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.