History Main / TheFogOfAges

* Immortals in ''Webcomic/ElGoonishShive'' have this as inherent to their nature, with a slight variation. Every couple of centuries, they "die" and [[LossOfIdentity lose the vast majority of their memory]] and power. They can apparently choose the time of their death, or even postpone it indefinitely, but this has [[WithGreatPowerComesGreatInsanity exactly the result you'd expect]]. Just before they "die", they can also "record" important memories and knowledge that their next incarnation will be able to access at will, but this is compared to recalling information read from a book rather than remembering something they had personally experienced.

* The multil-millennia-old Queen Albia in ''Webcomic/GirlGenius'' has a secret archive of memory, since it would be impossible even for her to store them all in her head. Interestingly, the archive is partially sentient and shifts between the personalities she had during those memories. [[spoiler:This bites her in the ass, because she had archived away an important memory from around 5,000 years prior which could have prevented the whole plot - specifically, the day her sister god-queens were slaughtered by a time-travelling Lucrezia]].

*** A downplayed example in the Wizards series: It's suggested a couple of times that the reason the seventy-something Dean of Unseen University occasionally acts like a rebellous teenager is because he doesn't remember been a teenager the first time, and vaguely suspects he may have missed out on it altogether.

* In ''Literature/{{Pyramids}}'', the high priest Dios prevented himself from dying by reversing time by sleeping in a pyramid but mentions that the process doesn't preserve memory. Instead, he refers to the written history of the kingdom as his memory. As a result, [[spoiler:he can't escape a millennia-long StableTimeLoop. By the time it comes around again it's a surprise.]]
* A downplayed example in the Wizards series: It's suggested a couple of times that the reason the seventy-something Dean of Unseen University occasionally acts like a rebellous teenager is because he doesn't remember been a teenager the first time, and vaguely suspects he may have missed out on it altogether.

** ''Literature/{{Discworld}}'': In ''Literature/{{Pyramids}}'', the high priest Dios prevented himself from dying by reversing time by sleeping in a pyramid but mentions that the process doesn't preserve memory. Instead, he refers to the written history of the kingdom as his memory. As a result, [[spoiler:he can't escape a millennia-long StableTimeLoop. By the time it comes around again it's a surprise.]]

* In ''Series/TheXFiles'' episode "Tithonus," Scully and Mulder meet a man who became immortal many years ago by accident -- when the Reaper came for him, he managed to look away and the nurse at his bedside was taken instead. He spends his time tailing people he knows are about to die and taking their picture right as they're taken so maybe he can look at the Reaper and finally die himself. When Scully expresses confusion as to why he would want to die when he has infinite time to see the world and gain every piece of knowledge, he tells her that forty years ago he went to the city's public records office to try to find his marriage certificates because it bothered him that he couldn't remember his wife's name so long after she died.

* In ''Series/TheXFiles'' episode "Tithonus", Scully and Mulder meet a man who became immortal many years ago by accident -- when the Reaper came for him, he managed to look away and the nurse at his bedside was taken instead. He spends his time tailing people he knows are about to die and taking their picture right as they're taken so maybe he can look at the Reaper and finally die himself. When Scully expresses confusion as to why he would want to die when he has infinite time to see the world and gain every piece of knowledge, he tells her that forty years ago he went to the city's public records office to try to find his marriage certificates because it bothered him that he couldn't remember his wife's name so long after she died.

* In ''Series/TheXFiles'' episode "Tithonus", Scully and Mulder meet a man who became immortal many years ago by accident -- when the Reaper came for him, he managed to look away and the nurse at his bedside was taken instead. He spends his time tailing people he knows are about to die and taking their picture right as they're taken so maybe he can look at the Reaper and finally die himself. When Scully expresses confusion as to why he would want to die when he has infinite time to see the world and gain every piece of knowledge, he tells her that forty years ago he went to the city's public records office to try to find his marriage certificates because it bothered him that he couldn't remember his wife's name so long after she died.

* In ''Series/TheXFiles'' episode "Tithonus", a man who couldn't die because he'd "missed his chance" tells Scully he went to the records office once to look up some facts on his late wife, only he couldn't remember her name.
* ''Series/{{Supernatural}}'':

* Scientific evidence suggests that this may now be on its way to being a [[DiscreditedTrope an obsolete trope]]; evidence from the beginning of 2016 by the Salk Institute suggests that human memory capacity may be much bigger than we thought. Like ''[[http://www.salk.edu/news-release/memory-capacity-of-brain-is-10-times-more-than-previously-thought/ size of the Internet big]]''. And that's just the gross amount of data our brain can store, by the way. It doesn't account for any the brain's methods of data compression -- which are impressive in their own right, seeing how trivially we take trains of thoughts that would fry top-of-the-line computers and compress them into simple sentences. This could mean that people don't forget standard things on arbitrary days because their brain is unable to remember them, but rather that the brain considers those things not important enough to bother keeping. It could be a question of priority rather than capability.

* Immortals in ''Webcomic/ElGoonishShive'' have this as inherent to their nature, with a slight variation. Every couple of centuries, they "die" and [[LossOfIdentity lose the vast majority of their memory]] and power. They can apparently choose the time of their death, or even postpone it indefinitely, but this has [[WithGreatPowerComesGreatInsanity exactly the result you'd expect]].

** According to Ruby, most demons have forgotten that they were once human. The only demons known to have some memory of their human lives are Ruby and Crowley.

* Scientific evidence suggests that this may now be on its way to being a [[DiscreditedTrope an obsolete trope]]; evidence from the beginning of 2016 by the Salk Institute suggests that human memory capacity may be much bigger than we thought. Like ''size of the Internet big'': http://www.salk.edu/news-release/memory-capacity-of-brain-is-10-times-more-than-previously-thought/ This could mean that people don't forget standard things on arbitrary days because their brain is unable to remember them, but rather that the brain considers those things not important enough to bother keeping. It could be a question of priority rather than capability.

* ''ComicBook/TheTransformersMoreThanMeetsTheEye'' reveals that even Transformers, MechanicalLifeforms who regularly last millions of years without slowing down, suffer from this: a phenomenon called "information creep" gradually degrades and alters their memories. In a typical example, in Overlord's memory of a gladiatorial bout, most of the crowd is the same flat color, and 1/3 to 1/4 of them are missing their faces. Chromedome estimates he's 4.2 million years old based on the level of degradation. A grander example is that [[spoiler:nobody remembers what happened to [[TheOldGods the Guiding Hand]], or that they were mundane Transformers instead of mythological, supernatural gods, despite some living Transformers being their contemporaries 12 million years ago.]]

* ''Comic book/TheTransformersMoreThanMeetsTheEye'' refers to this as information creep, and it can affect anything from minute details, like how in Overlord's memory there's a few bots in the audience missing faces, to major facets of someone's past, like what happened to [[spoiler: the Guiding Hand]].

* ''Webcomic/AxisPowersHetalia'' has one in the video game ''Videogame/HetaOni'', where Italy has so many memories of the time loops he starts to forget things from his real past.

* ''VideoGame/{{Touhou}} Project'':

* The millennia-old Queen Albia in ''Webcomic/GirlGenius'' has a secret archive of memory, since it would be impossible even for her to store them all in her head. Interestingly, the archive is partially sentient and shifts between the personalities she had during those memories. [[spoiler:This bites her in the ass, because she also locked her most traumatic memory away while it could have prevented the whole plot - specifically, the day her sisters were slaughtered by a time-travelling Lucrezia]].

A common partial aversion is to have the immortal's friends and family be the only thing they still can remember. The tragedies, the wonderful days, the good times and the bad may all blur together after a while, [[{{Tearjerker}} but they]] [[BittersweetEnding can still]] [[SugarWiki/HeartwarmingMoments remember those faces.]] In these cases, the memories of those people might be the only thing that holds the immortal together, as those memories are the one thing they can anchor their mind to, and without them, they would forget who they are and who they were.

* The millennia-old Queen Albia in ''Webcomic/GirlGenius'' has a secret archive of memory, since it would be impossible even for her to store them all in her head.

* Invoked in some ''Manga/{{Bleach}}'' {{Fanon}} to explain why Shinigami generally don't remember their mortal lives - they measure their ages in hundreds. In truth, most of them were never mortal to begin with - they were literally born in [[CelestialBureaucracy Soul Society]], putting them on a different level than humans. Still comes up in fanfic a lot despite WordOfGod.

* Brought up in ''Film/TheManFromEarth'' - John only remembers "the ups and downs" and not all that much more outside of general details.

* In the ''TabletopGame/MagicTheGathering'' novels, Archmage Eternal Jodah deliberately inflicts a version of this on himself every hundred years or so - storing his memory in a magical mirror, wiping his brain clean, then "reloading" himself. This allows him to keep the memories without the deep emotional attachments - which would cause him to lock up mentally.

** WordOfGod has it that the Doctor can't remember their exact age anymore - the Ninth Doctor just settled on '900' and started counting from there. This made into the actual show in "The Day of the Doctor," where the War Doctor and his tenth and eleventh incarnations are stuck in the same cell:

** In ''[[Recap/DoctorWhoS35E5TheGirlWhoDied The Girl who Died]]'', the Doctor suddenly pierces through the fog of his fading memories and remembers where he got his face from - [[Recap/DoctorWhoS30E2TheFiresOfPompeii a man whose family he once saved 1100 years ago]].

** Fairies in general, and Cirno specifically, fall into this category - as {{Anthropomorphic Personification}}s of nature, they are immortal to FromASingleCell levels for as long as their aspect of nature is powerful enough to support them. Individual fairies may well be TimeAbyss material, but because they are also permanently childish and simple-minded, they often forget everything that happened yesterday, much less a thousand years ago. Cirno, for example, can only vaguely remember the previous occurrence of the flowers' odd growth from ''Phantasmagoria Of Flower View'', only after being reminded a few times, and can't remember any of the details, but is fine with it, since she doesn't care, anyway. She simply wants to do what she always does - play, fly around, and pick fights to see if she'll win. Downplayed somewhat in that she's relatively young at less than a human's lifespan, as well as more intelligent than the average fairy. Simpler fairies have absolutely no sense of self-preservation whatsoever.

** Fujiwara no Mokou, an immortal, somewhat played this trope straight. In a supplementary material for a manga, it's explained that her rivalry with another immortal that's often thought to have driven her to take the immortality elixir wasn't actually her motive - she had forgotten about her by the time she was tasked to dispose of the elixir and was more interested in the prospect of, er, being immortal. Her rivalry is more out of a sense that she has something constant in her life, now.

* [[spoiler:[[GreaterScopeVillain Horde Prime]]]] of ''WesternAnimation/SheRaAndThePrincessesOfPower'' has lived for such a long time that he has trouble remembering it all. When he needs to recall details about a bygone era - such as the days of [[AbusivePrecursors the First Ones]] - he has to access the memories of his [[BodySurf former vessels]] from their preserved bodies.

* If you have a set MorningRoutine, your memory of individual tasks may fall prey to this - did you feed the cat this morning, or were you just remembering doing it a few days ago?