Tragic Time Traveler

"I agreed with my mother that I should travel back in time, but I had my own reasons for wanting to go. I had hoped that in the past, with Goku's help, I would find the androids had some weakness. That way I could go back to the future. And even through I still wouldn't be able to bring back all those already gone, I might be able to save the people who are left."

— Future Trunks, Dragon Ball Z

Good old Time Travel. Everyone's favorite plot device used to Set Right What Once Went Wrong, or the opposite if you're a bad guy.

Even without that, however, there's a lot you can do with time travel: see your parents when they were younger, avert some personal disaster that led to your life going off the rails, give your younger self advice on how to avoid an embarrassing situation, have better time management, et cetera.

What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

According to this character, a lot.

Just as how often it's depicted as a great tool to fix mistakes in media, time travel can be just as easily shown to be a significant danger to a character's mental and psychological health, especially if Failure Is the Only Option or there's some other caveat that makes traveling through time dangerous.

The reasons why the time traveler became tragic could vary:

1. They tried to Set Right What Once Went Wrong, only to discover that they failed and/or they were part of a Stable Time Loop all along.
2. Alternately, they succeeded at changing what went wrong in the past, but this did nothing to their own original timeline; all it did was create a new timeline instead.
3. The traveler's attempts to make things better only end up making things worse.
4. They suffer a bad case of Time Loop Fatigue as every time they jump through time, they fail to accomplish their goal.
5. They're stuck in a "Groundhog Day" Loop for so long that they end up turning tired and jaded.
6. They succeeded at their goal, but weren't aware of the Time Travel Taboo in place, causing them to be punished for it before they can even enjoy their victory.
7. The Reset Button is pressed once they leave, rendering their efforts for naught.
8. In the absolute worst case scenario, the traveler has no time traveling powers at all and are instead a victim of Accidental Time Travel, leaving them Trapped in the Past or even the future with no real way to go back.

While the traveler will generally become jaded as a result of all this, how they will carry themselves can vary. Some Stopped Caring and either give up on their goals or decide to stop their time-traveling agenda to enjoy the current world they're in, assuming they don't go back to their time altogether. Others stay determined and continue to try and achieve their goals, but with more pragmatism regarding the way they approach said goal.

Also, keep in mind that just because the trope's name is Tragic Time Traveler doesn't mean that their story needs to end in a tragedy. In fact, it's perfectly possible for the traveler to get their happy ending despite all the hardship. They just need to go through further hardship to achieve it.

Expect this character to come from a Bad Future, or even a Bad Present, giving them more reason to travel through time in order to try and change the timeline.

If the traveler suffers so much that they end up cracking, this can lead to a Despair Event Horizon or even a Heel–Face Turn. Alternately, they may end up so frustrated they'll turn into a Time-Traveling Jerkass.

Do not confuse with either Future Loser, Future Badass, or Future Foil: that's about a character from the present being much lamer/cooler/different in the future compared to their current self, while this trope is about a time traveler whose travel through time causes them no end of angst.

See also Ridiculously Successful Future Self, which can contrast this if the time traveler is going from a Bad Present to a better future.

Might result in a Conqueror from the Future.

Since explaining why a time traveler is tragic tends to require, at best, to reveal their backstory and a couple key plot points, beware of spoilers. You Have Been Warned.

---

Examples

Anime & Manga

• Dragon Ball: Future Trunks is the son of Bulma and Vegeta in an alternate timeline. His Goku wound up dying from a heart virus, and from there the androids were awakened and destroyed the rest of the Z Fighters, his father included, before going on to do the same to the rest of the world, leaving humans an endangered species while the few survivors go into hiding. His mother, Future Bulma, eventually manage to build a time machine to let him go back in time to prevent Goku from dying in the first place, a mission that seems to be successful at first... until Future Trunks goes back to his timeline to find out that nothing has changed; all he did was create an alternate timeline. Dragon Ball Super only makes this worse by not only giving him yet another threat in the form of an evil Goku, the same person who once protected his timeline, but events causes his timeline to become so corrupted that Future Zeno has to erase its entire multiverse — including the afterlife, and all the souls of everyone who had ever lived — rendering all his efforts for naught.
• Fairy Tail has several tragic time travelers a bit to various degrees.
  • The X792 future version of Lucy Heartfilia had to see all her friends get killed by a horde of ten thousand dragons with herself as the Sole Survivor and comes back in time to Set Right What Once Went Wrong while under the assumption at first that no one would believer her and still dealing with the loss of her version of her friends. She ends up Taking the Bullet for her present-day counterpart at the cost of her own life but not before her murderer, the X798 version of Rogue, accuses her of (falsely) dooming the world by closing the Eclipse gate. She does get a posthumous victory as the dragons are prevented from destroying the present thanks to the Eclipse gates destruction, but thanks to being Killed Off for Real she doesn't get to be a part of the happy future she helped create. However, she does get to see her version of her friends again in the afterlife when she goes to the Golden Fields.
  • The alternate future X792 Lucy Heartfilia as revealed in chapter 333's timeline diagram arguably has this even worse. She suffered the loss of her friends like the above version of her did from a horde of ten thousand dragons and was also the Sole Survivor thanks to the two of them sharing the same past by being a Temporal Paradox through the Timey-Wimey Ball of time travel. While this version of Lucy succeeded by time traveling and creating the timeline that X798 Rogue is from and prevented the dragons from coming, it ends up being All for Nothing as Acnologia ends up destroying the world meaning she still loses everything as a result of a dragon anyway. If any version of Lucy could be called a Cosmic Plaything it'd probably be this version.
  • The X798 future version of Rogue is a bit in a Tragic Villain kind of way. First he ends up losing Frosch his Exceed partner while fighting an Avatar-affiliated Gray resulting in Rogue being consumed by his evil Living Shadow and having to live under Acnologia for seven years after the latter took over and destroyed the world. After learning about a version of Lucy closing the Eclipse gate in the past and preventing a horde of ten thousand dragons from destroying the world Rogue decides he'll time travel and take control of those dragons for himself with his first step involuntary killing the future X792 version of Lucy while trying to kill the present version in order to prevent her interference in his plan. ^note Ironically he himself is unaware that another X792 future Lucy created his timeline in the first place while the one he just killed only exists through a Temporal Paradox thanks to his own actions of time traveling. He succeeds in his goal a bit getting seven dragons instead of ten thousand and plans to use them to kill Acnologia in the present and become the new Dragon King, but he ends up being Hoist by His Own Petard as Natsu ends up slamming Rogue's own dragon mount Motherglare into the Eclipse gate causing its destruction, thus ruining his plants with him disappearing from the present not long afterward, making everything he did amount to nothing.
• JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Stone Ocean: Emporio ends up becoming this during the final battle with Enrico Pucci and his time-forwarding Stand, Made in Heaven. After Jolyne sacrifices her own life to protect him, Emporio is thrust so far forward in time that he ends up on a new Earth created by a second Big Bang that is mostly identical and populated by alternate versions of all the other characters, leaving him the only one to stop Pucci. Then after he manages to do so, he ends up stranded on yet another alternate Earth where he has a chance meeting with the counterparts of Jolyne, Ermes, and Anasui, who have no memory of him and lead much happier lives than the originals did. Shellshocked from the battle, the loss of his only friends, and meeting these new versions of them, Emporio breaks down in tears over this rather hollow victory.
• Homura Akemi from Puella Magi Madoka Magica is a magical girl with both a penchant for firearms and the ability to travel through time. While she initially seems to be a cold and aloof girl, it's eventually revealed that she used to be a much nicer, shy girl before she was saved by Madoka and Mami, becoming so distraught when the former died that she made a contract with Kyubey to gain the power to undo Madoka's eventual death, giving her the ability to not only control time but rewind it back a month and undo any damage done in the meantime. Unfortunately, this being Madoka Magica, it came with quite the hefty cost: Every time Homura travels back in time, said energy causes Madoka to grow stronger as a magical girl, and as a result, her witch, Kriemhild Gretchen, also becomes stronger. And since Homura's unwilling to let Madoka die for the sake of the world, it leads to a vicious cycle of Homura doing everything she can to save Madoka, only for her to meet her end and force Homura to rewind time, causing Madoka to not only get stronger but gain more and more the attention of Kyubey, who wants her to contract.
• Summertime Rendering: Shinpei finds himself looping through time as he journeys back to his hometown to attend the funeral of his Childhood Friend Ushio Kofune. In short order, rumors of "Shadow Sickness" sprout up, culminating in Shinpei seeing Ushio's little sister, Mio, being attacked by a Doppelgänger, who subsequently attacks him, as well, where he then finds himself back on the ferry journeying to his friend Ushio's funeral. Then they run into Ushio, and it gets complicated from there, with Shinpei living the same three-day period over and over again, trying to learn why Ushio died, and that it might have something to do with the death of his parents years before. Each loop sees him having to deal with close friends being killed in various ways, and he's determined to figure out what is happening and why.

Comic Books

• Astro City: Samaritan. His home no longer exists; he originated from a Bad Future in the 35th century and was sent to the past to fix it. In the process, he acquired superpowers that allowed him to prevent the Challenger disaster. He did fix the bad timeline, but in the process, his family was erased from existence.
• The Flash: In Flashpoint, Barry Allen (the second Flash) traveled back in time to save his mom, Nora, from her death at the hands of Reverse-Flash. This came at a cost of breaking the DC Universe, creating the Crapsack World that is the Flashpoint timeline itself. In the end, after realizing what he (and secretly, Doctor Manhattan) did to the world, Barry travelled in time again to prevent his mother from being saved, restoring the DC Universe and finally bring himself closure, though he has to go through hell with regaining his power and surviving in the broken timeline first.
• Sonic the Hedgehog: Silver the Hedgehog's depictions in both the Archie comics and IDW series place a stronger emphasis on this as opposed to the games, where he has experienced the events of Sonic the Hedgehog (2006) in some form. The comics make his personality a lot more cheerful and idealistic, unlike his more dour counterparts from the mainline games and Sonic '06.
  • Sonic the Hedgehog (Archie Comics):
    • His storyline in this series pre-Super Genesis Wave revolves around him outing a "traitor" within the Knothole Freedom Fighters, who were responsible for creating his ruined future. Unfortunately, he ends up travelling through multiple timelines, and his attempts to identify the traitor make him more of a hindrance amongst Sonic and his friends, where his Inspector Javert tendencies make him a pariah. He ends up going through a Heel Realization in Issue #234, stays in the past, and joins a faction known as the Secret Freedom Fighters to uncover more information about who betrayed the group. By the time he discovers who was responsible, the comic has been rebooted with a new continuity.
    • In the post-Super Genesis Wave continuity, he hails from a dystopian future ruled by an ominous council who force the inhabitants to work. He's also more unskilled in this continuity and is learning how to control his powers to close errant Genesis portals that open up due to the events of the Genesis Waves.
  • Sonic the Hedgehog (IDW): He initially joined the Resistance in Sonic Forces, due to Eggman's rule going strong and unopposed in his future. After they stopped him, he headed back to his future, only to find an endless wasteland devoid of life. Thus Silver's return to the present is to find out what happened and prevent it, if possible. He noticeably takes up gardening, stating that his future doesn't have plants like the future he comes from. During the Metal Virus Saga, he eventually figures out that the Metal Virus was responsible for his future after Eggman confirms any infected lifeforms will destroy themselves within 200 years. Silver ends up being the key that saves both the present and future, helping Sonic destroy the virus for good. When he travels back to the future, it's now prosperous and flourishing. When Silver returns in the 2022 Annual, he is paranoid about why he was sent back and worries about what his future needs to be saved from again.
• Star Trek: Debt of Honor: Downplayed. Dr. Gillian Taylor, who came back to the 23rd century from The '80s with the crew in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, mentions problems adjusting to being a Fish out of Temporal Water: among other things, she had to partially relearn English because the language has continued to evolve since her time.
• Venom: In Venom (2021), Eddie Brock's travels through time lead to him getting caught in a time loop. He finds to his horror that he will be so broken by the knowledge of what is to come that he'll attack his own son on command, toady up to the cruel Meridius, and then become Meridius, putting his past selves through all that pain as a desperate plan to escape. All of Eddie's attempts to defy the loop only end up perpetuating it.
• X-Men: Bishop has been put through the grinder several times:
  • Introduced in late 1991, he is an Australian mutant from a Sentinel-dominated future where the X-Men have died due to a traitor (which becomes one of his reasons for his crossing). He follows time-traveller bad guy Trevor Fitzroy to the past (but not the past of his timeline) with two subordinates and friends, Malcolm and Randall, but discovers he cannot travel back.
  • He is stranded in the past along with many future prisoners from his timeline, and his subordinates die in the present while they are capturing some of the fugitives. Later, he joins the X-Men and adapts to his new situation.
  • In 1995, he travels back in time to the past to protect a young Magneto from being killed by Xavier's son Legion but fails and is stranded in the Bad Future Xavier's death creates (crossover Age of Apocalypse). He lives 20 years of a hellish reality until he travels back in time again and succeeds in protecting Xavier this time. His past self (present-time version) absorbs the memories from the alternate Bishop, which fogs his mind for a time.
  • In 1996, the Onslaught crossover makes use of the "X-traitor" plot point to reveal Professor Xavier was the traitor, and not Gambit, as he previously thought. Bishop jumps in front of an energy beam cast by Onslaught and absorbs it, saving the X-Men from being executed.
  • After some years in and out of the team, he returns as a main player in the X-books in 2007, with X-Men: Messiah Complex: Bishop betrays the X-Men and searches for the baby mutant messiah, since, this time, she will grow up to be a maniac who kills humans, leading to the Sentinel-led future Bishop came from (both a Reimagining the Artifact and a Retcon).

Fan Works

• Relic of the Future: Zig-Zagged and ultimately reconstructed with Jaune "Ashari", a version of Jaune who's gone back in time via a Faustian bargain with Salem in the hope that he could Set Right What Once Went Wrong. Salem sent him back because she was on death's door and out of options, and she was hoping that Jaune's presence in the past would have unpredictable ripple effects that might let her scrape together a victory. Some divergences in the alternate timeline do change things for the worse, and Jaune does go through a lot of new angst as a result of his time-traveling. However, for every negative change to the course of events that Jaune causes, he also gets to deliberately or accidentally cause two positives and forge a lot of new emotional connections that he never had before: saving his friends and their families from a lot of the original timeline's angst, turning multiple enemies into allies or outright loved ones, and falling in love and experiencing fatherhood with two adoptive daughters. A major point presented by the fic is that no matter how ashamed Jaune is, he doesn't regret accepting Salem's bargain in the slightest and he never will, because of all the new connections he got to make in the new timeline and the ways in which he changed the destinies of both friend and foe for the better.

Films — Animated

• Lightyear: After Buzz causes the Turnip's crew to end up stranded on a dangerous planet, his mission is to synthesize a hyperspeed crystal to help them get off the planet. However, his test runs end in failure as the crystallic formula is imperfect and 4 years pass on the planet by the time he gets back. He has so many failed attempts that his partner Alisha Hawthorne passes away from old age and the test runs are being retired. However, when he has the correct formula, he attempts the test run one last time, but in doing so, he ends up 22 years in the future where the planet is under attack by Zurg (who's revealed to be an evil version of Buzz from an alternate timeline).

Films — Live-Action

• Army of Darkness: In the original ending, Ash accidentally drinks too much of the sleeping potion and oversleeps by a century, waking up in an After the End world where everyone he knew and loved was dead.
• Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny: Jürgen Voller's plot is to use Archimedes' Dial to travel back to 1939, kill Hitler, put a more competent Führer in charge, and win the war. In reality, Archimedes designed the Dial to only bring people back to the Siege of Syracuse in 214 BC. When Voller realizes that he's now trapped two millennia in the past, with no way to get back, and his plan decades in the making was All for Nothing, he resigns himself to despair as the Roman ballistae shoot down his plane.
• The Butterfly Effect:
  • Evan keeps using Mental Time Travel to project himself into the body of his younger self and fix the mistakes he made from his previous attempts, but he never gets it quite right: either his friends are mentally or physically scarred due to his actions or he is (in one timeline he has no hands), and eventually he hits on the idea of being mean to his Love Interest as a young girl so she doesn't want to be friends with him (and thus moving away from her pedophile father).
  • Evan is noted to have brain damage that the doctors can't explain, but he knows it's due to the accumulated memories of multiple overlapping timelines.
  • The Director's Cut ending shows that Evan managed to deliberately strangle himself with his own umbilical cord in the womb, causing his mother to suffer yet another miscarriage. However, she later has a baby girl, implying all her sons eventually made the same choice as Evan.
  • Evan's father has much the same power, but he's in a lunatic asylum (see: brain damage). He ends up attacking Evan and is killed for it.
• In The Flash (2023), Barry Allen goes back in time to make sure his mom doesn't die and prove his father didn't murder her. However, due to being knocked off course from his return to the present by a mysterious creature, he ends up meeting himself when he's 18. He takes this as a chance to help stop General Zod's invasion, and recruits the local Batman as well as Supergirl. When their battle with Zod ends in tragedy, the Alternate Flash goes back in time to try and fix everything, but nothing seems to work. Eventually, the mysterious creature from before is revealed to be Alternate Flash after decades of trying to fix this one event, and the situation got so bad that all of the timelines converge and start destroying each other. Eventually Flash realizes that the only way to save everyone is to abandon his original goals and let his mother die after all, though he does still manage to clear his father's name.
• The Time Machine (2002): Physicist Alexander Hartdegen builds a time machine, aiming to change history so that his fiancee isn't killed by a mugger in a municipal park. Though he does save Emma from that fate, she perishes while crossing a street in the path of an automobile. Hartdegen reveals he's made dozens of attempts to remedy the past, only to have Emma perish in some other unforeseen way. It's The Morlocks who explains to him that Emma's demise is the catalyst in creating the time machine, and with it, a Stable Time Loop. If Emma survives, Hartdegen has no reason to build his machine, and the edited past will become self-negating.
• Terminator: Kyle Reese, the Shell-Shocked Veteran of the human resistance from the Bad Future sent to protect Sarah Connor. He still has nightmares from fighting the Robot War of the future (a deleted scene would have him crying seeing how beautiful Earth was in the past). He tails Sarah, saves her from the titular Terminator only to be arrested by the police and be treated as if he was insane. He's proven right, gets to save Sarah from the Terminator and fall in love with her but he dies saving her from the Terminator.
• Back to the Future: Zig-Zagging Trope.
  • In Back to the Future Part II, Marty accidentally gives 2015 Biff the idea to use a sports almanac from the future to bet on games in the past causes the 1985-A timeline where Marty's father is dead, his mother is in an abusive marriage with Biff, and Doc is in an insane asylum. While Marty manages to subvert the Bad Future timeline, 2015 Biff still painfully erases himself from existence by doing this.
  • In Back to the Future Part III, Marty receives a letter from Doc from 1885 assuring he's alive and well in the Old West... only to discover soon after, along with 1955 Doc, that Doc was shot in the back and died just a week after the letter. Subverted when Marty goes back to save Doc.
• Predestination: The Temporal Agent suffers cumulative brain damage as a result of time travel, ultimately fails to stop the Fizzle Bomber, and the simple act of disarming one of the bombs leaves him so badly burned that his own parents don't recognize him after all the reconstructive surgery. And it turns out that this is just the tail end of a long, long chain of temporal trauma: they started off as Jane, was romanced and abandoned by their future self, gave birth to their past self, was separated from her, had to undergo a sex change to repair the damage from a botched caesarean, became John, and was then recruited into the Temporal Bureau by an even later iteration of himself — leading to him falling in love with his past self and being forced to abandon her. And then, after a long career, his final mission was to set up both John and Jane for all these events, including kidnapping baby Jane and depositing her on an orphanage doorstep. Astonishingly enough, the finale actually makes things even worse for the Temporal Agent: It turns out that the Fizzle Bomber is his future self, having been driven insane by time travel-induced brain damage. Determined not to become like him, the Agent shoots the bomber dead... only for the very last scene to feature him in the middle of a mental breakdown.

Literature

• In Michael Moorcock's Dancers at the End of Time series (and to a lesser extent in his other works), the so-called "Morphail Effect" makes it far more difficult to travel backwards in time than forwards. Hence time-travellers often end up trapped close to the Natural End of Time, when the hedonistic superbeings who live there tend to put them in their "zoos" as curiosities, with all their needs provided for but very little meaningful to exist for.
• Downplayed in Pyramids: High Priest Dios turns out to be in a Stable Time Loop that lasts thousands of years, but it leaves him unaware that he's in one. He's the only person for whom Pyramid Power works properly (sleeping under a pyramid leaves him restored and refreshed, while all the mummified Djelibabian kings are left as still-conscious moving corpses, some for thousands of years). At the end of the book, he's sent back to the very foundation of the kingdom with amnesia and offers his services as High Priest to the founder.
• In the Molly Moon installments Molly Moon's Time-Traveling Adventure and Molly Moon, Micky Minus, and the Mind Machine, time travel creates dry, scaly patches of skin on the traveller that don't go away no matter how hard they might try until the traveller eventually just crumbles to dust.
• The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August: The eponymous main character is, like all the Kalachakra, stuck in a time loop beginning with his birth and ending with his death. Unlike the other members of the Cronus Club, though, Harry seems doomed to suffer throughout his journeys across time, in part because he still has a functioning moral compass: on top of all the humiliation and Cold-Blooded Torture that he suffered the last time he tried to share his secrets with "Linears," he's repeatedly pitted against his Evil Former Friend Vincent Rankin over multiple lifetimes while trying to stop him from dooming the timeline with his experiments, subjecting Harry to defeats, agonizing deaths, and the heartbreak of being unable to change Vincent's mind. Later, Harry suffers even further when he's forced to pretend that Vincent successfully enacted the Forgetting on him in a previous lifetime, leaving Harry with a front-row seat to the ongoing apocalypse caused by Vincent's experiments until he can finally figure out a way to stop the rogue Kalachakra once and for all.
• The Magicians:
  • In the finale, it's revealed that the Watcherwoman has spent most of her life experimenting with time magic in a desperate attempt to stop the Beast; not only has it resulted in her being permanently separated from her family and suffering a great deal of lonely journeys through time, but it's led to her being misinterpreted as a villain throughout Fillory in the process. For added tragedy, the Watcherwoman is none other than the former hero Jane Chatwin, and the Beast is her beloved older brother Martin — and when her efforts to save him all fail, she has no choice but to set up a timeline in which the Beast dies in battle with the main characters.
  • The Magician's Land adds another layer to the Watcherwoman's tragedy: having destroyed her time-controlling watch to stop Quentin from undoing her hard work, Jane's true age has caught up with her. When Eliot and Janet bump into her, they find that she's become a Solitary Sorceress growing clock trees in the wilds of Fillory, and believes this to be a genuinely happy ending after a long and miserable life. Thankfully, the epilogue features her meeting Plum, the great-granddaughter of her brother Rupert, indicating that she'll be able to reconnect with her family.
• Repeat: Brad Cohen finds himself stuck in a time loop that kicks off in the womb and ends on the night of his fortieth birthday. At first, once he's gotten over the embarrassment of reliving infancy, Brad thinks he's got the perfect chance to enjoy all the opportunities that he missed the first time around... only to find himself hit with Time Loop Fatigue once he realizes that he can't make any of his successes permanent. Furthermore, his marriage with Juliet never comes to pass in any of the timelines and his daughters are never born, leaving him consumed with loneliness. Worse still, the strain of uninterrupted time travel leaves him unable to keep his mental record of events in order, resulting in him spending his later lifetimes all but insane, to the point that he's regarded as something of a Mad Oracle in one loop.
• The Time Traveler's Wife is a sci-fi romance where the biggest source of drama comes from the fact that one half of the couple suffers from "Chrono Displacement Disorder", causing him to involuntarily jump across time and space seemingly at random. Not only does this result in Henry frequently disappearing from his lover's life for years at a time, he ends up uncovering and building his relationship with her all out of order, and his inability to change the past has led him to becoming a depressed fatalist with little to no agency in his own existence.

Live-Action TV

• Charmed (1998): In "A Paige From The Past", Paige's Mental Time Travel to her teenage self allows her to see her adoptive parents again. While she was sent there to figure out why she survived the accident that killed her parents, she decides to try to save them instead. While she alters the circumstances and even has a good heart-to-heart with her parents (who were originally angry with her when they died), they still die the exact same way, because, as Leo tells Paige, it was their time.
• The Flash (2014):
  • Eobard Thawne went back in time to kill his nemesis Barry Allen/The Flash when he was a child to get rid of him once and for all. The Flash follows him and manages to get his younger self out of the way, so Thawne instead kills Barry's mother in revenge. However, this strained Thawne's connection to the Speed Force, leaving him unable to go back to his own time. The only way to do so? Ensure that Barry becomes The Flash so he can reconnect to the Speed Force. On top of this, the murder of his mother actually gives the Barry of this timeline additional motivation to become The Flash rather than crushing his spirit, so Thawne only ensured his enemy would come back stronger.
  • Zig-Zagged and Downplayed with Barry himself. While some of his time travel attempts were necessary to prevent mass deaths and caused some positive changes (such as an enemy having a Heel–Face Turn), the changes he makes to the timeline in the process often cause him or his loved ones personal suffering, if he is able to prevent something from happening at all.
• In The Lazarus Project, the titular government agency has developed the means to set the entire world back by up to one year in order to go back and prevent catastrophic, world-ending events. The Big Bad in the first season, Dennis Rebrov, used to be a Lazarus agent but defected when one of these resets erased his infant son from existence.
• The Doctor from Doctor Who is this in spades; they're an immortal, time-traveling Human Alien that has loved and lost countless companions, has died and been reborn at least fourteen times, and has seen every part of the timeline from the Big Bang to the moments before the Natural End of Time. This goes doubly for their companions since the 2005 Revival: Rose Tyler gets stuck in an alternate universe, Martha Jones had to travel a dystopian post-apocalyptic earth for a year to save the Doctor and was broken by the experience, Donna Noble has her memories of the Doctor erased and will die if she ever gets them back... and that's just the Ninth and Tenth Doctor's companions.
• Dr. Sam Beckett from Quantum Leap is stuck pinballing across the past, jumping into the bodies of random people throughout the mid-20th century in an attempt to Set Right What Once Went Wrong with a spotty memory that, at one point prevents him from remembering he conceived a child during a leap. Sam's only connection to his present is Al, appearing as a hologram with an uplink to a supercomputer... but as the revival shows us, even that's gone, with Al having died in 2021, with Sam canonically never returning home. The revival brings us a new Tragic Time Traveler in the form of Dr. Ben Song, whose hologram just happens to be his fiancee, a fact that takes him almost four episodes to remember.
• In Continuum, the protagonist Kira becomes trapped in the past and slowly comes to the realization that her single act of time travel erased her entire timeline, including her husband and young son. She spends the rest of the series alternating between trying to get back, despite the futility of it, and coming to terms with her family's death and resolving to make a better future. When she finally succeeds in traveling to the future, she finds that her actions worked too well: he son is now alive, but with an alternate Kira for a mother, and the new timeline is, while utopian, completely alien to her. She will therefore never be able to go home and forever be a woman out of time.
• Dark (2017): Where do we begin?
  • Mikkel never returns to the present after ending up in 1986 due to a not-so-accidental time travel caused by Jonas. The only person he ever reunites with is his father, and only for a very short time.
  • Jonas, who is grieving for his dead father in the beginning, has to endure a lot over the course of the series. Being Trapped in the Past and the future more than once, barely surviving being hung and having to watch Martha die made him slowly turn into the Stranger and later Adam, who are determined to finally break the Stable Time Loop to end their suffering.
  • Ulrich attempts to prevent the death of his brother and the two other boys by killing young Helge in 1953, which is not only completely in vain, but also causes him to end up in a mental asylum for the next 33 years.
  • Noah appears as the Big Bad of Season 1, until it's later revealed that everything he did is only because his daughter Charlotte disappeared, and believes that following Adam's orders can lead him to her. After shooting Claudia, he learns the truth about Charlotte and attempts to stop Adam, but is fatally shot by his own sister.
  • After the disappearance of her son and husband, Katharina learns about time travel and is determined to bring both of them back. Mikkel is missing without a trace, but she at least meets Ulrich and plans to break him out. This never happens, as she is Bludgeoned to Death with a stone by her own mother in the end.
  • Claudia in 1987 finds out about the imminent death of her father and her terminally ill adult daughter in 2020, whose deaths she will both cause. Later, she successfully deceives Adam, Noah, and Eva and is the one who actually manages to find out how to break the knot.
  • In Season 3, Bartosz can't adjust to living in 1888 unlike adult Jonas, Franziska and Magnus, who escaped from the apocalypse with him, loses all hope after learning about Jonas turning into the one who will murder Martha one day, and is eventually murdered by his own son.
  • Martha, the one from the other world, who has to watch her new boyfriend die, and is manipulated by her older selves who slowly turn her into them, as well as Adam, whose plan is to brutally wipe her and her unborn child out. This is successful with one version of her, but changes nothing.
  • Finally, the Season 3 finale shows that H.G. Tannhaus in a third world attempted to construct a time machine. He finished it in 1986 and it destroyed his world and created the two entangled worlds instead.
• The Umbrella Academy (2019):
  • Number Five has the power to time travel, but during his big attempt to prove himself to the Academy, he accidentally traps himself in a post-apocalyptic future and was stranded alone there for forty years with nobody to talk to except for a mannequin. Worse still, he only managed to escape when the Commission offered him a job as a hitman, resulting in him growing even more detached from humanity in the process. After years of this, he slipped the Commission's leash and used his powers to send himself back thirty years in the hope of preventing the apocalypse... only for a miscalculation to regress him back to thirteen years of age, leaving him struggling to get the now-adult members of the Umbrella Academy to take him seriously.
  • Halfway through the first season, Klaus (AKA Number Four) steals one of the Commission's briefcases and accidentally sends himself to the Vietnam War. Not only does he suffer PTSD as a result, but he also falls in love with an American soldier by the name of Dave only to see him die on the front lines. Klaus returns to the present as an even bigger psychological wreck than before. As such, when the Umbrella Academy are sent back to the 60s in season 2, Klaus sets himself the goal of convincing Dave not to join up in the hopes of saving his life... and not only does he completely fail, but it's indicated that trying to persuade him only convinced Dave to join up in the first place.
• Farscape: "...Different Destinations": John, Aeryn, D'Argo, Jool, and Stark are accidentally sent 500 cycles back in time to the site of a Last Stand by a group of Peacekeepers against the Venek Horde, where a badly wounded young officer was able to negotiate a ceasefire and save the lives of a group of nurses before succumbing. Every action they take makes things worse until they're finally forced to fight a defensive battle. When they finally get back, they discover that all they managed to do was kick things over into a Close-Enough Timeline where the Horde killed everybody.
• Star Trek:
  • "The City on the Edge of Forever": Dr. McCoy accidentally travels back in time to The '30s and manages to make the entire Federation become Ret-Gone. Kirk follows him with an away team and falls in love with a local woman named Edith Keeler, whose life Bones saved from a car accident. Unfortunately, it turns out this was a linchpin event that led to Nazi Germany winning World War II, because in the altered timeline she led a pacifist movement that kept the United States out of the war. The crew are forced to let her die to restore the timeline.
  • Star Trek: Strange New Worlds:
    • "A Quality of Mercy": Christopher Pike's character arc up to now has largely dealt with him trying to come to terms with a vision of his future where he becomes crippled and horribly disfigured in an accident. In this episode, he experiments with trying to change this future but is warned off by an Alternate Timeline version of himself who was in command of the Enterprise during his timeline's version of TOS: "Balance of Terror". Spock is critically injured and a Forever War starts between the Federation and the Romulan Star Empire, all because the less-aggressive Pike was in command of the mission and not Kirk. Pike grudgingly accepts that The Needs of the Many dictate that he accept his ultimate fate.
    • "Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow": La'an is kicked into an Alternate Timeline where the Romulans are the galaxy's dominant superpower, and accidentally drags that timeline's version of Jim Kirk back to 2020s Toronto with her. She becomes attracted to him, and then he's killed helping her stop a Romulan temporal operative. Because of the Temporal Prime Directive, she's forced to keep these traumatic events secret forever.
• Red Dwarf: This occasionally pops up in the series, mainly because of the fact that time travel would have been an easy ticket out of the show's situation of being stranded in deep space 3 million years into the future.
  • "Timeslides" introduces a method of time travel involving mutated photographs. Whilst Lister's attempts to use them to become rich and famous are initially successful, Rimmer's attempts to do the same — by giving him younger self information on how to patent the "tension sheet" are completely unsuccessful, as another boy overheard and patented it before Rimmer. For bonus points, it does have the positive benefit of leaving Rimmer actually alive as opposed to originally being a Virtual Ghost in the original timeline, a change which is almost immediately ruined when he brings his fists down on several crates of explosives.
  • "Out of Time" has the Dwarfers come across a Time Drive whilst pursuing Red Dwarf. The origin for this time machine is already bad enough, with the previous owners having died of influenza on a trip to the 20th Century, but it gets worse when the Dwarfers meet a future version of themselves which have abused the Time Drive and have become Time Travelling Jerkasses. In the resulting fight, both crews are killed and it is only through a paradox that our Dwarfers survive another day. In the next episode "Tikka to Ride", Lister's attempts to use the Time Drive to stock up on curry lead to them preventing the JFK assassination, which results in a Bad Future where J. Edgar Hoover allowed the Soviets to install missiles, many Americans have fled the cities, and the Space Race never came to fruition. This future is only resolved when JFK offers to shoot his past self, and Lister ultimately never gets his curry (in the original ending at least).
  • Ace Rimmer would also count. His ship, the Wildfire, is capable of crossing dimensions and traveling through time, but he can never return to his home dimension again. The episode "Stoke Me a Clipper" takes it even further, revealing that the original Ace is dead and that he is now a Legacy Character, with a multitude of Rimmers becoming space-time heroes but at the cost of never being able to go back home and eventually dying in the line of duty. At least Word of God suggested that our Rimmer, who took up the mantle at the end of the episode, did eventually manage to find a way to return to his dimension.

Tabletop Games

• Warhammer 40,000:
  • One short story set prior to the Horus Heresy has a proto-Sister of Battle hurled into the future and then manage to come back and try to deliver a message to warn the God-Emperor of the impending catastrophe... only to be shot for using heretical psyker powers.
  • Subverted in the case of Waaagh! Grigutz, which emerged from the Warp at the same place and shortly before it actually left. Grigutz (a noted kleptomaniac) immediately attacked and killed his past self so as to have two of his favorite gun, after which the Waaagh(s)! fell apart in the resulting confusion. Being orks, they wouldn't have had it any other way.

Theatre

• Harry Potter and the Cursed Child: Years after Harry's time at Hogwarts, his son Albus, Malfoy's son Scorpius, and a girl named Delphi steal an illegal, powerful Time Turner from the Ministry of Magic and attempt to ensure Cedric Diggory survives the Triwizard Tournament by stopping him from getting to the Triwizard Cup in the first place. What results is:
  • Attempt 1 fails, but changes time just enough that Albus gets sorted into Gryffindor instead of Slytherin (separating him from Scorpius and making him no happier than when he was in Slytherin), and Albus's cousins are erased from existence (since Ron ended up with Padma Patil instead of Hermione).
  • Attempt 2 succeeds, but results in Cedric becoming a Death Eater, leading to Voldemort successfully killing Harry and erasing Albus from existence. While Scorpius is popular in this timeline, he sees Voldemort's rule as the hellscape that it is, his father is much colder since he never had his Heel–Face Turn, and he misses Albus too much. Scorpius is able to travel back and stop the changes that created this timeline, leading him back to the original Slytherin Albus timeline.
  • Attempt 3 has Delphi reveal she was Evil All Along and, after getting stopped from interfering anymore in the Triwizard Tournament, brings Albus and Scorpius back with her to October 31, 1981, where she plans to stop her father Voldemort from making the attempt on Harry that destroyed his body. Harry and co. travel back with another Time Turner and stop her, but Harry, in order to not risk the timeline again, must stand by and watch his parents' original death at Voldemort's hands.

Video Games

• Fire Emblem: Awakening: Chrom's daughter Lucina and her comrades travel from the future in order to prevent an apocalypse caused by the reawakened Fell Dragon, Grima and his army of Risen. Unfortunately, she never accounted for the Grima from the future following her and working from the shadows to keep the timeline of events intact, ensuring his resurrection by using his own vessel, the future Robin, for that of his present-day self. However, due to Future Grima's botched attempt to possess the present Robin early leaving the former weakened and the latter amnesiac, he inadvertently gave Robin the necessary information and memories that allowed them to eventually figure out how to kill Grima for good. Even better is that Grima didn't even need to travel to the past in the first place because of time travel in Fire Emblem working near-identical to that of the Dragon Ball Z multiverse, so his own timeline wouldn't have been affected whether Lucina succeeded or failed, meaning Grima put himself in the best possible situation to be killed without ever realizing it. Notably, the children also have a layer of personal tragedy added into the mix, as they all understand that they are foreigners in this timeline and cannot remain longer than it takes to defeat Grima, as their past selves still exist as infants and have their own lives to live (accordingly, most of the children tell their parents that they will have to leave after Grima's defeat and their endings generally confirm that most if not all do so). Their reactions to this state of affairs run the gamut from grinning and bearing it (Cynthia) to stoic acceptance (Laurent) to trying to avoid creating new emotional attachments to their parents (Gerome) so as not to suffer any more pain.
• Doodle World: The Big Bad Zavier is a Well-Intentioned Extremist bound to an apocalyptic future. He stole The Elder's Chronos to travel back in time and stop DoodleCo from getting their hands on the ten Keys that unseal the force that created that future in the first place. However, he has failed and rewound time over and over and over again, leading to him slowly becoming more aggressive and deranged with each failure until he is eventually willing to simply threaten and kill anyone who gets in his way.
• Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers: Grovyle is the thief who was stealing the Time Gears all across the island, causing time to stop in those areas. However, he was doing this to get them to Temporal Tower to stop the collapse of the tower and the time paralysis of the planet. He was branded a criminal by the entirety of Treasure Town and eventually captured by Dusknoir and his goons, who actually benefited from the dystopian future and were tricking everyone. He does escape thanks to you and your partner Pokémon, but is ultimately erased when the day is saved. (Although the bonus story in Explorers of Sky confirms that he actually survived thanks to Arceus.)
• Pokémon Legends: Arceus: One of the wardens for the Pearl Clan is Ingo, one of the twin Subway Bosses from Pokémon Black and White, who had ended up in the ancient region of Hisui with no memory of anything but his name and no obvious way to return home to modern Unova. It's noted that he has lingering memories of his old life, including his favorite Pokémon partner, Chandelure, and his twin brother, Emmett, but whenever he tries to recall them in greater detail, the knowledge escapes him.
• The Sonic the Hedgehog franchise has Silver, a psychokinetic hedgehog who is a direct expy of Dragon Ball Z's Future Trunks. In his debut game, Silver lives in a post-apocalyptic future where he is constantly battling the entity known as Iblis, a constant creator of flames. Mephiles then shows him who is responsible for these events, The Iblis Trigger — Sonic the Hedgehog. He then sends Silver back to the past so he can kill Sonic, in order to save his future. Once Silver arrives, he is in awe of the past's beauty, finding simple joys in the scenery of a desert. Despite his mission being to kill Sonic, he finds reluctance to do the deed, especially after Amy Rose gets him to stop. Silver's naivety allows him to be easily tricked and persuaded into killing the person he believes to be responsible, where it takes Shadow the Hedgehog and a trip further back into the past to find out that Mephiles orchestrated the complex web of events. His journey back into the past also allows him to find a solution to deal with Iblis in his ruined future. The final moments of his campaign end with him watching his friend Blaze sacrifice herself to seal Iblis away, saving his future. And then Mephiles causes a space-time rift, where he then realizes that this was why he was tasked with killing Sonic in the first place. He ends up defeating Solaris alongside Sonic and Shadow, with the game's events being reset so the future doesn't come to pass. After this, Silver still comes back from his future whenever he's involved in a game, usually to correct the mistakes of his future within Sonic's present.
• The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time: Where to begin with Link? After the Temple of Time is unsealed and he grabs the Master Sword, it spirits him away seven years into the future after Ganondorf beats him to the Triforce, who then goes on to leave Hyrule in ruin all the while thanking Link for making his goal easier to achieve. Needless to say, Link and Zelda are both lamenting over having accidentally handed Ganondorf world domination on a silver platter. Then after Ganondorf is defeated, Link is sent back to his original time by Zelda right before they met, which ends up doing more harm than good in a variety of ways. One: Link is left in a world where nobody knows him and his relationship with his adoptive family the Kokiri is doomed to deteriorate, leaving him all alone and eventually leading to the events of Majora?s Mask. Two: Because Link was sent back with the Triforce of Courage, it caused the Triforce to split apart anyway and allowed Ganondorf to escape execution by giving him the Triforce of Power, causing the events of Twilight Princess. Three: Zelda removing the Hero of Time from her own timeline made it so that there was no Hero of Time to stop Ganondorf when he came back, leading to Hyrule being destroyed and causing the events of The Wind Waker.
• In Final Fantasy XIV, one of the biggest reveals of Shadowbringers is how G'raha Tia traveled through time in hopes of averting the Bad Future he came from and save the Warrior of Light's life. The time traveller is determined to Set Right What Once Went Wrong even if it means risking being Ret-Gone by a Grandfather Paradox. After spending a century as the Crystal Exarch and nearly dying to Emet-Selch and Elidibus, G'raha manages to merge his soul with his slumbering counterpart in the altered timeline, allowing him to become an Ascended Fanboy as a member of the Scions.
• Star Trek Online: Leveling the Temporal Defense Initiative reputation unlocks access to a series of log entries by a Starfleet Time Police officer from the far future, a Cardassian named Commander Nereda. In one entry, Nereda records how she was forced to report a Na'Kuhl temporal incursion to the Obsidian Order, foiling a 23rd century terrorist attack that would have killed the father of Gul Dukat and led Cardassia to become a democracy several decades early. In other words, she basically had to enforce her people's equivalent of Hitler's Time Travel Exemption Act for the greater good.
  Nereda: I have ensured the birth of Procal's infamous son, and preserved the timeline. I have done my duty, but take no pride in doing so.
• The Chrono series zigzags this trope:
  • Chrono Trigger is mostly an aversion, save for Robo, the party's robotic companion from the future. Robo realizes at some point during the adventure that defeating Big Bad Lavos will rewrite the future and erase the timeline he happens to be from; no one has any idea what will happen if and when he has to return there, but there is a reasonable chance doing so will erase him from existence. Robo chooses not to disclose this to the party and tries to leave with a smile and a cheerful goodbye, but the party's Gadgeteer Genius Lucca had already come to the same conclusion and bursts into tears at their departure.
  • On the other hand, the trope is in full effect in the sequel Chrono Cross, thanks to a healthy dose of Happy Ending Override. The plot of Cross is ultimately kicked into gear when entities that were defeated in Trigger are able to strike back by doing their own meddling with the timeline from the void beyond time where overridden timelines are sent, undoing much of the work of the previous game's heroes and threatening Lavos's ultimate victory. Yes, it's just as confusing as it sounds.
• GrimGrimoire has apprentice mage Lillet Blan stuck in a time loop, constantly reliving the five days before the destruction of her Wizarding School and the death of just about everyone involved. However, each time she makes a loop and tries to fix things, it invariably results in death and destruction from another quarter and she still can't figure out how to stop the loop from resetting. During the final loop, she discovers that an alternate version of herself has been stuck in a Stable Time Loop for decades, waiting for her past self to figure out how to solve the problem.

Visual Novels

• Higurashi: When They Cry: Rika is revealed to have been stuck in a time loop for several decades if not centuries, reliving the same month over and over again which usually ends in her and people around her suffering a gruesome death. Needless to say, it hasn't done wonders for her mental state, as her real personality is extremely jaded and cynical from trying and failing to escape so many times. Fortunately, she eventually manages to escape with help from her friends.
• Steins;Gate: Okabe starts jumping back in time in order to Set Right What Once Went Wrong after Kurisu and Mayuri are killed. His efforts sometimes saves one, but not the other, or ends in a Bad Future where society is worse off. He's determined to set everything right, but it eventually breaks him and he's ready to give up. Kurisu's Reading Steiner activates and awakens her memories of all his past attempts, which gives both of them the resolve to reach the Golden Ending.

Webcomics

• In The Warrior Returns, it gradually becomes increasingly clear that the Resurrection Warrior's Resurrective Immortality, which sends him back in time every time he's killed, is as much a curse as it is a blessing. Seongjun has been stuck in a "Groundhog Day" Loop for 150,000 years, as his immortality will only end if he's killed by a Demon Lord. The stress and guilt he feels for this is so severe that he spends several thousand loops instantly dying of a heart attack when he's sent back in time. By the events of the story, he kills many of his closest friends from previous timelines and orchestrates the deaths of 1.4 billion people to turn Minsu into a Demon Lord capable of killing Seongjun for good and end the loop keeping everyone on Earth hostage. The story makes it clear that he's miserable the entire time and he has Exhausted Eye Bags from how exhausted he is mentally and emotionally.
• Homestuck: Dave for the majority of Act 5 Act 2 is on a spur of time travel adventures, wherein he creates multiple timelines and Daves, quite a few of whom happen to be dead. Dave comes to terms with having to kill another Dave to God Tier and leaves him alone, only for that Dave to die anyway. What also doesn't help is him finding his Bro dead not too long after. Despite all of this, he would continue to fulfill his purpose as a Knight of Time, and never give up.

Web Videos

• Dragon Ball Z Abridged, like the actual anime, has Future Trunks and deconstructs him as a Failure Hero. Similar to the source material, Trunks' future has been ravaged by the Cyborgs, with his mentor dying to them as well. He's sent to the past in order to prevent Goku's death, but due to multiverse theory, his timeline remains unchanged. He still travels to the past in order to at least save that timeline's Z-Fighters from the Androids, but his attempts to help end up in failure. His pre-conceptions of Vegeta and Goku are thoroughly taken down, where he realizes how dysfunctional they and the group in general are, and the androids in the present are now somehow stronger than the ones in his future. He fails to kill Cell or the androids, gets killed by Cell, only coming back to life via the Dragon Balls after Cell is killed by Gohan. These experiences in the past manage to make him stronger than the cyborgs and Cell in his future, and he defeats them once and for all in Episode 60's epilogue.
• Dream SMP: Karl has the ability to time travel to both the past and future of the SMP to document the events as he witnesses and later experiences them. However, not only does he have basically no control of his time travelling — both in terms of when and where he goes, but he is also gradually losing his memories and sense of identity every time he travels. The latter has resulted in some serious Poor Communication Kills with one of his fiancés, with a devastating fallout. It's also implied that the server god who granted him these abilities in the first place will have him killed once his mind has deteriorated too much from the time travel, as it's occurred to his unnamed predecessor; given the abrupt ending of the series as a whole, it's likely that Karl's fate will never be confirmed.
• RWBY: In Volume 9, Jaune ends up being this by accident. After landing in the mystical Ever After, he ends up finding a tree with Time Clocks as its fruit. He ends up unintentionally using one of the fruits, sending himself back decades before Team RWBY falls to the time when Alyx and Lewin (the latter a famous author of a beloved fairy tale back on Remnant) fell into the Ever After. Because they're extremely relevant to future events, and desperately trying to find some way to make up for the traumatic events that occurred to him in Volume 8, he tries to help them along according to what he remembers happened in the fairy tale. Unfortunately, this horribly backfires because Alyx and Lewin are not exactly like their portrayal in the stories, and his attempts at railroading them into what he perceives as the "right path" (mixed with the manipulation of the Curious Cat) only ends up making Alyx paranoid and afraid of Jaune, eventually enough to trying to kill him just to get away from his manipulation. With his mission failed, Jaune ended up staying in one place, waiting for his friends to arrive but also reduced to a broken shell of the young man he used to be, stuck trying to play hero with a group of Afterans he perceives as "fragile and helpless" to avoid facing his personal trauma (the actual reason he was sent back in time).

Western Animation

• Gravity Falls: In "The Time Traveler's Pig", Dipper Pines's attempts to win Wendy over at the fair leads to the same outcome each time: Wendy gets hit in the eye with his baseball, and Robbie comforts her and asks her out. The one time Dipper succeeds in getting the ending he wants, his sister Mabel suffers instead, which makes Dipper feel guilty enough to set things back the way they were.
• Miraculous Ladybug: During the episode "Desperada", Adrien Agreste is briefly gifted the Snake Miraculous by Ladybug in order to become the time-rewinding hero Aspik. However, no matter what he does, Ladybug falls and he's forced to reset the timeline, a process that goes on for so long that by then he decides to quit, Sass, the Kwami of the Snake Miraculous, suffers from a brief bout of Time Loop Fatigue.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: The plot of "It's About Time" involves a future version of Twilight Sparkle showing up to the present day version, one that comes from next Tuesday morning, and who has an important message to tell her. However, before her message can be delivered, she vanishes in a puff of smoke, prompting the present Twilight to prepare herself for the inevitable Tuesday morning her future self came from. It eventually turns out that said Tuesday morning was a perfectly ordinary morning, the reason Future Twilight looked the way she did was because of Twilight growing overly worried regarding her future self's version, which led to a series of events that caused her to get injured and donning a spy outfit. By the end, Twilight decides to travel back to the past to warn her past self not to get worked up too hard, something that her friends decide to leave alone.
• The Owl House: During "Elsewhere and Elsewhen", Luz Noceda and Lilith Clawthorne wind up traveling back in time to the Deadwardian Era in order for the former to learn more about the first visitor to the Isles, Phillip Wittebane. Once they meet him, Luz tries to help him by revealing to him the Light Glyph and generally keeps an optimistic belief that he might turn out to be good. Sadly, he turns out to be anything but: not only being willing to sacrifice Lilith to a beast, but wanting to eradicate the witches despite living among them. The duo aren't happy about their discovery, and they leave with their hands empty and, in Luz's case, a Broken Pedestal. And while Lilith mostly came out unscathed, "Hollow Mind" has Luz become this when she learns Emperor Belos is Phillip, and her trip to the past unknowingly aided him in his quest to wipe out witchkind, with the man himself twisting the knife once she finds out by thanking her for it.
• The Powerpuff Girls:
  • "Speed Demon" involves the girls engaging in an innocent race home, only to end up going past the speed of light, causing them to travel 50 years into the future. As a result of their absence, HIM has managed to take over the world and turned into a literal and figurative "Heck", with all of the girls' friends and loved ones going insane in the process. With nothing they do hurting HIM, the girls travel back to the present to prevent the future from happening, but are left marked by the experience regardless.
  • "Get Back, Jojo" involves Mojo Jojo using a time portal created by Professor Utonium to go back in time in order to prevent the professor from creating the Powerpuff Girls by killing him. However, doing this causes the girls to fly back to stop him, and this causes the younger professor to decide to become a scientist one day, rendering Jojo's travel for naught.
• Samurai Jack: The entire premise of the show revolves around the titular character being sent into the future by Aku, where he has won and conquered the world, and he faces many obstacles while trying to head back to the past. This is tragic enough, but the final season makes this worse because not only has Aku successfully destroyed every time portal, thus preventing Jack from ever going back home, but an unexpected side effect of the time travel has caused Jack to become The Ageless, leaving him trapped in the future with no way out for decades.
  • It's only compounded when Jack and his love interest finally manage to travel back to the point where he first fought Aku and kill him there, averting the Bad Future under Aku's rule. They're all set for a happy ending and a ride into the sunset... except the love interest is Aku's daughter. She vanishes to delayed-action RetGone in the middle of their wedding, leaving Jack victorious but heartbroken.
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2012): The episode "Tales of the Yokai" has the turtles hurled sixteen years into the past when Hamato Yoshi and Oroku Saki were still friends and Tang Shen was still alive. To make sure that the timeline goes the way it's supposed to after their interactions with the Hamato Clan threaten their future, they discover that they were partly and indirectly responsible for causing the violent feud between Splinter and Shredder. The tragedy is worsened as they had to do it in order to ensure their own birth by rescuing Yoshi so he would go to New York, become Splinter, and raise the turtles. The turtles are less than pleased with this revelation to say the least.
• Wakfu has the Big Bad of the first season, Nox. He's a Xelor who travels around the world in order to gather enough Wakfu to use it for some unknown motive. Said goal eventually turns out to be to save his family, which died centuries ago. And he eventually does manage to gather enough Wakfu to turn time back... by mere twenty minutes, leaving him utterly despondent and broken once he realizes his actions were pointless in the end.
• Wander over Yonder: "The Waste of Time" involves Wander and Sylvia recharging their orbble bottle with some juice, only for them to recharge it with time orbble juice instead, causing them to travel back in time by complete accident. The end of the episode sees them trap themselves 50 years in the past when their juice runs out, but they simply wait those years until their new counterparts show up and help them take the correct orbble juice, breaking the cycle and cause this version of Wander and Sylvia to cease to exist.

---