would happen if you show up at Thermopylae with a squadron of attack helicopters. Oh, and b) they don't want any more competition (Centrum, Reich-5, and the others are already making a mess of things, from Homeline's perspective, they don't need even more groups screwing up the quanta).

As already alluded to in the thread, there's also the Doylist explanation - the whole point of the Infinite Worlds setting is having characters playing in different timelines, and the Secret keeps those timelines as they are expected to be, rather than how they would be with known time-travelers roaming about. There's also the fact that time travel stories almost always involve some element of needing to keep one's nature as a time traveler secret (to avoid disrupting the timeline, to avoid getting thrown into a mental institution or burned as a witch, etc), so IW includes a built-in explanation for why you've got to do that even when it's alternate timelines rather than your own.

That makes sense, and it also kind of maybe explains why it can feel "off" to me: not all of the logic quite feels like it lines up jumping from time-travel to timeline-travel.

An easy solution -- if I needed to keep the setting the same -- would probably be to have an incident where timeline meddling shifted something in a way that was so horrifying to Homeline that non-interference is really about them being scared witless. I think of it as the difference between Star Trek's "we're being benevolent" and Animorphs "we meddled once, and let planet-conquering brain-slugs loose".

Though I should really be the last person to whine over following a genre convention "because genre convention".

Originally Posted by Varyon

All that said, a setting where there are a massive number of time-traveling factions (possibly with varying degrees of maintaining some form of the Secret, akin to ST's Prime Directive) could certainly be interesting.

It certainly doesn't have to be official IW; I can easily make my own.