Your characters: the Groundhog Day AU

[Dragonfree]

(Inspired by Chibi Pika in the Discord.)

Groundhog Day is a 1993 romantic comedy starring Bill Murray (and a 2016 musical adaptation starring Andy Karl that's better than the movie, spicy take don't @ me). In it, disgruntled asshole weatherman Phil Connors is sent to Punxsutawney to cover the groundhog day celebrations, but becomes trapped in a time loop where he relives this one day over and over again until he's learned to be a better, more compassionate human being.

So: if one of your characters got trapped in a Groundhog Day-style time loop, what day would they be reliving? How would they deal? When would they break the spell and get to continue to live a normal life? How likely are you to actually write this very necessary Groundhog Day AU now that you've conceived of it? Tell us!

 

[Negrek]

Missed this earlier, but what a fun topic!

To me it seems like there are two basic ways to take the Groundhog-day AU: either the time loop happens on some totally mundane, unexceptional day for no apparent reason, or it happens on the day of some dramatic (usually dramatically bad) where the character(s) is typically trying to prevent the badness from happening. The second is great and can lead to some serious emotional moments, but I kind of like the open-endedness of the first possibility. When there's some clear disaster that the character(s) needs to stop it the story kind of lends itself better to a thriller kind of format, where the characters are essentially puzzle-solving and there's a lot of tension in "will they be able to pull it off this time?" On the other hand, if there's no clear problem to solve, then there's probably going to be a lot more of a focus on the character's internal state; if there's no glaring issue out in the world for them to deal with, then presumably the issue is within, yeah?

On the other hand, having the loop happen on an unexceptional day makes it kind of difficult to decide what day a character would be reliving, because by definition it should be an unremarkable one. It's also tough because I don't really know what I would necessarily want any of them to do to break the loop. It seems like you'd kind of want one specific revelation for them to have in order to get out of things, like "other people are worth appreciating, too" or "you need to have confidence" or something, and I can't think of any one thing that would work well for the characters in my current fic. Like, "don't be a dick" would be an improvement, but it wouldn't actually solve the underlying problems.

It might be kind of fun that, if you put either Mewtwo or my protagonist in any kind of time loop, they would immediately decide that someone/thing was doing this to them and they need to find that person and eliminate them[/i], which is not how most loops tend to go, I think. Things would get pretty harrowing for any other people unfortunate to appear in Mewtwo's time loop.

At the moment I'm not feeling compelled to write anything Groundhog-day for my story; there are other AUs that are calling to me more, and as expressed above I don't think I have a real good, concrete idea to work with in that vein. I do enjoy the genre, though, and it might be fun to do a story with a Groundhog-day loop but with a more appropriate cast/scenario. Or, might be fun to work with characters who are more interested in testing the limits of the loop or generally trying to exploit it... could you have someone who develops into a villain as a result of their Groundhog Day experience?

 

[Namohysip]

"Groundhog-day loop" is one of the earliest reader theories to crop up in my main work, at least for the early chapters before it's either confirmed or denied with solid evidence.

That being said, if I were to have my characters in a groundhog day loop, I'd definitely prefer it to be for some sort of pivotal moment. If it's just something on repeat, that isn't going to mean a whole lot for a number of my characters who, prior to the beginning of the story, lived very static lives. Still, I can think of a number of spots where a key event happens that perhaps they'd live in a loop to try to solve, or perhaps just give up and let the loop eventually conclude, or... do something to make the loop end. I guess it's a little ambiguous what force would cause it to happen, let alone what the "solution" would be.

Most of the moments are shrouded in a thick layer of spoilers, but if I had to pick one that was less on the spoiler side, I wonder what would happen if Owen kept getting a loop on the day of his tryouts to joining the Thousand Hearts. That chapter's coming up soon here, and I wonder if he'd keep trying to optimize himself until he got the top score out of sheer save scumming~

 

[DeliriousAbsol]

Hmm this is a tough one, as a lot of my main characters are kind of stuck in the past, which is what drives them in their areas of 'badness'. Macro, Enigma, Harlequin, Harbinger...

So I guess I need to pick someone who's not already stuck in a memory XD Lemme have a little think...

(A good think later)

It would probably be my mawile character, Faith, from The End. She'd likely be trapped in the moments where she rescues Enigma (a banette assassin) only for him to kill the heretic meowstic scientist who trapped him in the first place. So she'd be trying to free Enigma while also avoiding Rio dying at his claws, which would give Rio the opportunity to abandon his crazy project and be given a chance at redemption.
EDIT - Faith would be a good character to choose for this to play out, as she sees the good in everyone and would want to see both Enigma and Rio turn away from their evil paths.

I don't think I'll write this AU, but it would be fun to speculate how Rio's redemption arc would play out. He was a huge threat, yet a minor character in comparison to the other 'big bads' in The End.