Time-Traveling Jerkass

One candyass' trash is a manly man's treasure.

Timmy: Hey, Beethoven, you wanna hear music from the future? [plays dubstep]
Beethoven: Oh my God, that shitty music made me go deaf!

— Smosh, "22 CRAZY VINES (That Don't Exist)"

Time Travel can be pretty scary, especially if you don't know the rules. Whether one has access to a Time Machine or someone who can naturally travel through time, the personal stakes are about as high as they can get, with erasure from existence being the grand prize. No matter the method of transport, it behooves all time travelers to be as careful as humanly possible to avoid irreparable damage to both personal history and the time-stream at large.

Too bad the Time-Traveling Jerkass didn't get the memo.

The lowest form of a Conqueror from the Future, the pettiest kind of Time Master, a Non-Linear Character with teeth, the TTJ's main M.O. is just to enjoy the ride regardless of what it might do to the past, present, or future. If time is totally flexible, it means any form of bad behavior can be erased, which means someone with the means to traverse time can indulge themselves to the fullest without ever having to face up to anything. Why worry about tomorrow when you can live for today every day?

If the traveler in question doesn't care for the usual supervillain accoutrements, this usually means just messing with people without their knowledge or using their power to relive the best moments in history over and over. But it can get pretty hairy if things are pushed to a breaking point, especially if overuse of time travel can result in a Time Crash.

Will usually result in the traveler trying to Make Wrong What Once Went Right, or in some other cases the generic Time-Freeze Trolling Spree. Will definitely run afoul of the Time Police if they haven't Ret Goned them yet. Will probably not work in a setting where You Already Changed the Past. See also Invisible Jerkass, another supernatural ability that is often misused to be an asshole.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Dragon Ball Z: Cell is from an Alternate Timeline where Trunks destroyed Androids 17 and 18, robbing him of the two beings he needed to absorb in order to achieve his perfect form. After killing the Trunks of his timeline, Cell uses his time machine to travel to the main timeline in order to absorb 17 and 18. After he does so, he challenges all fighters to a tournament with the threat to kill all life on Earth if he wins.

Comic Books

• In The Authority, after the Renegade Doctor discovers that his new powers include time travel, he goes back in time and molests the Engineer when she was a teenager.
• Kang The Conqueror from The Avengers also counts: a well-off guy from a utopian future who was so bored from everything being so peachy, he went back in time to live out the warrior fantasies he developed looking through events of the past. As such, he went back to Ancient Egypt with futuristic tech to rule as a brutal Pharaoh named Rama-Tut, which not only gave birth to the evil mutant Apocalypse but started events that would lead him to continuously antagonize the heroes of the 21st century. At least some versions of Kang do mellow out and become Immortus, but he's not above ruining lives or just erasing entire universes for the greater good.
• Booster Gold: Rip Hunter, leader of the Time Masters. He's notionally good but tends to manipulate Booster in the name of protecting the timeline. Come his return from being erased, he's gotten worse. Flashpoint Beyond has Batman call him a smug, unlikable jerkwad who lords his future knowledge over people in the most condescending fashion possible.
  • However, Rip's as nothing to his kid sidekick, Corky Baxter, who is the sort of smug obnoxious only a pre-teen kid can be.
• Eobard Thawne, AKA Reverse Flash, from The Flash. He's constantly travelled to the Flash's childhood to do everything short of killing him to ruin his life (because actually killing him would cause a paradox). To wit:
  • He murdered Barry's mother and framed his father for the deed.
  • He retgonned Barry's best friend.
  • He's even done petty stuff like push him down the stairs or kept him from catching a baseball. And so on.
• Per Degaton, from Justice Society of America, is an example. Frustrated for not being able to harm the JSA chronologically in their last encounter, Degaton uses his time-traveling abilities to "watch life hurting [his enemies]." He spends his next appearances confronting JSA members just to tell them when they'll die. For example, he provides the revelation of the gruesome punishment that Atom Smasher will suffer at the hands of the Spectre and then appears as the punishment happens just to say "I told you so!"
• In Seven Soldiers, the Sheeda are an entire race of fairy-like bastards from the far future who travel through time and pillage human civilization for raw materials to maintain their crumbling civilization. And then there's Melmoth, their former king, who went back in time to the days of the Roanoke colony and impregnated all of its female inhabitants.

Fan Works

• Weight Off Your Shoulder: When Marinette contemplates giving up her Guardianship and passing on the Earrings to a successor, Bunnyx arrives to convince her that she's making a mistake. Instead of reassuring her that she's better than she realizes, however, she orders her to "suck it up". Then she accidentally reveals that in the future, Hawk Moth will get his hands on the Miracle Box. Naturally, Marinette and the kwamis are horrified, but Bunnyx casually dismisses this as "just how things have to happen", showing No Sympathy for anyone who will suffer at the villain's hands. When Marinette decides to Screw Destiny, creating a better timeline, Bunnyx is hellbent on "fixing" everything — and it's eventually revealed that she's been abusing her powers for ages, trying to force LadyNoir to happen despite the relationship always ending in tragedy.

Film — Live-Action

• Back to the Future Part II: 2015 Biff takes a sports almanac detailing stats for the latter half of the 20th century back to 1955 and gives it to his past self with the idea that he can get rich and have everything he wants. This results in "Hell Valley"^note Named from the defaced "Welcome to the City of Hill Valley" sign with an E crudely graffitied over the I, a horrific dystopia where Biff murdered George; married Lorraine, who can't get away from him thanks to the power he has; and is insanely wealthy corrupting Hill Valley into a Wretched Hive. When Marty tries to nab the almanac, he discovers that 2015 Biff also warned his past self about the possibility of either Marty or Doc coming to him one day asking when he got that almanac and to kill them should that happen. Marty barely escapes with his life. Fortunately, Word of God claims he gets shot and killed by Lorraine in the '90s.
• Groundhog Day: Phil Connors is the Trope Codifier for the "looping day" variant. He gets pretty nasty when he realizes he can do whatever he wants and no one will remember it, leading to (in no particular order) rudeness, assault and battery, robbery, poor table manners, suicide, and vehicular mayhem with a groundhog. Learning to make the most of his imprisonment is what leads him to become a better person by making the most of the loop as it occurs. Even so, his dickishness is Played for Laughs and used more to depict Phil as going through something of a Wish Fulfilment phase — the filmmakers deliberately kept Phil from engaging in truly horrific crimes because it would have made it impossible to redeem him in the audience's eyes.
• This doesn't really occur much for Tree in Happy Death Day as she's too focused on trying to figure out who's trying to kill her so she can escape her "Groundhog Day" Loop (the most she does is stroll around on her college campus buck naked in one loop), but she indulges into it in the sequel Happy Death Day 2U because she's been sent back to the time loop and is incredibly frustrated, acting even more dickish than usual to those she passes by when she realizes she back into it. Later on, she realizes this is a slightly alternate universe where Carter, her boyfriend in her own universe, is hooked up with Alpha Bitch Danielle; combine this with her decision to commit suicide rather than wait for the killer to get her means in one loop she goes skydiving without a parachute — or any clothes at all besides underwear — and go splat right in front of them while they're making out while Flipping the Bird.
• Repeaters: Michael. Once he realizes he's trapped in a time loop, he more or less goes berserk, indulging in armed robbery, murder, rape, and several other crimes before committing suicide once the loop ends. Too bad he's still trapped in another one.
• Retroactive: A scientist invents a time machine that traps Karen in a twenty-minute time loop trying to stop a dangerous criminal, Frank, from wreaking havoc. When Frank discovers the time machine in the next-to-last loop, he makes it clear he's going to use the machine to kill Karen as many times as possible, at least until he gets bored of her death rattles.
• The Time Bandits are greedy, thievish dwarves that got hold of the Supreme Being's map of the universe. With this guide, the Bandits time-hop through history to plunder the riches of King Agamemnon and Napoleon Bonaparte, among others.
• The short film Two Distant Strangers revolves around an African-American man named Carter trying to get out of a "Groundhog Day" Loop in which he is repeatedly murdered by a violence-prone cop named Officer Merk. The short's final twist is The Reveal that Merk also has Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory of the loop and is exploiting it to kill Carter over and over for kicks.

Literature

• The short story "Let's Go to Golgotha" by Garry Kilworth has an inadvertent version: the protagonist is a time-travelling tourist who has gone back in time to witness the Crucifixion who gets a Heel Realization as he looks at the rest of the crowd and figures out that they are all also time-travellers thinking they are the only ones of such a kind in said crowd and thus all of the people who condemned Jesus to die are just going through the motions thinking it's correct because that's what history said.
• In the short story "The Men Who Murdered Mohammed" by Alfred Bester, a Mad Scientist discovers his wife cheating on him. Instead of just murdering the other man, he decides to completely erase him from existence by killing his grandparents while they were children, but when he returns to the present the other man still exists. The scientist proceeds to murder people of greater and greater historical significance in the past in order to change history, but it remains unchanged. The final result of all this meddling with the past is to erase himself from history.
• Discussed in One Hundred Years Ahead when Yulia imagines a criminal travelling to the near future to commit their crimes and then creating the perfect and completely genuine alibi for themselves by going to a different city for the time when their past self is at the crime scene.
  • Downplayed with the book's actual plot: Rat and Jolly U do commit a lot of petty crimes and try to execute their Evil Plan while being in the past. However, the time travel itself was a spontaneous decision for them rather than a part of said plan: they were chasing after Alice and simply went after her when she rushed to the past.
• The Shining Girls is about a Serial Killer that either murders or attempts to murder a lot of women across human history, inspired by their "shine". He gets away with it due to his powers until one of his victims survives.
• The Star Diaries: In "The Twentieth Voyage", time travelers involved in the project of Optimization of Historical Processes in the 27th century are supposed to Set Right What Once Went Wrong, while in reality, many of them use time travel just to act on their rivalries with their own colleagues or to commit crimes they wouldn't get away with in their own time. For example, the fall of the Aztec Empire at the hands of the Spanish conquistadores turns out to be the result of project supervisors P. Latton and Harry S. Totel trying to spite and discredit each other.
• A short story by George R. R. Martin titled "Unsound Variations" revolves around one man inviting some former college buddies of his to dinner and using the opportunity to gloat that he invented a machine that allowed Mental Time Travel to his younger self, which he then used to sabotage their lives in revenge for a bunch of petty slights. This ends up backfiring on him big time because, when he described the destinies that he prevented them from having, instead of finally shattering whatever little hope they still held, it reignited now that they knew what they could have achieved if some petty little idiot hadn't become obsessed with revenge over stupid things like getting lesser grades than them. The Big Bad ends up accidentally killing himself by using his machine one time too many to go back and get revenge for being mocked. Well, it looks like that to the protagonists and makes no difference to them, because of the way time travel works. Every time he travels back into the past, the villain's current body dies and he creates a new timeline. It is implied that this was just his latest and most successful "revenge timeline" and he still failed.
• A 1953 short story by Jack Lewis, Who's Cribbing?, revolves around a science fiction author who has his career destroyed by a man who created a method to watch the future and steals all of the protagonist's stories decades before they were published.

Live-Action TV

• Dark (2017): In Season 2, Hannah travels to 1954, where Ulrich has been arrested for being supposedly a child murderer. When she is allowed to visit him, she could have lied to the police in an attempt to free him but chooses not to primarily out of spite, resulting in him being still imprisoned in 1987. Then, while still in 1954, Hannah begins an affair with Egon Tiedemann, a married policeman. She leaves Egon after becoming pregnant by him, and he ends up divorced as his wife finds out about the affair.
• Doctor Who:
  • Time Lords who are not the Doctor often fall into this archetype, starting with the Meddling Monk and his callous disregard for established earth history. Then The War Chief, with his intentions of becoming a Galactic Conqueror. Then The Master, whose motives vary with each regeneration, from lust for power to just wanting to get under the Doctor's skin.
  • When we first meet Captain Jack Harkness, he fits this archetype; A hedonistic rogue time agent who dumped alien tech in the middle of the London blitz in hopes of conning other time agents for money and accidentally caused a Zombie Apocalypse by it.
• Henry Danger: The Time Jerker is a supervillain who uses his time machine to evade capture by going back in time so he can change events to his benefit. However, nothing is stopping his opponents from using the time machine, meaning Henry can go back to the morning of the day he fights the Time Jerker and take advantage of an instance where he monologues to knock him out.
• Lois & Clark: Tempus is a villain from a utopian future that was created by heroism of Clark Kent and Lois Lane. Having grown bored of his timeline, Tempus steals a time machine created by H.G. Wells, with the intention of ruining it by any means necessary, including going back to Smallville when Superman was a baby to assassinate him or brainwash the United States to become President. He also insults Lois about how blind she must be to not notice how obvious Clark and Superman are the same person.
• Red Dwarf: "Out of Time" has the crew meet their future selves after acquiring a time drive. Apparently not only has the future crew decided to commit themselves to a life of luxury, but they've also nonchalantly dined with the worst people in history, including Hitler, Louis the XVI, and the Borgias. It's disgusting enough to the original crew that they tell them to Get Out!, and when the future crew attacks the present crew even Rimmer is willing to fight.
  "Better dead than smeg!"
• One recurring segment of Sorry, I've Got No Head has a downplayed example. Steve owns a time machine, but always uses it to go forward in time and return to the present to spoil stuff for his friend Frank that he wanted to be kept a surprise. While this is certainly mean of him, Steve isn't outright evil; in fact, in one version of the segment, he refuses to let Frank cheat in a game, in a subversion of the joke where Frank actually wants Steve to travel to the future since it would be perfect for helping him win.
• The Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "A Matter of Time" features a time traveler from the future named Rasmussen who wants to observe the Enterprise at a historic mission, but spends most of the trip stealing equipment from the crew, badgering them with annoying questions, and even inappropriately hitting on the ship's doctor. It turns his real mission from the future is a sham; he's actually from the past and he killed the real time traveler before stealing his time machine to use for fun and profit.

Video Games

• The main plot of Criminal Case: Travel in Time is about two rogue time travelers named Ammon Bast and Nefertiti who manipulate events so Ammon can manipulate time to give rise to a tyrannical empire.
• Towards the end of Life Is Strange, Max is accused of this by herself (or rather "one of the Max's you left behind"), in a Nightmare Sequence. She points out that Max has been using her powers to get the upper hand in social situations, manipulate people and avoid the consequences of her actions. She's then interrupted by a manifestation of Chloe, who delivers a counterargument. Whether this is true, or just an overactive guilty conscience is up to the player's interpretation.
• Played with in Undertale: YOU, the player, can become this, due to the normal nature of video games in general. If you're so inclined, you can affect the outcome of the game by just being a jerk to the characters in the game, or you can go on a rampage, and then erase every event that happened up to a certain point just by quitting the game and resetting your progress to that point, or even the very beginning; rewinding time so to speak. This may also be reflected in characters somehow remembering events that technically never happened to them. However, if you keep going too far, and ignore the moral message of the game, it will be SURE to let you know once you've finished said rampage.
• World of Warcraft:
  • Since the Expansion Pack The Burning Crusade, the Infinite Dragonflight tries to mess with several key events of the history of Azeroth and it's up to the players to stop them in the Caverns of time dungeons.
  • Warlords of Draenor sees Garrosh Hellscream, fresh off his defeat at the siege of Ogrimmar in Mists of Pandaria, create an Alternate Timeline Draenor by preventing the Orcish clans from drinking the blood of Mannoroth and bringing them much more evolved war technologies.

Websites

• Features as the winning entry of the classic Cracked photoplasty, If Superheroes Were Assholes. Said entry sees Superman beating up a guy, and then time traveling to the past to watch himself beating up the same guy while munching popcorn.

Web Video

• Jarvis Johnson: Parodied in a sketch that declared Jarvis as the person who sank the Titanic, only to then arrogantly declare he'll never be caught just before climbing into a time machine and becoming a commentary YouTuber. As soon as this information comes to light, Jarvis very quickly and awkwardly ends the video.]
• A recurring character in the Smosh video "22 CRAZY VINES (That Don't Exist)" is Timmy the Time-Traveling Troll. Examples of trolling include making Ludwig van Beethoven go deaf by making him listen to dubstep, making Hitler laugh at Borat and then telling him that he's Jewish, and telling the dinosaurs that they're all going to die from a meteor.
• Unus Annus: In the video "Like It or Not... This is What The New Human Looks Like", Markiplier discusses (and would relish) being this:
  Ethan: Why do you want to control time?
  Mark: 'Cause you can do whatever you want!
  Ethan: Meddling with time has severe consequences, Mark.
  Mark: "Not in multiverse theory! You can do whatever you want! Who's gonna stop you? The Time Police? They don't exist yet; you made sure of that."

Western Animation

• Archie's Weird Mysteries: Vinnie Wells may hold the all-time record for time-traveling jerkassery. A punk who got his hands on a pocket-sized time-travelling machine called the Chrono Field Generator, he starts out by using it to rob the Bank of Riverdale. When his plans are thwarted by Archie, he decides to use the Chrono Field Generator to repeatedly ruin Archie's life, then wipe him from existence, making himself a God-Emperor of Earth in the process. When Archie ruins his plans again, Vinnie then brings in a T-Rex from prehistoric times to have it destroy Riverdale.
• China, IL: Ronald Reagan is one of these, using time travel to mess with Steve during all points of his life just because he did an insulting impression of him as a child.
• Family Guy: While Stewie usually uses his time machine for pragmatic purposes, at one point he uses it to troll Brian throughout different time periods so he can get the last word in all their past arguments (over Brian making one gay joke).
• Futurama:
  • In Bender's Big Score, the Nudists get their hands on a time sphere (formed through a code on a tattoo on Fry's butt), fully intending to use it to steal things of all value from history. After realizing that they can't use it to go to the past without causing a paradox that would result in their demises, they get a brainwashed Bender to do it for them. Additionally, the Nudists don't care that the time sphere could lead to the destruction of the universe until after they have obtained everything of value in history.
  • In the series finale, Fry and Bender use the Professor's time travel button to commit petty theft, albeit for the cause of Fry getting the perfect engagement ring for Leela.
• Justice League: The two-part episode "The Once and Future Thing" has Chronos, a time-travelling villain from the future, who initially uses his technology to steal objects throughout time. However, his wife prods him into using his tech for bigger things than petty theft, and he ends up becoming Drunk with Power and nearly destroys time. Fortunately, Batman and Green Lantern stop him by trapping him in a "Groundhog Day" Loop arguing with his wife.
• The LEGO Movie 2: The Second Part: Rex Dangervest decides to undo his Dark and Troubled Past by returning to the past and manipulating his younger self into destroying the universe and dooming all his friends to an eternity of imprisonment in a dark dimension.
• Looped: A downplayed example. Luc and Theo are in a constant loop, with every day in Port Doover being October 12. While they have their fun, they also try to keep their actions within the loop from spiraling out of control.
• Miraculous Ladybug: Timetagger, the Akumatized Villain of "Timetagger" is a time-travelling delinquent-themed supervillain who uses his magical graffiti to send people to different time periods and arrives from the future to take Chat Noir and Ladybug's miraculouses.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: In "The Cutie Re-Mark: Part 1", Starlight Glimmer uses a modified version of Star Swirl the Bearded's time-traveling spell so she can stop young Rainbow Dash from causing a Sonic Rainboom so that the rest of the Mane Six will not gain their special talents or become friends. However, in "The Cutie Re-Mark: Part 2", Starlight is horrified when Twilight Sparkle helps her see that this has caused disaster and desolation throughout Equestria. She never wanted it to come to this.
• Robot Chicken: The "Dicks With Time Machines" sketches play this straight by having a time traveler ruin J.K. Rowling's writing career, rewrite the Ten Commandments, and inverts it when he prevents Hitler from taking power in Germany (by showing a video of him suffering diarrhea).
• The Secret Show: In "Victor of the Future", Future Professor Professor turns out to be an even bigger asshole than his younger self. When asked by present Victor how the Floaty-heads were defeated back when this was happening for him, he trolls the latter by having him play a guessing game and then throw potatoes at their ship.
• Teen Titans: Warp, the Villain of the Week in the episode "How Long Is Forever?" is a time-traveling thief from the future who says that the items he steals were recorded lost by history, so all he's doing is enforcing a Stable Time Loop. Of course, when Starfire pursues him to the future, he's perfectly okay fighting her, and tries to break her spirit, gloating that he's going to leave her in the Bad Future that he's created.

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