The World God Only Knows – Time and Relative Dimensions in Space
Out of the 4000 versions of time travel Keima has seen, this is his 244th least favourite.
Most people are familiar with so many different styles of time travel that the use of the term itself can inspire groans. With all the questions that need to be answered before you send your characters through time, you can easily come up with a well developed system just by answering the most basic of them. Just in the last two chapters of The World God Only Knows, we’ve gotten enough information so that we can figure out how things are supposed to work, and we can also get a good idea of what the series will need to establish in the chapters to come.
How do you accomplish time travel? From what we saw a few chapters ago, the Goddesses are capable of time-altering magic, though the fact that at least five of them were needed shows how difficult it is. The exact specifics of the spell are vague enough that it will probably be used for at least one plot twist later on.
How does your present self interact with your past self? I like how we aren’t getting the traditional version of time travel where a person exists in two places at once. It appears as though for the duration of the spell, Keima will be occupying his seven year old body. It hasn’t been brought up yet, but I assume that Elsie appears unchanged because she is hundreds of years old and hasn’t aged much in ten years.
Can the future be changed, or is it predestined? The overall purpose of going back in time is to find and rescue this mysterious girl who has appeared to Keima several times now. Exactly what this entails will rely heavily on how possible it is to change the future. I can already imagine at least two possibilities right now: Chrono Trigger time travel, where the easiest way to alter the past is to make it look like your reason for going back to the past still happened, and Futurama time travel, where causality is dragged out to the curb for a beating.
How likely are Grandfather Paradoxes? This is what I’ll be looking forward to seeing. Very few time travel stories can resist making characters the cause for something significant in the present. Maybe we’ll find out he inspired Kanon to start singing, or turned Lune into the vicious psychopath we know today. It isn’t the most original idea in the world, but after reading nearly 200 chapters of this series, I know that it can make the mundane fantastic again, so if we ever start to see other returning characters (and I’m sure we will), I’ll be all the more excited to find out where things will go.
Posted on July 31, 2012, in Series, Shonen Comedy, The World God Only Knows and tagged Elsie, Kami Nomi zo Shiru Sekai, Keima, manga, The World God Only Knows, time travel. Bookmark the permalink. 4 Comments.
Shades of Grey 
Hmm, that’s an interesting point in regards to the upcoming chapters of TWGOK. I have seen series that use that trope where the main character happened to do something towards the main harem characters when they were children that inspired them. One of the series happens to be Kanon 2006. Of course, the major difference is time travel is being used, and Keima has to figure out why he has to go back into the past and find this mysterious girl. I’m still not entirely sure how to feel about the current arc, but you raised some points that I’ll attempt to keep in mind each week.
Never thought about Kanon, but it wouldn’t surprise me if Keima had that kind of effect on somebody. Maybe everybody.
Most of the time, time travel is left unexplained as a plot device rather than a plot element… I’ll be looking foward to how TWGOK tackles this.
Somehow I doubt someone as rule-obsessed as Keima would let the explanation for time travel go unexplained.