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Everything is right with the world! The birds are singing, the zeppelins are zoomin', and Adolf Hitler has finally defeated the last pockets of resistance in Australia.
...wait, what?!
It seems that the history we, the viewers on Earth 616, have grown familiar with is slightly... or hugely different. It can be an Alternate History where the Nazis won WWII, or even a complete reversal Mirror Universe where the characters we know and love have changed into Jerk Asses.
Rest assured though! Like a stretched rubber band, history may bend but will always spring back to its original form, and the more radical the change the nastier the Snap Back will be.
Our heroes in this strange and disturbing timeline will likewise undo it with Time Travel and reset it back into our history with a hearty "twang"! (Watch your fingers, and make sure you aim at the butterfly).
Sometimes, the resident Future Alternate Badass of said timeline will come back if the alternate timeline threatens to become dominant again. Don't expect them to stick around, though.
If history can't be brought back to its original form without some major differences, it's a Close Enough Timeline — like when Alice escapes death, but our heroes make sure she gets run over by a truck a few minutes later anyway. If Alice's tomb is instead filled by Bob just to preserve the timeline, it's Tricked Out Time.
Examples:
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Comic Books
- Neil Gaiman's Marvel 1602, in which the heroes and villains of the Marvel Comics Universe begin to appear 400 years early, qualifies, although it manages to avert the typical ending a bit: things are altered so that events are put on track to occur at their proper time, but the 1602 universe survives in a pocket universe.
- Which is pretty much how this kind of thing tends to work with Marvel. They have to populate the multi-verse somehow!
- Usually averted over at DC Comics, where it seems every little time-ripple gives Hawkman and Wonder Girl new origins.
Literature
- K.A. Applegate's Animorphs did this a couple times. Elfangor's Secret opens with a normal day for our heroes: this great new game called Pong just came out, the extermination of the population of South America is going nicely, and even the slaves seem to be having a good time... wait, what?! (Since they don't have Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory until the Sufficiently Advanced Alien steps in, the first couple of lines on this page are pretty much exactly how it goes.)
- And that's not even getting into the fact that one of the characters has been sent off for "reeducation" and there's someone else in that character's place.
- Isaac Asimov's The End of Eternity. The title agency constantly changes the timelines, but in a few thousand years, the change inevitably smooths out. The only exception is the creation of the Eternity itself, which is created through a Stable Time Loop.
- In Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency by Douglas Adams, Samuel Taylor Coleridge finished writing "Kubla Khan" and nobody's ever heard of Johann Sebastian Bach's music. It turns out that the music was obtained by the time-traveling main characters from an alien spaceship and given to Bach.
- Coleridge had to be interrupted (by a time traveler) because the last part of his poem would have started a chain of events leading to the retroactive destruction of the world. The Bach thing, though, was just because the traveler liked the music he heard and wanted to save it before destroying the ship.
- Variation: The Thursday Next books are set in an alternative history where, amongst other things, the novel Jane Eyre initially has a different ending from the one in 'our' world. However, due to the exploits of the heroine and the events of the final climax taking place within the novel's original manuscript, the ending gets changed to the ending it does have in our world - something which everyone greatly approves of, since in that history the novel's 'original' ending was widely accepted to be depressing and dramatically unsatisfying.
- For added Mind Screw, the fifth book, First Amongst Sequels does the same thing with the Thursday Next books.
- This is also played with regarding the "real world" history. Thursday's father, a rogue Time Police officer, spends much of the first four books bouncing around history and setting events right, and events after his intervention more closely resemble Real Life history. However, eventually time travel itself is retroactively never invented, and that still leaves the Thursday Next world with a past, present, and future wildly different from our own.
- James P. Hogan's The Proteus Operation. Some 21st century aristocrats from a peaceful world where World War II never happened go back to the 1920s and give Those Wacky Nazis (who faded to obscurity after the Beer Hall Putsch) funding and technology with the intent of moving in and taking over after Hitler conquers the world for them. He takes what they offer, gives them the finger, and proceeds to take over just about the entire planet. An American team from that world's 1980s are able to go back to 1939 and sabotage the Nazis' time gate, and the uptime information they bring back is used by the Allied leaders to launch Operation Overlord and create our world.
- Ward Moore's novel Bring The Jubilee begins in a timeline where the Confederacy won the American Civil War; the main character goes back in time to observe Gettysburg and accidentally changes history to our version.
- History in the Discworld is described as being rather stubborn, and hence, self-correcting. This is a large plot point in Mort, and later gets explained as the province of the History Monks and expanded in Thief of Time and Night Watch.
- Mathematicians in Love by Rudy Rucker (though it's always obvious that the starting world isn't our own; e.g., the university across the bay from San Francisco with all the hippies is called Humelocke, not Berkeley).
- The short story "Wikihistory"
 by Desmond Warzel reveals that history is vulnerable to the whims of, of all things, an amateur time traveling society embroiled in a massive, history-changing Edit War.
- Lawrence Watt Evans' short story "One-Shot" has a guy go back in time to save Kennedy from being killed by a love-sick Marilyn Monroe. He drugs her and makes it look like a suicide. The Secret Service agent he confesses and proves his story to says he'll tell JFK about it after he gets back from Dallas.
- Philip Roth's "The Plot Against America" features a timeline in which Lindbergh becomes President in 1936, leading to a pro-Nazi America which oppresses Jews. However, by about 1946, world and US history alike are inexplicably back to the ones we know.
Live Action TV
Video Games
- One of the Guilty Gear drama CDs takes place before the first game, but early on, one of the major characters from the games, Ky Kiske, gets killed. Cue a darker alternate universe, during which another character goes back in time to save Ky ...
- The whole premise of Super Robot Wars Alpha Gaiden is this. The heroes get thrown into the distant future, while in the present their absence causes The End of the World as We Know It, meaning the world they land in is After the End. After they return to their time and prevent that disaster, the Bad Future continues to exist as an alternate timeline.
- The Legacy of Kain games involve huge amounts of very confusing time travel, where various past events get changed by the main characters (whether deliberately or not). It is mentioned that after minor changes, history can shift a little bit to accommodate the change, and will then try to continue on approximately the same path. However, a warning is given that since history tries make changes along the path of least resistance, if the change is too great the people causing the change could be "expelled" from the timeline. What exactly this means is never explained, though since the hellish Eternal Prison level in Blood Omen 2 was said to be for people who had transgressed the laws of nature in some unspecified way, it is possible that that is the fate of those who meddle with the timestream too much.
- Of course, for all the "defiance of fate" that was the theme of the series - up to the final (released) game being called "Legacy of Kain: Defiance", it turns out to have been one MASSIVE, unbelievably convoluted, Stable Time Loop. Or maybe, Stable Time Cloverleaf Intersection. It turns out the only one who COULD have truly defied his fate was Raziel, but he just blindly went along with what was going on around him, right up until he almost literally thrust himself upon the Soul Reaper blade, ensuring that everything happened as it should have. Or, did it? The end of the game is a semi-cliffhanger, implying that now KAIN has been given the opportunity to change his destiny.
Web Comics
- Oddball variation: In Irregular Webcomic!, the Indiana Jones parody strips feature Hitler as a Brain in a Jar - to circumvent the fact that the LEGO Group doesn't produce Hitler figures. This is later explained as the result of a change from yet another alternate history where Hitler died in the Reichstag fire. He was brought back in the jar by Adam Savage of the MythBusters as part of Chess with Death (specifically, a bet that Adam couldn't confirm the myth that Hitler's brain was saved in a jar... hey.)
Western Animation
- Dog City: Baron goes back to the time the pilgrims purchased the new world from the natives and made a better offer: squeak toys. This created a Bad Future where he rules. Somehow, Ace and Eddie had Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory and, after visiting a timeline where Eddie ruled, went back to the past and made an even better offer: a technologically advanced (even for present time standards) fire hydrant the heroes took from the Eddie-ruled timeline.
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