Dr. Tenma: For now, but that wasn't your name back when you were brought into my hospital.
Amnesia comes easy in fiction. It is also conveniently specific. A taste of Applied Phlebotinum, a particularly shocking traumatic event, or even a simple Tap on the Head will be sufficient to make your character forget all about who or what they are.
In most cases, the character has simply lost their memories, no longer remembering their name, loved ones, or where they came from. This is often the cause for a Quest for Identity.
Sometimes, however, it is their personality that has changed. Not only do they not remember who they were, they are convinced that they are someone else entirely. In essence, Bob doesn't just forget that he's Bob, but he thinks he's Alice instead...
The affected character may have additional amnesia on top of their personality change, but it's not a guarantee. It's possible they may still know everything they did prior to the switch, except that they've never before acted the way they're acting now. Attempts to get them to remember previous life-defining events that may snap them out of it are likely to be met with a stern dismissal: "Why do you keep talking about this "Bob" guy?! I haven't time for this! I'm a world-famous opera singer and must be on stage in one hour!"
Just like other forms of TV amnesia, this variety is often rectified by just smacking the character in the head a second time; they are usually very resistant to seeking out help on their own. As far as they're concerned, nothing is wrong.
Once restored, they'll probably have no recollection of their amnesia-induced alter ego, and will probably be puzzled as to why time has moved forward by several hours/days.
Once their Jekyll & Hyde nature has been demonstrated, it's a foregone conclusion that should the character in question get tapped on the head at a later date, the alternate persona will be right back in the saddle again.
A vast exaggeration of a Truth in Television mental disorder, known as a "Fugue State". This is when someone believes themselves to be someone completely different. They may move to a different town and assume a different identity, without being aware the new identity is false. It is a very, very rare result of a psychotic break. Dissociative amnesia can also parallel this trope, but also under very rare and extreme circumstances.
Clinical identity amnesia is the inability to identify with things you have done or said. You still remember who you are, but have no memory of having done certain things. You're just as likely (or more) to disown good deeds as bad ones.
See also Brainwashed, Easy Amnesia, Fake Memories, We Want Our Jerk Back!, Wistful Amnesia, Amnesiac Hero, and Amnesiac Lover. Not to be confused with I Am Who?
Subtropes:
- Alternate Identity Amnesia — A character who shapeshifts, is Brainwashed and Crazy, or has a case of Jekyll & Hyde has no memory of their actions while in their other form or brainwashed state.
- Amnesiacs Are Innocent — The new character is childlike and innocent.
- Amnesiac Costume Identity — The character thinks the clothes they're wearing are their own.
- Amnesiac Liar — The character lies and then forgets that it's a lie.
- Criminal Amnesiac — The character goes from their heroic or noble life to an evil or self-serving one, often because a villain lied to them about who they're supposed to be.
- Forgot the Call — The character in question goes from a heroic life to a mundane one.
- Napoleon Delusion — The new "character" is a famous historical figure (insanity is a bigger factor here).
Example Subpages:
Other Examples:
- The entire Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf season Love You Babe is built around Wolnie being hit with a gene gun and forgetting who she really is. The amnesiac Wolnie thinks she's Paddi's mother.
- Big Finish Doctor Who: In "Gods and Monsters", Hex, a Seventh Doctor companion possessed by Fenric, comes to his senses for long enough to jump into the Time Vortex, stopping Fenric from doing nasty things with the TARDIS. He lingers in the Vortex until he wins enough card games to buy a year on Earth—unbeknownst to him, as a different person. In "Afterlife", his time up, prominent mobster Hector Thomas runs into the Doctor and Ace; though they save him from being returned into the Vortex, they're unable to restore his memories of being Hex. It's not until they meet fellow companion Sally Morgan, who happens to have the memories in her St. Christopher necklace, that things are sorted out.
- Christopher Titus joked about how if anyone saw his kids running around crazy in a store and he wasn't doing anything to keep them in line, they had permission to thwack them on the top of the head cause "It's still soft there and it's like a reset button."
- Archie Comics: One story had Veronica bump her head in an airplane due to turbulence, and wake up believing herself to be the heroine of a novel she was reading.
- Asterix: Happens with Getafix in Asterix and the Big Fight.
- Batman:
- An Elseworlds comic, Batman: Hollywood Knight, has an actor who plays Batman (here a fictional character) in film serials barely surviving getting shot in the head by mobsters, only to start thinking he really is Batman and proceed to run around fighting crime.
- In Batman (James Tynion IV), members of the Unsanity Collective do this voluntarily. The idea is that everyone is being driven mad by what society expects of them, so why not simply wipe all those expectations from your mind? This is most clearly shown in the Miracle Molly one-shot, when Molly encounters Mary Kowalski's family. Despite their insistence that they recognise her, all Molly knows about these people is that Mary decided to become her rather than deal with them.
- The Chimp With The Brown Hat: This is the titular character's motivation for traveling from town to town.
- Drowntown: Alexandra Bastet woke up in Alexandria (hence her name, presumably) with no memory whatsoever of who she used to be, and although she has achieved a huge amount since then, she still wants to know where she came from. Her accent marked her as British, so she hired a London investigator to dig up clues.
- The Flash: In The Flash (1987), Wally West made everyone forget that he was The Flash, to protect his Secret Identity, without telling anyone about it. Unfortunately, "everyone" included himself. Depending on the character, such a move was found either awesome or manipulative and unfair.
- Green Lantern:
- In Green Lantern (1960), Carol Ferris sometimes transfomed into Star Sapphire; whereupon turning back to normal, she didn't remember what she did while transformed.
- In Justice League International, Green Lantern Guy Gardner takes off his ring to fight Batman. One punch knocks him out. When he recovers, he bangs his head looking for his ring and wakes no longer an abrasive chauvinist. He was instead Sensitive Guy, who cared what women thought and was generally respectful and agreeable in every way that the true Guy wasn't. Random head bops (his powers protected him from real damage) switch him around for the Rule of Funny. Years later, in his own book, this was retconned as tied into his earliest appearances, where he'd been neither Chauvinist Guy nor Sensitive Guy before entering a coma. His Evil Counterpart, Dementor, had apparently been taking advantage of these states of unconsciousness to alter Guy's personality for his own amusement.
- Nightwing: Downplayed in Nightwing (2016) "Knight Terrors": Ric Grayson is prepared to believe what others tell him about the man he was before. He just doesn't recognise that guy and doesn't care what he'd do.
- Sonic the Hedgehog (IDW): This is a major plot point in the first arc, as Doctor Eggman has been suffering total amnesia ever since his defeat in Sonic Forces, reducing him to a kind-hearted engineer called Mr. Tinker. This lasts until being reunited with Metal Sonic in Issue #12 triggers his memories and restores him.
- Spider-Man: A storyline in Amazing Spider-Man #55 to #58 featured Spider-Man suffering amnesia after Doctor Octopus attacked him with the "nullifier weapon", a device intended to neutralise the homing devices of enemy missiles; when it was used against Spider-Man, the device reacted with the radioactive elements in Spider-Man's blood and blanked out his memory. Doc Ock was able to use this amnesia to trick Spider-Man into thinking the two were partners, but ultimately Spider-Man's morality won out and he left Octavius to be arrested. The wall-crawler regained his memory when he fell into a lake while fighting Ka-Zar, as the shock of the cold water ended his amnesia.
- Super Agent Jon Le Bon!: Played with. Jon gets amnesia in "The Prophecy of Four" and begins to think that he is a bloodthirsty killer, but his actual cheerful personality doesn't change all that much.
- Superman:
- The Mysterious Motr of Doov: Shortly after landing in Doov, Supergirl happens upon a robot called Cresa who only remembers its name. He has no idea as to who put it together, where he came from, or why he is in Doov. He only is aware that a mysterious being called the Motr can possibly help it get its memories back.
- Superman developed a trauma-induced split personality after executing three Kryptonian criminals in The Supergirl Saga; his new identity, known as "Gangbuster", would tackle the underworld whenever Superman fell asleep, venting Superman's anger and guilt over his role in executing the criminals even if he had no choice but to deal with them.
- In Action Comics #600, Lex Luthor has his mind infected by nanites and loses his memory, developing a new identity as "Alex Luthor" — still a villain, and still hating Superman, but based on anarchy and chaos rather than power and control.
- In Superman's Girl Friend, Lois Lane #11, Lois Lane had the misfortune of being left amnesiac after a plane she was on crash-landed into the jungle and immediately became a Jungle Princess.
- The Leper from Krypton has criminal boss Ventor brainwash Clark Kent into forgetting his real identity and believing he is one of Ventor's henchmen.
- Supreme: In one issue from the early era after the title character apparently died, a younger-looking superhero with powers and costume very much like Supreme's suddenly appears with no memory of his past. For a long time it is ambiguous if this is the real Supreme or not: given Supreme's power set, it's entirely plausible that he could have come back to life in a younger body. Eventually it is revealed that this is Supreme's future daughter Probe, body-switched with her brother -– she regains her memories when a large swathe of male superheroes across the Image line are transformed into women. After this, she takes on the new codename of Lady Supreme.
- Swordquest: In Swordquest: Waterworld, this happens to the protagonists after the evil sorcerer Konjuro casts a spell of forgetfulness on them.
- Taskmaster: The miniseries reveals that Tasky suffers from this because of his photographic reflex ability. When he finally does remember who he was (A SHIELD agent named Tony Masters, oddly enough a name he used as an alias in the Agent X days) and that he has a wife named Mercedes Merced, he loses his memories again when he's forced to copy the abilities of another fighter to save Mercedes' life.
- Ultimate X-Men (2001): Magneto was deliberately given this by Professor X, turned into a mild-mannered social worker until Charles could figure out how to permanently de-evil his main personality. He never got the chance.
- Violine: The fumes in the diamond mine cause anyone who stays inside too long to lose their memory and their identity. This leads to several important Heel–Face Turn's.
- X-Men:
- For a long while, Magneto seemed to have fallen into this trope, when he was discovered as a mysteriously de-aged amnesiac calling himself Joseph. The X-Men took him in and began trying to help acclimate him to his new life while worrying about what would happen if he regained his memories and his former personality returned. All of this ended up being averted when Joseph turned out to be a clone created as part of another plan, culminating in Joseph sacrificing himself to stop Magneto's latest plan to destabilise Earth's magnetic fields.
- Jimmy Hudson jumped from the Ultimate Marvel universe to the prime Earth, but forgot everything when he did so. He was rescued by the time-displaced X-Men, who already knew him because they had a crossover before this. His memories returned in time.
- Young Justice: In one issue Impulse takes a pretty severe blow to the head and comes to believing himself to be Batman. He's quickly cured when...
Impulse: Great Scott! I'm moving at superspeed! Oh, yeah; I'm Impulse.
- The Twilight Empire: Robinson's War: Robin begins the story with a complete void in his memory, and no notion of who he is besides his name, the name of his home area (New Hampshire), and the occasional flash of remembered moments; he regains his full memory only after visiting a powerful wizard for help. His old wife similarly suffered from complete loss of identity and episodic memory after being hit by a car, and built a life as a human woman on Earth before eventually recalling her past and returning to her old sense of self as a cruel fey sorceress.
- All Assorted Animorphs AUs: "What if they were in Anastasia (1997)?" is about a woman called Rae who lost her memories due to stress. It turns out that she's Rachel, since she subconsciously remembers things that no one else should know.
- In the Transformers and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2014) Crossover Amnesia
, it is revealed that Mikaela Banes is actually April O'Neil, who had been accidentally teleported to an alternate dimension by one of Donatello's experiments. April had suffered a severe head injury that caused her to believe she was Mikaela, which was her counterpart in that reality.
- In Another Brother Zuko has this, in an apparent case of Trauma-Induced Amnesia. He does remember his name, and that he's from the Fire Nation, but can't recall anything else that's personal. For example, one of the Water Tribesmen starts talking about Fire Nation food, which Zuko can remember the taste of, but he draws a blank once the man asks what his favorite food is.
- Danganronpa: Paradise Lost: Deuteragonist Shion Nanashi is introduced as an amnesiac who has completely forgotten her old name, acts contrary to her former self, and can only remember scant details about her previous life. One of the main sub-plots is Daisuke helping her during her Quest for Identity.
- In the Hanna Is Not a Boy's Name fanfiction Dead of Night, both the Detective and Hanna suffer this to different extents. Hanna can remember his name and a few bits and pieces of his former life, but most of his memories were magically blocked by whoever murdered him. The Detective, meanwhile, remembers absolutely nothing before he was found unconscious in some woods, not even his own name. The only reason he knows he used to be a detective was that when he first met Hanna, Hanna had his old business card (which, naturally, had the Detective's old name scratched off).
- In the Pacific Rim fic Echoes in the Dark, the Sentinels are all hit with them. It was deliberately induced against their will.
- In the My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic novel Fragments, this is the state of "Sky" at the start of the tale.
- A Game of Cat and Cat: "(In)Effective Communication": When Soma talks about "the amnesiac with a single-letter name" meaning Julius Belmont from Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow, who refers to himself as One-Letter Name J until he recovers from losing memory of most of his name.
- Glitched Miko AU: Miko has no memories of being a Glitch, or anything prior to being with her family.
- In the Avatar: The Last Airbender fan sequel comic How I Became Yours, Azula is hit by total amnesia caused by poison, and it causes a complete personality wipe, turning her into a giggly, innocent Princess Classic who falls in love with Sokka. Then she gets more of her memory back...
- Interventions: Willow defeats Sylar by stripping his memory of his crimes and reducing him to Gabriel Grey, too scared to connect to anyone and condemned to never be anything special to anyone.
- Occurs in Lost, Found. Due to how young she was at the time of kidnapping, Ryuuko doesn't remember her name and her life before she was kidnapped and this is also the case for Nui, however, the latter does remember some things, while Ryuuko doesn't, at least, not initially.
- Missing (Miraculous Ladybug) has Ladybug unknowingly suffer from this after she's hit by an akuma's powers. Said power made all of its other victims vanish; in her case, however, it completely erases all of her memories of her civilian identity, Marinette. Her friends, family and classmates subsequently find themselves dealing with her mysterious disappearance while Ladybug focuses on protecting Paris, unaware of the danger she's in.
- Krysta from My Brave Pony: Starfleet Magic. Krysta isn't even her full name, just the partial fragment she remembers. She's Queen Krystalline of the world of Luminous.
- Rainbow Factory: In the sequel Pegasus Device, Scootaloo has survived the events of the first story, but has lost all memory of herself and her past, and is renamed Absentia. She still remembers Rainbow Dash, but that's all.
- The entire plot of Harry Potter fanfiction primum mobile, or ten forgotten things
.
- The Queen's Consort: After Anna tells the amnesiac Elsa that they were married, Elsa then spends all of her time seducing and flirting with Anna, something she is not used to considering how introverted pre-amnesia Elsa was.
- In Digimon Tamers and Jackie Chan Adventures crossover Renamon Who
, Valmont ended up giving Renamon this by spraying her with an amnesia potion and make her think he's a loyal Dark Hand employee to him.
- In the Charmed (1998) fic “Revelations of the Ultimate Kind
”, it is revealed that Prue and Andy were given new lives after their deaths as Michael and Marie Holloway. Prue/Marie was allowed to retain enough magic power to protect herself in a life-threatening situation, but she had no conscious knowledge that magic was real, and the two were left completely ignorant of their pasts for the better part of five years, until they move to New York and ‘Michael Holloway’ meets his new boss, Captain Darryl Morris, who swiftly recognises both.
- In Taaroko's Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 9, a spell cast causes the now-human Angel to revert to his original identity of Liam, initially a chauvinistic flirt and layabout. Despite having just become engaged to Angel, Buffy accepts Liam's initial rejection of the offer to restore his memories because he doesn't want to remember the horror of Angelus's crimes after she explains what happened to him, but Liam later redeems himself in her eyes when he asks to remember who he was after looking over various photographs, as he wants to remember the people who were important to Angel despite those crimes.
- In The Royal Reunion, a shipwreck accident caused King Gaspar and Queen Malin to become amnesiacs for three years. They didn't even remember they were married. They began working at a restaurant together. Gaspar regained his memories when he saw a colour picture of Elsa and remembered his daughter's eyes. Malin regains hers a few moments later when Gaspar hums a tune she knows.
- In the My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic novel The Stranger And Her Friend
, Celestia has no memory of who she is, what she is, or where she came from. She seems to have the voice of Daylight in her head, whether she realises it or not. It's likely that she used to BE Daylight.
- The protagonist of Stuck in a World of Fiction
wakes up without remembering anything about who he is, save that he knows he's from the real world, where Mass Effect is just a video game. He ends up taking the name Jason Bourne due to said amnesia. Eventually, he admits that he doesn't want his memories back, because he no longer feels like he's that person. This becomes a plot point in the sequel.
- The Shepard of the same story, Raptor suffers from amnesia as well, due to heavy trauma from the batarian attack on her colony as a child. Her name is due to a toy dinosaur they gave her in therapy; since she couldn't remember her real name, she had that put down as her new legal name.
- The Truth Behind The Lie: The Empress' wish causes the Auryn to remove her memories and she is referred to as the Child from that point on.
- Waters of Lethe
, a My Hero Academia fic, has Aizawa hit with an amnesia-inducing quirk from a villain known as Oblivion when he's captured by quirk-traffickers. Since Oblivion dosed himself with Trigger and Aizawa was in one of the cells that was hardest hit, he remains unable to remember anything about himself or his life long after the other rescued captives have recovered. It takes three and a half days for anything to even start to come back, and even then, it's bits and pieces before the final dam break when the quirk wears off. The part that's borderline for this trope is that Aizawa is convinced he's a criminal because the only thing he can remember is being chained to the ground in a prison cell.
- The KPop Demon Hunters fic "We'll find you (I'll reach out to you)
" opens with Huntr/x achieving the Golden Hunmoon at the Idol Awards, only for Rumi to collapse and wake up with total amnesia, which Celine speculates is a side-effect of her demon side being "killed" by the Hunmoon.
- One Stormy Night: When Gabu gets caught up in an avalanche, he forgets all about his experiences with Mei. When they meet, he knocks him out and drags him away to eat him, just like any other wolf would. He only remembers when Mei repeats the phrase 'one stormy night' to him.
- In ParaNorman, Agatha, the "witch" of Blithe Hollow was actually a little girl medium who was hanged for "witchcraft" by the townspeople. Over the following 300 years, the town's efforts to cash in on tourism, including sanitizing her story by depicting her as a Witch Classic, resulted in her losing her sense of identity, becoming a Vengeful Ghost who only remembers how she was murdered, but otherwise forgetting who she really was until Norman manages to get through to her.
- Steven Universe: The Movie introduces a weapon called a "Rejuvenator" that, as Bismuth explains, was used to punish Gems that went out of line by reverting them back to the way they were when they were first formed. Spinel uses it on all of the main Crystal Gems, although on Steven it instead serves as a Power Nullifier, before he manages to get it and use it on her. Fortunately, it's possible to jog the Gems' memories to restore them.
- In The Addams Family, "Gordon", the son of the film's Big Bad, who was posing as Fester, is revealed to actually be an amnesiac Fester.
- In American Dreamer, after an accident the main character thinks that she is the heroine from the book series she writes — a sort of female James Bond.
- Happens to the shell-shocked hero of Angel Heart (1987).
- In Blackout (1985), a man gets in a car accident that leaves him an amnesiac and the other man who was in the car dead. As only one of the men's identities is known, he takes on that one and becomes a sweet guy who marries his nurse, adopts her kids, and has a baby with her. Everything is going swimmingly until everyone, including him, suddenly realizes that he's actually the other guy — a crazed serial killer. Oops.
- The whole plot of The Bourne Identity revolves around Jason Bourne having lost all memory of his previous life (although he has some flashbacks).
- In The Brighton Strangler, an actor playing the title role suffers a head injury when the theater is bombed and believes that it's his real identity as a result.
- In the 2022 South Korean action movie Carter, the title character wakes up in a bloodstained apartment, confronted by gun-toting CIA agents, with no idea who he is. He's suggested to be either a North Korean or CIA agent, but it takes him a while (and much asskicking) to find out which.
- In A Chump at Oxford, it is revealed that Stan's regular foolish self is the product of amnesia — originally he was one "Lord Paddington", a prestigious Oxford University scholar who had lost his memory and wandered off after getting hit on the head by a closing window. Eventually Stan gets hit on the head in the same manner and regains this original intelligent, snobby personality, while accordingly losing all memory of his life as "Stan Laurel", essentially making this trope apply both ways. Naturally he later gets hit on the head again and returns to the "Stan" persona in the film's conclusion.
- In Crime Doctor, Morgan comes out of his coma with no memory of who he is. Over the next ten years, he forges a completely new identity as 'Robert Ordway'.
- Dark City (1998) opens with the protagonist, John Murdoch, waking up in a hotel bathtub with a bleeding puncture wound in his forehead and no memories whatsoever. He spends the rest of the film trying to piece together his past and identity while trying to evade strange pale men in trenchcoats and the police simultaneously, believing he is a serial killer.
- Double Trouble (1915): Gentle, virginal, mild-mannered wimp Florian gets conked on the head by muggers in 1910, and wakes up in 1915. He finds out that in the intervening five years he's been Eugene, an oil magnate and politician, and also an aggressive alpha male and The Casanova. Thereafter the film becomes a split personality story with Florian's two sides fighting each other for control.
- Christina's first question after being resurrected in Frankenstein Created Woman is "Who am I?". Initially, she has no memory of her prior existence as either Christina or Hans.
- Hancock: The titular character was attacked when he was with his wife and had his skull fractured, which erased any memory of who he was.
- Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets: A Laser-Guided Karma version for Gilderoy Lockhart. After talking himself up the whole movie (despite the fact that most of his students are more skilled wizards than he is), Harry and Ron discover that he's in fact a fraud who stole the stories of witches and wizards who did amazing things, erased their memories, then took credit for their deeds. To protect his image, he tries to do the same to Harry and Ron in the Chamber... only he used Ron's broken, malfunctioning wand to try and cast the spell, causing it to backfire and erase his memory. Most fans agree that he deserved it.
- The premise of Hook is that Peter Pan chose to finally leave Neverland and grow up, and eventually loses his memory... until Captain Hook shows up and kidnaps his children.
- The Last Sentinel: The Girl has lost all memory of her past, and so she's just called this since instead of her name.
- The Majestic: Blacklisted screenwriter Peter Appleton gets drunk and crashes his car and wakes up with amnesia. He wanders into a nearby town and adopts the identity of Luke Trimble when he is mistaken for a local boy who died in WWII. He later regains his memory after watching one of his own movies.note
- The hero of Mirage (1965) suffers from amnesia brought on by a traumatic event that he cannot remember and hence tries to uncover. He even hires a Private Detective to help him find out who he is really is.
- A key plot point in The Muppets Take Manhattan; just as Kermit has succeeded in getting someone to produce his musical on Broadway, he gets hit by a taxi and loses his memory. He comes to believe he's an advertising executive named Phil until opening night when he laughs a little too loudly at the thought of being in love with Miss Piggy and gets karate-chopped by her, recovering his true identity and memory moments later.
- In Overboard (1987), Joanna is a spoiled rich heiress who hires a local carpenter, Dean, a single, working-class dad, to do some remodeling on her yacht. When she doesn't like the job, she throws him off the yacht along with his tools, ruining them, and stiffing him on the bill. Joanna later falls overboard at night and washes up on shore with no idea who she is. After Dean sees her on TV, he goes down to the hospital and claims she is his wife and the mother of his three sons. He takes this opportunity to get revenge by making her do all of the chores around the house. The remake, Overboard (2018), is a Gender Flip with Leonardo, a spoiled rich heir, and Kate, a single, working-class mom.
- Primal Fear (1996): Lawyer Martin Vail is defending an altar boy named Aaron Stampler, who has killed someone in response to the Father at his church taping Norton being forced to rape some girl he knew. At Aaron's criminal hearing, Vail calls out Aaron's psychotic side with belittling taunts, to prove that Aaron has no memory of the attack.
- In RoboCop (1987), Alex Murphy forgets everything about his past life when he was killed, including his real name. Over the course of the film, he regains his identity and gets his revenge on the people who wronged him.
- In Santa with Muscles, a greedy health guru named Blake suffers a blow to the head while disguised as a department-store Santa and starts thinking he really is Santa Claus.
- In Shredder Orpheus, souls processed through the Styx are subject to having their memories erased, leaving them without any knowledge of who they are. Orpheus's memories of his parents are selectively erased, and when it's done, he has no idea who they are, and they have no idea who he is.
- The protagonist of the 1946 movie Somewhere In The Night loses his memory after being hit by a grenade in WWII.
- In Trap for Cinderella, Micky has amnesia and is told that she was the sole survivor in a fire that killed her friend Domenica and disfigured Micky. Except, memories and evidence suggest she might actually be Domenica...
- In Unknown (2006), the entire cast awakens in a warehouse with no memory after they were exposed to a toxic gas. Figuring out who's who becomes a pressing matter when they discover that A) they're all locked inside, B) some of them are kidnappers who'd abducted the others, and C) the kidnappers' armed and ruthless accomplices will be arriving in a few hours.
- Unknown (2011): Dr. Martin Harris awakens from a coma after a car accident only to find that no one, not even his wife, recognizes him. He then starts to question his true identity, yet as it turns out, he's actually an assassin, and the person that he thinks he is is actually only the cover identity given to him for this particular mission.
- "Veronica" by Elvis Costello has the title character suffering from Alzheimer's, and fully aware that she may have forgotten her own name.
- The song Día cero ("Zero Day") by the Chilean group La Ley is from the point of view of a person afflicted with this.
- WWE wrestler Perry Saturn, via a series of blows to the head, went from a hard-nosed brawler/submission expert to a ditz who was in love with a mop with a crudely drawn face on it. It's actually crossed with Real Life Writes the Plot. Saturn had faced Jobber Mike Bell on the May 12 (taped May 7), 2001 episode of Jakked, in a match where Bell had dropped Saturn on his head and Saturn had retaliated by stiffing Bell. He apologized afterwards but was Put on a Bus for a few weeks. The Bus Came Back on the May 21st episode of Raw. Terri Runnels, manager of the Radicals (Saturn and Dean Malenko), had walked into the APA (Faarooq and Bradshaw)'s office and had attempted to distract them by pouring their beer on her white shirt. Later, the APA faced the Radicals in a match, where, as Saturn's punishment for the incident with Bell, the APA beat the hell out of him, complete with Bradshaw no-selling Terri flashing him. This was what led to the "Moppy" gimmick.
- CHIKARA wrestler Tim Donst received a double underhook piledriver from UltraMantis Black, leader of The Order of the Neo-Solar Temple — then woke up, and was convinced by UltraMantis that he had been a member of the Temple all along. Tim was faking it, after the initial few days after the bump on the head.
- WCW World Tag Team Champions
Harlem Heat (Booker T and Stevie Ray) defeated Barry Darsow and Bobby Eaton on the August 21, 1999 WCW Saturday Night. After the match, Eaton tried to hit them with one of the belts, but they took him out and hit Darsow with one of the belts instead. This led to Darsow reverting to his previous gimmicks of Krusher Krushchev and Blacktop Bully.
- Justified in Save the Earth. The protagonists are reincarnated from their original canons on a new world. Their original hometowns, countries, planets, universes ceased to exist a long time ago. Once aliens start a slow invasion, their memories start to return whenever they run into something similar to their original experiences.
- All player characters in Anathema (2011) start with almost no memories of what their life or identity were. The ones they do have are fractured and scrambled.
- The Necromunda special character Brakar the Avenger was found alone and near death in an isolated Underhive tunnel with no memory of who he was or how he got there. The Ratskin natives who rescued Brakar adopted him into their tribe but, although his physical wounds healed, he never regained the memories of his previous life.
- Happens to anyone who enters the Ravenloft domain of Darkon and stays there longer than a month or so. Someone "claimed by Darkon" remains essentially the same person, but forgets having ever lived anywhere else, believing that they are native-born Darkonians.
- As far as we can tell, no roboman in Rocket Age, be it Ancient Martian or otherwise, can remember their original job or time period. Justified, as robomen are usually millennia old.
- Ace Attorney:
- Case 2-1 begins with Phoenix getting cracked over the head with a fire extinguisher and totally forgetting who he is, who his client is, and what he's supposed to be defending her for. This is done as a convenient way to have the case be a tutorial level for new players, as the defendant has to remind Phoenix how to do various things (check the Court Record, make objections, etc.). Of course, Nick gets his memories back by the end of the case. He even forgets his own name, and when he learns it, he thinks that it's weird.
- In Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney, the singer Lamiroir can't remember her past at all. It's revealed that this is because she's actually Thalassa Gramarye and lost her memories after an accident during practice for a performance.
- In the fourth case of Ace Attorney Investigations 2: Prosecutor's Gambit, Kay Faraday suffers from this after being kidnapped by the Mastermind for his revenge plot and dropped from the roof of the Bigg Building so hard to forget her memories (name, past, personality and even some of her vocabulary). Then she is targeted by Excelsius Winner who wants to frame her for his murder, taking advantage of her current status. She eventually restores her memories at the end of the case, after Edgeworth gives her back her notebook that she kept as a child.
- In Professor Layton vs. Ace Attorney, Phoenix and Maya lose all memories of themselves upon being brought to Labyrinthia, instead believing themselves to be lifelong citizens of the city who worked at a bakery for five years. Their personalities stay the same, though (there's a Running Gag that even with amnesia, Phoenix feels the need to dramatically shout and pound the bread dough) and, interestingly enough, don't believe that magic is real (despite everyone around them asserting that it's an everyday part of life). They get their memories back as they go through their first trial in Labyrinthia. Oddly enough, unlike the Case 2-1 example, this isn't used as a tutorial opportunity, since the player would already have had a starter trial by this point. The game later reveals that everyone in the town has undergone identity amnesia, save for the Storyteller, Newton Bellduke, High Inquisitor Darklaw, and Espella (who has a different kind of amnesia altogether going on). Labyrinthia is an elaborate experiment in testing hypnosis and everyone there volunteered to have their memories altered and live there like they've been there their whole lives.
- Famicom Detective Club: The Missing Heir: The protagonist suffers this in the beginning while he was investigating the case regarding Ayashiro matriarch Kiku's death, only to get thrown off a cliff and by chance landed on the grass instead of in the ocean. For the players' convenience, this is done so that they can get a full understanding of what the case is about and who the key players are. It's later revealed that the protagonist was actually attacked by Akira, who was attempting to kill you because you were getting too close to finding out that he was responsible for killing Kiku.
- Fate/stay night: Tohsaka messed up in her summoning preparations and got an Archer who can't remember which legendary hero he's supposed to be. Or so he says. He eventually reveals that he remembers everything; he was most likely just hiding as much information as possible so that Rin wouldn't realize he was actually a Future Badass version of her partner Shirou. Archer came to hate himself so much that he found a way to come back in time to kill his younger self. Word of God is that he did initially have real amnesia, but he recovered in a few moments when Rin first spoke to him.
- In The House in Fata Morgana, the viewpoint character starts off in the titular house not knowing who they are or how they got there. This acts as a Framing Device for the first half of the story as the maid of the house shows them various stories from the house's history hoping to jog their memory.
- Infinity series:
- Ever17: The Kid. In an interesting use of this trope, the amnesia is used to hide the fact that there are two Kids. Both of them, Kaburaki and Hokuto, lose their memory due to being briefly possessed by a fourth-dimensional being.
- Remember11: Satoru suffers partial identity amnesia. His past self was responsible for the "Freaky Friday" Flip that he is undergoing during the story.
- Seven of Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors seems to suffer from this as a result of an incapacitating gas.
- K from the sequel, Virtue's Last Reward also has amnesia.
- No Case Should Remain Unsolved: At the very end, it is revealed that the protagonist isn't Jeon Gyeong. She is actually Song Minyeong, but due to her mental illness and addled memories, she keeps convinving herself that she is other people.
- Tsukihime has, in one of its many endings, Kohaku get her memories completely blanked as a result of a Near-Death Experience. She doesn't even remember her real name and takes the name "Nanaya" because it's written on the knife (Shiki's, which he used to save her life) that she feels holds some significance for her. Considering the horrific things she went through growing up, this might be for the best, as it allows her a chance to start over, surrounded by people who love her.
- Umineko: When They Cry has a rather interesting case of this. At the end of ep 8 it is revealed that Battler actually survived the Rokkenjima incident but lost his memory. He was then found by Ikuko Hachijo with whom he stayed with and adopted the name Toya Hachijo. He slowly regained his memory but interestingly even when his memory was fully back he still couldn't think about himself as Battler and so kept his new name.
- In the unfinished Homestar Runner cartoon "Tis True, Pom Pom, Tis True", Homestar believes himself to be a Wandering Minstrel in medieval times after taking a blow to the head. Possibly justified because the first character he saw after being hit on the head was the King of Town.
- After the Alpha AI from Red vs. Blue: Reconstruction severed its memories of torture from itself, it completely forgot what it was. Using the few memories it retained, it adopted the identity of a younger version of its creator: Dr. Leonard Church.
- 180 Angel: For a damned soul to become a Reaper, they apparently have to give up their memories of Earthly life, though it's unclear if that applies to souls that escaped from torment like Peggy.
- Sometimes, if a soul is left unclaimed on Earth for too long, they can develop a "glitch" that renders them temporarily unable to remember their afterlives. If this happens to a Reaper... Zero is the main example that we see.
- Nevy in Ava's Demon has forgotten everything about herself from before she died. As of chapter 21 she's started to gain some of her memories back.
- Anastasia in Binary Stars has lost all her memory before the destruction of a colony, and at first believes it to just be bad dreams until the literal man of her dreams shows up in the flesh and recognizes her... as he's in the process of kidnapping her. It's still unknown why she has amnesia, whether it is because she was shot in the head, as first implied, or if the Enemy Within that shows up now and again when she starts remembering too much is somehow involved, or if her post-amnesia mother is the culprit.
- Odette in City of Somnus remembers nothing that happened before she was taken by The Fair Folk, including who her parents were. She's quite curious about what it's like to talk with your parents.
- Elf & Warrior: People trapped in the demonoid realm start with all their memories gone, and it only gets worse from there. The entire world seems designed from the ground up to force people to do the worst in order to survive, giving up more of themselves in the process.
- The inhabitants of The Ends are reborn without memories in an endless cycle. The protagonist, Jason, has managed to recover a portion of his identity and is now questing for the remainder.
- In Falconhyrste Mira wakes up in the island's mysterious forest not knowing who or what she is.''.
- Gunnerkrigg Court: At one point, Zimmy forgets who she is and takes on the identity of someone else she knows. (And for extra Mind Screw, the comic portrays this from Zimmy's perspective, so when Gamma tries to help Zimmy remember who she is, the audience is more likely to interpret it as someone else being brainwashed into believing they're Zimmy.) Gamma's response implies that this is not a rare occurrence for a Reality Warper for Power Incontinence.
- {...} of Hanna Is Not a Boy's Name is unable to remember any of his past, including his name. This is probably because he's dead and all. Not even a flashback of his murder rings any bells, and he tells Hanna at one point that he suspects he was a different person when he was alive than he is now.
- I'm the Grim Reaper: The Myth Arc for the series so far is Scarlet tying to find out who she was when she was alive and what she did to make the Devil himself claim she was one of the worst sinners ever to live.
- In Melonpool, severe bonks to the head cause Mayberry to believe he is any number of characters from Star Trek: The Original Series.
- Used for a throwaway joke in Precocious, when it's mentioned
that Tiffany once hit her head and briefly thought she was a woman named Matilda.
- Fuzzy from Sam & Fuzzy is eventually revealed to have amnesia. Three years before the comic started, he woke up in a dumpster with no idea who he was or why he's a three-foot tall bear thing in a bowtie, but with enough knowledge to get around in the world (though even that knowledge has a lot of holes in it). Fuzzy's lost memories is a very sore spot for him: He is extremely guarded about who he reveals this to and prefers filling in his backstory with outrageous lies when asked, when he begins encountering people who might have known him beforehand he becomes very focused on finding out what they know, and the mere mention of the main suspect to his memory erasure becomes a Berserk Button. Fuzzy eventually teams up with Hazel and Brain again, on the slim hope that they might find a way to recover his memories in The Pit, only to learn that Brain was lying and any trace of his old life is gone. We later meet people suffering from the same problem as Fuzzy, all of them victims of Brain's memory-eating power. By the end of the comic, Hazel — who had been one of the prime beneficiaries of having Brain eat all those memories and consented to having him do it to Eric — suffers the same fate.
- Neither Nick nor Josie of Shinka: The Last Eevee can remember much about their previous lives, so when they hear about an artifact that can restore memories, they jump at the chance to get it. Too bad it was a trap.
- Sinfest:
- Lil Evil drinks from the Lethe. Reaction? Agh! Who's that weirdo in the river?
- Tangerine, the orange devil girl, was originally a farm girl. Bamph'ed by The Devil, she became a feral and violent creature. Baptized by Seymour, she became an innocent dangerous mainly through ignorance and capable of great friendship (when she thinks).
- Lil Evil drinks from the Lethe. Reaction? Agh! Who's that weirdo in the river?
- Siren's Lament: To have the siren's curse placed on you is to completely forget everything about your life, though Lyra has something protecting her from losing her memories all at once and when Shon takes the curse from her to save her he starts having painful indistinct flashes of memories of his old life indicating she passed an incomplete version of her protection on to him.
- The Splat Crew: In the comic "Rise of Darkness", Darkness, an Inkling who is the Sole Survivor of a beach raid caused by Octolings, completely forgets who she is after the event and decides to call herself Darkness after another Inkling says he likes how she has a kind of "darkness" to her.
- Strange School: As of the second post
, the protagonist has forgotten her name.
- The first story in the Unity 'verse follows Officer Juni Melrose, who remembers quite a lot of its technical knowledge... but not its name or how it ended up in the hospital room it woke in.
- In Yokoka's Quest, the barrier around Betel's Forest, among other things, gives those who enter it Easy Amnesia. They forget who they were before, and think the other inhabitants are their family. Some characters also gain Name Amnesia as part of this note .
- Critical Role: After several weeks of traveling with Mollymauk, the Mighty Nein suddenly encounter a strange woman who hugs him immediately, calls him Lucien, and acts like she's known him for years. After Molly manages to get her to back off, he explains to the Nein that about two years ago, he woke up Buried Alive, practically catatonic, without any memories. Molly has absolutely zero desire to find out who he was before waking up in his grave and is extremely insistent that Lucien and Molly are not the same person.
Molly: Let me make this abundantly clear: My name is Molly. That person is dead, and not me. It's just a person who had this body. They abandoned it. It's mine now.
- More or less done in the SuperMarioLogan episode "Bowser Junior Gets Rabies!". After getting rabies from being bit by a squirrel, Bowser Junior starts hallucinating and saying Non Sequiturs, until Wham. Junior becomes a rabid foaming creature with no presence of his former identity who tries to bite anyone near him. That served, the rest of the episode has Chef Pee Pee and the Brooklyn Guy trying to cure Junior and restore his memory.
- Meet Saheem Bateman,
who can't remember what happened to her between 2007 and 2011. In her own words: "Right now I'm trying to be who everybody wants me to be, or who everyone remembers me as."
- Reverend Ansel Bourne
is a famous case study in psychology because he had this happen to him during a dissociative fugue.
- Agatha Christie (September 15, 1890 — January 12, 1976) disappeared for eleven days in 1926 and was widely believed to have been killed by her husband (who had asked her for a divorce). She was found in a health spa under another name and later diagnosed with amnesia. To all appearances, a classic psychotic break, caused by an emotionally trying year including her mother's death and her husband's infidelity.
- There's considerable evidence that Mrs. Christie planned and executed the entire affair quite consciously in order to embarrass her husband. No one, of course, can know for certain, but the setup strongly resembled those in her books. To top things off, she registered at the Swan Hotel using the surname of her husband's paramour.
- In 2004, a man was found naked and suffering a blow to the head outside a Burger King in Richmond Hill, Georgia. The man remembered absolutely nothing about himself, not even his own name, and police's attempts at trying to help him recover his memories have consistently turned up fruitless. Taking on the name "Benjaman Kyle"
, he went on to become a notable case of dissociative amnesia that seemed to directly parallel this trope, and even though his social security number was rediscovered and his real name, William Burgess Powell, was recovered by genetic tracing, both in 2015, to this day he still has not been able to recover any memories from before 2004.
- In 1918, a French veteran from World War One returning from a German stalag where he was held as a POW was found wandering in Lyon, suffering from amnesia and lacking military or civil identification documents. He gave "Anthelme Mangin" as his name. In 1938, his real identity was found to be Octave Félicien Monjoin but, as his parents had died, he had to remain in a psychiatric hospital, where he starved to death during World War Two.
