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Basic Trope: Character makes use of Time Travel for their own personal gain.

  • Straight:
    • Alice goes back in time and uses her future knowledge to place bets, invest in stocks etc. and become rich.
    • Alice runs a time tourism business, or trades between different eras to make a profit, exploiting the differences in price between eras.
    • Alice becomes a successful "songwriter" by taking future hits back and publishing them before they were written, reaping the royalties.
    • Alice takes advanced future technology back to the past and patents it, reaping the royalties.
  • Exaggerated: Alice uses the vastly superior technology and her knowledge of future events at her disposal to Take Over the World.
  • Downplayed: Alice goes back in time to watch a sunset from decades ago because she thought it was better back then.
  • Justified:
    • Alice is the inventor of the time machine. She worked hard and invested heavily to make the invention a success and needs to recoup that investment/make her hard work pay off.
    • It's an easy way of making money/getting power, since all you need is the right knowledge, or the vastly superior technology to what existed in the past.
  • Inverted: Attempted exploitation backfires. Trying to mine out a depleted gold mine again in the past results in never getting the gold the first time.
  • Subverted: Alice tries to place a bet in the past only for the Butterfly of Doom to wreck her chances because her presence changed the past in some way.
  • Double Subverted: Or it looked that way until that other horse fell and the one she was backing crossed the finish line after all, her team scored a surprise last minute goal, etc. New events are unpredictable in good ways as well as bad.
  • Parodied: ???
  • Zig Zagged: ???
  • Averted: Alice uses the time machine simply to observe the past, or potential future.
  • Enforced: The network wanted a Time Police series. To give them something to do, there has to be someone using time travel for nefarious purposes.
  • Lampshaded: ???
  • Invoked: ???
  • Exploited: ???
  • Defied: Alice outright refuses to use the time machine for anything other than observational purposes, no interference permitted. Moreover, she founds the Time Police to ensure no-one else can exploit this trope either.
  • Discussed: ???
  • Conversed: ???
  • Played For Laughs: Alice uses time travel in incredibly petty ways such as "pirating" a movie by traveling back to before she paid for admission.

Back to Time Travel for Fun and Profit, so you can reap your reward.

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