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Time Travel (trope)

"Time travel is theoretically impossible, but I wouldn't want to give it up as a plot gimmick."

For related tropes, see Time Travel Tropes.

Time travel is a very versatile plot device. It can range from simply a device for moving The Hero from one Adventure Town to another, to a driver of the plot in itself as the characters try to understand the Nonsensoleum behind it. But broadly speaking, time travel stories can fall into the following categories:

  1. You Can't Fight Fate: The heroes go to the future, only to find a Bad Future where bad things will happen if things keep going the way they are in the present. So they return to their own time and resolve to prevent the Bad Future from happening. They may or may not be successful, and if they aren't, it's because, well... You Can't Fight Fate.
  2. Stable Time Loop: The heroes go to the past, only to realise that they can't actually change anything. Even if they interact with the past, the timeline has already accounted for it because You Already Changed the Past. Sometimes it's because You Can't Fight Fate, but in the past instead of the future. Other times, it's a Wayback Trip: the heroes go to the past, realise that history is different from what they thought it was, and then change it so that it conforms to what they "know" as history — they think they "changed the past", but history already accounted for their actions.
  3. Set Right What Once Went Wrong: The heroes go to the past, this time because things went wrong in the past and they want to change it to make a better "present". But there are a few variants of it:
    • Make Wrong What Once Went Right: The villains go to the past to change it so that the present is better for them. Better for the villains, obviously, is bad for the heroes. It can result in a Terminator Twosome, where the heroes follow the villains back to the past to try and stop them from changing it.
    • Set Wrong What Was Once Made Right: Sometimes, if you go back to the past to try and make it "better", you end up making it worse, either by accidentally making a Bad Future, invoking a Temporal Paradox or Time Crash, or drawing the ire of the Clock Roaches. If this happens, the heroes have to go back to the past and undo their own changes, which returns everything to how it was.
    • Hitler's Time Travel Exemption Act: Sometimes, the story makes it impossible to go back in time and stop a Real Life bad thing from happening. Either it makes things worse (e.g. the past villain is replaced with an even nastier entity, the present loses technological and social advancements spurred by the past conflict), or time itself will prevent you from doing it. In any event, you can't go back in time, kill Hitler, and prevent World War II from happening.
  4. Reset Button: Something happens that changes the present, and the heroes go back to the past to prevent that thing from happening. If they succeed, everything snaps back to normal without any further intervention. Nobody will even remember that anything was ever different — not even the time travellers themselves, unless they have Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory.
  5. Trapped in the Past: The heroes go back to the past and get stuck there. They now have to figure out a way to get back to the future. If they can't, they have to choose between living a quiet life and trying not to interfere with the past, or using their future knowledge to make the past better. Or they might discover that they're in a Stable Time Loop and can't change anything even if they wanted to. Either way, they might make it back to the present if they take The Slow Path.
  6. Alternate Timeline: The heroes go back to the past and change it such that the universe splits in twain. It's a distinct separation from a Stable Time Loop in that the future will always be different because of the intervention of time travellers. Whether those time travellers can return to their "original" timeline or are stuck in the alternate one depends on the work.
  7. "Groundhog Day" Loop: The heroes relive the same bits of the past, over and over and over again. They have to find a way to break out of the loop and start moving forward in time again, often while using what they learned from experiencing that bit of the past so many times.
  8. San Dimas Time: The heroes go back to the past and have a time limit before something bad happens in the future. Normally this doesn't make any sense — presumably, you have until the future to prevent something bad from happening in the future. But in this kind of story, there's some mechanism or other that will prevent the heroes from fixing the future after a certain amount of time in the past. Sometimes this is because of a Delayed Ripple Effect — the timeline has already been changed, but the change hasn't "caught up" with the heroes yet and they can still work to fix everything before the change catches up with them and prevents them from acting further. Either way, it allows a time travel story to have a Race Against the Clock.
  9. Temporal Paradox: If you thought all that was complicated, you ain't seen nothin' yet:
  10. Timey-Wimey Ball: Any of the above may be in force at any given time.

As you can see, these stories depend in part on the many variants of Temporal Mutability. The characters might expect a certain change to be possible when it really isn't, and vice versa — in so doing, they may be Wrong Genre Savvy and think they're in one type of story when they're really in another.

Whichever time travel plot you're working with, there are a few near-universal elements that you find across time travel stories:

  • A mechanism by which to travel through time, usually a Time Machine. Since time travel is as speculative as Speculative Fiction can get, it usually runs on Applied Phlebotinum. There are many different ways to travel through time — some instantaneous, others not, and still others not dealing with your physical form at all. Whichever form is in use, the heroes will not really understand how it works and may struggle to get it to do what they want or to find Phlebotinum to power it. On the other hand, a Time Master will generally know what they're doing.
  • A scientist or scholar who knows more about time travel than the other characters. They consider time travel an untested phenomenon and constantly spout warnings about avoiding a Temporal Paradox. They'll be particularly wary of a Butterfly of Doom or a Timeline-Altering MacGuffin, whether or not they're actually possible in that particular time travel story. They come across as Reluctant Mad Scientists a lot of the time, curious enough to want to explore a groundbreaking scientific endeavour but well aware of everything that could go wrong.
  • A Mind Screw. The human mind is used to time going in a single direction at a single speed. Anything outside of that destroys the entire human conception of logic. Things happen one after another — until they don't. Any time travel story is going to deal with characters being unable to comprehend the causality they've set up. They may even encounter Time-Travel Tense Trouble. This can be mitigated somewhat with a Stable Time Loop or an inability to return from an Alternate Universe, which are the only resolutions to the story that are remotely logically consistent with the typical ideas of causality; stories wishing to be more "realistic" tend to favour these.

"Realistic" is a very weird thing to shoot for in your average time travel story. There's no reason to think that time travel is even possible in real life. Rather than realism, the aim is more for consistency; it's important that the rules of time travel make sense. But this makes time travel stories tricky to write. Too far in the direction of consistency, and you risk hopelessly confusing the audience as they try to wrap their heads around the mess of causality you've made (e.g., unintentional plot holes will become more obvious to the viewer). Too far in the opposite direction, with no consequences for casual time travel, and you risk No Permanence, No Stakes—the audience won't even care about anything that happens in your plot if they suspect that a time-traveler can just change it freely in the future. (Or in the past.)

See also Meanwhile, in the Future… (for how you can run a narrative in two time periods at once) and What Year Is This? (for how your characters can deduce that they've travelled through time).

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Examples with their own subpages:

Other examples:

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    Comic Strips 
  • Robotman and Monty: Doc is a time traveler.
  • In Safe Havens, Maria is a time traveler that pops in and out of the main casts' lives until the Mars mission starts taking shape, in which case she joins the main cast. It's something she also passed on to her son, Leonardo da Vinci. She reveals how it's possible when she reveals she's Samantha's Kid from the Future: the radiation on their Mars shuttle wasn't completely effective, giving her a mutation while gestating in Samantha's womb that gave her time jumping abilities. Thankfully for the still-infant Maria already born in this timeline, she doesn't actually get those abilities till she hits puberty.

    Fan Fiction 
  • Calvin & Hobbes: The Series uses the time machine from its inspiration several times, including a whole arc about getting back to the future aptly named "Time Terror".
  • A Crown of Stars: In the first chapters Shinji and Asuka skipped back and forth along the timeline, led by Daniel and his family who use it… a lot. There are limits to it in this story, though. You can collapse the whole reality fabric if you are not careful.
  • In Darth Cain, the Reluctant Sith Lord, Darth Cain's ship, the Invincible, suffers a hyperdrive malfunction that takes him, the ship's crew, and his subordinates on board 3,500 years into the future, from the time of the Old Republic to the modern Galactic Republic.
  • Difficult to Endure, Sweet to Remember: Asuka travels from the Third Impact to the very beginning of the Angel War, over half year ealier.
  • Earth-27: Averted. Word of God states that time travel will not be a part of this world. This has resulted in various changes to character origins, such as Bart Allen being Barry Allen's son instead of his grandson, Booster Gold being a present day set character and the Legion of Superheroes from 30th century are present day set characters renamed as The Advena Legion.
  • Elemental Chess Trilogy: The final volume, Chronology, deals with Edward Elric's son trying to perfect time travel through the use of alchemy in order to accomplish type 2.
  • A key piece of the plot of Flashpoint 2: Advent Solaris, considering that the entire plot is happening because of the ending to Justice League Dark: Apokolips War and the storyline is an adaptation of Sonic the Hedgehog (2006) which itself has time travel as an integral part of the plot what with the main villain having it as a core ability and there being multiple instances of characters traveling or being sent across past, present and future.
  • The Forever Captain series follows Steve Rogers as he returns the Infinity Stones to their places in the timeline at the end of Avengers: Endgame, and then time travels back to the midcentury to retire and built a new life with Peggy Carter.
  • All over the place in the Hellsister Trilogy, with Supergirl and the Legion of Super-Heroes travelling to the future, to the past and to the even more distant future.
  • Higher Learning (Strike-Fiss): At the end, Kaoru reveals he is Shinji and Asuka's grandson from the future, who was sent back in time to prevent Third Impact.
  • In New Beginnings (Smallville), Clark Kent's Legion Ring sends him and Lois Lane back seven years in the past, concretely the night when Clark learned about his origins.
  • In Once More With Feeling (Crazy-88), Lilith sends Shinji back in time to the beginning of the War to change the past.
  • The Second Try: It is not revealed the method that Kaworu or whoever did it used, but in chapter 10 Shinji and Asuka found stuck in their teen selves and back six years in the past.
  • Thousand Shinji: In order to save the galaxy from the Necrons, the Warhammer 40,000 gods send a Chaos Space Marine back in time to meet and train Shinji.
  • Transformers Prime: Time War has Megatron use a machine created by Shockwave to go back into the past. Whereupon a small band of Autobots, led by Smokescreen are inadvertently dragged along with him.
  • In The Warrior's Daughter, Bulla travels to the past several times before going back to her own time.
  • You Are (Not) At Fault: Discussed. When asked if time-travel is possible, Lilith argues that using time-manipulation to prevent the end of the world is a bad idea due to its unpredictable nature.

    Music 

Examples by creator:

  • GFRIEND's Fictional Universe is a story about a group of girls seeing their friendship crumbling until one of them tries to Set Right What Once Went Wrong going back in time and experiencing a "Groundhog Day" Loop.
  • Tracy Lawrence used a time-travel plot to link several of his music videos together over the years. In each video, he would be transported to a different time period at the beginning of the song, with the plot line carrying over to each subsequent video in the series.

Examples by work title:

  • In the video for KT Tunstall's "Hold On", Tunstall plugs her guitar into a weird machine with a synthesiser keyboard and a row of filament light bulbs on the top, and when she starts playing she's catapulted through time, first finding herself at a swing club, then jumping through various other time periods and musical fashions.
  • Time is about a person who winds up being transported from the Present Day of 1981 to 2095, completely upheaving his life in the process. He suffers from Fish out of Temporal Water as the technology in the far future confounds him, and Nostalgia Filter as his entire neighborhood has become unrecognizable; he particularly misses his girlfriend, whom he left behind in the '80s, and laments that a robot girlfriend just isn't the same. The future itself isn't very bright, with inclement weather, crime, and union disputes being commonplace. The Ambiguous Ending makes it unclear if the protagonist is able to return to his own time or not.
  • Unknown Pleasures: "Wilderness" features Ian Curtis singing as if he's an ancient traveler who saw nothing but mankind's misery and despair around him.

    Pinball 

    Podcasts 
  • ars PARADOXICA is built around this, with the protagonist (Dr. Sally Grissom) being accidentally flung into the 1940s with a Higgs Field Inhibitor. The rest of the podcast centers around her trying to fix the machine, dubbed the Timepiece, and the American government's interest in what she brings from the future...
  • Man Buy Cow:
    • The Man Buy Cow Podcast features time travel as well as technology allowing people to call people in the past and future and to access memories in the present like they're videos and enabling them to be shows to people other than the person whose memory it is.
    • The spin-off The Adventures of Grett Binchleaf has even more time travel in it. It went to the extent that after their two first series it was agreed upon by the two hosts that time travel wouldn't be allowed in their third series, with an unspecified punishment each time the rule were to be broken. Trying to get away with still putting time travel then turned into a running gag, resulting in even more of the story being about time travel than before. Cue book 4, and the titular hero escapes his murder by using his magical watch to go an hour back in time multiple times in a row shortly before breaking it upon being killed by a crocodile and being hurtled a thousand years into the past and meeting his nemesis from two different points in time.
  • Red Panda Adventures:
    • In "The World Next Door", a time traveler named Baboon McSmoothie comes from the early forties to the thirties to steal a prototype invention created by Nazi scientist Friedrich von Schlitz. He explains he also came from an alternate timeline precisely to avoid paradox issues in his own. Otherwise stealing the prototype would slow, if not stop, the future work of von Schlitz, give the Allies an advantage, and remove his reason for time traveling in the first place. He enlists the Red Panda's aid with future knowledge that might potentially save the Flying Squirrel's life one day.
    • The Red Squirrel is the Terrific Twosome's descendant from the future who was inspired to take up superheroics by stories of her ancestors. She goes to the past when one of her Rogues Gallery starts launching attacks on the past in order to protect the Red Panda and Flying Squirrel. She reappears once more to pose as the Flying Squirrel so Kit can properly prepare for her wedding day, since the Red Squirrel has a vested interest in making sure they get hitched without a hitch.
    • "The Honoured Dead" has the Red Panda and Flying Squirrel traveling back in time to retrieve a lost artifact. They utilize time travel because the Red Panda concludes You Already Changed the Past is in effect and the reason the artifact was lost to begin with was because they went back in time to take it.
    • "The Chimes at Midnight" feature a pair of time travelers on a mission to eliminate the Black Eagle before he can become a superhero. Their information gives them the exact time and place in which he becomes a hero, but the plan ultimately fails because, while their historical records accurately describe the moment the Black Eagle became a hero, they fail to mention that was not the moment he got his powers, which he'd had for a while already.
  • Despite Twilight Histories primarily being an Alternate History podcast, a few episodes are straight-up time travel. "Mask of the Plague Doctor" takes place in Medieval Florence during the Black Death. "Ice Age Misery", funnily enough, takes place during the ice age.

    Roleplays 
  • We Are Our Avatars. Near the end of the Skyrim arc, a few members of the group went back in time to learn Alduin's weakness. However, they bungled up Alduin's previous defeat at the hands of a group of heroes and turned Skyrim's present into a world ruled by Alduin. However, they got the weakness from a tablet left behind and used it to fix the error they made.

    Tabletop Games 
  • In Chrononauts, the players are time travelers from various alternate futures, and are trying to change the timeline to match their own timeline's version of the "past" so that they can finally go home. Since all the alternate futures have conflicting versions of "history," and many of those conflicting versions require a specific outcome to World War II (Hitler was assassinated early and WW2 was Japan vs. America, Hitler lived and D-Day failed so that Germany won WW2, and a couple other variants), Hitler's Time Travel Exemption Act gets a real workout. There's an alternate victory condition in which players have to collect certain combinations of MacGuffins of questionable historical importance, but that's for material gain, not timeline shenanigans. A third victory condition is to get hired by the local Time Police after fixing enough of other people's paradoxes.
  • C°ntinuum: roleplaying in The Yet is a Tabletop RPG entirely about time travel. Read its page for the details; further information is not available here.
  • In the Dungeons & Dragons compatible supplement The Tome of Mighty Magic by North Pole Productions, the spell Between sends the recipient to any place and time that can be visualized — in other words, it's a time travel/teleport spell.
  • In Feng Shui, a region of cross-time 'space' called the Netherworld allows characters to move between four different points in history (69 AD, 1850 AD, 1996 AD and 2056 AD). These junctures are fixed with relation to each other, treating the start of the campaign as zero-hour for all of them. So, if you enter the Netherworld in 1996, travel back to 69 AD, stay for six months and then return to '96, it will be six months later there, as well. A second use of phlebotinum states that only people who control powerful feng shui sites can actually change the future by changing the past; everyone else just sees history work itself around the change.
  • Time and Temp is another Tabletop RPG entirely about time travel, using office temps (temps, get it?) as field agents because (as unimportant shlubs) their lives are least likely to suffer a reality-ending paradox due to their own past actions. What Could Possibly Go Wrong??
  • Warhammer 40,000: Warp travel involves going through another dimension where FTL is possible, but it's extremely erratic and random. One ship ended up setting out to respond to its own distress signal sent just before it exploded, while an ork Waaaaagh! ended up popping out of the Warp just in front of its younger self. The warboss immediately attacked and killed his past self so he could have two sets of his favorite gun. In the ensuing confusion, the Waaagh! disbanded.

    Visual Novels 
  • The Turnabout Time Traveler case in Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – Spirit of Justice discusses if time travel is actually possible. The defendant claims she traveled back in time to avoid being killed by her assailant. She uses the wedding reception as proof because she went through one already and was going through it again while everyone acted like things were going on as normal. She didn't time travel. She simply passed out after her attacker was killed by a third person. All of her in-laws covered up the murder and held a second identical reception to make it look like she went back in time once she woke up in order to prevent the murder from becoming public.
  • Radical Dreamers: Following the Ocean Palace incident, Schala was unaged into a baby by the Frozen Flame and sent to the present, where Lucca found and raised her, in a form of Reincarnation.
  • A major theme and the focal point of Steins;Gate. There are multiple types of time machines and they all depend on the use of black holes. However, prototypes could only send back emails or some sort of electrical pulse because sending matter back in time causes it to turn into some jelly-like substance. Steins;Gate uses the John Titor hoax from real life as if it were real, to create a plotline based on world lines and stable time loops.
  • Thousand Dollar Soul has earpieces that allow time travel, which is considered a separate reality so the time traveler doesn't have to worry about messing up the future. Except not really. It just creates a realistic simulation of the past inhabited by AI copies of people.
  • The main character in Time Hollow does quite a bit of time-traveling (via a pen that "draws" windows in the time stream) in order to fix the effects of temporal meddling and get his parents and old life back.

    Web Animation 
  • Cross Between Time is about a man from Victorian England who builds a Time Machine to go back in time and save his mom. Instead he finds himself in the year 2218 and separated from his Time Machine. He must work together with the Unit F8 to retrieve his Time Machine from a government facility on Mars.
  • In The Debbie and Carrie Show, there are many examples of time travel being used for various purposes.
    • 1. In the original timeline, Sandy Smith came down with multiple sclerosis and died by suicide because she thought she was a burden to her daughter Debbie. But Debbie was so traumatized by this that when time travel was invented in the 2050s, she used this to change her own history by giving her mother a vaccine in the year 2021 so she would remain able-bodied and thus live much longer.
    • 2. Sandy Smith not only lived to a ripe old age, she became mayor of her Town and lives there became so much better through her ethical leadership.
    • 3. Ted Wilson originally lived to the year 2060 and then as a old man attempted to use a time machine to murder Carrie Sims in the year 2020, but this was stopped by both his own grandson Tony Wilson and Debbie and Carrie's son Richard Sims. Richard instead was killed in the past, spawning a new timeline in which Debbie and Carrie became superheros by the year 2030 and sought to avenge Richard's death. They were assisted by the 2060 version of Debbie.
    • 4. Superhero Carrie tracked down Ted Wilson in the year 2005 and killed him, but not before he murdered Lucy Sims, one of Carrie's mothers (this was an accident, Ted was trying to kill Jessica, Carrie's other mother).
    • 5. Superheros Debbie and Carrie, guided by the 2060 version of Debbie, finally sabotaged Ted Wilson's time machine and it killed him in an explosion before he could make any time trips, undoing the events of timelines 3 and 4.
    • 6. Debbie of the year 2061 then traveled back in time again to warn her mother of Ted Wilson having murdered his wife Rebekah, the mother of their daughter Janet and then blinding Janet. However, Debbie told Sandy about these events AFTER they had happened; she wanted Ted to be sent to prison for those crimes before he could force Janet to bear his grandson Tony and thus she erased Tony from the timeline completely. Ted Wilson then died in the year 2036 at the Battle of Austin.
    • 7. Richard Sims and his wife Diana Hudson sought to undo a timeline in which Suzanne, Diana's aunt, had died of a variant of Covid-19. They were successful in giving Suzanne a vaccine for the virus when she was a teen.
    • 8. Debbie and Carrie traveled back from the year 2061 to the year 2029 to stop a homophobic terrorist from murdering a gay couple, Michael Jefferson and Charles Mc Kinsey, who were Richard Sims' fathers. This was successful, but also changed events affecting not only Debbie and Carrie themselves, but others like the Belmont triplets, who were never adopted by Debbie and Carrie.
    • 9. Debbie, Carrie, and James, Debbie's brother, went back to the 19th Century to visit the time when the Town was first founded. When they returned to the year 2063, they found that Ted Wilson was not only still alive, but was mayor of their Town and living in James' mansion! To undo this, they went to the year 2020 to entice Carrie and her mothers, Jessica and Lucy, to move to Texas to start the chain reaction of events that would bring down Ted Wilson to begin with.
    • 10. The crew of a spaceship capable of time travel, the U. S. S. Sandy, went to northern Italy 100,000 years ago and visited a family of cave dwellers and even took two young members of that family back with them to the 21st Century.
  • Laghari Portals: After ZeWei and Fāng get caught up in some portal interference, they get caught in the present and the future simultaneously, involuntarily flipping between 2106 and 2399. ZeWei gradually gains the ability to control it.
    • The Bàbá̬yǟ̬ have invented their own method for time travelling, and have used it often enough for their language to account for Time-Travel Tense Trouble. It only allows them to go into the past, a couple of years at most, and it can't be used too often on a single person as it's not good for the brain. They're not sure how ZeWei's situation would effect it, since time travelling causes a split in the timeline. ZeWei only uses it as a last resort, to undo their and Fang's accidental poisoning.
  • Paranormal High School: The general plot of the 3rd Anniversary arc involves this, with Hikaru and Masa being sent to the future and the past respectively to protect someone important in each time period. This is quickly revealed to be the other person's counterpart during that time period.
  • Red vs. Blue: This is a primary plot-point in Season 3, during which Church is apparently blown into the past from the bomb that was placed in his gut, while the rest of the members of Red and Blue teams were blown into the future. Church escapes the past by having the computer Gary use his power to create a time machine so that he can go forward in time and stop any of this from ever happening. It turns out that time travel never actually played a role in this, and that all of Church's experiences in the past were actually him being tortured by Gary (who is really Wyoming's AI Gamma) and the others just being blown away by the blast. However, all of this wasn't put in place until it was retconned by Burnie Burns so that it fit with the later story lines of The Recollection and The Project Freelancer Saga.
  • The sixth season of Sonic for Hire involves this. Sonic tries to go back to time with the Epoch to make sure he doesn't squander his life away. However, characters have been stealing his time machine and now many plot holes have occurred.
  • Supermarioglitchy4's Super Mario 64 Bloopers: In "Losing Your N64," Luigi says that he went back in time to the 1990s to replace his Nintendo 64.

    Websites 
  • SCP Foundation:
    • SCP-110 ("Subterranean City") is a city that appeared 1/2 kilometer underground in the Foundation universe as the result of a temporal disturbance that threw it across time.
    • Researchers exploring SCP-1351 ("Moebius Cave") found the remains of a Foundation expedition from the decade of the 2030s. The remains had been in the cave for more than 7,000 years, indicating that the expedition had entered the cave in the 2030s, gone back in time 7,000 years and been trapped and killed.

    Web Videos 

 
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Alternative Title(s): Time Travel Tales

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Sonic the Hedgehog CD

By touching a Past or Future signpost and keeping enough speed for some time, Sonic can travel to that time period in each zone. Stardust Speedway, for example, starts as a normal city in the Present and becomes a Greek/Roman-style city in the Past.

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