Bearadactyl

Nah, that's kind of the opposite of what I was talking about. What you are talking about seems to be an ages old time paradox where you cannot travel back to fix something if that thing was the only reason you invented the ability to travel back. Because if it was fixed, you never would have traveled and fixed it... meaning you never would have invented time travel to go back and fix it, but then that means what was wrong does in fact come to occur- and thus you have either this paradox or this time loop where the person is stuck in the cycle of time they cannot break out of.

What I am talking about is future sight, which is seeing all the connections, all the outcomes from different actions. In this way the equation changes. You are trying to change the future with actions in the present, instead of changing the present by altering actions in the past. If you know all the possible actions and then deliberately choose one, you 'change' the future. Or rather determine that a specific one come to pass. In this, the change is proactive rather than reactive. You see the options and then choose. In the other, a specific bad event had to have happened as the impetus to even attempt to change time in the first place. This view of time facing it in the opposite direction is free of the paradox that haunts the past altering method.

The idea from the first scenario, where time itself is determined that what has already happened remain constant is a flaw idea itself, in my opinion. If you COULD go back in time and stop an event from happening, does it really mean that events will shape so that something else will have to happen to create the desire to time travel? That's like saying, I saved a kid from drowning, only to have him die in a car accident on the way home from the incident. Sure it changes things that the family's car is on the same road but at a different time after the incident is avoided, but that doesn't mean that he necessarily has to die. Events changed. It just so happens that both now and 12 hours later the road from the lake is still without traffic. Suddenly, it never happened and the tragedy is avoided. The need for time travel never occurs, but it had to have happened for this outcome to occur, right?  Dat paradox.

The easiest way to reconcile this is the idea of infinite universes (string theory) that says that BOTH things DID happen. Just in parallel timelines. That the time and place you traveled to is not really the same as the timeline you left before. Literally, a separate time.

Future sight is so much less complicated (and superior) and basically amounts to being omniscient. Where if you determine that something should or should not happen, you would know exactly how to get it done and it would be done.

And then there are those stories of people with perfect memories. That for them to perfectly recall a a full day, they would lose a day in its re-experience.

tl;dr- don't fuck with the past. that's a stupid idea that I don't think works as the self-fulfilling loop stories and thought experiments have portrayed.

And I generally hate time travel as a plot device because they almost always go to stupid places I don't agree with. Just look at the most recent season of the Flash.

@Maelstrom You obviously know quite a lot about the genre, much more than me, and have thought about this quite a bit. So I recommend you try to read the story, if you have the time, as I feel that you're missing some fundamental parts of time-travel concepts that are presented in the story, as they are quite unlike any other interpretation of time-travel I've seen, and are unlike your interpretation of the story in your comment. 

If you decide to read it, at the very least it's a good story.

Or don't, if you don't want to... My only point is that as long as time-travel follows internally consistent rules, and not used as a macguffin, it can be a great vehicle for telling stories.