Time Loop Fatigue

"'Late'... An irrelevant word. Past and future are one. It matters not. This will happen again. This will all happen again, forever, until the Conquering King is satisfied. UNTIL THEN- WE ARE MERE VERMIN TO BE CRUSHED ON THE WHEEL OF FATE ITSELF, OVER AND OVER, AS HE SPINS THE WHEEL AND LAUGHS AT GOD!"

— 6 Juggernaut Star Scours the Universe, Kill Six Billion Demons

Being trapped in a time loop is hard. What's even harder is when you've tried everything you can think of, and nothing works. What do you do now?

Wallow. Or cry. Or destroy things. Or in some cases, attempt suicide. Which rarely works.

What makes the loop so awful? Sometimes it's the monotony of the whole thing. Maybe you have to keep watching your friends and family die. Maybe you're tired of dying. Or, maybe, you keep injuries from the previous loops. Either way, being trapped in the loop is simply exhausting.

Note that this usually only happens if you can ''retain'' the memories of each loop. Sometimes you might be one of the lucky (or some would say, unlucky) ones who don't know if there's even a time loop in the first place, as they may not realize that they have done "similar things" before.

Subtrope of "Groundhog Day" Loop. Form of Despair Event Horizon. Can be a consequence of being placed in a Time Loop Trap. Can result in Heroic BSoD.

Compare Who Wants to Live Forever?, i.e "Immortality Fatigue", and Temporal Sickness, where Time Travel in general results in ailments including, and beyond, fatigue.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• The final fate of Diavolo in JoJo's Bizarre Adventure has him subjected to dying endlessly in ways he can't change or predict. The last time we see him on-panel, he's reduced to screaming at a little girl to stay away from him, a far cry from the fearsome mob boss we were introduced to.
• The Endless Eight Arc in the second season of The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya has the world go through the same two weeks over and over thanks to an unwitting Haruhi Suzumiya...15,532 times. That's about 595 years of doing the same things over and over. And Yuki Nagato is the only one aware of what's happening from the beginning but is forbidden by her superior the Data Overmind from any interference because her job is to observe. For a character who would be the poster child of the Emotionless Girl trope if we didn't already know she has emotions that are just heavily suppressed and difficult for her to express, the fact that even casual viewers can see visible fatigue on her face is enough to tell us that she's right up against the Despair Event Horizon at her situation and if she had a regular human's emotiveness she would probably be a sobbing mess crumpled into a fetal position on the floor. This is almost certainly the reason why Yuki steals Haruhi's powers and alters the world so that everyone has normal lives and Haruhi is Put on a Bus in the Disappearance story arc after "Endless Eight" — she is that sick and tired of what she had gone through.
• Puella Magi Madoka Magica: Homura definitely has this going on, going through who knows how many self-inflicted time loops trying and failing to save Madoka, and watching the same people die over and over again. She becomes a far cry from the sweet, innocent schoolgirl she was in the beginning. By the time of the main story, she's at her wit's end and Kyubey, who eventually realizes what's happening, gives her a Breaking Speech before her lone battle against the witch that'll destroy the city. When she can't even scratch it despite her planning and weaponry, she can't even bring herself to start over again and is on the verge of turning into a witch herself. Luckily Madoka likewise finds out what's going on and Takes a Third Option to help break the loop... and the laws of reality with it.
• Space☆Dandy: Zig-Zagged in the episode There's Always Tomorrow, Baby. The crew is stuck in a "Groundhog Day" Loop while visiting Meow's family. Although they can remember each day and notice things are repeating, they just chalk it up to life in Meow's hometown being incredibly monotonous. In the end, it is not the crew that experiences fatigue, but the Narrator who had to watch them fumble about in a loop for over 100 days while being none the wiser.

Comic Books

• In the comic book miniseries for Regular Show: "Skips", Skips ends up finding himself stuck in a time loop whenever Mordecai and Rigby drop soda and pop rocks down a geyser in the park that he, Benson, and the duo are visiting. He teams up with a time cop named Ted to try to stop it, but it results in a lot of failed attempts, meaning weeks pass as they work to figure out a solution. Some days they don't even bother and just take a break before the loop resets. Skips nearly hits a Despair Event Horizon until some inspiration from Benson leads to a solution and the real cause of the time loops: a Destruction Lord.
• In House of X/Powers of X, we learn for the first time that Moira Mac Taggert is a mutant and has lived her entire life on repeat nine times and is on her tenth. She was getting tired of it already by the third repeat and invented a mutant cure, only to be killed early and told to find a better path. After failing repeatedly to find a Golden Ending, Moira sides with Orchis and tries to wipe out all the mutants. It doesn't help that she's been told she only had ten lives and this is her last.

Fan Works

• The Best Night Ever starts with Prince Blueblood waking up after the Grand Galloping Gala, only to find he's gone back to the morning before it. At first he tries to play along, thinking it's a prank, but as it becomes clear time is repeating itself he tries avoiding it, then starts exploiting it to indulge himself, and then starts trying to kill himself when that gets boring. Eventually he figures out that he has to get the day right to escape. His first attempt fails because he's miscalculated — while everyone technically got what they wanted, nopony enjoyed it. He seriously considers breaking Discord free just to get out.
• The Harry Potter story Getting The Hang Of Thursdays is about all of Hogwarts being stuck inside a single-day time loop with a few fixed details, including Hermione dying and a time-turner being smashed. The loop has been going on for a long time before a few characters start to be aware of it, but horrible despair sets in pretty quickly as all attempts to prevent the death make it happen in worse and worse ways. Suicide only lets her choose the method and how painful it will be because she will die anyway, every day, and she remembers every time. It's not much better for Professor Snape watching it happen and failing time after time to prevent it, either.
• Hard Reset (Eakin): The main Twilight doesn't encounter too much of this, but the sequels show that in the Alternate History where she wasn't able to break out of the loop, she was stuck repeating it for billions of years, going completely and utterly insane and back again, until the universe finally broke down before she could die and reset it.
• The entire premise of The Infinite Loops is that the characters caught up in them repeat their lives over and over again, with no end in sight. This causes numerous issues, from the Sakura syndrome where they think that their actions have no consequence, to suicidal depression, to simply not giving a damn anymore about the world. A few loopers have tried breaking out of the loops — even though it's made perfectly clear In-Universe that that's impossible — with no success. Eventually, most loopers settle on Living Forever Is Awesome, but they'll still go long stretches where they're completely alone and depressed.
• Gumball gets hit by this hard in The Loop. At first they're relatively benign hijinks, but as he gradually loses his hope and sanity the longer he spends in the Loop, it escalates in violence and desperation. At its peak, he's physically attacking his own family, his schoolmates and finding new and creative ways to kill himself in front of the school during the pep rally (such as setting himself on fire and eating rat poison).
• Miraculous Ladybug fics tend to have an interesting variant through the character of Luka aka Viperion. The Time Loop is entirely voluntary & he can leave it at will. But when the stakes are high & the consequences dire, its not always an option he personally can accept. The result is often more like emotional burnout, even just actual fatigue, and other real world symptoms of severe overwork.
• Purple Days sees Joffrey Baratheon suffer this after a few initial loops spent being his canon Jerkass self—and getting a painful comeuppance in the form of a vengeance-driven Robb Stark. He becomes depressed to the point where he keeps killing himself for a few loops, and in increasingly creative ways. He breaks out of this cycle after a Heel Realization and finding a measure of inner peace thanks to advice from Ned Stark.
• Sisyphus sees Harry Potter trapped in an infinite loop, resetting at his meeting Hagrid on the island every time he dies. He at first sees an opportunity to improve how things went, but it soon becomes clear that deviating from the regular course of events will get him killed faster. He slowly loses the will to go on, first attempting suicide and then seeking a way to cease existing entirely once it becomes clear suicide just resets the loop faster, but finally musters enough energy to finish the events and move on, eventually dying peacefully of old age. And it all starts over again.
• In Wishful Thinking, after trying to accomplish her goals only for the time loop to reset, Makima breaks down from frustration, going from executing increasingly nonsensical schemes, to screwing up at critical moments due to stress, to using her powers for self-indulgent cruelty, to becoming suicidal.

Films — Animation

• My Little Pony: Equestria Girls: In the special Sunset's Backstage Pass, Sunset Shimmer experiences this when time keeps rewinding on the day she and her friends go to a concert. Naturally, she knows it's Equestrian magic, but has trouble finding who or what's causing it. It isn't helped by Pinkie's antics, which hold her up and force her to relive the day again, to the point where she gets irritable and snaps at Pinkie.

Films — Live-Action

• 12:01 PM: The perpetual, 59 minutes cycle that Myron is stuck in makes him gradually angrier and more desperate to escape with every loop, to the point he is Driven to Suicide, not that it helps him.
• Boss Level: At the beginning, Roy has basically set up the same routine for each loop: fight through initial enemies, go to bar, drink until killers show up again, die. The movie focuses on him coming out of the exhaustion and starting to actually take steps to prevent it.
• Stephen Strange in Doctor Strange (2016) exploits this against Dormammu. The Dark Dimension Dormammu rules/is doesn't have time, so Strange makes sure to bring it with him from Earth with the Eye of Agamotto. Endless, looped time. He intentionally traps himself and Dormammu in a potentially infinite time loop. While Strange can bear it, no matter how many times he is painfully tortured to death, Dormammu, who has no concept of time, cannot.
• Edge of Tomorrow: Major William Cage, a P.R. director gets demoted to private in time for the final battle against the Mimics. After dying in the doomed frontal assault, he finds himself alive before the battle again. This happens several times, then he meets Rita Vrtaski, who was forced to become a war hero after she also gained the ability to reset time from a dead Alpha mimic and realised that the only way to prevent the resets was to win the battle. However after spending the equivalent of several months, well over a year, reliving the same day over and over again, he goes from a scared greenhorn recruit, to a stone-faced veteran, and even a deserter a few times, before they figure out that to win the war they have to kill the Omega Mimic.
• The Endless has most of the region the brothers visit caught in time loops of varying lengths, and one man refuses to help until he's provided a gun — the suicide doesn't work. Special mention goes to one poor bastard whose time loop lasts all of five seconds, and he's likely been stuck in that loop since the Gold Rush era.
• Groundhog Day: Phil Connors becomes so exhausted by his time loop that he attempts suicide multiple times. The loop continues anyway, and he springs back to life again none the worse for wear every time the day starts over. One scene where Rita identifies his body in the morgue raised many audience questions about how the loop works. The main problem Phil has is that he's trapped in this one Pennsylvania town and all the highways are closed off due to the weather. There's only so much he can do before he gets bored out of his skull.
• Happy Death Day: Tree suffers this, especially after killing Tombs, who she believes is her killer, doesn't end the loop. It doesn't help that she keeps her injuries from the previous loop, including after-effects of however she was killed this time.
• Jagged Mind: Being put in the time loops by Alex makes Billie suffer from blackouts, memory loss (so she doesn't clearly remember this happening), and progressive brain damage. Rose warns Billie that she will die if she doesn't break the loop.
• Meet Cute: Sheila insists on using a time machine to travel back to the same day and play out a first date with Gary over and over as an escape from her otherwise miserable life, but after a year of first dates, even she tires of the same thing over and over again, and Gary's flaws start to grate on her more and more, causing her to fall back into despair.
• Palm Springs: Sarah suffers this, especially after Sarah and Nyles sleep together for the first time (for Sarah). Nyles is also implied to have suffered it in the loops before Sarah entered the cave.
• Source Code: Captain Colter Stevens grows increasingly exhausted and traumatized as the film goes on while trying and failing to search a train full of people in eight minutes' time before a bomb destroys him with the train. And every time he fails, Goodwin sends him back to the beginning.

Literature

• Before I Fall: Sam suffers this a few times, but especially during the loop when Juliet and Elody both die, from suicide and a car crash, respectively. It really hits hard since Elody was sitting in the car seat that Sam was supposed to be sitting in.
• Haruhi Suzumiya: In "Endless Eight", the SOS Brigade is trapped in a time loop covering the last two weeks of summer. They go through the loop over 15,000 times before breaking it. Fortunately for their sanity, most of them don't retain memories of the past loops, apart from déjà vu. The exception is the alien Emotionless Girl Nagato, who recalls everything with superhuman clarity. The toll this takes on her comes up in Disappearance, when her fatigue with her duties causes her to alter reality so that the Brigade never met.
• Re:Zero: Subaru gets thrown back in time whenever he dies. While it's not strictly a time loop as he can get out of it by simply not dying, it affects him badly all the same, especially if he fails to save his friends, with at least one death leaving him little more than a vegetable for most of the next loop. The first time he dies at pretty much any time affects him much harder than his future failed attempts at avoiding the same (or roughly same) death.
  • In the second arc, he finds he keeps mysteriously dying in his sleep before resetting (later discovered to be due to a curse placed on him). In one loop he finally manages to avoid his fate, but Rem contracts the curse instead. With everyone devastated, Subaru ends up committing suicide in order to reset time and have a chance to save Rem, despite not knowing for sure if he would return.
  • In the third arc, after having watched numerous characters get killed by the Witch's Cult and the White Whale, particularly Rem, he hits the Despair Event Horizon hard and pretty much loses the will to live. When he finally does reset, he's so broken that he tearfully hugs Rem tightly as soon as he sees her.
• Repeat: the plot of the novel features Brad Cohen being trapped in a loop beginning with him waking up in the womb and ending on the night before his fortieth birthday. Over time, he's beset with both this trope and Who Wants to Live Forever?: his advanced mental age leaves him emotionally numbed and makes it difficult for him to relate to people, while the time loop itself leaves him feeling like everything he does is meaningless. Once he's run out of ambitions to achieve, Brad's sanity begins circling the plughole, at one point prompting him to strip nude and begin screaming heavenwards; by the climax, he's experienced so many lifetimes that he can no longer tell them apart, leaving him a psychological wreck. In the end, Brad finally breaks the loop by living his life exactly as he lived it the first time, allowing him to achieve satisfaction and finally awaken on the morning of his fortieth birthday.

Live-Action TV

• Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.: A paradox causes a time loop in "As I Have Always Been", and it starts to get to the usually unflappable Coulson. For one, the loops aren't unlimited — time is still passing outside the ship the team is on, and it's headed for a Negative Space Wedgie. Coulson's the only one with full Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory, but he's asleep at the start of the loop and if he's not woken up then he misses out on the entire thing. Daisy also keeps her memories of the loops, but only if she doesn't die. By the time the episode starts he's already frustrated at losing so much time to loops where he has to bring Daisy back up to speed, if she even knew to wake him in the first place. On top of everything else, he's in the middle of an existential crisis at the time.^{Final season spoilers}He's dealing with the fact that he's not the original Coulson, but a Ridiculously Human Robot and Replacement Goldfish for him, using a mind upload in a robot body.
• The Doctor Who episode "Heaven Sent" deconstructs the trope. A grieving Doctor is stuck in a trap where he must confess his Dark Secret. Rather than doing that he willingly subjects himself to a time loop where he dies and resurrects himself over the course 4 billion years. As the loops keep going, he gets more and more depressed and frustrated about this situation and wonders if he has the strength to keep torturing himself like this just for the sake of "winning" against his mysterious captors.
• In the Eureka episode "I Do Over", Carter becomes trapped in a time loop on the day of Allison and Stark's wedding. Every time the loop resets, Carter keeps his injuries, including shaving cuts and broken bones.
• In Haven, Audrey becomes trapped in a "Groundhog Day" Loop of a man with OCD trying to prevent the hit-and-run death of his daughter. Being immune to the Troubles, she is the only one besides the Troubled man who even notices, and is the only one affected after spending close to a week in the time loop. She retains injuries she sustains in previous loops and is exhausted because the loop resets just as her alarm clock goes off and she hasn't slept in five days.
• Legends of Tomorrow: In "Here I Go Again", after Zari does a "fun montage," she ends up locking herself in the main bridge with the bomb that sets off the whole reset. Turns out, this was a fake-out masterminded by the ship's AI, in order to make her feel at home on the ship. In another version, she finds Amaya and Nate about to have sex and says "Kill me now." right before the explosion. Also a Shout-Out to Groundhog Day, as Nate identifies is as such, and tells Zari to use that title to immediately let him know what is going on and prove that it is happening, in the continuing loops, as he will realise that she has never seen the film before that day that is looping for her.
• The Librarians (2014): In "The Librarians and the Point of Salvation", Ezekiel becomes so fed up with watching his friends die that he tries to destroy the room the loop starts in. This ends up letting him figure out that the team is in a video game.
• Lois & Clark has a twist in "'Twas The Night Before Myxmas", in which this happens to people who don't remember the previous loops. Every time Mr Mxyzptlk resets Christmas, everyone has a little less joy. While we only see the direct effect on the main characters, this appears to be happening to everyone, even showing news reports saying that the world is going one step closer to war. When the time loop breaks, the fatigue is instantly cured with the news report claiming a rather historic peace agreement being signed.
• The Magicians (2016): In "Oops! ...I Did it Again", Eliot and Margo are trapped in a time loop twelve hours before the end of the world. Eliot eventually becomes exhausted by their consistent failures to stop the apocalypse and retreats into parties, alcohol, and drugs while Margo sets off on her own. When she gets kicked out of the loop, he is left by himself and falls into an even bigger Heroic BSoD before a talk with the Genre Savvy Josh (who loves time loop stories) gets him out of his funk.
  Josh: A lot of the time in these movies the solution of the problem is facing the thing you're most afraid of.
  Eliot: What if I die?
  Josh: What if you do?
• Mashin Sentai Kiramager: Reset Button Jamenshi has the power to rewind time and he uses it every time he's defeated by the heroes so he can back to try again knowing everything that happened. The heroes turn his power against him by forcing him to reset before he can learn anything. Driven insane after countless resets, the Jamenshi simply surrenders and hands over his reset button to the protagonists while storming off. He runs into his boss Galza to whom he admits there's no way for him to defeat the heroes. Galza promptly destroys him for failing his mission.
• Happens to Nadia in Russian Doll. She dies after getting hit by a taxi on her birthday, only to reappear at her party a few hours earlier. She hates constantly dying and it doesn't take long for this to start taking its toll on her. At one point, she worries that each loop might create an alternate universe where her deaths are permanent, leaving her loved ones mourning each time. Subverted with Alan. Even though he's reliving the worst day of his life — when his girlfriend confessed to an affair and dumped him the same night he planned to propose — he finds comfort in always knowing what to expect.
• Stargate SG-1:
  • A virtual reality version appears in "The Gamekeeper". The team are trapped in simulations of their worst memories, the death of Daniel's parents in an accident and a black ops mission of Jack's that went horribly wrong, but no matter what they do to try and change things the simulation throws something in that causes them to fail. After enough runs through they simply sit down and give up. The same thing happens to Teal'c when the tech is repurposed as a training sim in "Avatar".
  • In "Window of Opportunity", Teal'c is surprised that O'Neill isn't spending a loop trying to get out of it...
    Teal'c: O'Neill, should we not be assisting Daniel Jackson with the translation?
    O'Neill: I'm taking this loop off. I'm telling you, Teal'c. If we don't find a way out of this soon I'm going to lose it. (Teal'c looks confused) Lose it... it means go crazy, nuts, insane, bonzo, no longer in possession of one's faculties, three fries short of a happy meal, (holds up plate with smiley face drawn in condiments) WACKO!
• Star Trek:
  • Discovery: In Magic To Make The Sanest Man Go Mad", the the only person aware of the loop isn't main character Michael Burnham but Lt. Paul Stamets, who did some illegal alien DNA experimentation on himself several episodes before and is, as of the episode, developing weird time-perception issues while not yet really understanding what is happening to him. Because Stamets isn't the viewpoint character of the episode and the action doesn't stay with him, the episode instead shows the cumulative effects of the loop by having each of Stamets' scenes in order from his point of view. Early in the episode he's at the "...didn't we already have this conversation?" stage; slightly later he's progressed to panicked ranting; as the danger to the ship increases, he's settled down into a sort of weary calmness at sharp odds with his crewmates' terror and despair; by the last loops he's exhausted, sick to death of explaining things and watching people die, and nearly ready to give up.
  • Voyager: In "Relativity", it's established that repeated travel back and forth in time can have an adverse effect on the humanoid body. Seven of Nine is used to try and save Voyager but is so affected that the Time Police have to enlist Janeway to stop the villain of the week.
• Supernatural: Sam suffers this in the episode "Mystery Spot" after the loop forces him to watch his brother die over and over again in increasingly strange ways. What's worse is that Sam is never able to stop his brother's death.
• Xena: Warrior Princess: Xena is stuck in a time loop at one point. She gets so sick of it that when Joxer enters the barn, which starts the day, she just kills him and goes back to sleep.

Theatre

• Groundhog Day: The musical adaptation of Groundhog Day follows the film pretty accurately, including Phil's attempts at suicide once he becomes fed up with the loop.

Video Games

• BlazBlue: For those who are aware of the time loops in the first game (Rachel and Terumi), they found their lives being filled with massive boredom. Terumi, being the villain, is trying to find the way to break the loop so he can continue with his Evil Plan — and the plot of the first game ends with the loop being broken, allowing him to be more active in pursuing his goals.
• Cobalt Core: CAT.exe mentions early on that the crew has looped 517 times before the game proper begins. This mostly manifests as the crew taking a rather blasé attitude towards death; Dizzy in particular has a tendency to lose his smile while flatly commenting that it looks like it's "Back to the loop again."
• Forever Home: Xero keeps communicating with the Guide, who is actually his future self from a previous time loop. It turns out there are Guides for each time loop, and each one failed to save Enda and failed to stop Barclyss from destroying the planet's environment. Their constant failures caused them all to cross the Despair Event Horizon so hard that they're angered when the current Xero insists that it's still possible to save both Enda and the world.
• no-one has to die. has Troy. His confession to having killed the guards and started the fire is a lie — he's actively trying to get killed because he's gone through the events of the game five times before the game started, and after failing to save anyone else on any of the previous loops, he no longer has any will to live.
• START AGAIN START AGAIN START AGAIN: a prologue: Siffrin/The Traveler has already been worn down by the weight of his plight, yet feels it best to keep up the act for his companions.
  • In Stars And Time, its finalized version, draws this out over a longer period, with Siffrin gradually losing his cat smile and suffering Sanity Slippage as the loops go on... and on... and on...
• Undertale: Sans the Skeleton. While he lacks Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory, he is aware he's stuck in a timeline that can be reset at any time every time Flowey or the Fallen Child resets to an earlier save state. The mask only slips in one particular instance at the end of the Genocide route, but it's very clear he's not very happy about his circumstances and has stopped caring.
  You can't understand how this feels. Knowing that one day, without any warning... It's all going to be reset. (...) To be blunt... It makes it kind of hard to give it my all.

Visual Novels

• This forms the core motivation for Mercurius' whole plan in Dies Irae. He has been stuck in his eternal recurrence for who knows how long, endlessly repeating the entire life of the universe millions, perhaps billions, of times and has learned everything that there is to know about everything. As a result, he has grown sick and tired of it all and simply wants the sweet release of death and cooks up a plan to have someone kill him and become his replacement as the God of the multiverse.
• Higurashi: When They Cry: Rika. On the outside is the cheerful and innocent girl everyone loves. On the inside is a girl who has been broken several times over from being stuck in a time loop for centuries, witnessing the same people around her die repeatedly, and she herself being killed in every last timeline, all the while trying and failing to figure out how to escape it. Frederica Bernkastel's poem for the Atonement Arc lampshades this, saying that the second time it happens, you're shocked, the third time you despair, but by the seventh time, it becomes a comedy.
• Raging Loop. Main character Haruaki gets trapped in a time loop and is forced to re-live the Yomibito Feast (essentially a real-life game of Werewolf (1997)) over and over again where the wolves change every loop. Haruaki develops a certain sense of fatalism and detatchment over the whole thing since the people who die (including Haruaki, multiple times) inevitably come back again and again with none of them the wiser. Two other villagers have already been trapped in the loop far, far longer than Haruaki has, and have gone somewhat mad as a result — cracking their Mask of Sanity is an important part of the game's later loops. Chiemi, in particular, mentions having done practically everything under the sun to try and escape it, and has died over a hundred deaths in the process. The path to the final solution involves a Bad Ending where Haruaki and Chiemi loop and kill each other several hundred times more to ferret out the rules of the game.

Web Animation

• Red vs. Blue: Church experiences this as he tries to correct the past and prevent, among other things, the demise of himself and Tex.

Web Comics

• Kill Six Billion Demons 6 Juggernaut Star and Jagganoth, thanks to both of them being bound to Metatron, have flawed Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory about Zoss essentially Save Scumming the universe. Both are forced to play out their parts in the same Hero's Journey, over and over again, until Zoss can find the right Successor who can 'fix' the universe, all at the behest of Metatron puppeteering Zoss. As a result, they're both utterly broken and bitter individuals, 6 Juggernaut Star becoming a sociopathic fatalist whose only source of joy is tormenting people who can't remember and Jagganoth being motivated to omnicide in the hope that slaying Metatron will stop the cycle forever.
  • The final book reveals that Gog-Agog is also aware of the time loop, and part of her nature as a Hive Mind means she is not only able to directly carry over information between loops, meaning each new loop is a direct extension of her overall lifespan, but she is always one of the survivors by the time the loop is reset. Unlike 6 Juggernaut Star and Jagganoth, Gog-Agog doesn't even get the luxury of uncertainty, as she remembers all the cycles without the others' flaws, but she can't see a way to break the cycle and is resigned to watching everyone else go through the same motions, over and over and over and over and over and...
• Surviving Romance: Protagonist Chaerin suffers from this at the start of the story. After hundreds of failed attempts to reach a happy ending, each ending in her death, she almost gave up completely, if it wasn't for meeting the Unknown Extra.

Web Videos

• CalebCity: In the video "Super Human Interview", one of the interviewees has the power to put people in a time loop. The interviewer suffers this trope when he gets trapped in one of these time loops, and the interviewee doesn't even remember creating the loop in the first place. The interviewer begs the interviewee to end the loop. Playedfor Laughs.
• Played With in Every Man Hybrid; while the three main characters are caught in an endless cycle of iterations and restarts, dating back to at least the '60s, their memories also reset each time, leading to a bunch of strange inconsistencies but no mental impact on them. However, at the end of the story fans uncovered clues that lead them to another character, who also was stuck in the loop but retained their memories; this character expressed exhaustion and frustration at the circumstances and admitted Vinny was lucky for not needing to remember everything.
• The Jacob Geller video "Time Loop Nihilism" is dedicated to discussing the trope using Death Loop and Twelve Minutes, pointing out the effects time-loop gameplay has on both the Player Character and the player themselves.

Western Animation

• In the Code Lyoko episode "A Great Day", XANA manages to take control of the Return to the Past capability of the supercomputer it is trapped in. It ends up restarting the same day over and over. This drives the heroes who have ripple effect-proof memories nuts, as they are forced to live the same day over and over again while trying to figure out how to stop XANA from resetting time. XANA isn't doing this to spite the heroes, however — each time reset increases the supercomputer's processing power, which makes XANA more powerful too. Annoying the heroes is a side benefit.
• Nate Is Late: In "The Pocket Watch", Nate and Malika happen upon a magic watch that rewinds time to the start of their morning after a set amount of time passes. They eventually discover that the solution is to get to a watch repairman to fix it, but experience multiple obstacles that get them sent back to the start of the loop. Eventually, they get fed up and plow through the quest as fast as they can, all while yelling at the top of their lungs.
• Sonic Boom: In "Hedgehog Day", Eggman gets trapped in a time loop after the projectiles from his new weapon collided with each other along with a bolt of lightning. Eggman uses this as an opportunity to finally defeat Sonic, but quickly crosses the Despair Event Horizon and undergoes Sanity Slippage when he is unable to escape the time loop, requiring the help of Tails to figure out how to stop it.

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Being trapped in a time loop is... Ugh, not again...

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