History Main / TrappedInThePast

* OlderThanRadio: In Creator/MarkTwain's ''Literature/AConnecticutYankeeInKingArthursCourt'', the aforementioned Connecticut Yankee, Hank Morgan, gets whacked over the head with a crowbar and finds himself in [[KingArthur Arthurian]] England.

* In Creator/TerryPratchett's short story ''Once and Future'' a {{time travel}}ler called Mervin finds himself not only trapped in the past, but in a past that never existed: the AnachronismStew that was KingArthur's time. Working as a doctor for a village in Sir Ector's demenses, he quickly realises that what they need is a great and noble leader, gimmicks up an electromagnet to hold a sword in a stone, and waits for a candidate whose body language suggests he's sensible enough to take advice. It works, although not quite how he expected.

* Temporally inverted in the ''2078'' arc of the Filipino comic strip ''ComicStrip/PugadBaboy'', whose main cast accidentally ride a train from the then-present of 1992 into 2078, thanks to a wormhole swallowing up the train. The whole arc has them briefly adjusting to a very dense, overcrowded, and CyberPunk-ish metropolitan Manila (and lamenting the lack of beer in the 2070s) before riding the next wormhole back into their time. (The arc never explains the fate of the presumed other passengers though.)

* Temporally inverted in the ''2078'' arc of the Filipino comic strip ''ComicStrip/PugadBaboy'', whose main cast accidentally ride a train from the then-present of 1992 into 2078, thanks to a wormhole swallowing up the train. The whole arc has them briefly adjusting to a very dense, overcrowded, and {{CyberPunk}}-ish metropolitan Manila (and lamenting the lack of beer in the 2070s) before riding the next wormhole back into their time. (The arc never explains the fate of the presumed other passengers though.)

* In ''Manga/{{Amakusa 1637}}'', seven teenagers from a Catholic school get trapped in the Japan of few before the ''sakoku'' ("isolationism") period. They learn that they're in the Amakusa area, right before the Shimabara Rebellion, and they decide to try averting the bloody massacre of UsefulNotes/{{Japanese Christian}}s. [[spoiler: When one of them returns to the future alone, she finds out that their mission has been succesful.]]

* In ''Franchise/{{Superman}}'' storyline ''ComicBook/TwoForTheDeathOfOne'', the Man of Steel gets dragged to the fourteenth century by his enemy [[EvilSorcerer Satanis]]. During a magic duel between Satanis and villainess Syrene, the Man of Steel gets split into two duplicates. Since their enemies only need one Superman to carry out their plans, one "twin" is hurled back to the present day. The remaining Superman remains trapped in the [=XIVth=] century until his duplicate self manages to go back to the past and merging back together with him.

** In ''FanFic/TimeWillTell'', Gandalf and Elrond believe that Jorryn is from the far future.
** In ''FanFic/TheGamesOfTheGods'', this is a DiscussedTrope. Rachel isn't sure if she is trapped in TheAgeOfMyths, or in AnotherDimension.

* This is one of the most predominant theories on the relation between [[VideoGame/TouhouProject Yukari Yakumo and Maribel Hearn]].

* Zira and Cornelius are this in ''Film/EscapeFromThePlanetOfTheApes''. After their planet exploded in ''Film/BeneathThePlanetOfTheApes'', Cornelius, Zira, and Dr. Milo escape on the spaceship that George Taylor and his crew used in the beginning of [[Film/PlanetOfTheApes1968 the first]] ''Franchise/PlanetOfTheApes'' movie. The ape trio used the ship to go backwards in time to the way the human crew came, landing them on the same time when they left on Earth. Since the ape planet was destroyed, they are now stuck in the present Earth in the 70s.

* Overlapping with TrappedInAnotherWorld due to the nature of AlternateTimelines in ''VisualNovel/AreaX'', this happens to Elcia when she loses her Dimensional Watch in the Middle Ages, meaning that she can't travel back to the Future. [[spoiler:It also happens to Rexus, who's trapped in the Present because Belph stole the needed item for Rexus to travel back to the Future.]]

* Creator/PoulAnderson's short story "The Man Who Came Early", in which an American soldier stationed in Iceland is sent back to the Viking Era after being hit by lightning. Luckily the Icelandic language has not changed much since then. All his attempts to change history fall flat on their face. When he tries to show the Vikings how to make compasses, he has no idea where to find or mine magnetic ores. When he tries to show them how to build more modern sailing vessels, the Vikings point out that such vessels are too cumbersome to dock anywhere where there is not a ready built harbor, an obvious rarity in that time period. The Vikings find the matches he brought with him impressive, but he has no idea how to make more. The only knowledge he has of any use is modern martial arts. [[spoiler:In the end the soldier runs afoul of his ignorance of Viking legal customs and is killed.]] The story's main point is that victims of this trope don't really have much chance of introducing future inventions because most advances are useless without an advanced societal and technological infrastructure to support them, while the characters in question don't have sufficient skills, tools and resources to introduce new technology. [[WordOfGod Anderson admits that he wrote the story, in part, as a criticism of "Lest Darkness Fall"]].

** [[Recap/DoctorWhoS38E1E2Spyfall Spyfall Part 2]] has [[spoiler:the Master]] trying to find the Doctor in 1943 where she is accidentally stranded by disguising himself as a Nazi Officer, however he is exposed and captured, enabling the Doctor to steal his [[spoiler:TARDIS]] and return to the present. In the present-day sequence of the episode, set in 2020, [[spoiler:the Mastter then turns up, remarking that he has just had [[TheSlowPath the worst 77 years of his life]], being a Time Lord he was able to live through these years and has barely aged]].
* ''Series/{{The Flash|2014}}'' features [[spoiler:Harrison Wells, aka Eobard Thawne/Reverse-Flash]] who is in this situation, though it's entirely his own fault. [[spoiler:He got trapped in the past as a result of a failed attempt to go back in time and kill the Flash as a child. After failing, he decides to kill Barry's mother instead, but after doing so he discovers that he lost his connection to the Speed Force and is unable to get back to his own time. His actions throughout the series have ultimately been dedicated to creating the Flash (earlier than in the original timeline) and using his speed to travel back to the future.]]

* This is the primary conflict of ''[[Anime/{{Tamagotchi}} Tamagotchi! Miracle Friends]]'', where a pair of twin girls named Miraitchi and Clulutchi are inexplicably sent to the past and have to get help from Mametchi and co. in thr present day to collect Dreambakutchis, creatures that will return them to the future, before a villain named X-Kamen can make off with them.

* The ''ComicBook/Marvel1602'' mini-series has a time-displaced ComicBook/CaptainAmerica sent back to Elizabethan times. When asked to return to the future, he insists on staying to try and build a better America from the beginning -- which he does in small ways, such as helping a group of colonists survive a winter that should have wiped them out, or warning the natives against selling their land to unscrupulous capitalists. The final touch comes when, because of his actions, the American colonies declare independence from Britain 174 years early.
** And it's got ''[[EverythingsBetterWithDinosaurs dinosaurs]]''.
** It also has consequences beyond his control -- his presence causes the Franchise/MarvelUniverse to impose itself on the past, and period versions of the Comicbook/XMen, [[Comicbook/TheAvengers Avengers]] and other superheroes start appearing.

* [[ComicBook/FantasticFour Reed Richards]] was shunted to the distant past by a villain without his gadgets and he wasn't rescued until much later when his teammates found out what happened to him.
** Speaking of the ComicBook/FantasticFour, this has happened several times with ComicBook/DoctorDoom. The first time he was shunted back to the medieval age with ComicBook/IronMan (And kept calling him Lackey because he was [[SecretIdentity Tony Stark's]] bodyguard. It bothered Iron Man. ''A lot''); a second time happened with Iron Man '''and''' ComicBook/TheSentry, though they were sent into UsefulNotes/{{the Silver Age|of Comic Books}} and were desperately trying not to cause any ButterflyOfDoom effects. Another time Doctor Doom's so called "[[TheMentor Mentor]]" the Marquis of Death came by to fight the Fantastic Four and sent Doom, burnt alive, straight into prehistoric lands where he got eaten by a Megalodon. Naturally, Doom showed up a few issues later, boasting that he survived via ThePowerOfHate and took TheSlowPath back to the present. Though it was later retconed that the ComicBook/Thunderbolts unwittingly saved Doom during an unrelated time travel adventure, and he merely hijacked their time machine to get back to the present.

* at the end of ''Manga/InuYasha'' [[spoiler: [[AmbiguousSituation it's implied]] that Kagome willingly does this to herself when she [[IChooseToStay chooses to make an apparently one-way trip to feudal Japan to be with Inuyasha.]]]]

** Speaking of the ComicBook/FantasticFour, this has happened several times with ComicBook/DoctorDoom. The first time he was shunted back to the medieval age with ComicBook/IronMan (And kept calling him Lackey because he was [[SecretIdentity Tony Stark's]] bodyguard. It bothered Iron Man. ''A lot''); a second time happened with Iron Man '''and''' ComicBook/TheSentry, though they were sent into UsefulNotes/{{the Silver Age|of Comic Books}} and were desperately trying not to cause any ButterflyOfDoom effects. The last time was when Doctor Doom's so called "[[TheMentor Mentor]]" the Marquis of Death came by to fight the Fantastic Four and sent Doom, burnt alive, straight into prehistoric lands where he got eaten by a Megalodon.

* ''WesternAnimation/XiaolinShowdown'' In "Citadel of Doom" Omi utterly panics about being stuck in the past though he was at least able to get the Puzzle Box from Grand Master Dashi. He then freezes himself for over 1000 years and then unfreezes himself in the present!

* In Creator/TerryPratchett's Literature/{{Discworld}} novel ''Discworld/NightWatch'', Commander Vimes is eventually torn between trying to fix the timeline so that he can get back to his own time, or [[GivingRadioToTheRomans attempting to improve the Ankh-Morpork of thirty years ago]]. [[spoiler:He eventually decides to take the latter course of action, but historical inertia forces the former one. Mostly.]]

* The plot of ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyX'' revolves around Tidus being plucked out of the futuristic city of Zanarkand (while said city is [[DoomedHometown destroyed]]) and dropped in the world of Spira. He finds that Zanarkand was destroyed 1000 years ago and has no way of getting back, so he helps a summoner on her quest to destroy the local [[EldritchAbomination world killing god whale]]. Fully subverted when we find out [[spoiler:Tidus, along with his version of Zanarkand, is a dream of the Fayth, the last survivors of the ''actual'' Zanarkand.]].

* There are many stories about [[TrappedInAnotherWorld girls falling into Middle-earth]], the setting of ''Literature/TheLordOfTheRings'', but only a few such stories acknowledge that Middle-earth is from our own past. This is consistent with the original LiteraryAgentHypothesis, that Creator/JRRTolkien discovered and translated an ancient book. These girls are falling [[TimeTravel back through time]] and becoming trapped in TheAgeOfMyths.