Destiny and Wrinkle in Time (Destiny)

by Ragashingo , Official DBO Cryptarch, Sunday, July 16, 2017, 16:05 (2774 days ago) @ Cody Miller

Wow. A trailer for A Wrinkle in Time came out today, and seeing that it was based on a book I looked it up. Looks like Destiny drew some inspiration…

-Themes of dark vs light
-A darkness the main characters have to fight
-Earth is a "shadowed" planet, in which the darkness surrounds it, but has not conquered it.
-There is a character (Mrs. Whatsit) which is hinted to be a star that sacrificed itself in fighting the darkness, but was not totally destroyed.

Sound familiar? Lots of parallels. Who has read the books? How similar is it?

Not similar at all.

Sure some of the words and phrases are familiar, but well, that happens a lot. You can hardly look in any direction without finding mention of light vs darkness in the plot summary of a popular work of fiction.

Destiny, if it has been about anything so far, has been about groups of sci-fi heroes and their struggles and successes and occasional failures to reclaim their world after their entire civilization was destroyed. In the background there is some sort of battle between light and darkness but we haven’t yet even really seen anything of the light’s point of view or its motivations.

A Wrinkle in Time is a story about a very smart but insecure teenage girl going on a fantastical fantasy adventure to rescue her father. Its themes revolve around it being ok to be different, goodness and love overcoming evil and conformity, and a little about not looking to others to solve all your problems and not being angry at them when they aren’t able to solve everything for you.

There are some names that are similar. When Rasputin talks about fighting IT (The Darkness) with all manner of sci-fi weapons, it really has nothing to do with A Wrinkle in Time’s IT which is a bodiless brain that telepathically controls the population of a planet to conform in perfect lockstep. One wishes for destruction, while the other whishes for the perfect peace that only comes when all chaos and individuality is driven away. If anything, A Wrinkle in Time’s antagonist is more similar to Halo’s Gravemind in wanting peace through oneness... but even that is a huge stretch to compare those two, they are just completely different things.

Similarly, Gene Roddenberry’s Andromeda had a galactic force of evil Darkness in the Abyss and had stars operating among regular people via avatars like Trance Gemini and had tesseracts used as major plot points, all of which are words and concepts used in A Wrinkle in Time, but those two don’t feel even slightly similar, either.

Honestly, just go read A Wrinkle in Time’s plot summary on Wikipedia and you’ll see that sharing a few superficial words does not make two works of fiction anything alike...