Basic Trope: Someone meets their own past self and can hardly stand them.
- Straight: Maxine goes ten years back in time to assist her younger self in an important mission. She spots her younger self engaged in melee combat and mopes about how poor a fighter she was.
- Exaggerated:
- She then decides to kill her younger self, despite the cosmic implications (or may decide nonexistence is preferable).
- Maxine goes back three hours into the past and remarks about how inept she was at fighting.
- Maxine goes back a very short period of time (anywhere from a day to several hours) and remarks about how stupid she was.
- Maxine create a time machine solely so she can inflict Cold-Blooded Torture on her past self, because she hates what she was that much.
- After going back in time, Future Maxine realizes how much Past Maxine sucks. Then she remembers that she's Past Maxine, not Future Maxine. Ouch...
- Maxine has an argument between 8 past versions of herself.
- Downplayed:
- Maxine goes back in time and notes that, while her past self's fighting skills showed much potential, the rookie mistakes her past self continually makes causes her to sigh at her inexperience. Future Maxine's cringing at her past self's unrefined performance is tempered by the fact that she keeps in mind it's the experiences Past Maxine has yet to have that makes her that way.
- Alice reminds Maxine of her previous behavior, and annoys her quite a bit.
- Justified: Maxine has gone through quite a bit of Character Development since her younger years.
- Inverted:
- Future Me Scares Me
- Alternatively, Maxine is in awe at how cool she was in the past.
- Subverted: Maxine watches her past self for a moment, and decides she was actually a pretty good fighter.
- Double Subverted: ...But still manages to find fault with herself.
- Parodied: Maxine calls her past self a loser and runs off while laughing.
- Zig Zagged: Maxine finds her past self to be a competent fighter. Her driving, however, makes her ashamed to know herself. But Maxine reflects that her past self is a better gymnast, since she's fallen out of practice in the future. But she used to be a complete jerk...
- Averted: Maxine has no strong opinions about her past self.
- Enforced: "Alice, the actress who plays Maxine, has a little sister that looks like Alice ten years ago. Let's do a story where Maxine goes back in time and is ashamed of who she used to be."
- Lampshaded: "You know, I didn't think I'd hate myself this much."
- Invoked: Maxine makes a list of all the flaws she had in the past, so she can more easily hate herself.
- Exploited: The villain accompanying the present Maxine remarks, "If you hate her so much, why don't you go over there and do something about it?", setting up the Deconstructed situation above.
- Defied: Maxine makes a list of all the good qualities her past self had, so she can convince herself that she wasn't all that bad.
- Discussed: Maxine tells her past self that she is her older incarnation, and her past self asks "So am I a disappointment to you?"
- Conversed: Maxine tells her past self "If you were my daughter, I wouldn't let you carry on like this."
- Deconstructed:
- Maxine is so fed up with her past self's actions that she jumps in and knocks her aside in order to take over and do things the "right" way. The dazed past Maxine is trampled and killed before she can realize what has happened... whoops.
- Maxine's past self is driven to distraction by her future self's disdain, taking greater and greater risks in hopes of proving herself.
- Reconstructed:
- Past Maxine survives, vows she'll never get upstaged like that again, and puts herself through much Training from Hell in order to make it so, thereby becoming the Maxine who hated her past self in the first place.
- Both Maxines sit down and have a frank discussion, which leads to past Maxine working out the flaws in her routine and perhaps avoiding the costly mistakes she was going to have made.
Back to I Hate Past Me
