How Paper Girls Touches On Time Travel Tropes
Warning: This article contains spoilers for the first season of Paper Girls.
Based on the comic book of the same name by Brian K. Vaughan and Cliff Chiang, Amazon’s Paper Girls is one of the best new shows of the year. It’s a large-scale time-bending sci-fi adventure told through the lens of an intimate Stand by Me-style coming-of-age story. The titular time-traveling tweens are brought to life by the perfectly matched cast of Camryn Jones, Riley Lai Nelet, Sofia Rosinsky, and Fina Strazza. The series subverts the familiar tropes of time travel narratives in order to explore the dimensions of its characters and the heartwarming friendships they share.
In stories about time travel, the time travelers usually have to avoid encountering their older/younger selves to prevent any drastic alterations to the timeline. But in Paper Girls, that’s the central dramatic engine. The characters engage in deep conversations with their older selves. Erin has an existential crisis after finding out that she makes nothing of herself. Tiff is initially proud of herself for attending MIT, but is later disappointed to learn that she was kicked out of school (not to mention the bombshell that she was adopted). Both Erin and Tiff judge their older selves for the choices they’ve made and lecture them on how they should’ve done things differently, both missing the irony that they’re the ones who are destined to make all those mistakes.
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Mac learns from her brother – who’s a bully in the present but a caring husband and father with a medical degree in the future – that she’s only a couple of years away from dying of brain cancer. She seizes the opportunity to make a connection with the
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