Peggy Sue - Television Tropes & Idioms

Not to be confused with Mary Sue, a Peggy Sue fic gives a character, usually at the end of a story or series, the chance to go back and relive his life with the knowledge he gained from living through his story the first time. This sometimes uses a Death Fic-type setup as a starting point, where one of the things the character intends to do with his knowledge is prevent the death of a loved one.

It can turn out that they're perpetuating a time loop. Or, less commonly, breaking it.

In some hands, this can turn into a Fix Fic.

While this might seem as a recipe for an overly powerful character, the Peggy Sue is not without its risks. Often the only way they made it through the first time was because of fate or luck giving them Plot Armor, a luxury that they will be unlikely to have a second time around, though they can try for Tricked Out Time. They may also have to deal with a weaker and less experienced body, mental baggage, gaps in their knowledge regarding past events, negative reactions by anyone who realizes that they know things they shouldn't, or worst of all, that another, less friendly, individual has also pulled the same stunt.

Within anime fanfiction, it's not uncommon for the means of time travel to be a wish granted during a brief (or not-so-brief) crossover with Ah My Goddess.

The trope name comes from the 1986 film Peggy Sue Got Married starring Kathleen Turner and Nicholas Cage, in which Turner's character was able to relive her high school days.

Compare Groundhog Day Loop, in which the Mental Time Travel is a repeating short-term loop. New Game Plus is when you do this in a videogame.

Examples

Buffy The Vampire Slayer and Angel

The Journeyverse turns Xander into a massive Marty Stu, then gives him a Peggy Sue and carries Faith, Dawn, and Giles along for the ride. It is also a Mega Crossover.
Here is Gone gives Spike (former Big Bad) a Peggy Sue after he completes his Heel Face Turn and acquires his soul.
Cordelia's Wish sends Cordelia back so she can join the Scooby Gang from day one... Her efforts to turn it into a Fix Fic go rather disastrously wrong, however.
M. McGregor's I Am What I Am sends the soul of a dying 97-year-old Xander back in time to take over his own body during That Halloween Episode. He takes a rather more direct approach than in most examples of the trope.
Yahtzee (no, not that one) has a fic called "Two Steps Back" gives this idea an interesting twist. After his final battle, Angel is given a device that can send him backwards through his life, a little farther each time; he can use it as many times as he wants, but he can't go forward again. Angel thinks he'll only need one jump to fix everything, but he soon learns how easily "knowing then what you know now" can lead to disaster...

Discworld

In a rare canon example, the entirety of the novel Night Watch could be considered to fall under this trope.
- Although Night Watch slightly differs from most examples of the trope in that Vimes takes the place of his own mentor 30 years in the past (before returning to the present), rather than reliving his own life, and that he's more or less trying to make things happen the same way he remembers.
In Going Postal the Patrician tells Moist a parable about how occasionally, when someone has truly screwed their life up beyond repair, an Angel will appear to them and offer to take them back to the point where it all went wrong so they can try one more time. At that point this is just Vetinari trying to make a point in his usual fashion, but then at the end of the book Moist once again finds himself at a metaphorical fork in the road, and... (Around the middle of the book Moist also winds up using it as a rhetorical device to convince someone to do what he wants, or at least confuse them sufficiently to keep listening.)

Harry Potter

Nightmares of Future Past is probably the best of this sort. Although well-written, Harry's future knowledge and skills make him extremely powerful, extremely quickly.
- To be fair, though, Harry's foreknowledge creates as many problems as it solves, and arguably becomes all but moot as the story progresses. As for his becoming extremely powerful, there is an explanation for it, and it doesn't seem to come into play very much.
Backward With Purpose: Always and Always complicates the premise in three ways: 1) Harry, Ron, and Ginny go back, 2) The Lost Prophecy has changed as well, bringing For Want Of A Nail to unpredictable levels, and 3) the author seems to have had the whole fic planned out before posting the first chapter.
- And then its sequel, The Book of Albus has Albus Severus Potter travel back in time and he indirectly interacts with his own parents when they traveled back in Always and Always. Again, signs that the author has everything planned out.
Back Again, Harry? has Harry travel back to his first year due to certain events in the seventh book. As such, he's an entirely fallible Harry trying to change things for the better on his own.
Wastelands of Time is only the most recent in a long series of Harry failing to save the world. And trying his hardest anyway.
Furious Angels features Ginny Weasley, rather than Harry Potter, returning to the past. The return is incomplete, however, so she doesn't quite remember details from the future very often, or very completely, and this causes problems.

Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman

The questionably titled but quite nicely written Begin the Begin by Aromassa has the post-finale, married Lois and Clark accidentally going all the way back the the Pilot and their first meeting, and rebuilding the events of the show from there.
Zoomway's Kerth-nominated The Persistence of Memory has more intentional bits of time-travel, with the protagonists going back to revisit and correct some of the key moments in their relationship

Naruto

For the Love of My Friends sends Naruto back to the day before graduation from Ninja Academy.
Sasuke gets sent back (as an adult) in Two Steps Back, and adopts Naruto in order to give him a better childhood this time.
This Time Around sends both Naruto and Sasuke back to save everything.
Mixed With the Lightning of Slaughter beautifully subverts this by sending Sasuke back (from presumably some point near the end of the series)...but he may be going insane from the mind-breaking stress of involuntary time-travel.
Reload Also has Naruto and Sasuke doing the time warp again. Only it's been thousands of times, and all they want to do this time around is drink, party, and kill that damn cat.
Don't know why there aren't a hundred examples just in this category, considering the size of the Naruto fandom in ffnet alone, but here's an up-and-comer for ya. A Second Chance For a Frozen Heart, definitely fits into both Death Fic and Fix Fic, though the death was canon. And if you can't figure out who just from the title, you don't read Naruto. Summary: Given a second chance to save people precious to him Naruto accepts and bonds with the Kyuubi. Now back at the age of Nine he gets ready to save a certain swordsman and his pupil. Naru Xfem Hauku
A Chance At The Road Not Taken
Here's a very interesting take on it. Afterthoughts Summary: Time-travel, that is not really time-travel. Naruto makes his way from his first day as a genin, with a 'feel' about how he should do things as a shinobi, and dreams about what 'a' future holds.
- From the looks of it, it really is a time-travel fic, and not one where Naruto suddenly gets precognitive powers. This is evidenced when Jiraiya sends word to the Sandaime in ch. 2 (I think) and says Naruto may be acting strangely.

Neon Genesis Evangelion

Done to death in the Evangelion fandom, to the point where it's become an Epileptic Tree for the Rebuild of Evangelion movies.
The most notable, though the least acessible, example is the Evangelion doujinshi Re-Take, which shows much of the later half of the series as Shinji's dream. Of course this doujin, despite the hentai, is also Original Flavour for Eva, so things go horribly wrong, such as Asuka dying in the second volume after being unable to sync with her Eva anymore and it being forced to self destruct for example.
- This gets subverted entirely in Volume 3, when it turns out it's not really a Peggy Sue, but the original Shinji's consciousness sort-of possessing his analogue's body in an Alternate Universe. In the end, Shinji changes that parallel universe for the better, gets his taste of happiness, but recognizes he can't take back what he messed up the first time, and winds up back on the beach from EoE with Asuka, wiser, happier, and better-adjusted, but with nothing in the past really changed. Oh, and the Shinji he possessed and the local Asuka analogue forget everything that happened during the comic. At least they get to work out their issues in peace.
To counterpoint the above, Crazy-88's Once More With Feeling has up to the current point of the story, generally positive results of Shinji going back in time. This can be explained by him having gone back to before stuff began going downhill fast, and having a spine shoved in him during the time travel. Still, it's a good story so far.
Yet another straight up and well written example is Higher Learning by Strike Fiss, although the Peggy Sue is not immediately apparent.
- Your Mileage May Vary; this troper saw it coming from the first moment Kaworu Miyazaki was introduced, though he admits he didn't have the divine foresight necessary to guess that he was Asuka and Shinji's post-3I grandson. I'd gotten as far as son by about the tenth chapter of his appearance, but Strike Fiss' brilliant explanation of everything just blew me out of the water.
The 2nd Try by Jimmy Wolk is something of a subversion; Shinji and Asuka travel back in time, but they leave their daughter behind. Emotional and well written.
- This Troper has a warning: the last few chapters are somehow very... dusty; be careful while reading them, or you might get something in your eyes.
Yet another one (by a troper!): Taking Sights has Gendo go back instead of Shinji. Also a subversion of the common Fix Fic aspects of this genre.
Better Luck Next Time subverts this trope so hard, it hits Dark Fic territory.

Ranma 1/2

Ringmaster's The Demon's Contract.
Lord Archive's Second Chances features an emotionally-shredded Akane going back in time via a wish from Urd to both prevent Ranma's eventual death and make their lives together happier.
Actor in the Mirror is a well-written straight example that is quite enjoyable.
Parodied in the short story Deja Vu All Over Again by Scott Jamison, wherein Akane is given a magical amulet which will take her back to the day she met Ranma so she can make sure their relationship gets off on the right foot — only to discover that a similar amulet has been given to every other girl chasing him as well when they all show up within minutes of each other.
Ranma, the Second Time Around, which is set to break one million goddamned words.
Toyed with in The Bet: Study in Scarlet, where Akane found a way back to the day Ranma arrived after an ill-worded wish dropped her in a far-future era long after Ranma's bloodline died out, and she spent several centuries getting back (in the process becoming a legendary and universally-feared villain in that era). Problem is she seems to have forgotten a lot about human society (one does not use pain-inflicting pressure points to impress a prospective mate, even if putting them through a wall would somehow slide).

Videogames

A rare non-fic example occurs in the game Final Fight One for Game Boy Advance. It's possible to unlock Alpha Guy and Alpha Cody (i.e. Guy and Cody as they appear in the Street Fighter Alpha series) as secret characters in the game, and when playing as them, their dialog shows that the whole experience is a Peggy Sue moment for them, though there isn't really a whole lot to change.
- Alpha Cody treats this pretty seriously, since he used to be a hero. Alpha Guy, however, lampshades and mocks his trip down memory lane. It's his new shoes!
A rather strange example occurs in the Sonic The Hedgehog fanfics (link unavailable because apparently they're on an "adult" site) A Rose And A Thorn 3 and A Rose And A Thorn 4. The OC 'Project: Mirage' loses everything — including her lover Espio and her vision — at the end of ARAAT3, and then with Sonic's help uses the Time Stones to try and re-write history in ARAAT4. She — and the reader — learn many strange things about the events on the ARK, including the possibility that she is perpetuating a time loop that may have been going round for centuries, and the uncertainty of whether Espio reminded her of a former love on ARK — known as Midnight — or that Midnight reminded her of Espio. Blast to the Past has Silver, Blaze and Princess Elise thrown back in time in an Archie/Fleetway mixed Mobius, when Sonic and Eggman were apparently friends. Knowing that the Metarex, the antagonists of the fic, were attempting to alter the timeline to take over Mobius and the universe, Elise ensures that the plot doesn't come to fruition. However... in doing so, it turns out that Princess Elise HERSELF was the one responsible for turning Eggman evil, very much the same way Sonic was responsible in the Fleetway comic.
The good ending of Shadow Hearts Covenant appears to provide Yuri with a Peggy Sue, placing him back at the beginning of the first game with, presumably, a chance to achieve that game's good ending instead of its canon bad ending.
This is pretty much the point of the interactive fiction game Tapestry. A man who made some regrettable choices in his life gets to relive the three points where he felt he went most wrong. The three paths available in the game each take a different approach to the Peggy Sue — he can do it the same and live with his guilt, change what happened, or do it the same but try to understand what happened better. There's no correct ending. If he changes what he does, he feels better about his life, but the new choices cause just as much harm. If he reevaluates his life, he sees that his original decisions weren't as horrible as he believed them to be. Choosing guilt and self-hatred does seem to be the one bad ending, however.
The GBA game Astro Boy: Omega Factor has this, combining the trope with New Game Plus. After what looks like a massive, massive Downer Ending in which the world is nearly ruined and Astro dies. The Phoenix revives Astro sending him back to the start of the game. You then need to play through the stages again, Time Travel all around, in order to find the cause of the tragedies and fix everything. In a Running Gag, Astro makes no attempt to hide his knowledge of the future and thoroughly confuses everyone he meets by knowing what they're going to say before they say it.
Prince Of Persia: The Sands of Time allows the player to do this constantly, with a special dagger that can turn back time. Only for a few seconds mind you, but it allows the player to correct mistakes they made during the combat and free running sequences. The very end of the game is a straight example, with the twist that this unleashes the Dahaka.
There's this excellent sequel to The Legend Of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, where Link travels to another world that's under the spell of an imp wearing an evil mask, and where he constantly has to turn back time in order to... Wait a minute...Didn't he do this already?!
As noted above, any New Game Plus is rather like a Peggy Sue story. You get to start your adventure over, but with all the equipment and skills you've gained along the way. This usually makes a huge difference at first and then less and less as the game goes on.
The Persona4 fic Fortune's Revolver is an interesting take on this. In it the main character goes back in time to the start of the game after one of the Downer Endings. However he's unable to come up with a way to save the Sacrificial Lamb character at the start without making himself look suspicious and thus fails to save her. He also opts to let a lot of things play their course since he knows it will work out in the end and is afraid trying to change it will make things worse. He does however cause a few minor changes, such as preventing a friend from doing something stupid to get the police off their case, use his knowledge of the future to start of on better terms with his uncle, and subtly give a few hints to cause his two friends to admit their feelings and become a couple almost right away rather than go on with the Ship Tease for months on end.

Wicked

Meltalviel's For Good is a story which starts off a year after Wicked ends and throws Glinda into the body of herself (Galinda) shortly before "Dear Old Shiz." Thrown for a twist in that she immediately decides to change things for good and that she's not the only one finding herself back at Shiz.

Film

Lola Rennt has elements of this: the first time she runs through the day, she can't use a gun and doesn't know where the safety catch is. The second time, she flicks it off with practiced precision.
- Oddly for this sort of plot, it may extend to other characters. The security guard at the bank seems aware of the loop by the third iteration.
In Stargate Continuum, Ba'al uses time travel to go back seventy years and make a huge number of changes, resulting in him becoming the leader of all the Goa'uld, with almost the entire galaxy enslaved, making him a Dangerously Genre Savvy villain
The Butterfly Effect is a variation on the trope, which also deconstructs the hell out of the concept.
Next is a film where a character effectively has this as a power.
- I thought that was Save Scumming?

Sailor Moon

The fight against Galaxia doesn't go well, so Usagi uses the Ginzuisho to go back in time... and ends up a bit farther back then expected in Third Time's The Charm
- Technically, something similar happened in the manga canon.
  - Actually, the fic does acknowledge this. It's a sort of "back again — again" setup.

Clannad

Vive, Vale, Gaude has Ryou Fujibayashi encounter a distraught Tomoya in the hospital where she works. She discovers that he lost everything: Nagisa and Ushio. She encounters a wish shop (which may be a CLAMP reference) and she is then sent back in time, where she attempts to ensure things flow smoothly so that they might be able to avoid that fate.

Webcomics

In Wapsi Square, Jin has already gone through the entire plot and failed thousands of times.
Another non-fanfic example: In Sluggy Freelance, in the Harry Potter And The Prisoner Of Azkaban parody "Torg Potter and the President from Arkansas", the Time Turner from the original is tweaked so that it rewinds the users in time, leaving them but no-one else with memories of what happened next. Instead of going back a few hours as the Hermione analogue intends, Torg uses it to return all the way to the beginning of the story, stomps on the bad guy in his animal form, and goes home, neatly avoiding any possible loose ends and negating the need for him to be involved in the affairs of that annoying school.

Live Action TV

Being Erica: it's the entire premise of the entire show.
There was a show in the early-to-mid-'00's whose name escapes me right now about flawed people who'd messed up their lives and died miserably being given a "reprieve" by a heavenly judge and who were sent back to Earth along with a spiritual guide to the most pivotal time in their lives, with three days to change the course of events for the better. They went back with their contemporary bodies, though (like the Discworld example above), and spoke to their own past selves often.
- The title was Twice in a Lifetime, and it was another Canadian show.

Mega Man

Mandi Paugh's Mega Man Fan Fic Powered Down has a variation of this. Mega Man switches bodies with his counterpart from the PSP remake of the first game, Mega Man Powered Up, eventually attempting to use his knowledge to prevent Mega Man 2 from ever happening. Unlike other Peggy Sue fics, it doesn't affect his own timeline, but he's still using knowledge of his own future to Set Right What Once Went Wrong.

The Once And Future King/Disney Animated Canon

4chan's /co/ has a copypasta fic involving King Arthur getting a chance to start over. He asks Merlin to change the female squirrel who pursued him in one sequence of Disney's The Sword In The Stone into a human to be his friend and companion (and implicitly his wife rather than Guinevere).