Bruce Banner: Changing the past doesn't change the future. [...]
Clint Barton: Well, that's what I heard.
Bruce: By who? Who told you that?
Rhodey: Star Trek, Terminator, Time Cop, Time After Time...
Scott Lang: Quantum Leap...
Rhodey: A Wrinkle in Time, Somewhere in Time...
Scott: Hot Tub Time Machine...
Rhodey: Hot Tub Time Machine, Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure. Basically, any movie that deals with time travel. This is known!
Clint Barton: Well, that's what I heard.
Bruce: By who? Who told you that?
Rhodey: Star Trek, Terminator, Time Cop, Time After Time...
Scott Lang: Quantum Leap...
Rhodey: A Wrinkle in Time, Somewhere in Time...
Scott: Hot Tub Time Machine...
Rhodey: Hot Tub Time Machine, Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure. Basically, any movie that deals with time travel. This is known!
— A quick discussion about time travel, Avengers: Endgame
Of all the concepts in Speculative Fiction, Time Travel is probably the one that, over time, has provided us with the most possibilities for storytelling, and therefore the one that has been (clocked as having been) exploited the most.
Whether you're casting a critical eye on the past, satirizing the present through a warped future, or just looking for an excuse to have dinosaurs rampaging through New York, time travel is the way to go. Or, possibly, the way to have been going. It's so hard to tell these days. Or those days. Or whatever. Or whenever. We tend to get grammatically confused when talking on this subject.
Also, try saying the name of this page ten times fast.
Tropes:
Main topics:
Media index:
Trope indexes:
- Accidental Time Travel: Characters wind up in another time by sheer accident.
- Adventures in the Bible: Someone goes to the past and experiences a well-known story (usually a biblical one, hence the title).
- Alien Space Bats: Something supernatural or technically natural but highly implausible that causes the alternate history to be, well, alternate.
- All of Time at Once: Something makes every day in history happen again simultaneously.
- Alternate History: A story about a world where history happened differently from how it did in real life. This may sometimes be the result of meddling time-travelers visiting and changing the past.
- Alternate-History Nazi Victory: An alternate history where the Nazis won World War II, or where World War II stopped with them still in power.
- Alternate Self: There's an extra version of an existing person, sometimes caused by time travel.
- Alternate Timeline: An alternate continuity, where both continuities share a past.
- Alternate Timeline Ancestry: Same person exists in alternate timeline, but with different family history.
- Alternative-Self Name-Change: The version of the alternate timeline changes their name either to better distinguish or to keep the original from finding out who they are.
- Anachronism Stew: A story taking place in a specific time period features technology, cultural references, etc. that are either out-of-date or don't exist yet. This could be the result of time-travelers introducing something from another era.
- Army of The Ages: An army of warriors from different times, except they're not all famous.
- Back to the Early Installment: Characters time-travel to a previous point in their own story, often a previous episode of a series.
- Bad Future: The hero time-travels to a future where the world is worse off without them.
- Bad Present: Someone from the past ends up in the present and dislikes it.
- Been There, Shaped History: Time travel is a very common way for fictional characters to become involved in major historical events.
- Beethoven Was an Alien Spy: A historical figure is revealed to have an unusual aspect of their lives that isn't brought up in the history books.
- Born in the Wrong Century: A character really wants to live in the past or future.
- Butterfly of Doom: Changing the past, even in a minor way, results in something terrible happening.
- Can't Take Anything with You: Time travel prevents you from bringing material objects with you. May sometimes have the outcome of time travelers arriving in their destination naked if clothes are counted as material things.
- Catching Up on History: A character has to catch up on what they've missed.
- Casual Time Travel: Time travel is a normal hobby or occupation.
- Caught in the Ripple: An installment of a work begins with something having radically changed and no-one noticing.
- Causality Mechanic: Changing the past to affect the future is available as a Game Mechanic.
- Changed My Jumper: Time-travelers somehow don't attract attention in the past with their modern clothes.
- Chekhov's Time Travel: If time travel is possible, then the characters need to time-travel.
- Christmas Every Day (some variants): Something makes it so that Christmas occurs every day.
- Chronoscope: A device with a screen that shows things that happened or will happen.
- Clock of Power: A timepiece that has superpower or grant superpowers to its user / inhabitant, usually time-related.
- Clock Roaches: Changing the timeline causes an infestation of dangerous creatures.
- Close-Enough Timeline: Several attempts to alter the past and fix history ends with the protagonist settling for a timeline that's sufficiently similar.
- Cold Sleep, Cold Future: Someone wakes up from being a Human Popsicle, only to discover that the future is a Crapsack World.
- Compound-Interest Time Travel Gambit: Trying to make money by putting some money somewhere, then travelling to the future when the money will supposedly be worth a lot more.
- Conqueror from the Future: A conqueror from the future goes back in time to start his conquest in the past.
- The Constant: Something or somebody that still exists, even in the far future.
- Contemporary Caveman: A caveman ends up in modern times. Usually happens because the caveman was frozen, but they can also end up in the present day because of time travel.
- The Cretaceous Is Always Doomed: When someone time-travels to a period with a disaster in it, they'll always end up witnessing that disaster.
- Cryo-Prison: Freezing someone as punishment.
- Crystal Spires and Togas: A future that's sort of like a technologically-advanced version of Ancient Rome or Ancient Greece.
- Delayed Ripple Effect: Negative effects of changing the past take a while to come true.
- Doctor Whomage: Characters clearly inspired by Doctor Who and share similar time traveling adventures.
- Equivalent Exchange: In order to be able to do something, somebody must give up something equivalent.
- Emergency Temporal Shift: A character evades danger via time travel.
- Eyepatch After Timeskip: Someone is depicted wearing an eyepatch in the future.
- Fantastic Time Management: If someone is pressed for time, they use time travel as a solution.
- Fashions Never Change: Anything set before the twentieth century has the characters wear generic clothes for their time period as opposed to nuanced fashions existing.
- Field Trip to the Past: Someone learns history by experiencing it.
- Fighting Across Time and Space: Characters fight or chase each other while teleporting through different time periods.
- Fish out of Temporal Water: Someone ends up forced to adjust living outside of their original time period.
- Fling a Light into the Future: A message sent to the future when people in the past were unable to deal with a problem or situation.
- Floating Clocks: When someone time-travels, clocks can be seen floating around.
- The Future: A time that hasn't happened yet.
- Future Badass: Someone who's wacky and/or a bit of a loser will be competent and gritty in the future.
- Future Foil: In the future, someone will have at least one aspect of their personality changed.
- The Future Is Shocking: Someone from the past ends up in the present, and while they don't find it to be a Bad Present, they do find it shocking.
- Future Loser: In the future, someone will be unpopular, have a lame job, etc.
- Future Me Scares Me: Someone is disturbed by their own future self.
- Futureshadowing: Foreshadowing by showing something that hasn't happened yet.
- Future Self Reveal: A character is revealed to be another character's future self.
- Future Slang: Funny words that will be used as slang in the future.
- The Future Will Be Better: A utopian future.
- Get Back to the Future: Someone is sent to the past and has to find their way back.
- Giving Radio to the Romans: Giving modern technology to people in the past.
- God Test (to establish the veracity of the time traveller): Someone has to prove they're God/an alien/a time traveler/etc.
- Godwin's Law of Time Travel: An alternate history in which the Nazis won is very easy to accidentally create.
- Gone to the Future: Going forward in time erases you from the timeline.
- Ye Goode Olde Days: A work that makes the past seem better.
- Grandfather Paradox: Altering the past in a way that would logically prevent one's time travel from happening in the first place. Named for the example of using time travel to erase oneself from existence by killing one's grandfather before he started a family, or at least before your mother or father was conceived.note
- "Groundhog Day" Loop: The events of an entire day repeat continuously.
- Groundhog Peggy Sue: A character is forced to live some past event in canon over and over in a fanfic.
- Have We Met Yet?: Someone meets a time traveler who already knows them.
- Help Yourself in the Future: Someone goes back in time to help their past self.
- Historical Domain Crossover: A crossover between a multiple historical figures.
- Historical In-Joke: A work mentions a historical event and implies that it happened differently than what we learned in history class.
- Historical Person Punchline: Someone from the past is revealed to be a historical figure.
- Hitler's Time Travel Exemption Act: Going back in time to kill Hitler won't ever end well.
- Human Popsicle: Someone gets frozen and then thawed out in the future.
- Identical Grandson: Someone has an ancestor or descendant who looks exactly like them.
- I Hate Past Me: Someone dislikes their past self.
- I'm Mr. [Future Pop Culture Reference]: Somebody goes back in time and uses a pop culture reference as an alias.
- Immune to Fate: A person's superpower is that they can fight fate.
- In Spite of a Nail: In spite of one change, everything's the same as it was in the original timeline.
- Intangible Time Travel: You can only time travel as an astral being.
- In Their Own Image: Going back to the beginning of time to rewrite the world.
- In the Past, Everyone Will Be Famous: Going back in time always leads to unintentionally meeting historical figures.
- It Will Never Catch On: Someone in the past thinks that something will never be popular. They're wrong.
- I Want My Jet Pack: A work written in the past wrongly predicts a piece of technology being invented.
- Just One Second Out of Sync: Making something unobtainable by putting it a few seconds out of sync with time.
- Kid from the Future: A childless person or people meet their future child.
- Like a Duck Takes to Water: A character has knowledge that makes them able to adapt to another time/world.
- A Little Something We Call "Rock and Roll": Someone time travels, then plays modern music to the people in the different time.
- Love Transcends Spacetime: Love causes time travel.
- Make Wrong What Once Went Right: Using time travel to prevent good things from happening and to cause more bad things to happen in the past.
- Married in the Future: In an alternate future, two characters are married.
- Mass Teleportation: When a whole lot of people are transported to another time/world.
- Meanwhile, in the Future…: The story shifts from one plotline to the other, but one plotline takes place after the other.
- Mental Time Travel: Going back in time and possessing your past self's or someone else's brain.
- Merged Reality: Saving the day by merging an alternate universe with the normal one.
- Merlin Sickness: Aging backwards.
- "Mister Sandman" Sequence: Could be about time travel, but it could just be for a Period Piece: when the past is shown, a lot of things are shown in sequence to signify the time period.
- More than Three Dimensions: The idea that time is another dimension.
- Multiple-Choice Future: The idea that destiny is unreliable and many things could happen in the future.
- My Future Self and Me: Someone meets themselves from the future and nothing bad happens.
- My Own Grampa: Through time travel and incest, a person becomes their own ancestor.
- Narnia Time: Another world has a different timeline which changes unreliably.
- Necessary Fail: Going back in time to prevent something bad from happening results in something worse happening.
- Never the Selves Shall Meet: Meeting your alternate-universe self, or yourself from a different timeline, is bad.
- Newspaper Dating: A time traveler finding out what year is it by looking for a newspaper or something else dated.
- No Backwards Compatibility in the Future: Characters from the future time-travel to our time, but their technology doesn't work with ours.
- No Equal-Opportunity Time Travel: Someone has problems when they time-travel to a time when a lot of people were prejudiced against a group they belong to.
- Non-Linear Character: A character who can simultaneously see into the future and the past while still observing the present.
- Non Sequitur Causality: Altering the past has consequences that realistically wouldn't happen.
- No Ontological Inertia: The idea that if the creator is destroyed, the creation will disappear and/or also be destroyed.
- Now I Know What to Name Him: A character meets their parents in the past, prompting them to name their child after that person as part of a Stable Time Loop.
- Ominous Message from the Future: A person or people from the future send a message back in time, warning people that something bad is going to happen.
- One-Man Industrial Revolution: Someone makes enough technology to change the world significantly.
- Only One Me Allowed Right Now: If there's more than one version of the same person, something bad will happen.
- Ontological Inertia: Making something "un-happen" is impossible. Technically, you might be able to change the way something happens, but if you have something specific that you want not to happen, you're out of luck.
- Other Me Annoys Me: Someone dislikes their alternate self.
- Our Time Machine Is Different: Any significant time machine.
- Our Time Travel Is Different: Ways of showing time travel onscreen.
- Out of Time, Out of Mind: Someone experiences lots of out-of-place time, yet when they return to the normal timeline, they look/act as if nothing happened.
- Past Right Now: Something historical-seeming exists in the present.
- Peggy Sue: A fanfiction where a character goes back in time to change history.
- Place Beyond Time: A place where time doesn't exist.
- Popular History: Works set in the past will have an implausible emphasis on pop culture and/or portray their pop culture as being a mishmash of things from different parts of the era.
- Portal to the Past: A portal that allows time-travel into the past.
- Precrime Arrest: Someone is arrested for a crime they haven't even committed yet.
- Present-Day Past: In the recent past, technology or fashion that hasn't been invented yet exists.
- Progressive Era Montage: A montage that shifts from one era to the next.
- Reset Button: Something which renders one or more drastic events unimportant.
- Reset Button Ending: It looks like the main conflict has been solved, but at the end, something happens that resets the status quo and makes it so it hasn't.
- Reset-Button Suicide Mission: Sacrificing oneself in an alternate timeline, knowing that it won't really happen.
- Ret-Gone: Someone ends up erased from history alongside all memory and evidence of their existence.
- Retroactive Precognition: A character who ends up in the past ends up seeming psychic.
- Retroactive Preparation: Someone is prepared because they time-traveled and made their past self prepared.
- Ripple Effect Indicator: An object or sometimes even a person that signifies that time travel has been happening.
- Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory: Someone still remembers the old timeline in spite of it being changed.
- Rubber-Band History: A story that begins in an alternate history and ends in a non-alternate history.
- San Dimas Time: Someone has a limited amount of time to change the past before it somehow becomes too late to change it.
- Screw Destiny: Someone successfully defies destiny.
- Screw Yourself: If having intercourse with oneself involves using time travel to have sex with one's past or future self.
- Self-Defeating Prophecy: A prophecy that would come true if it weren't for its own existence.
- Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: Trying to defy a prophecy actually makes it come true.
- Set Right What Once Went Wrong: Using time travel to prevent bad things from happening.
- Set Wrong What Was Once Made Right: Someone goes back in time to undo a bad thing in the past, and (due to it creating a Bad Future, Temporal Paradox, or something else terrible) has to go back and undo that change.
- The Slow Path: Waiting is treated as similar to time travel.
- Speculative Fiction LGBT: LGBT people feature a lot in sci-fi and fantasy.
- Spin the Earth Backwards: Making the Earth spin backwards in an attempt to turn back time.
- Stable Time Loop: Events happened because a person went back in time and vice versa.
- Stranded with Edison: Using a historical genius to introduce modern technology to people in the past.
- Supernaturally Young Parent: Not always because of time travel but it can be: for a paranormal reason, someone is younger than their son or daughter.
- Temporal Abortion: A time travel plot to end someone's existence by preventing them from ever being born.
- Temporal Duplication: Multiple versions of the same person present due to time travel.
- Temporal Paradox: When time travel causes a paradox.
- Temporal Sickness: Time travel literally makes someone sick.
- Temporal Suicide: Someone killing their past/future self.
- Terminator Twosome: Two people go back in time, one to change history and one to prevent history from being changed.
- This Is Going to Be Huge: Someone in the past thinks that something will be very popular. They're wrong.
- This Is My Boomstick: Using technology to impress people from the past.
- Time and Relative Dimensions in Space: A work tries to answer the question of where (not when) you end up when you time travel.
- Time Crash: Someone "breaks" time via time travel.
- Time Dilation: Effectively traveling forward (but not backwards) in time, via Einsteinian relativity.
- Time Dissonance: A species that thinks of time in a different way than humans.
- Time-Freeze Trolling Spree: Playing pranks on other people while they're frozen in time.
- Time Is Dangerous: Time machines are dangerous to use.
- Timeline-Altering MacGuffin: Something from the future that will cause an alternate timeline if left in the past.
- Time Loop Fatigue: A character is exhausted physically or emotionally by a time loop.
- Time Loop Trap: Someone uses a Stable Time Loop for imprisonment.
- Time Machine: A machine that enables time travel.
- Time Master: Somebody who can control time.
- Time Police: People who either outlaw time travel or make laws related to time travel.
- Time Rewind Mechanic: A video game "mechanic" that allows you to rewind time.
- Time Stands Still: Time stops progressing, thus freezing everything in perfect stasis.
- Time-Travelers Are Spies: A time traveler is mistaken for a spy.
- Time-Traveler's Baby: A time traveler has a baby in the time period they traveled to.
- Time-Traveling Jerkass: Changing the past to benefit oneself or get revenge on someone.
- The Time Traveller's Dilemma: Changing the past raises moral dilemmas.
- Time Travel Taboo: Time travel is not allowed because [insert reason here].
- Time Travel Episode: An episode of a series that focuses on time travel.
- Time Travel Escape: Saving a dead person via time travel.
- Time Travel for Fun and Profit: Using time travel to make money.
- Time-Travel Romance: Falling in love with someone from another time.
- Time-Travel Tense Trouble: Not knowing which tense (it was, it is, it will be) to use because of time travel.
- Timey-Wimey Ball: The rules of time travel are inconsistent.
- To the Future, and Beyond: Somebody can travel further into the future.
- Trapped in the Past: Someone accidentally ends up in the past without knowing how to come back.
- Tragic Time Traveler: A character who travels through time, but has had no end of misery because of it.
- Tricked Out Time: Changing the past while making it look like you didn't.
- Trust Password: A phrase that proves someone's identity.
- Unstuck in Time: Somebody who randomly time travels with no idea when (and sometimes where) they'll end up.
- Wayback Trip: The protagonist/s have to fix a change in history but the change has happened for seemingly no reason.
- The Web Always Existed: If you bring a computer while time travelling, you can use the internet even before it was invented.
- Weirdness Search and Rescue: When someone ends up in another timeline, they'll get help from a more seasoned time traveler.
- We Will All Fly in the Future: Flying is effortless in the future.
- We Will Have Perfect Health in the Future: People in the future don't get sick.
- We Will Not Have Appendixes in the Future: In the future, people will lack useless body parts.
- What Year Is This?: Someone has time traveled but doesn't know when to, so they ask for the year.
- Which Me?: When somebody has been cloned, they don't know whether to use "me" or "you/they/he/she".
- Write Back to the Future: Somebody writes a letter so that people in the future will read it.
- Wrong Time-Travel Savvy: Someone mistakenly thinks they know how time travel works.
- Year Inside, Hour Outside: A long time in another world is a short time in this world.
- Year Outside, Hour Inside: A short time in another world is a long time in this world.
- You Already Changed the Past: Someone attempts to prevent a tragic event from happening in the past, only to find in the end that the event happened because they traveled to the past.
- You Can't Fight Fate: No amount of altering the past will prevent your destined fate from happening.
- You Will Be Beethoven: Someone travels into the past and accidentally kills someone important or finds out the important person never existed, so they have to "be" that person.
- Young Future Famous People: Past/younger versions of famous celebrities and historical figures.
