Cats also don't know.
"What then is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know."
Time passes. Often, this is significant to characters and plots alike.
Tropes:
Categories:
- 10,000 Years
- Ab Urbe Condita
- Absurdly Long Wait
- Age-Progression Song
- All of Time at Once
- Alternative Calendar: A calendar where the names of the months are different.
- Ambiguous Time Period: It is not clear what time period the story takes place.
- Anachronistic Clue
- Bait-and-Switch Time Skip: It seems like a long time has passed, but it's only been a little while.
- Bizarre Seasons
- Bullet Time: A visual effect in which time is slowed down to show something really fast happening.
- Cartoonland Time
- The Cavalry Arrives Late: The heroes' reinforcements don't show up until after the villains have already been defeated.
- Celestial Deadline
- Chronoscope
- Clock Discrepancy
- Clock King
- Clocks of Control
- Clock Tampering
- Colour-Coded Timestop
- Cue O'Clock
- Distant Finale: The series' ending takes place many years in the future with the surviving characters much older.
- Event-Driven Clock: Time doesn't progress until the player progresses.
- Exactly Exty Years Ago
- Exploding Calendar
- Extremely Short Timespan
- Exty Years from Publication
- Fantastic Time Management
- Fast-Forward to Reunion
- Father Time: Anthropomorphic Personification of time.
- Flashback B-Plot
- Flash Forward Fic
- Floating Clocks
- Fresh Clue
- Funny Flashback Haircut
- Hating on Monday
- The Hidden Hour
- Implausible Synchrony
- In It for Life
- Just in Time
- Late to the Action
- Liminal Time
- Lineage Ladder: When describing a repetition of ancestors or descendants conveys age or time passage.
- Microts: Fictional units of time.
- Move in the Frozen Time
- The Present Day: The current period of time you're living in right now.
- Progressive Era Montage
- Race Against the Clock
- Right on the Tick
- A Rotten Time to Revert: A transformed character is forced to revert to their natural form at the worst possible time.
- Seasonal Baggage
- Snail Mail
- Spinning Clock Hands
- Spinning Paper: Newspapers rotate into view with headlines relevant to the events of the story.
- Spring Is Late
- Standard Time Units
- Stopped Clock
- Sunday Is Boring
- Take Your Time
- Thousand-Year Reign
- Time Abyss: A being who is much older than all recorded history.
- Time Capsule
- Time-Compression Montage
- Time Crash
- Time Dilation
- Time Passes Montage
- Time-Freeze Trolling Spree: Someone freezes time or takes advantage of time being frozen so they can play pranks on people without the risk of getting caught.
- Time Is Dangerous
- Time Master: Someone who has the power to manipulate time at will.
- Time Skip: A sequel or continuation that takes place a specific amount of time after the original.
- Time Stands Still: Someone or something causes time to freeze and everyone around them to become motionless.
- Time Zones Do Not Exist: When a world logically should have different time zones, yet none are shown or mentioned.
- Universal Universe Time
- Unnecessary Time Precision: Doing complicated time calculations just to say that the date requested is very recent.
- When the Clock Strikes Twelve
- When the Planets Align
- "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue: The story ends by explaining what happened to the characters after the story's events.
- A Year and a Day
- Year Inside, Hour Outside: A long time in an alternate reality is only a short time in the regular universe.
- Year Outside, Hour Inside: A short time in an alternate reality is much, much longer in the regular universe.
- Year X
- You Are Too Late
