The implication is almost always "this is the best possible timeline, actually."
(CW: nerd shit under spoiler)
spoiler
Granted, because of the butterfly effect, pretty much everyone conceived after the time travel direction change would be different people because that's how sperm work, among an uncountable number of factors, so yeah it might suck for everyone you knew after that period to never have existed, but you could say the same about the people that now exist in the changed timeline and wouldn't want to un-exist now that they exist.
Yeah, I hate that bullshit of implying a moral high ground by not touching anything when it's like someone's existence at a point in time affects the world in the smallest of ways.
But somehow if you just keep you head down and stay anonymous, things will work out in the favor of the status quo.
I tend to absolutely hate time travel gimmicks in fiction because they almost always have some clownish "oopsie woopsie we fucked up the timeline, but if we act out whatever we just broke/killed/whatever it'll be like nothing changed at all, lol."
Sometimes it's like "be very careful... butterfly effect and all that wink wink nudge" which is not how the butterfly effect works you clowns. Just being there already changed everything ever afterward.
Then there's the ultimate asspull: "apparently what we did was what already happened all along."
Dumbledore is good and powerful, but couldn't be bothered to fight hitler. Good world building.
Preventing the holocaust would be worse than the holocaust, actually.
I love how these problems of worse timeliness only come up when the writer in question has to reflect on material conditions.
The implication is almost always "this is the best possible timeline, actually."
(CW: nerd shit under spoiler)
spoiler
Granted, because of the butterfly effect, pretty much everyone conceived after the time travel direction change would be different people because that's how sperm work, among an uncountable number of factors, so yeah it might suck for everyone you knew after that period to never have existed, but you could say the same about the people that now exist in the changed timeline and wouldn't want to un-exist now that they exist.
Yeah, I hate that bullshit of implying a moral high ground by not touching anything when it's like someone's existence at a point in time affects the world in the smallest of ways.
But somehow if you just keep you head down and stay anonymous, things will work out in the favor of the status quo.
I tend to absolutely hate time travel gimmicks in fiction because they almost always have some clownish "oopsie woopsie we fucked up the timeline, but if we act out whatever we just broke/killed/whatever it'll be like nothing changed at all, lol."
Sometimes it's like "be very careful... butterfly effect and all that wink wink nudge" which is not how the butterfly effect works you clowns. Just being there already changed everything ever afterward.
Then there's the ultimate asspull: "apparently what we did was what already happened all along."