Tropes and Cliches

Time Travel: In General

I hate time travel. Well, actually the concept of it. There are so many rules and possibility of creating paradoxes is too much. 

So the main rules for time travel are as followed :

1) Don't do anything that could change what you know as the present

2) Don't use time travel to for gambling

3) Some things are set in stone, so changing them won't do much.

4) There are some paradoxes that are inevitable.

These are the basic rules, but there is so much more to it. Like the rule about not changing the past is in fact a thing. However there is this lovely thing called "temporal paradoxes" that comes into play. For example DC comics' Flashpoint Paradox gives us an example of how changing somethings can cause everything else to get fucked up in the process through this charming concept called "The Butterfly Effect" which boils down to event A affect/cause events B-Z. In Flashpoint, Barry Allen goes back to save his mom which causes an all out war between the Atlanteans and the Amazons, Bruce Wayne dies in the alley which causes his parents to become the Joker and Batman, and a bunch of other events.
Now before you say that only applies to traveling to the past and not the future, it does. Now if you go into the future and see something and doing everything in your power to make it so or avoid, then you might cause some problems. Plus the amount of time that passes may differ. Like you could be in the future or past for years, but be gone for less than an hour in the present.

SPOILERS FOR ENDGAME

Now Marvel Studios made a few hint to time travel, but in the way you'd expect. How Loki escaped was due to Tony and not some random guard/ agent , and who Captain America thought was Loki was actually himself. And it was hinted that Nebula was a traitor before she was even one. And we find out that Peggy Carter's unnamed husband was possibly Steve Rogers..who was trapped in ice...boom Paradoxes galore. Hell, Rhodey suggested offing Thanos as a baby. Points for efficiency, but the idea was shot down.  
Now writing time travel is trickier than one might expect. How? Well, it depends in who's writing it because the rules I established at the beginning could be thrown out the window. Because not all the rules can easily be kept. The biggest example is the Grandfather Paradox, which is basically explained as you going back in time to kill your grandfather, which would cause one of your parents not to have been born, which would in turn cause you not to have been born, which means you couldn't have gone back to kill your grandfather.
And then we dive into the Alternate History trope( more on that later) where you explore what if scenarios, something Marvel actually did, but the main one would always be Nazis winning WWII. Not that's bad, it's just that it's always the same and no one wanted to explore or explain in detail what would actually happen until Wolfenstein came out( to my knowledge).

Time Travel is something I am neither a fan of nor do I hate it. It is something that you'd have to make the most amazing thing in order for me to actually like it. Loki( the miniseries) is one that I like due to the fact that they actually explain as to why time traveling is a big no-no. You're going to fuck up the sacred timeline( the Ancient One actually mentioned this in Endgame, I think). There's a whole agency that was created to stop you from going back in time with Wakanda's technology to stop the slave trade will end with you getting pruned. Or you going back in time to actually routing Columbus to India would have stopped a lot of fucked up shit from happening. 

Mortal Kombat had dipped into time travel, but they managed to fuck shit up more. Like Raiden sent a message to his past self that was so vague that he started to fuck shit up trying not cause Armageddon that caused the death of many people that later come back as zombies and later get involved in another level of time travel fuckery. And this is stuff that involves the past. 

There's actually a movie and if you know the name if it please comment it. The basic jist of the movie is that there's a group from the future that came to the past to fight a war in the future with creatures they don't anything about. They come to the past and recruit first armies and then civilians that had to serve like a month and come home traumatized and they find how to defeat the creatures in the futures but then they realized they would have to deal with it all over again. It's a mess. 

Time loops, accidentally being the cause of the UK not existing going back and being the cause of your own problems, time dilation where you're gone for like a week only to find out it was actually 20 years,  time travel is one of those things where how you use time travel and it's established rules can make or break a story. Like I like the idea of time travel but at the same time it can feel like the same story is being told many times over.  

Now this is just an In General chapter, so the many time travel tropes have yet to be talked about. Like the time thing where it's five minutes for us,  2 days for them  is a thing that I want to explore a bit more. There's a lot shenanigans when it comes to time travel.