User blog comment:DYBAD/Character Sheet/@comment-30411952-20180708183943/@comment-4867780-20180711021805

It's the same avatar logic applied to the temporal dimension, so it does fit quite nicely ^ ^

More or less the same situation as Doctor Manhattan, except Lawrence doesn't complain about being a "puppet who can see the strings" because he is not. He can make different decisions at any point in the past, and chooses not to because time-travel is a messy business that causes more problems than it solves.

If there is only one timeline, short-range time travel considerably cheapens the story you're living and your connection with others by nullifying any decision and consequence at will, while encouraging you to act in irresponsible if not downright evil ways - which is not only wrong but also cheapens yourself as well.

Long-range time travel on the other hand effectively rewrites their history which is not much different from reality warping, playing god with other people's world and retroactively wiping out anyone born in the meantime (butterfly effect), which is basically committing temporal genocide on a world-wide if not universal scale.

If there can be multiple timelines, then time travel simply "forks" the timeline and creates a new one, while the one you left goes on completely unchanged. So not only did you fail to fix anything, but you indirectly created an entire new universe of struggles and misery along the way - meaning everything bad that happens from there is clearly on your hands.

Quite the dirty business all-around, conveniently glossed over in most depictions. For all these reasons and more, and considering Lawrence already has the necessary means to fix most everything without messing around with timelines, he decided to ditch time travel and just live in the eternal present, savoring each moment as utterly unique and irreplaceable.