"Stein's Gate" and Time Travel

I took a few days to watch the anime "Stein's Gate" because I had read that it was very good.  And it has time travel, which is always a plus.  So I jumped into it and said, "time to get lost in crazy paradoxes and weird temporal stuff that probably doesn't make sense."  During this time I was also playing Final Fantasy 13-2, which also deals with time travel.

Of course I have my own time travel theory, created after many years of piecing together different time travel theories from anime, video games, books and sci fi shows.   Surprisingly, both the anime and the game give a very good "approximation" of what time travel is supposed to be.  I enjoyed "Stein's Gate" both for the characters and the story--a clever connection between minor events, and cause and effect relationships.  It's pretty brilliant when you think about it as a whole, and overall emotional in the simple drama that it has.  

There are two things I like to remember when dealing with time travel.  First is the idea of parallel worlds/realities or what Stein's Gate calls, "World Lines."   Altering the existing time line by going into the past and changing something causes a shift to a different time line.  Also, time machines or time travelers usually have some kind of "temporal shielding" like Forge's bracelet in the Xmen cartoon, or temporal shields around the time ship in Star Trek Voyager, something that prevents that person or vessel from being affected instantaneously by any time alterations they do.   

Incorporating these two ideas when you make your own time travel theory makes it more reasonable, if still highly difficult to accomplish.