This is discussion archived from a time before the current discussion method was installed.
This trope is under discussion for disambiguation as of 7/13/09.
Is this the proper trope for when people in the "present" have time to reflect on incoming timeline changes because the new history moves like a wave that hasn't reached them yet (instead of having the new past be the past that's "always happened"? I'm explaining myself incredibly badly here, so let me try a different way.
1. Alice goes back and time and kills Bob.
2. Alice comes back to the present and tells Bob that she killed him.
3. Bob dies. Alice probably still remembers him being alive up until a second ago.
And if this isn't the correct trope, what is? Time Travel Tropes hurt mah brain.
Micah: The trope you're thinking of is Delayed Ripple Effect.
Korval: This trope needs clarification.
Originally, I thought that the idea was that San Dimas Time was the rate at which time changes. That is, the idea that changes in the past have to "catch up" with the future. Several of the examples fit with this description.
But this is different from the idea that a time machine/time travel method doesn't move between discrete points in time, but instead simply blasts you X time units forward/backwards in time. That is, if you set your time machine for a year in the past, you go backwards 1 year. And if you return from that trip, you go forwards 1 year, returning to a point in time 1 year + however long you spent in the past. Several of the examples fit with this description.
Neither of these ideas have anything to do with each other. So we need either a new trope or a culling of mis-aimed examples and a more clear description.
Mister Six: Ignore the below conversation between me and Heartburn Kid; Meanwhile, in the Future… has now been split into three tropes, of which this is one.
HeartBurn Kid: Isn't this basically Meanwhile, in the Future…?
Mister Six: Er, yes - I kind of misunderstood what it was talking about, and some of the tropes don't really seem to apply. I'll turn this into a redirect. Shame, because I like this title.
Mister Six: cut—
" Video Games
- Is one of the basic elements of Chrono Trigger's time-traveling mechanism. Once you've done something in the past you can't go back further and undo it."
—because it doesn't seem to be discussing the same trope. And from what I can remember of Chrono Trigger, time didn't progress in a time period unless you were in that period, nor was there a concurrent countdown in another period at any point...
Mister Six: cut—
"Anime
- In Inu-Yasha, the same amount of time passes between the two time periods Kagome travels through."
— because that's an example of a Portal to the Past, not San Dimas Time. Also restored the bold around "Examples:" because that's how the Categories Template has it, and restored the link to Timey-Wimey Ball because a: it's mildly funny (well, kind of) and b: there is no way that this trope can be justified, even by "the mechanics of time travel". It just doesn't make sense on any level.
Ununnilium: Actually, I was thinking a couple days ago of a system that uses it sensibly and doesn't depend on a Portal to the Past.
Mister Six: Really? How would that work? I'm really interested to know. The only way I could think of it working would be to have the time machine only return to a time period chronologically after it first left it (ie. you could keep going back to 1982, but it would be equivalent to the time passed since you returned to 2007), which would have the same effect but wouldn't be quite the same thing. Functionally, it would be a Portal to the Past.
Keenath: Yeah, the only way to do that is to have a Portal to the Past that just doesn't look like a portal.
For example, you might have a machine that can travel in time, but not space (relative to the sun — perhaps the math for making it operate relative to Earth is too complicated for this version of the time machine). So you can only travel to points that are approximately one year apart, when there's actually a planet under you. It's not so much a portal as a very granular time machine; but it may as well be a portal because if you leave October 12th, you can only go to other years on that same date. If you then spend four days, you can only travel to other years' October 16th.
But as I say, that's just a time-machine-shaped Portal.
Red Shoe: (Shamless promotion) Cribbed from the instruction manual of the Interactive Fiction game Moments Out of Time, one way such a time machine might work is if its power source was not portable. The recall device consists of a "temporal capacitor" which is charged during the initial transit, and must be discharged to effect a return transit. Such a device would require that the return journey consisted of a temporal displacement equal and opposite to the outbound journey, resulting in San Dimas Time.
More abstractly, a time machine would produce this effect if it were constrained by design to produce transits in pairs of equal displacement and opposite direction.
Less mechanistically, we might easily suppose that it is a physical property of time that the net progression of time is constant, and therefore traveling in one direction in time must eventually be "balanced" by an equal and opposite transit in time.
Anyway, the way you justify this is by proposing some kind of rubber-band-time-machine.
ralphmerridew: Does "Big Time Operator" by Jack Wodhams qualify as San Dimas Time, Portal to the Past, or a subversion / justification of them? In the story, Dr. Leigher runs a business where he will hide criminals in the past for money, and it clearly mentions that time passes at an equal rate for people at both ends, but the time machine is fake; he's killing the travelers
Count Spatula : Does the Digimon example really belong here? The series doesn't involve any time travel. The example given is just a Narnia-esque case of time passing differently in one dimension rather than the other.
Blork: It's been ages since I watched Bill And Teds Excellent Adventure so I may be completely wrong here, but after their first journey through time didn't they return to just before they left, meet up with Rufus (and themselves) and then get told that they should travel further forwards to take the time that passed while travelling into account? If so, this would suggest that the San Dimas Time was not so much a limitation of the time machine as a rule that time-travellers are supposed to follow (so that people don't notice them apparently aging faster?). And then the end of the second movie could be justified by the fact that what they did was important enough to justify breaking the rules.
Ninjacrat: Not A Subversion:
- Subverted in Silence in the Library, where the Doctor meets a woman, who has met the Doctor countless times before, and not in the order of the Doctor's life either; she has the habit of keeping a diary of events the Doctor has experienced, and uses it to cross reference which point of the Doctor's life she has met him this time. In the episode, it is the Doctor's first time, and she is a complete stranger to him.
- Also subverted in Blink and Smith and Jones. In Blink, the Doctor has planted clues for Sally to find in the past, but she doesn't meet him and give him the material for the clues until the end of the episode, which causes some confusion for Sally who was at first surprised that he didn't know who she was. In the same episode it also poses the Timey Wimey paradox of the Doctor having dictated a message to Sally in a video, but he only knew what to say because he had a transcript of the video that could only have been made after the video was finished. In the beginning of Smith and Jones, when Martha Jones first meets the Doctor, he had already met her and was planting a memory in her to prove to the future her that he could time travel.
Erased:
There's no indication that arriving one year after they left was anything other than a fluke caused by Viral's tampering, or that the turtles couldn't have returned to exactly the time they left—they certainly weren't aiming to arrive one year in the future. Add to that the fact that St. Dimas Time has not been a factor in any of the other times the turtles have time travelled, and there's little reason to think that this particular example is a case of the trope.
Count Dorku: Corrected: someone trying to pothole something to Eldritch Abomination linked to CosmoHorror. Should perhaps have just corrected it and shut up, but I like how they've spelt this one. It gives me a mental image of a Fairly Odd Parents version of Cthulhu.
