Time travel fiction brainfart.
It sure is weird that time travel fiction in a thing in the first place - the idea that you could travel to the past and change history. That a point in time can have a "before" and "after" a change.
Like, why should time travel specifically be able to do that? What would make travel through time alter history, that travel through space does not? It makes more sense as a result for history to be immutable - a time traveller always exists in that point in time.
I feel like I had some kinda point but now I'm just confusing myself. You could probably argue that it's the unnatural act of travelling through time that creates an alternate history, though one that technically always existed too.
Time travel fiction brainfart.
@Taylor It's not all that unnatural, even. Time travel scenarios sort of just fall out of special and general relativity, they're just very very hard to set up.
But really, at the heart of things, isn't it just an outgrowth of the very human desire to undo something bad that just happened? We can conceive of a world where the embarrassing thing we just said didn't happen, but why can't we go there? All the counterfactuals we can think of that can't be real worlds.