Warped Reality

OK. Walked to Morecambe, ate a veg breaker with fried egg and hash browns (see The Food Thread) and visited Andrea (scroll down) above his brother's second-hand bookshop.

Andrea informed me that, in the current Marvel superheroes film, reality is somehow warped so that future films in this series will refer back to an altered history. Such reality alteration has become a standard superheroes gambit.

Something like this could have happened in Poul Anderson's Time Patrol series. Imagine:

a novel set in future centuries;

villains who change the course of history so that it no longer leads to the Danellians;

Time Patrol agents who restore a course of events that leads to the Danellians but that also has major differences from what they remember, e.g., one of the agents is now in a timeline where some historical events are different and where his own birth and previous life did not happen.

Maybe only he remembers or maybe others realize that there are some differences but also judge that they do not matter. Careful writing would be necessary to keep the plot consistent within the level of discontinuity that is allowed by the variable reality concept. But we get the impression that the history protected by the Patrol is already patched together at various crucial points in any case. Was there an "original" timeline in which Veleda was raped and killed and never became an avenging prophetess capable of disrupting the timeline further? And what was the original history of Cyrus the Great? Etc.