History Main / OffscreenInertia

* In the Webcomic/BobAndGeorge subcomic ''Oddball Fancomics'', the main character and DescendedCreator, Rick O'Shay, is lost in the multiverse, his only recourse being to use a dimensional transported and pray that he'll luck back into his original universe at pure random in time to save everyone. [[ScheduleSlip The very last strip]] shows him doing this, and failing repeatedly, so the fans are left with the idea that he's still engaged in this sisyphean task. A MilestoneCelebration for the main comic [[{{Bathos}} put a lighter spin on it]], as Rick, who is TheAlcoholic, admits in an interview that the reason the story hasn't continued is because he found a dimension of pure beer and doesn't want to leave.

* Since Toei's ''Anime/YuGiOhFirstAnimeSeries'' never made it to Duelist Kingdom, if you don't count the 30-minute movie Seto Kaiba has been in a coma since 1998.

* Played with on an episode of ''Series/TheColbertReport''. Musical guest Music/{{Rush}} starts playing "Tom Sawyer" at the end of the show while Colbert prepares to go to sleep. Next night, as the show starts, Rush is still playing "Tom Sawyer"...

* Averted in ''VideoGame/{{Persona 3}}'', ''VideoGame/{{Persona 4}}'', and ''VideoGame/{{Persona 5}}''. These games take place over a year. As the year goes by, talking to {{Non-Player Character}}s reveals that their dialogue changes every few days -- their lives are going on in the background, unobserved by you. In ''Persona 3'', your party members can also become briefly unavailable for a Tartarus expedition for reasons such as studying for upcoming exams, showing that the rest of S.E.E.S. have lives outside of the plot.

* Averted in ''VideoGame/{{Persona 3}}'' and ''VideoGame/{{Persona 4}}''. Both games take place over a year. As the year goes by, talking to [[NonPlayerCharacter Non-Player Characters]] reveals that their dialogue changes every few days -- their lives are going on in the background, unobserved by you.

* In ''Series/{{Castle}}'', Beckett has been [[spoiler: shot in the heart and dying]] for an entire summer break, and now her and Castle are [[spoiler: in coitus]] for another.

* One blogger has [[http://www.scq.ubc.ca/in-which-our-protagonist-learns-the-importance-of-the-base-case/ told the story]] of being driven to tears as a kid by the ''Series/SesameStreet'' episode where Big Bird paints a 'Wet Paint' sign to warn of the paint on a bench, then a 'Wet Paint' sign to warn of the wet paint on the ''sign'', then another for the new sign, and so on past the end of the episode. [[FridgeHorror Poor Big Bird kept going on forever]], she thought. Her mother lied that she was friends with the characters and they told her that Grover would tell Bird to stop painting, and he'd be doing something different the next day. (Also in the post is speculation that someone might stop Bird and give him a crayon.)

* This is what makes the Art/SistineChapel's ''The Creation of Adam'' work so well -- God is always ''just about'' to give Adam the Touch of Life.

* On ''Series/GameOfThrones'', Gendry was last seen at the end of Season 3 rowing away from Dragonstone back to King's Landing by himself. His actor later humorously invoked this on Twitter, saying that he was [[https://twitter.com/joedempsie/status/479055824414076928 "Still rowin'..."]] after Season 4 came to end with no Gendry in sight. Keep in mind that he was given navigational advice "Keep the rocks (coast) on your left!" - Dragonstone is an island...[[note]]Davos actually tells Gendry to row in the direction of certain star for a day and a night until he gets within sight of a certain town, THEN keep the coast on his left. This joke among the fandom assumes Gendry forgot the first part of the instructions.[[/note]]
** He made [[https://twitter.com/joedempsie/status/611249292850950145 another joke about it]] when he failed to show up ''again'' in Season 5.
** When Gendry finally shows up again in Season 7, Davos references the joke in-universe.
--->''"Wasn't sure I'd find you here. Thought you might still be rowing."''

* Seems to be deliberately invoked in Music/{{Madness}}' song "Time for Tea" in which a child playing hide-and-seek hides in a freezer and is still there at the end of the song, by which time the game has been abandoned because it's [[TitleDrop time for tea]]. Whether he is found in time is LeftHanging, but the implication appears to be no.

*** Thankfully, fans would get [[VideoGame/MegaMan11 a new game]] several years later that conclusively proves Roll was cured.

* An edit in international dubs of ''Anime/{{Pokemon}} 3: Spell of the Unown'' was caused because of ValuesDissonance and a desire to avert this trope. In the Japanese version, the scene where Molly Hale's DisappearedDad Spencer is released from the Unown world plays during the end credits. The English dubbers were aware that most Western theater audiences start to file out once the credits start[[note]]While [[TheStinger post-credits scenes]] [[Film/XMenFilmSeries were starting to come into vogue in the West]] around the same time, they weren't yet something that was widely expected.[[/note]], so this scene was moved to before the credits so that no one would think he was stuck there forever.

[[folder:Real Life]]
* Everyone's had the experience where someone leaves, then comes back, and you're doing the same thing you were doing when they left, and they assume "you haven't moved", no matter ''how much'' you managed to get done in the time they were gone.
** One web article about job performance mentions as much when cautioning about taking smoke breaks or similar.
** Similarly, if you have pets, especially cats, and leave for several hours, when you return to find them sleeping in the same spot as when you left, you have to wonder if they even ever moved at all.
** Also zoo animals, especially if the animal is a nocturnal species and has a favorite sleeping spot in its enclosure.
* On the other hand, young children's murky understanding of the concept of "permanence" (that an item might still be there when you don't see it) is what makes playing peek-a-boo with them work.
** Babies' lack of object permanence is also why they often cry when you leave the room. They aren't just worried that you won't come back -- they don't understand that you still ''exist''.
** This entire trope is essentially object permanence gone haywire. It takes us a while after we're born to get the idea that things are still there when we can't see them, and apparently, once that idea gets into our heads, it's tough to shake it.
* You have to wonder if Music/PhilCollins [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PsavsRcQno ever stopped explaining the "Domino" effect]].
* ''The Song That Never Ends''.
** "I know a song that gets on everybody's nerves..."
%%** The premise to that identical to [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZgdJ-y79KY a video by TheWineKone]]......
* UsefulNotes/{{NASA}}'s lunar rovers are still just sitting there on the moon, in the same positions they've been in for 40 years. Given America's budget woes and NASA's perennial TheUnfavorite status in DC, that's not likely to change anytime soon.
** In a Creator/StephenBaxter story there's still a lander abandoned on the Moon in the year ''171,257''. It's a historical monument of sorts.
** This sort of thing is invoked horrifically and sadly by ''Webcomic/{{Xkcd}}'' [[http://xkcd.com/695/ here]]. This generally happens if you try to personify any of NASA's deep space exploration equipment, since it can get rather heartwrenching. Heck, even /b/ cries when people start talking about Voyager-tan. [[http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/06/12/scientists-rescue-voyager-2-probe-on-edge-of-solar-system/ Meanwhile, a happy story]].
* A more personal example in the form of [[http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/history_lesson/2011/10/elizabeth_and_hazel_what_happened_to_the_two_girls_in_the_most_f.single.html Hazel Bryan,]] a white girl immortalized by a famous picture where she is enraged at a young black girl desegregating her high school. Hazel learned from her mistake and grew out of it over the subsequent 50 years, but in that picture she's [[NeverLiveItDown forever a snarling racist.]]
* When you don't see a child for a long time, you tend to assume that they stayed about the same age they were when you last saw them. This happens a lot with relatives who don't often see each other. ("What? How can Becky Sue be thirteen already? She was six when I last saw her!" "Because the last time you saw her was seven years ago.") This also affects the public's perception of child actors, especially when they haven't done any acting since they were a kid. And even though Creator/DakotaFanning stayed in the public eye when she grew up, the public was still slow to grasp the fact that, no, she is not eternally twelve years old.
** It didn't help that she consistently [[DawsonCasting played characters significantly younger than she was]] and then suddenly started playing characters her own age. While a 15-year-old becoming a 16-year-old normally isn't jarring, a 15-year-old who played 10-year-olds for a couple of years becoming a 16-year-old who plays 16-year-olds takes a bit of getting used to.
** Similar issues arise for many actresses who originally make their mark as children or teenagers in kids shows such as [[Music/MileyCyrus Hannah]] [[Series/HannahMontana Montana]] or [[Music/HilaryDuff Lizzie]] [[Series/LizzieMcGuire McGuire]]. Hilary Duff once complained in a Maxim interview that she would get chastised for not acting like a proper fourteen year old girl when she was in fact twenty three. In more recent times, snarky articles like to point out that nineteen year old Miley Cyrus is criticized for acting like some sort of partying college girl. It doesn't help that she got those same complaints when she actually ''was'' still underage.
* Plenty of items that were sealed in tombs or covered with rubble or dust or sand are still sitting where they were left when archaeologists come along centuries later. However, in the case of Pompeii, there were holes in the volcanic ash that preserved the exact positions people were in as they died, such that we now have plaster casts of a dog eternally stealing a raisin cake, a man eternally running, a husband eternally trying to cover his pregnant wife's eyes... It's all rather creepy.
* High-profile FrivolousLawsuit filings are always breathlessly announced and trumpeted by the news media, but the results of these suits are almost never reported on. It's probably because there's nothing sensational about a groundless claim getting dismissed by a judge, but it often leaves the general public to assume that such cases spend years clogging up the legal system, long after they'd already been tossed out of court.
* This is basically how [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Client-side_prediction client-side prediction]] networking works in online video games. The game client simulates a local player's input without regard to server-side lag, or going "offscreen" to the server as it were. The general assumption is that lag spikes would be brief enough that a player probably really was doing whatever they were doing a few milliseconds ago, and the server's assumption about that laggy player's state is still correct. [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GGPO GGPO]], a networking framework made specifically for the UsefulNotes/FightingGame genre, is similar in concept.
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* Roman Torchwick of ''WebAnimation/{{RWBY}}'' fame's last appearance in Volume 2 has him put into a tiny holding cell on an Atlesian airship. During the climax of Volume 3, his henchwoman Neo breaks him out of that same cell, implying he was stuck on a military ship instead of being moved to a proper jail or prison, trapped in solitary confinement in a tiny cell [[NobodyPoops without a toilet or sink,]] [[LimitedWardrobe wearing the same clothes]] for the weeks if not months that passed.

** Played straight with Hoffman when he's captured by Lawrence, Brad and Ryan in ''Film/Saw3D''. He's trapped inside the Bathroom (next to Adam's corpse, no less), but with all possible methods of escape removed. The film ends with him being left to stay there until he dies, though his fate remains ambiguous due to production-related issues.