History Main / TravelingAtTheSpeedOfPlot

* ''Webcomic/TheOrderOfTheStick'': Described [[http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0937.html here.]] Julio Scoundrél's airship goes faster the higher the stakes, but it never gets anywhere earlier than the nick of time.

* ''Series/GeneralHospital'' Jax whisks Courtney off to Italy for a romantic dinner. Her friend Carly pursues them and arrives at the restaurant in time to interrupt them. This fails to account for the fact that a flight from upstate New York (where ''GH'' is set) to Italy is anywhere from 6-8 hours, plus whatever time Carly would need to travel from the airport to the city itself, not to mention the time difference between NY and Italy (6 hours), all of which mean there is ''no way'' Carly could have left New York when Jax and Courtney started dinner and arrived in Italy while they were still eating.
** In another episode, Stefan goes to Switzerland to visit Laura and is stunned when her husband Luke walks into the room, as he clearly left Port Charles long before Luke did. Luke lampshades this by snapping, "Haven't you ever heard of the Concorde?" Fair enough, but Stefan's nephew Nicholas arrives shortly after Stefan, even though also left Port Charles after he did and took a regular flight as well.

* The final arc of the first season of ''Anime/{{Yu-Gi-Oh 5Ds}}'' has a truly egregious example. Mikage has marked on a map the 5 locations where the 4 heroes need to go to duel their opponents -- far apart but all relatively similar distances from where the group is at the time. The groups splits up with 1 duelist each going by car or motorcycle to 4 of the locations. It would seem logical that all the duels would begin at times relatively close to each other (showing events one at a time that took place at the same time is common and easy in fiction, after all). Instead, everyone is shown spending all episodes before their own duel driving. And driving and driving. So no duels take place at the same time, and everyone arrives at their own destination after another duel has ended and before another begins. In addition to being a huge coincidence, ''and'' the length of traveling time and distances not making sense, this completely defeats the purpose behind why they agreed to split up in the first place rather than go as a group to each location one at a time.

!!Examples

[[folder:Anime and Manga]]

* In ''Manga/{{Naruto}}'', Naruto revealed [[SuperMode Sage Mode]], which provided him dramatically enhanced speed, enough to move hundreds of meters in a few seconds. But when he's fighting [[spoiler:[[TheDragon Deva Pain]]]], he struggles to travel less than a hundred feet in the five seconds the guy needs to wait between bursts of his power. From a standing start.
** During the [[spoiler: Fourth Shinobi World War Arc]], Naruto spends many episodes running towards his friends. Despite being close enough to help some of his friends out along the way, he doesn't reach the main group until the {{Filler}} arc ends. Other characters manage to travel across the [[spoiler: battlefield]] and help out other squads in a single episode. During the same arc, Sasuke travels to the Hidden Leaf village and back in a single night.
* In ''Manga/FairyTail'' Happy could transform into a flying mode for a brief time and could only carry one person rather slowly. But when the team needs to stop a villain headed towards a town he suddenly has a "max speed" which lets him catch up with the guy even though he could fly quite quickly and was most of the way there.

*** Speaking of Little Garden, Nico Robin/Miss All Sunday makes it all the way back to Alabasta while the Straw Hats are still on Little Garden. Granted, she has the Eternal Pose to Alabasta, but for the sake of the plot, the villains seem to travel more quickly than the heroes do in that arc.

* Late in ''Anime/MobileSuitGundamWing'', Relena goes to try to talk down White Fang's leader [[spoiler:Milliardo]]. We get scenes with her ''en route'' for two episodes before she finally arrives on Libra in a third, making her trip last four days total (according to an official timeline). In a series where space flight has been around for over 200 years, that's pretty dang slow. On the other hand, there's no sense that Faster-Than-Light is possible, so this might actually be a more realistic example than the Gundams' rate of speed.
** ''Gundam Wing'' does this frequently. There are a number of episodes where Wing Zero goes from space down to earth in one episode, and then back again in the next one. That thing must be damn fast.
** Taken to the extreme late in the series. Treize is in space, in the path of Libra's main cannon, as it is getting ready to fire. Lady Une is unconscious in a hospital on Earth. In the time it takes for Libra to fire its cannon and its massive energy beam to reach Treize, Lady Une wakes up, gets in a space suit, steals Wing Gundam, flies out into space, and arrive just in time to knock Treize away to take the brunt of the hit. You'd think she was a [[Franchise/DoctorWho Weeping Angel]].
* ''Anime/MobileSuitGundamSEED'' has one notable example. When Kira gets his shiny new Freedom Gundam, he flies off from a space colony all the way down to Alaska, just in time to save the Archangel. The way the sequence of events is shown suggests that this all took a few hours at most, though the official SEED timeline clarifies that Kira actually spent three days flying from the colony to Earth.

** Actually, they do sorta explain. Chuta originally arrived by stowing away on a ship run by humans. In the first episode, Gamba and his gang stowaway on the same ship heading to the island, but in episode 4 a storm causes it to sink. So Gamba and his friends had to create make-shift boats out of whatever scrap they could find.

* ''Manga/SaintSeiya'': In the Hades Arc, some of the Bronze Saints need to reach Greece despite some of them being in Japan and Siberia.
* ''Anime/SaintSeiyaOmega'': The Bronze Saints move from Greece to Mexico on foot. Unlike the original, they actually have a normal person traveling with them, making even less sense.

* ''Manga/DragonBall'' and ''[[Anime/DragonBallZ Z]]'' use this trope for all it's worth, thanks to never establishing geographical distances: Goku will always arrive ''just'' in the nick of time after travelling at top speed, no matter how far away his destination was. Similarly, after Raditz is defeated Vegeta and Nappa are eleven months away from Earth. A few episodes later, the narration mentions they're at the edge of our solar system but still a few months away. In later seasons, spaceships (including the same type Vegeta and Nappa use) can get anywhere in the galaxy in no more than a few days.

* ''Anime/{{Digimon Adventure 02}}'' is rife with this. Tamachi and Odaiba are about an hour's drive apart by car, but Raidramon's able to get Davis from Odaiba to Tamachi in what looks like a few minutes, yet in a later episode, Raidramon has to spend considerable time chasing a truck as if it's too fast for him. Izzy and Kari seem able to cross all of Hong Kong from one border to another in just a few minutes. The whole World Tour arc relies on the heroes allegedly being unable to use portals to the Digital World as a shortcut to travel to other countries on Earth because of the distance between portals within the Digital World, but Michael and Mimi previously once used a portal in New York to come to the same Digital World location as the other kids coming from Japan. In short, when distance is needed to be an obstacle, it is; when it's not, it's not.

* Franchise/{{Superman}} can zip about at supersonic speeds, for example grabbing something out of someone's hand and returning to where he was standing before they notice. Of course, he can't do this in the case of hostages, or any other situation where the plot requires him to move at a certain speed.
* ComicBook/{{Supergirl}} is sometimes even faster than Superman. She's been known to shoot a handgun, dash forward, grab the bullet, flicking the forehead's target so onlookers think he's been shot and go back to her initial position with none the wiser. However her speed fails when the plot demands she isn't fast enough.
* Franchise/TheFlash is fast, but just how fast seems to depend on the situation he's facing. Sometimes, he clearly moves faster than light and there are only negative effects of high speeds (sonic boom, becoming super massive) when he wants them. In one infamous case, he evacuated the entire population of a city to save them from a nuclear bomb... ''after the bomb had detonated'', carrying half a million people to safety 35 miles away, one at a time, in the span of 0.00001 microseconds. He can also tap into a cosmic force called the Speed Force that allows him to control the physics of movement at will. Fine, but this [[FridgeLogic raises the question]] of why he has any trouble handling normal-speed foes, though. Or for that matter, how he has any trouble handing ''anything'' short of reality-warpers.

* In ''WesternAnimation/{{Shrek 2}}'', it takes Shrek, Fiona, and Donkey several days to get to Far Far Away. Later in the movie, when the supporting cast finds out that the group is in trouble, they get there in just a few hours. It's implied that perhaps the supporting guys were riding on Dragon and Dragon is capable of flying at a much faster speed than a typical horse-drawn carriage is able to travel. Worse in ''WesternAnimation/ShrekForeverAfter'', Shrek travels the distance between his home and Far Far Away three times within less than a day.
* ''WesternAnimation/{{Frozen|2013}}'': Elsa takes apparently no more than a few hours to get from Arendelle up to the top of the North Mountain on foot. It takes about a day and a half to two days for Anna to travel up the North Mountain to Elsa's ice palace, first by horse, then by foot, then by Kristoff's sled, then by foot the rest of the way. [[JustifiedTrope This is likely because she was not initially traveling to the mountain specifically, but rather searching around for the missing Elsa]] - she may have been traveling ''away'' from the North Mountain until the scene at the trading post when she overhears Kristoff's remarks to Oaken about the storm coming from the direction of the North Mountain. Likewise, it appears to take Hans and the Arendelle soldiers roughly thirteen to eighteen hours to travel from the castle in Arendelle to the ice palace on horseback since they appear to leave in the early afternoon and are seen arriving at the ice palace just as dawn is breaking. [[JustifiedTrope The difference between the travel times of Hans and Anna could be explained by Hans and his team riding horses the whole way and with soldiers who may have known the terrain and/or been more experienced trackers, whereas Anna made the majority of the the journey on foot and half of it unaccompanied, after spending most of her life in isolation]], but no explanation is actually given how they found where to go.
* ''WesternAnimation/FrozenII'': It takes several days for the heroes to journey to Northuldra the first time they traveled there, but in the climax [[spoiler:Elsa rides the Nokk back to Arendelle just in time to save the city from getting flooded when the dam in Northuldra is destroyed. Justified as she's riding a magical water-horse on top of a flash-flood wave caused by the destroyed dam, already heading towards Arendelle; on the way up to the forest, they were on a cart being pulled uphill by Sven, a single reindeer pulling 3 adults, a snowlem, and other supplies.]]
* ''WesternAnimation/InsideOut'': Joy and Sadness get themselves sucked out of Headquarters while Riley is at school. They they apparently proceed to spend the ''entire rest of the day'' just landing in Long Term Memory and walking across Goofball Island, a distance which they are later able to cross in roughly thirty seconds [[spoiler:when the island starts to collapse]]. Pops up a few other times throughout the movie as well, but this is by far the most obvious one.
** The fanfic ''Fanfic/{{Intercom}}'' theorizes this is because the Mind World operates on slight NarniaTime or YearOutsideHourInside, with things in Headquarters happening immediately (and by extension the Islands since they're linked to it) while everything else moves slower in comparison.

* ''Film/GodzillaKingOfTheMonsters2019'': When we see the [[Characters/MonsterVerseKaiju various Titans]] awaken, their locations are given; with Methuselah in Munich, Scylla in Arizona, Behemoth in Rio de Janeiro, and a new female [=MUTO=], which WordOfGod states was underneath Hoboken, New Jersey. Despite originating thousands of miles apart, [[spoiler:they all make it to Boston at the exact same time, despite Methuselah and possibly Behemoth needing to make ocean crossings, Scylla needing to cross North America, and the new female MUTO being only two small states away. Furthermore, there were two other Titans in Washinginton, DC., and both make it to Boston several hours ahead of the others.]]

* Film/TransformersFilmSeries:

* In ''Literature/JourneyToTheWest'' the initial trip from China to India takes over a decade, the return, about a week.

* ''Series/TheBoys2019'': In season 2, [[Characters/TheBoys2019TheSeven the Deep]] makes it to the Boys' yacht's location far ahead of the Seven ''and'' manages to recruit several marine animals to help him, despite being based hundreds of miles further inland than the Seven's coastal location.

* ''Series/GameOfThrones'': This got more pronounced as the series progressed, especially as it increasingly diverged from its [[Literature/ASongOfIceAndFire source material]] from Season 5 onward. Westeros is a ''huge'' place, approximately the size of South America; Essos is even larger, more like Asia. Going from King's Landing to the Wall should take months, as it would be like traveling between Buenos Aires and Panama, ''on horseback''.

* Averted in ''VideoGame/MassEffect2''. There are two storyline missions that start automatically when you receive them: one where you can dawdle, and the big one, [[spoiler:the suicide mission: you can choose when to do it, but if you do more than '''ONE''' mission, then a member of your abducted crew will die. The death toll gets higher the more missions you do, culminating in Dr Chakwas being the only survivor.]]
** You can still get to your destination with time to spare, no matter where you are in the galaxy -- even if it's on the ''other side of the galaxy''.
* No matter how quickly you complete all previous missions in ''VideoGame/MassEffect3'' you will not get the vital information about Thessia until [[spoiler: Cerberus is already there one step ahead of you]].
* The computer does this in ''VideoGame/KingdomHeartsI''. Upon arriving in Monstro, the player encounters Geppetto and Pinocchio. Pinocchio was previously seen in Traverse Town, and the game establishes that without a Gummi Ship or dark powers, traveling between worlds is impossible. Sora even asks Pinocchio "how did you get here?", but Geppetto starts talking to him, and somewhere between that and Pinocchio wandering off, the game forgets to explain it.

* Up until the recent events of the quest The World Wakes, the time in ''{{VideoGame/RuneScape}}'' has stood still for the player character; meaning hundreds of hours for random skill training, other quest plots, etc. have occurred within the same 24 hour period as no other quest give a sense of time passing and are referred to as "in the past" for anyone who does them after The World Wakes.
* Happens in all materials in the ''{{VideoGame/Warcraft}}'' universe, due to the writers never really establishing the size of anything. Especially bad in the ''ComicBook/WorldOfWarcraft'' comic, where it takes a hippogryph less than a minute to fly from Ashenvale to Thunder Bluff, which would make the world about as big as the map in ''VideoGame/WorldOfWarcraft'', ignoring the obvious SpaceCompression that's present in the latter.

** Exaggerated on case 2 of ''Justice for All'', when little Pearl, who's lived all her life in a small, isolated village, makes it to her cousin's trial [[{{Determinator}} ON FOOT]]. Said village is an hour away by train, which she didn't take because she did not know what trains were. Never mind how exhausting it would've been for her, realistically, she never would've made it on time.

* In ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyVI'', the heroes are split up into three groups, all trying to get to Narshe. Terra's group is able to take the most direct route. Locke has to infiltrate South Figaro first and get some intel before heading there, which is certainly a detour, but doesn't send him all that far out of the way. Sabin, meanwhile, is thrown completely off-course, and has to help fight back against the invasion of Doma, deal with a train full of ghosts, cross a giant plain, take an underwater passage to Nikeah, and from there sneak onto a boat to South Figaro (which, remember, is where Locke was) before heading to Narshe. Most of Sabin's path has him traversing nearly the opposite side of the world from Narshe. While Terra's group is in the middle of pleading with Narshe's elder for assistance (and it's implied that her team hasn't been there very long), Sabin somehow gets there about a minute before Locke does.
* In ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyIVTheAfterYears'', Ceodore's squad enters Baron castle, fights with his BrainwashedAndCrazy father, and banters a little. Meanwhile, Rydia, Edge, Luca, and the Man in Black travel all over the world, saving people and collecting allies. There are cutaways to the fight against Cecil and a barrier preventing the other characters from entering Baron, indicating that these events are simultaneous.

[[folder:Webcomics]]

* Used in ''WesternAnimation/AvatarTheLastAirbender'', as also noted on ItIsAlwaysSpring. The last season was particularly notable for this as in the first half, it took a while for them to travel to the rendezvous point, with Sokka constantly complaining about all the detours cutting into their travel time [[note]]They get there 4 days early anyway[[/note]]. In the last 4 episodes though, they travel from the Fire Nation to the Earth Kingdom and back again in less than 3 days. In the first season it was a bit more justified since they flew everywhere and the timescale was a lot less defined, but that just made the way Zuko easily kept pace in an obsolete steamship which was explicitly slower than them stand out.
** Later in ''WesternAnimation/LegendOfKorra'' Book 2, Korra and friends manage to travel by ship from Republic City, which is located in the northern regions of the Earth Kingdom Continent, all the way to the South Pole in just under the 3 day time limit.

* The first episode of ''WesternAnimation/InvaderZim'' indicates it takes Zim six months to get from the planet Conventia to Earth. All other trips into space, however, seem to go more quickly: for example, Foodcourtia is only ''three days'' away. Either Conventia is ''waaaaay'' out there on the far border of Irken space, or the first episode's time [[RuleOfFunny was just to torture Zim with six months of]] "[[MemeticMutation The Doom Song]]."
** In another episode Zim is shown to be enduring Gir's messing around with base's computer for a ''year'' - it's a RunningGag. Another one: Sizz-Lorr mentions 20 years of being trapped on Foodcourtia after Zim runs away, but Zim's mission lasted no longer than few years. It got [[LampshadeHanging lampshaded]] with time-warp-thing. To sum it up, Sizz-Lorr did 20 years in about 2 or so.

* In the WesternAnimation/{{Leapfrog}} educational release ''Math Adventure to the Moon'', Leap, Lily and Edison board a rocket bound for the moon. The entire point of this DVD is to teach kids about counting and math, so the rocket has a speed gauge with 1 being the slowest speed and 10 being the highest. As the two learn to count by 2s, then 5s, then 10s, the gauge keeps getting replaced with greater numbers, finally going up to a 100. Tad orders it to slow down and the computer says that cruising speed has been achieved. It then says that the moon is [[TheMetricSystemIsHereToStay 93,000 kilometers]]... behind them. They've overshot.

* ''WesternAnimation/{{Samurai Jack}}'': In ''[=XCVII=]'', Ashi spends the entire episode wondering around in numerous places searching for Jack and comes across many of the people he helped in previous episode. The setting even changes to night in the climax and Ashi is still nowhere near finding Jack. Yet she still arrives at the cemetery just in time to prevent Jack from committing {{Seppuku}}.
** FridgeBrilliance sets in when you realize that seppuku is meant to be performed in front of spectators. When Ashi finally does show up, the Omen tells her she will be a witness to Jack's suicide, thus it's likely that Jack was waiting for Ashi to find him.

** This trop is averted in ''WesternAnimation/TransformersPrime'' with the use of the Ground Bridge.
* In ''WesternAnimation/ThreeTwoOnePenguins'', the penguins' ship, the Rockhopper, travels as fast or as slow as the plot demands, as this conversation in ''The Cheating Scales of Bullamanka'' shows.
-->'''Michelle''' (''Who has been on the ship for all of three minutes''): Wow, so let's get on with the mission. Buckle up for landing, everyone! \\
'''[[TheCaptain Zidgel]]''': Woah, slow down there, missy. I don't think you have a full appreciation of the demands of space travel...space travel can take hours, days, even, [[DepartmentOfRedundancyDepartment uh, several days]]. [[ThisIsReality It's not like in those T.V. shows where they just go zipping around]]- \\
'''Midgel''': Coming up on Bullamanka. \\
'''Zidgel''': Uh, buckle up for landing, everyone.

** ''Wings of Liberty'' and ''Heart of the Swarm'' have their own issues even assuming the above FanWank is true. In ''Wings'', Kerrigan ultimately loses because she overstretches her forces and leaves Char vulnerable to a decapitation strike. She tries to recall her broods to Char, but as noted by both Word of God and in-game news reports, they couldn't get from the Dominion core worlds to Char fast enough to stop Raynor and Valerian's strike that took at least a day - even though Char is a former core world and thus should be quite close to them in relative terms. So in this case, it appears that they're back to the few light-years per day speeds of the Overmind's Swarm. ''Heart of the Swarm'' however has Kerrigan travel from Koprulu to Zerus, located in the center of the galaxy (so tens of thousands of light-years away), in what's implied to be a pretty short time period and is ''definitely'' nowhere close to even a single year, putting zerg FTL speeds back at ''Brood War'' levels. As noted on the [[TheWikiRule StarCraft wiki]] page for Zerus, one Blizzard employee actually lampshaded this and noted that ''Heart'' gave the false impression of Zerus being right next to the Koprulu sector given how easily Kerrigan goes there and back.

'''Kronk''': ''[[[BreakingTheFourthWall pulls down the map from the montage]]]'' Ya got me. By all accounts it doesn't make sense.\\

* In the opening of ''VideoGame/TrialsOfMana'', every character's introduction ends with them travelling to Jadd while the opening credits roll. Unlike the others, Kevin doesn't take a boat because Mintos has no harbor, and swims his way there. He still arrives at the same time as everyone else, despite being a whole continent away.

* In ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyVI'', the heroes are split up into three groups, all trying to get to Narshe. Terra's group is able to take the most direct route. Locke has to infiltrate South Figaro first and get some intel before heading there, which is certainly a detour, but doesn't send him all that far out of the way. Sabin, meanwhile, is thrown completely off-course, and has to help fight back against the invasion of Doma, deal with a train full of ghosts, cross a giant plain, take an underwater passage to Nikeah, and from there sneak onto a boat to South Figaro (which, remember, is where Locke was) before heading to Narshe. Most of Sabin's path has him traversing nearly the opposite side of the world from Narshe. While Terra's group is in the middle of pleading with Narshe's elder for assistance, Sabin somehow gets there about a minute before Locke does.

* ''Film/KingKong1933'': So they manage to capture the giant ape on Skull Island, but the question is how they would be able to keep him alive on the boat journey back to New York City. Skull Island is located in the Indian Ocean, west of Sumatra, so they would need to either cross the entire Pacific Ocean and sail up the Eastern Seaboard, or cross the entire Indian and Atlantic Ocean, and steam boats of the time had a cruising speed of about ten knots. The journey would have to take several ''weeks'', but no one ever asks how in the world they're keeping Kong alive and contained for that long. The [[Film/KingKong1976 1976 remake]] partly rectifies this by showing the crew throwing cratefuls of fruits and vegetables down into the cargo hold to keep him fed.
** ''Film/GodzillaVsKong'', while not a direct adaptation, has a similar sequence where Kong needs to transported across the ocean, and actually shows how they go about it. Kong is chained and sedated, he's periodically fed on fish they can catch from the sea, and they're travelling with a Skull Island native that Kong's befriended to help keep him calm.

* Invoked by JustForFun/TropeTan in ''Webcomic/TheWayOfTheMetagamer''. Apparently it's [[FasterThanLightTravel Faster Than Light]] but [[ArtMajorPhysics slower than sound.]]

* ''Film/JurassicWorldFallenKingdom'': The cargo ship gets from Isle Nublar, somewhere off the coast of Costa Rica, to somewhere in Northern California in a single night. That's a journey of roughly four thousand miles in a vessel that has a maximum speed of about 45 mph (which it can't maintain for long periods of time) in less than 12 hours. Even if they could have sustained that speed, it should have taken roughly four days plus the time it would have taken to actually get the ship unloaded (a lengthy process even if they'd bribed everyone involved to expedite things and not ask questions), plus the time required to get the dinosaurs from whatever dock they used to the remote mansion where the final act was set.

* ''Film/TransformersRevengeOfTheFallen'': The Autobots go from Giza, Egypt to Petra, Jordan and back in what seems to be a few minutes at most. Even apart from the substantial distances involved, this would involve crossing into and out of Israel four different times, which would probably not be the quickest endeavor for a platoon of unlicensed vehicles.

* ''Series/CowboyBebop'': When Spike is strapped into a computer system that's trying to fry his brain on Mars, Jet and Faye take the Bebop to Earth to destroy the master computer. It's previously established that even if two planets are relatively close together thanks to their orbital positions, Gate travel still takes a matter of days, but they're still able to get to Earth, find the remote base where the computer is located, land, and destroy the computer before Spike suffers any serious brain damage.

* This frequently happens in the ''Film/LordOfTheRings'' films, due to squashing down the events of the books (which followed a fairly realistic schedule for the journeys and distances involved, with events regularly being separated by days or weeks). The most glaring example is Gandalf's journey to Isengard in ''Fellowship'' where he manages to get to there before Frodo and Sam even leave the Shire after they depart Bag End at the same time(in the book, Frodo waits a few months before leaving the Shire after Gandalf's departure.) Another odd example is the film addition of the Marchwardens at Helm's Deep, which arrive right before the battle; meaning they would have had to leave Lorien right after the Fellowship and before they knew there was even going to be a battle.
** Jackson's ''Film/TheHobbit'' film are even worse about this. In ''The Desolation of Smaug'' Gandalf manages to go from the borders of Mirkwood to Rhudaur on the other side of the Misty Mountains and then get back across them to Dol Guldur by the time Thorin's Companey leaves Mirkwood. He must have been using Eagles.

* This frequently happens in the ''Film/LordOfTheRings'' films, due to squashing down the events of the books (which followed a fairly realistic schedule for the journeys and distances involved, with events regularly being separated by days or weeks). One of the weirdest is the film addition of the Marchwardens at Helm's Deep, which arrive right before the battle; going by maps of Middle-Earth, that means they had to march around 300 miles on foot in a single day.

* Comicbook/{{Supergirl}} is sometimes even faster than Superman. She's been known to shoot a handgun, dash forward, grab the bullet, flicking the forehead's target so onlookers think he's been shot and go back to her initial position with none the wiser. However her speed fails when the plot demands she isn't fast enough.

* Combined with a TravelMontage in ''Film/TheMuppets''' "Travel by Map" sequence.

* In Literature/JourneyToTheWest the initial trip from China to India takes over a decade, the return, about a week.

* Franchise/TheFlash is fast, but just how fast seems to depend on the situation he's facing. Sometimes, he clearly moves faster than light and there are only negative effects of high speeds (sonic boom, becoming super massive) when he wants them. In one infamous case, he evacuated the entire population of a city to save them from a nuclear bomb... ''after the bomb had detonated'', carrying half a million people to safety 35 miles away, one at a time, in the span of 0.00001 microseconds. He can also tap into a cosmic force called the Speed Force that allows him to control the physics of movement at will. Fine, but this [[FridgeLogic begs the question]] of why he has any trouble handling normal-speed foes, though. Or for that matter, how he has any trouble handing ''anything'' short of reality-warpers.

* ''WesternAnimation/Ben10'': The length of time it takes the Omnitrix to time out varies to fit the episode's plot, as does the length of time it's bleeping to signal a time-out before it changes Ben back. ''WesternAnimation/Ben10Omniverse'' justifies this via Azmuth explaining that when Baden slams down on the thing, he's accidentally messing with the timer.

* ''WesternAnimation/Ben10'': The length of time it takes the Omnitrix to time out varies to fit the episode's plot, as does the length of time it's bleeping to signal a time-out before it changes Ben back.

* ''Film/GodzillaKingOfTheMonsters2019'': When we see the [[Characters/MonsterVerseKaiju various Titans]] awaken, their locations are given; with Methuselah in Munich, Scylla in Arizona, Behemoth in Rio de Janeiro, and a new female [=MUTO=], which WordOfGod states was underneath Hoboken. Despite originating thousands of miles apart, [[spoiler:they all make it to Boston at the exact same time.]]

* ''ComicBook/YTheLastMan'' apparently takes place in real time... even so the fact that it takes two years to get from one coast of the US to the other, even in a somewhat post-apocalypse landscape, considering that trains and cars are still running, and the friggin' ''Oregon Trail'' was consistently done in 6 months, seems like their traveling speed just follows the month to month plot.
* In ''ComicBook/AllStarBatmanAndRobinTheBoyWonder,'' an ''incredible'' amount of other things happen in the time it takes "[[WebVideo/AtopTheFourthWall Batman/Crazy Steve]]" to get [[MemeticMutation Dick Grayson, Age 12]] to the Batcave, to the point that it apparently took ''days'' for the Batmobile to cross town. It doesn't help that Creator/FrankMiller is forever forgetting how long one event or another was supposed to take, so something said to have taken weeks will occur at the same time as something said to have taken minutes - [[Franchise/{{Superman}} Clark Kent]] even has a milk carton with Dick's picture during a flashback to "fifteen hours ago" during the same drive (in other words, ''before'' Dick was kidnapped by Crazy Steve.) Website/IMockery theorized that the milk carton was a magical prescient carton of milk.

** The TARDIS always arrives at the exact right time for the Doctor to become embroiled in the plot of the week.
--->'''[[http://docohobigfinish.blogspot.com/2013/08/revenge-of-cybermen-written-by-gerry.html Doc Oho]]''': The Cybermen advance so slowly in their decrepit old banger of a spaceship that the Doctor should have tied them up in a bow and packed them off before they even arrive. Most alarmingly of all, as soon as the ship is docked he suddenly rushes off screaming ‘We’ve got to stop them!’ Does he just enjoy doing everything in a last minute rush? Is that how he [[MonsterProtectionRacket made his name for himself?]] By putting everybody in danger when he could have saved the day before anxiety sets in?
*** Usually justified in that the TARDIS is sentient and almost certainly doing this on purpose. This is made explicit in "[[Recap/DoctorWhoS32E4TheDoctorsWife The Doctor's Wife]]":