Does Not Illustrate: Clock Roaches

This trope is about creatures that eat people that would cause a Temporal Paradox. I suppose that's pretty difficult to illustrate, but the current image does a bad job at it: it simply shows a bunch of spiders dropping from the sky, with no context or indeed anything referring to time travel either.

Speaking of which, the page quote is also incorrect, since it just talks about putting creatures in the time line For the Lulz, rather than having the clean-up creatures that the trope is about.

Motion to pull. The only replacement that comes to mind is this visual pun.

edited 28th Oct '13 10:33:12 AM by Spark9

Dr Who has several examples of Clock Roaches, maybe we can find one from there.

The OP suggestion is a slight uptick over the current.

I disagree, I feel like a Visual Pun is a last resort if we just can't find anything else.

A visual pun is only good when the definition of the trope is evident from the name. I had no idea what a clock roach was before reading the description, so I would avoid using that.

That is not true I don't think.

I agree. When I first saw the trope name, the thing that first came to my mind was the Clock Spider meme, which the description explicitly dissociated.

I concur. How about this title card for a Nostalgia Critic episode on The Langoliers?

edited 29th Oct '13 9:45:11 AM by Earnest

That is way too jpged for me to approve. But quality issues aside, it doesn't look like he was caught, but falling with the rock. I'd like an image to be very clear or a parody aversion.

I agree on the quality issues but disagree with everything else; if we don't come up with a more straight example, I'd be fine with using that provided we get a cleaner version.

edited 29th Oct '13 12:31:43 PM by Willbyr

Sorry about the quality, usually the program I use isn't quite so lossy. Anyway, here's a cleaner version and the source◊ in case anyone wants to take a whack at resizing and cropping.

Oh, I have no idea why, but I thought this was Not the Fall That Kills You… when I wrote 9. I was on my phone and at work. So, yeah, it looks good.

I still have no clue what the trope is when looking at that image.

Clock is set.

I seriously doubt any simple picture can describe the whole Cloack Roach concept by itself, so I'd say the Nostalgia Critic one is good enough; better than the current, certainly.

Here's a PNG take on that one.

I like that PNG take with the langoliers.

Anyone else?

I'm kind of undecided, but it works, I suppose.

A bit weak on the "time travel" part, but I suppose it'll do.

Well, it's a little weak, but there's enough of a consensus to run with the TGWTG pic. It's up, potholed, and tagged, and the actual episode is added as its own example on the page. Caption or no? I haven't watched the episode, so I dunno if the Critic has a good line about the concept that would work or not. I reclocked this one to give some time for consideration.

edited 25th Nov '13 7:58:58 AM by Willbyr

Some more info about the trope and why that image is relevant to it? I don't get it.

The image is the title card for the show The Nostalgia Critic. In that particular episode he was reviewing the film of the Stephen King book The Langoliers. The film is about a plane that flies through a rip in time that strands them in the past. The way time travel works in his universe is that the present is constantly surging forward like a wave, occupying empty worlds that already exist, only to leave them behind empty and discarded. The people on the plane are thus trapped in a world where physics has stopped and no one else is around. The titular Langoliers, those flying mouths in the image, are Clock Roaches. They are essentially time’s cleanup service. They eat the discarded pasts to keep the time stream clean, and they don't particularly care if they're eating a human wrongly trapped in the past.

The title card is poking fun at the fact that they basically leave floating islands of Earth as they devour the countryside Tazmanian Devil style.

edited 26th Nov '13 8:10:22 AM by Earnest

Was a caption suggestion/question.

Did explain it though, now to fold it down into a sentence.