History Main / TimeTravelTenseTrouble

* A consistent element of the {{Terminator}} series (although rarely lampshaded), going back Sarah's quote from the first movie: "You're talking about things I haven't done yet in the past tense."

* Avoided rather nicely in ''{{Fate Stay Night}}'', as when [[spoiler:it is revealed that Archer is a future version of Emiya Shirou, rather than deal with the issues on how to address him everybody either ignores his real name and keeps calling him 'Archer,' or refers to him as 'Heroic Spirit Emiya.']]

* The tagliney prophecy which drives the action of the animated Science Fiction film ''{{Light Years}}'' makes use of it: "In a thousand years, Gandahar was destroyed. A thousand years ago, Gandahar will be saved."

* The {{Narnia Time}} in effect between the territories in ''{{The Pendragon Adventure}}'' occasionally causes this sort of trouble. Usually involving rookie Travelers (We're looking at you, Spader and Siry).

* In ''{{Goodnight Sweetheart}}'' time traveler Gary Sparrow (who is married in the present day but is having an affair with a woman in 1940s Britain) upbraids his friend for cheating on his wife. When the obvious hypocrisy is pointed out to him, Gary replies "That's different. All my indiscretions are in the past. Even my future indiscretions are in the past.".

[[folder:Boardgames]]
* In ''Time Agent'' the objective is to have always been winning by using time travel to have changed the past, while never having had time travel invented. The flow of causality operates according to the [=~Schrodinger's Gun~=] trope, which means that technologies often work until you discover that even before you had been making changes to the timeline, they had never been working. In one instance the player commander of the Zytal had to leave and be replaced by another player, but from the board's perspective, the new player had always been the commander of the Zytal, for the previous commander had never been playing.
[[/folder]]

* Naturally, ''[[PrinceOfPersia Prince of Persia]]'' also falls victim to this trope during Sands of Time's [[spoiler: final boss fight. Among the banter we find this: "It happened! ... Well, it will happen!" referring to the events of the game being experienced, rewound, and then about to happen (again?) if the Prince doesn't do something about it.]]

* In SimulatedComicProduct: Behold! [[http://robotandghost.com/wp-content/gallery/2008/2008-01-15-ERROR.jpg the museum of the future!]]

** "[[http://mspaintadventures.com/?s=6&p=003256 It begins to dawn on you]] that everything you are about to do may prove to have been a collossal waste of time."

* In ''[[KimPossible Kim Possible:]]'' ''[[TheMovie A Sitch in Time]]'' Shego's future self tries to explain her scheme to take over the world in the future to her present self.

--> '''Kim Possible''': But if the Supreme One has the time monkey in the future . . . or the past . . . or . . .wow. Aah! Brain pain.\\

* ''SouthPark''' had the memorable episode "My Future Self and Me", where Stan's adult future self (later revealed as an actor) comes to live with present, young Stan. "Don't be so hard on yourself, Stan" and "Why don't you go upstairs and play with yourself?"

* Paradox from Ben10AlienForce has this problem, more specifically, it's the fact he seems to mix up events that have happened yet with events that have.

[[folder:ComicBooks]]
* In {{Watchmen}}, Dr. Manhattan, who is able to perceive the past, present and future, says "Yes, yes, he [[spoiler:killed Blake and half of New York]]. Excuse me, Rorschach, I'm informing Laurie 90 seconds ago," to Laurie "Silk Spectre" Juspeczyk, being confused by tachyon interference, before saying the same thing to Rorschach 90 seconds later. He's even in the exact same pose and position (relative to the walls of the panel) both times he says it.
** That, and the whole flashback (flashnow?) scene on Mars.
* In a Uncle Scrooge story, the evil witch, Magica has this problem
--> '''Magica''': This is like all the times in the past that Scrooge himself has chased me in the future. I mean... what am I talking about?
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** Topical PanelGames like ''HaveIGotNewsForYou'' also get confused by tenses when describing something that might happen between recording and broadcast (and might have changed by the repeat. And heaven knows what'll be happening by the time it's on Dave...)

-->"There's an old windmill up there. I was some kind of look-out post during the war. Is, I mean."

* ''{{Discworld}}:

* ''TheHitchHikersGuideToTheGalaxy'' has a good excerpt on the mechanics of time travel useful for this. There was even a book written in-universe called the ''Time Traveler's Handbook of 1001 Tense Formations'' by Dr. Dan Streetmentioner.
** Note that the titular Guide doesn't even bother trying to explain the tenses, and simply notes that it does not use the future perfect tense, [[IncrediblyLamePun because it was discovered not to be]].
* ''The {{Discworld}} Companion'' entry for a character existing in a StableTimeLoop says "Dios was (or is, or will be - certain temporal uncertainties make the choice of tense very difficult)".
** But when Vimes goes back thirty years in ''Night Watch'', he is told to "just imagine [[SanDimasTime things happening one after another]]" and sticks with that as less confusing.
** Also, in ''Equal Rites'', when it is explained that the dead are unbound from ''all'' dimensions, the narrator describes the fact that a cat appears to simultaneously be its own age, a newborn kitten, and a decrepit moggy, as resembling a kind of white, cat-shaped carrot, "which will have to suffice until someone is able to devise effective fourth-dimensional adjectives".

** '''Kim Possible''': But if the Supreme One has the time monkey in the future . . . or the past . . . or . . .wow. Aah! Brain pain.\\
'''Rufus 3000''': Time travel does that.

** '''Magica''': This is like all the times in the past that Scrooge himself has chased me in the future. I mean... what am I talking about?

* Described in the commentary for [[http://dizzy.pestermom.com/?p=thcomic101 this]] TroperWorks/TouhouNekokayou, where it divides temporal conversation between "subjective" (what the time traveller personally experience), "objective" (chronological order), and "metatemporal" (the perspective of changes made to the timeline).

* The tagliney prophecy which drives the action of the animated Science Fiction film ''Light Years'' makes use of it: "In a thousand years, Gandahar was destroyed. A thousand years ago, Gandahar will be saved."

* The {{Achron}} fandom made a little of their own grammar to explain stuff in the game. They talk about game-time and real-time, and refer to units and events as early or late. When they specify when something happened, they use an ordered pair for the time.

* The {{NarniaTime Narnia Time}} in effect between the territories in ''{{ThePendragonAdventure The Pendragon Adventure}}'' occasionally causes this sort of trouble. Usually involving rookie Travelers (We're looking at you, Spader and Siry).

* The [[NarniaTime]] in effect between the territories in ''[[ThePendragonAdventure]]'' occasionally causes this sort of trouble. Usually involving rookie Travelers (We're looking at you, Spader and Siry).

** Obvious {{Narm}} aside, I always thought it was something akin to a CatchPhrase. The scene is obviously some sort of TV show (or a segment of such), and it could be something like [[TheNostalgiaCritic "Hello, I'm the Nostalgia Critic. I remember it so you don't have to."]]

* Technically, English has a system a bit like this with tense and aspect; tense denotes the action's time related to a reference point, while aspect denotes the reference point's time related to the time of speaking. In a sentence like "I had done it by 3 o'clock", the pluperfect "had" tells you to imagine it's 3 o'clock, and the past "done" tells you that from that point, the event was in the past.
** or perhaps imagine at 2 o'clock stating "I will have done it by 3 o'clock" that is referring to a present event becoming a past event in the future.

* Though not actually time travel, English has a perfectly grammatical verb form called the [[AddedAlliterativeAppeal Past Perfect Progressive Passive]]. It goes like this: It had been being written. The Present Perfect Progressive Passive is also somewhat hard to wrap one's head around: It has been being written.
** Pfft. Try FUTURE Perfect Progressive Passive. It will have been being done.
*** ...That will have been being done my head hurt.
*** Your head will have been hurt by it. Perfectly accurate in next to if not actually all situations, but also obstructively unspecific.
*** [[YourHeadASplode BOOM!]]
*** Your head will have had been asploding...
*** Were it going to have exploded, it would have been being exploding
**** Please. Were it to have been inducing your head to explode, it will have, having been doing so precisely when it was being done. Happening, it will have been being ongoing from the moment it was begun, taking [[ShapedLikeItself as long as]] it will have been observed to have taken, and, thus concluded, it will not have not been said to have been happening precisely when it was. And it had better have been going to be so doing when it did, or else we run the risk of becoming [[MyOwnGrampa our own grandfathers]].

* It's not TimeTravel as much as [[AscendToAHigherPlaneOfExistence Ascending To A Higher Plane of Existence]], but John 8:58 in the New Testament mangles grammar the same way: "before Abraham was, (there was) [[AC:I am]]."
** Only if you don't realize that this is more translation trouble. In Hebrew, all names have destinctive meanings describing the individual. Since God is all knowing, all powerful, omnipresent, creator of everyone and everything etc. the only name that ''can'' describe him is "he who is" or, from his perspective, "I AM".

* This Troper tends to use this a lot when explaining her state of mind; she once has been going to said... sorry... anyway, "Well, okay, that actually is the truth. But in the future, it might not have been." This lead to her friend having a [[CrowningMomentOfFunny CMOF]] that, sadly, will take too long to explain.

** Obvious {{Narm}} aside, I always thought it was something akin to a CatchPhrase. The scene is obviously some sort of TV show (or a segment of such), and it could be something like [[ThatGuyWithTheGlasses "Hello, I'm the Nostalgia Critic. I remember it so you don't have to."]]

*Averted in one place in ''{{Gurps}} Time-Travel'' by saying that there are two timelines for the adventurer, the time he came from "hometime" and the time he is adventuring in and Hometime keeps going while the adventurer was adventuring. Thus all that is necessary is to distinguish between home past and away past.