History Main / CaughtInTheRipple

* One Sci-Fi anthology comic had a trio of scientists experiment with a time machine by altering specific moments in history. Each time they alter their present unawares and repeat their experiment further back in time. This regresses their culture to the points in history they tampered with, until they altered the entire human race by preventing life from leaving the ocean. Even then, as aquatic creatures, they get the bright idea to meddle with the creation of life on Earth, which is where the comic ends once they initiate the experiment.

In ''Fanfic/JonathanJoestarTheFirstJoJo,'' After defeating Heaven Ascension Dio, everyone is sent back to their original time. Nobody (except for Jotaro) remembers the journey at all, but looking at all the photos taken over the course of the adventure jogs their memories.

* ''Series/WandaVision'': The entire premise of the series is that Wanda Maximoff and the Vision are living out a domestic sitcom life in the town of Westview, New Jersey and getting into all sorts of wacky hijinx to [[TheMasquerade hide their superpowered nature]] from their neighbours. Right from the start the audience is aware that something is very, very wrong with this world despite none of the characters treating this situation as odd in any way. Aside from the confusing GenreShift from the rest of the MCU, Vision is BackFromTheDead without explanation. [[spoiler:It's gradually revealed that Wanda is mind controlling an entire town into playing along with the life she wished she and Vision could have had. When people from outside the town who haven't been Caught in the Ripple try to interfere, things go from bad to worse.]]

* ''Series/WandaVision'': The entire premise of the series is that Wanda Maximoff and the Vision are living out a domestic sitcom life in the town of Westview, New Jersey and getting into all sorts of wacky hijinx to [[TheMasquerade hide their superpowered nature]] from their neighbours. Right from the start the audience is aware that something is very, very wrong with this world despite none of the characters treating this situation as odd in any way. Aside from the confusing GenreShift, Vision is BackFromTheDead without explanation. [[spoiler:It's gradually revealed that Wanda is mind controlling an entire town into playing along with the life she wished she and Vision could have had. When people from outside the town who haven't been Caught in the Ripple try to interfere, things go from bad to worse.]]

* ''ComicBook/{{Wanted}}'': At some point every supervillain banded together to rewrite reality so that not only did the world forget superheroes were real, the superheroes forgot as well (the supervillains, for their part, operate in secrecy). One villain killed his nemeses (BatmanAndRobin expies) by dunking them in a vat of acid, they kept screaming that they ''weren't'' superheroes, they'd just played them on TV.

This could be anything from a DreamSequence to an AlternateUniverse. The point is, the audience doesn't know what's going on because the characters are, at first at least, treating this interlude as a completely normal occurence. Like InMediasRes, the audience only finds out what is happening later on. Compare ElephantInTheLivingRoom, when characters aren't talking about it but do notice, and contrast RippleEffectProofMemory. When a timeline has been changed, everyone who doesn't have a RippleEffectProofMemory is covered by this trope. Examples of that trope don't have to be added here.

* The aborted anime ''Anime/UsagichanDeCue'' has Mimika, a bunny-girl formed from skilled fighter Mikami Inaba merging with a pet rabbit. When Mimika appears in the home of Haru, the rabbit's keeper, nobody seems surprised, not even noticing that Mimika has rabbit ears and a powderpuff tail. Mimika explains that she can project thought control similar to a PerceptionFilter, so that people regard her as perfectly normal.

* Creator/WilliamTenn's "Literature/BrooklynProject" ends with an official demonstrating that the time travel experiment had changed absolutely nothing... except that the reader is fairly certain that neither him not the audience were {{Blob Monster}}s when the demonstration started.

* ''Series/StarTrekTheNextGeneration'':
** The episode "Yesterday's Enterprise" opens with the Enterprise-D coming upon a time rip with the Enterprise-C (lost decades earlier) emerging. Suddenly, reality is changed and the Federation is now involved in a war with the Klingons. On top of that, Tasha Yar (killed in season one) is still on the bridge crew (in place of Worf, logically -- no Klingon would be on a Starfleet ship). No one notices anything is different, although Guinan suspects something is wrong.
** The episode "Conundrum" has an unknown alien ship cause a bit of LaserGuidedAmnesia on the crew and alter the computer records of the ship to make the crew think they are at war with another alien race called the Lysians, who are enemies of the race that screwed with their minds. For good measure, they also have a member of their race infiltrate the crew and pretend to be the NumberTwo -- no one recognizes him, but of course they don't recognize each other either. Everyone is initially caught in the ripple, but Picard eventually does some SpottingTheThread.
* In ''Series/{{Torchwood}}'', the episode "[[Recap/TorchwoodS2E5Adam Adam]]" starts off with with a new (to the viewers) team member Adam in the opening credits who's supposedly been with the team for the last three years. Turns out he's an alien who's infiltrated them by inserting years of fake memories into the Torchwood teams' minds.

* ''VideoGame/BlazBlueCentralFiction'': from the beginning of the game, the game somehow seems to revert the timeline and events to that of the first game, i.e. 2199. Most people act like they would during that part of history. There are a few people, however, who notices something's wrong. [[spoiler:It's revealed later that the world they're in aren't the same world they (or the audience) know, but rather a PocketDimension called "Embryo", and most people's memories are reverted to the events of the first game. They do, at least, regain their memories around the end of the second act.]]

** The episode "Yesterday's Enterprise" opens with the Enterprise-D coming upon a time rip with the Enterprise-C (lost decades earlier) emerging. Suddenly, reality is changed and the Federation is now involved in a war with the Klingons. On top of that, Tasha Yar (killed in season one) is still on the bridge crew. No one notices anything is different, although Guinan suspects something is wrong.
** The episode "Conundrum" has an unknown alien ship cause a bit of LaserGuidedAmnesia on the crew and alter the computer records of the ship to make the crew think they are at war with another alien race called the Lysians, who are enemies of the race that screwed with their minds. For good measure, they also have a member of their race infiltrate the crew and pretend to be the NumberTwo. Everyone is initially caught in the ripple, but Picard eventually does some SpottingTheThread.

This could be anything from a [[DreanSequence dream]] to an AlternateUniverse. The point is, the audience doesn't know what's going on because the characters are, at first at least, treating this interlude as a completely normal occurence. Like InMediasRes, the audience only finds out what is happening later on. Compare ElephantInTheLivingRoom, when characters aren't talking about it but do notice, and contrast RippleEffectProofMemory. When a timeline has been changed, everyone who doesn't have a RippleEffectProofMemory is covered by this trope. Examples of that trope don't have to be added here.

This could be anything from a dream to an alternate universe. The point is, the audience doesn't know what's going on because the characters are, at first at least, treating this interlude as a completely normal occurence. Like InMediasRes, the audience only finds out what is happening later on. Compare ElephantInTheLivingRoom, when characters aren't talking about it but do notice, and contrast RippleEffectProofMemory. When a timeline has been changed, everyone who doesn't have a RippleEffectProofMemory is covered by this trope. Examples of that trope don't have to be added here.

* ''Literature/{{Animorphs}}'': Megamorphs #3's first chapter ends with the WhamLine about people owning slaves, with nobody seeing a problem. It gets worse from there, with Rachel nowhere to be seen, Jake being a egomaniac asshole considering selling out Cassie to the Yeerks for talking back to him, and writing off entire chunks of humanity called Primitives. When the Drode restores their memory to the real timeline, they retain the branch timeline's memories and feel sick to their stomachs. For the rest of the book they have RippleEffectProofMemory, but retain the memory of what will happen if they fail.

* ''VideoGame/BlazblueCentralfiction'': from the beginning of the game, the game somehow seems to revert the timeline and events to that of the first game, i.e 2199. Most people act like they would during that part of history. There are a few people, however, who notices something's wrong. [[spoiler:It's revealed later that the world they're in aren't the same world they (or the audience) know, but rather a PocketDimension called "Embryo", and most people's memories are reverted to the events of the first game. They do, at least, regain their memories around the end of the second act.]]

* ''VideoGame/BlazblueCentralfiction'': from the beginning of the game, the game somehow seems to revert the timeline and events to that of the first game, i.e 2199. Most people act like they would during that partof history. There are a few people, however, who notices something's wrong. [[spoiler:It's revealed later that the world they're in aren't the same world they (or the audience) know, but rather a PocketDimension called "Embryo", and most people's memories are reverted to the events of the first game. They do, at least, regain their memories around the end of the second act.]]

* In ''Series/{{Torchwood}}'', the episode "[[TorchwoodS2E5Adam Adam]]" starts off with with a new (to the viewers) team member Adam in the opening credits who's supposedly been with the team for the last three years. Turns out he's an alien who's infiltrated them by inserting years of fake memories into the Torchwood teams' minds.

* ''Literature/{{Discworld}}'':
** It recurs in ''Discworld/{{Sourcery}}'' when the repentent super-magician, Coin, reverses the damage he has caused and restores the entire world. In ''Discworld/{{Mort}}'', a kind of ripple effect caused by Death's stand-in not killing a Queen when he should have done creates two worlds, superimposed on each other: the dominant world, where the Queen died, tries to restore order by rippling back into the second reality where she still lives. And in books like ''Discworld/ThiefOfTime'', the History Monks are revealed to be the super-secret organisation that manages the time-line and seeks to stop things like this from happening.

** In ''Discworld/TheLightFantastic'', a Change Spell affects the entire ''world'', beginning in Unseen University and rippling outwards to encompass the entire world. The wizards, who are trained to recognise and act on this sort of thing, realise what's happening and speed to a high vantage point to watch the ripple in reality spread out first over the city and then onwards. [[note]]This is done to save the life of the Wizzard Rincewind - mis-spelling deliberate - who in this time and place is the most important person in the world, for reasons that become clear later.[[/note]].

* The "Endless Eight" arc in the ''LightNovel/HaruhiSuzumiya'' anime was like this too during the beginning of the GroundhogDayLoop.

* ''Literature/{{Animorphs}}'': Megamorphs #3's first chapter ends with the WhamLine about people ownig slaves, with nobody seeing a problem. It gets worse from there, with Rachel nowhere to be seen, Jake being a egomaniac asshole considering selling out Cassie to the Yeerks for talking back to him, and writing off entire chunks of humanity called Primitives. When the Drode restores their memory to the real timeline, they retain the branch timeline's memories and feel sick to their stomachs. For the rest of the book they have RippleEffectProofMemory, but retain the memory of what will happen if they fail.

* ''ComicBook/EmperorJoker'': The comic starts with Superman as a dangerous criminal locked up in Arkham Asylum and trying to escape Bizarro's clutches every day, Lois Lane as a bald CorruptCorporateExecutive, the Justice League as a bunch of supervillains and the actual DC supervillains as a rag-tag bunch of heroes, all treated as if this is the natural state of things. It's only revealed halfway through that all of reality has been perverted by ComicBook/TheJoker after [[RealityWarper he acquired the powers of Mr. Mxyzptlk]], which only those two characters are aware of.

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