Basic Trope: An instance of an endless recursion of time.
- Straight: Alice finds herself constantly reliving the same day, and tries to find a way out.
- Exaggerated:
- Alice is reliving the same second.
- Every character ends up trapped in their own localised time loop.
- Downplayed: Alice finds herself reliving the same year.
- Justified:
- A Jerkass God trapped Alice into an endless time loop.
- Groundhog Peggy Sue.
- Inverted: Days do not repeat. Instead, every day is unique; they offer new possibilities and outcomes.
- Subverted: Alice thinks she's reliving the same day over and over, but her days are just so dull that nothing new ever happens.
- Double Subverted: Then she sees that everyone else still thinks it's the same day as when the loop started and realizes that she is stuck in a time loop.
- Parodied: Alice is reliving a very embarrassing day.
- Averted: There's no time loops, time continues as normal.
- Defied:???
- Zig-Zagged: ???
- Enforced: ???
- Lampshaded: ???
- Discussed: After several loops, Alice knows everything that is going to happen in her town, allowing her to finally convince her friend, Bob that the time loop is real so they discuss it.
- Conversed: ???
- Invoked: ???
- Exploited: An evil nerd puts Alice in a Groundhog Day Loop to drive her insane.
- Played for Laughs: After hundreds of loops, Alice decides to go streaking. This breaks the cycle.
- Played for Drama: After hundreds of loops, Alice loses all hope of breaking free and kills herself. This doesn't break the cycle.
- Played for Horror: After hundreds of loops, Alice goes insane and starts murdering and raping people in her loops. Eventually she breaks the loop and is committed to an insane asylum.
- Alternatively, when she finally breaks and goes on a murderous rampage, massacring several people, expecting there to be no consequences as the loop will reset, she finds that the loop is somehow broken and will have to face the consequences of her actions.
- Implied: Alice mutters "not this again..." at some misfortunate event like she's seen it before and seems to have uncanny knowledge of future events, but it's not clear whether this is just coincidence (it could just be Alice being tired at similar but not literally the same events, for example), time-looping, or some other supernatural explanation like being able to see the future.
- Unparodied: ???
- Untwisted: ???
- Deconstructed: Alice is alarmed by the fact that her husband, Bob has woke up a completely different person to the man she fell in love with. Bob has been in a time loop for several decades and has used the time to pick up new hobbies and grow and change as a person. The sudden change is too much for Alice who doesn’t understand how Bob has these new skills that he had no previous experience in. She considers getting a divorce.
- Reconstructed: Bob is able to explain to Alice that he went through a ton of loops, and through some actions he took once he got out it becomes clear that the time loops Bob went through caused him to change into a better person than he was before, at least in some ways. For Alice, it's like meeting a new person, which opens the possibility of falling in love with Bob again.
Back to "Groundhog Day" Loop.
