Little Ash. Now that's a name I've not read in a long time. Or maybe time travel is real and I am back on some old forum...
With regard to prophecy I agree. You're on the money. It's the same problem. If the oracle were to give complete information (i.e., the full picture that Oedipus really wants, you know, before bangin' mom and killin' dad), then the prophecy would not be completed. The oracle, therefore, is always a cheat, giving our hero just enough information to screw them to the wall.
To the extent that a prophecy is unfalsifiable it cannot be complete (because if it were, it could be undone). To the extent that it's not complete, it's a cheat. And to the extent that the prophecy is falsifiable, on the other hand, is the same extent to which we're freed from the hands of fate. TLDR: Skip the Oracle and don't pay the ferryman.
It has been a couple of months.
I guess I need to go back to the first post to refresh my mind as to the main issue, because my brain mentally focused on how it causes there to be a lack of stakes. And yet, it seems like there's a number of time travel movies out there (a reasonable number) were presented in this thread that I would still have stakes. And if I were to go off of what I remember the original take-away was, the argument would be, the movie might appear to have stakes, but if you think about it, either the timeline could be changed and they could ultimately just keep using time travel to remove those stakes or the predestination (hey, that's a title that's been mentioned in this thread) of it all removes those stakes. (or maybe the bigger issue was just the logical inconsistencies of time travel - personally, I think the real issue was the last one of it being done in a lazy manner. Which, well, lazy story telling will manifest itself some overdone way or another).
And my inclination is to go, "and yet, a number of those movies still have stakes."
So, I guess it would make sense to start breaking some of them down. It's somewhat late here, so that's not happening right now, but shooting from the hip, a common device in the ones that work is, there is some type of restriction on the time travel tech. I think the best ones is, the tech isn't... foolproof. I'm thinking of 12 Monkeys being a good example there. And it's also unclear how long the people in the future would have opportunities to send people back. Combined with a lack of knowledge of what the original cause actually was.
The prophecy comparison came to mind because of the intermediary example of Arrival, which could be considered time travel, or more-though-not-completely accurately as prophecy. And relatedly, in Slaughterhouse V, Billy Pillgrimz becoming unstuck in time (but it's been a while, and that one is primarily more interesting when read as someone experiencing psychosis and PTSD). Which in terms, for the viewer, I'm not sure if getting a prophecy is anymore narrative deflating than starting with a teaser of the ending at the beginning of a story (which is also now being overdone). And yet, in those stories, there can still be stakes (though less so when it feels like it's being lazy). Admittedly those would be analogous to the incomplete prophecy for the viewer, and the lazy version is often a teaser for the plot to progress further later on in the movie. Though (also admittedly, it's been a few decades), I remember it working in Memento.