Basic Trope: Time travel without shortcuts.
- Straight: Alice travels to the future without Bob, so Bob waits 10 years to meet her in said future.
- Exaggerated:
- Alice travels forward 600 years. Bob is somehow still waiting, having achieved immortality or frozen himself or something similar.
- An entire cult forms to await Alice's arrival.
- Logical Extreme: Alice travels forward to the heat death of universe. Bob, whatever he had left in the void, is still waiting.
- Downplayed: Alice travels to next Tuesday. Bob barely noticed she was gone.
- Justified:
- The time machine only has room for one person.
- Bob is a walking paradox, so he and time machines don’t mix.
- Bob is guarding the MacGuffin.
- Inverted: Bored of waiting for next week, Bob time travels there... in a setting without time travel.
- Subverted:
- Bob finds his own time machine.
- Alice tries to find Bob in the future, but he's actually dead.
- Double Subverted: ...But it’s broken and Alice isn’t around to fix it, so he waits anyway.
- Parodied: Alice travels backwards in time. Bob’s waiting for her when she gets there.
- Bob says that he can also time travel to the future, at a rate of one second per second.
- Zig Zagged: Alice initially travels to the future without Bob, but later on, they find a way to travel together, and then circumstances force them to wait separately once again.
- Averted: Bob gets in the time machine.
- Enforced: Alice’s actor falls ill, so she needs to be Put on a Bus while Bob has adventures without her.
- Lampshaded: “Didn’t you ever feel the need to move house or something?”
- Invoked: Bob loves Alice but is too young for her, so he goes the long way to rectify the issue.
- Exploited: Bob uses the extra time to brush up on his fighting skills in preparation for the upcoming adventure.
- Defied:
- Bob barges into the time machine just as Alice begins leaving.
- Alice realises she forgot Bob and comes back for him.
- Discussed: "Have you ever noticed how time travel without shortcuts is portrayed in movies? It's always so complicated."
- Conversed: "Have you noticed how in most time travel stories, they never really address the waiting game when someone goes to the future?"
- Implied: In the future, a stranger with the same scar as Bob joins Alice’s adventures.
- Deconstructed:
- Bob waits several years, but the stress of waiting causes him to fall ill.
- By the time Alice finds Bob, he's moved on with his life and doesn't welcome a walking reminder of his past.
- Reconstructed:
- His illness is a sign that he wouldn’t have survived the time travel trip had he gone along with Alice.
- But then he admits that his prickly reaction ultimately roots from how much he missed Alice. She sincerely sympathizes with his pain for waiting and the two of them reconcile.
- Played For Laughs: Alice travels to the future, where Bob is waiting, unaged and unharmed, in a post-apocalyptic wasteland.
- Played For Drama: Alice travels too far into the future, and sees Bob’s skeleton still waiting for her. She can’t even travel back to get him, because that would cause a paradox.
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