Set Right What Once Went Wrong / Fan Works

Setting Right What Once Went Wrong in Fan Works.

Series Plots

Calvin and Hobbes

• Calvin & Hobbes: The Series: The plot of "Time Terror" involves Calvin trying to rescue his friends from different time periods before time gets screwed up.
  • Also used in "Super Calvin" by Hobbes, of all people, when he learns that Calvin's new superpowers are a Deadly Upgrade.
  • Then there's the very end of "Thunderstorm", where everything that happened in the special is undone.

Crossover

• Goggles and the Tears: Being a Time Travel crossover, the fic is set up as a final chance to defeat SHODAN before she uses Elizabeth to take over the multiverse. A majority of the story involves a trip to Columbia, and one chapter named after this trope involves Booker DeWitt, Elizabeth, and a Vox Populi member detouring to Finkton to rescue Chen Lin before Jeremiah Fink kills him again. By Booker distracting Fink in a firefight, Elizabeth manages to sneak Lin out to his gun shop. This allows the Vox to properly get their weapons, resulting in the Vox allying themselves in the fight against SHODAN instead of trying to kill Booker. It turns out that the chapter played out this way because of the G-Man, who had been fed up with the Luteces running Booker through the same scenario 122 times.
• "Remember Me This Way" sees Sam Beckett (Quantum Leap) arrive in the life of Jack O'Neill (Stargate SG-1) shortly after the death of Jack's son Charlie and shortly before the first mission to Abydos. Sam and Al are immediately focused on why Sam didn't Leap into Jack's life in time to prevent Charlie's death, but after Al learns that the original mission through the Stargate ended with the apparent death of most of the team, he speculates that Sam's purpose is to get Jack to accept the mission. While it was ultimately accepted to be a suicide mission, Ziggy calculated that Jack would be more likely to tell the rest of the team about the nature of the mission and give them a chance to go home, particularly since Jack would take Doctor Daniel Jackson with him through the Stargate where the second choice left Daniel behind. They consider trying to help Jack's marriage to Sara as well, but ultimately Sam and Al have to concede that Charlie's death did so much damage to the O'Neills' relationship that Al isn't sure the marriage would stay "fixed" once Sam Leaped out no matter what he did with Sara beforehand.
• Storm on the Horizon:
  • On the Life Is Strange side of the crossover, after becoming immortal and officially dead, Max used her powers to set Arcadia Bay right. She murdered Mark Jefferson (and seemed to enjoy it, given that she rewound five or six times just so she could do it again), exposed Sean Prescott's financial crimes, and got Nathan and David into treatment programs. The butterfly effect also prevented the death of Chloe's father William as a pleasant side effect. As a result, both Rachel Amber and Chloe Price lived, with Chloe, instead of a rebellious punk whose life was falling apart, becoming an A student and even a member of the Vortex Club for a time. As an adult, she went on to marry a Hollywood lawyer named Neil Sobeck and give birth to a daughter named Elisabet... whose work made Faro Automated Solutions into a MegaCorp and put it in a position where it could accidentally destroy the world. Oops.
  • Max regularly uses her powers to "correct" herself. Aloy is initially quite disturbed, but gets used to it.
  • On the Horizon Zero Dawn side, meanwhile, Aloy uses her foreknowledge to pull a Peggy Sue. First, she prevents Olin and HADES from learning about her, which led to the massacre at the Proving and Rost's death in the original timeline, by having Max lead him away to drink and gamble. Without the Proving massacre, she instead gets made Seeker after winning the Proving and requesting, as her boon, to go into All-Mother Mountain in order to meet her mother, where the scanner recognizes her as Elisabet Sobeck just as it did in the original timeline. Without Olin spotting her and reporting her back to HADES, Aloy gets the jump on the Eclipse, killing Helis at the Ring of Metal instead of much later at the Battle of Meridian.
• The Weaver Option begins with the galaxy being overrun by multiple enormous Tyranid fleets because its inhabitants were too busy and weakened fighting each other. Tzeentch orders its last sorcerers to carry out a ritual that will bring certain people from the faraway past into a closer past: the plan was to use them to ensure Chaos' victory in time to prepare for the Tyranids, but the interference of the last Ultramarine instead spreads the targets across the Imperium, allowing the latter to reap the reward.
• An omake for White Devil of the Moon had Chibi-usa (Or rather, a Nanohaesque version of Chibi-usa) travel back in time, believing she was doing this trope by making sure Nanoha never met Fate. Cue Vivio, who believes that by preventing Chibi-usa from doing that, she was doing this trope. Vivio won.

Descendants

• Rewrite the Past: The Core Four plus Dizzy and a comatose Ben go back in time. A "purity of heart" requirement is the explanation Mal gives as to why Maleficent never used the spell they use for the jump. They end up landing on the Isle in five-year-old bodies (one in Dizzy's case)... while Jane and Lonnie (who had died in the previous future) also come back in five-year-old bodies and land at Auradon Prep. Jane leads Lonnie and Dude (in puppy form, which the two encounter along the way) to her place as it was closest. The first adult to know about the time travel is Lumiere, who had been with the group when they performed the spell. Notably, because the Core Four (plus Dizzy) are already at Auradon (Ben had refused to leave the Isle without them), Ben only announces three villain kids in his first official proclamation; he had entered expecting his parents to react the same way they did in canon, and even singled out Gil as the one to get the reaction Mal did in canon due to his parents' personal history with Gaston.

Game of Thrones / A Song of Ice and Fire

• This is a fairly common Fandom-Specific Plot for ASOIAF fics, with the White Walkers succeeding in bringing the Long Night and destroying Westeros, and various characters being sent back through time through various means (the Old Gods, the Three Eyed Raven, etc) in order to try and avert this from happening.
• In the Peggy Sue fanfic Robb Returns, this is the Old Gods' purpose in sending Robb back in time.
• The Raven's Plan is another. The Night King and his forces have overwhelmed the living, so Bran and Melisandre carry out a highly risky magical ritual to send a group of core characters back in time in order to avert the War of the Five Kings and other conflicts which weakened Westeros before the Night King's assault. However, it ends up working too well, with the already unpredictable and unstable spell being supercharged by the blood of 3000 soldiers and causing way more people than expected or intended to remember what happened to them in their previous lives, throwing the whole plan off the rails.

Marvel Cinematic Universe

• Born of the Same Impulse: Stephen uses the Time Stone to send both himself and Tony on a Mental Time Travel to change history and save the universe from Thanos. They found themselves back in 2015, just as Tony and Bruce are set to create Ultron. Tony uses this opportunity to fix the mistakes he made during the events of Avengers: Age of Ultron all the way to Captain America: Civil War, first by rewriting Ultron's code and repurposing him into Vision, and by confronting Steve about his parents' death, thus preventing the breaking of the Avengers.
• In the Avengers: Infinity War fic Checkmate, after Thanos has left Titan with the Time Stone, Tony suggests that they use a device he created back on Earth that can project an individual's consciousness back in time to essentially possess their past self; with this plan proposed, Peter Parker is chosen to be the one sent back, projecting himself back to 2015 (shortly after the events of the Battle of Sokovia) to warn the Avengers of Thanos's ambitions.

Miraculous Ladybug

• Leave for Mendeleiev: "Race Against Time" features Timebreaker jumping back in time to try and prevent the destruction of her pocketwatch, while her timeline's iteration of Ladybug hitches a ride and warns her past/present self that Nadja is about to arrive to pick up her order early, and Marinette needs to be there. This also has the unintentional (but highly fortunate) side-effect of throwing Adrien off Marinette's scent: he suspected she might be Ladybug, but seeing them together causes him to assume otherwise.
• Spellbound (Lilafly): Félix eventually learns that his father wants to use the Wish to undo the creation of the fae (which also involved a Wish). It's implied that this would result in restoring the canon timeline.

My Little Pony

• My Choices: Twisted Tales Through Time: After Twilight accidentally strand herself a thousand years and change in the past, she decides to use the opportunity to prevent princess Luna's transformation into Nightmare Moon. The chapters set in the present show that she was successful at this, as Luna continues to rule peacefully alongside Celestia.
• Pony POV Series:
  • Recursive Fanfiction Fading Futures has Twilight Tragedy manage to break free of Discord's control in the Epilogue timeline and seek to change the past so that Discord never won in the first place. She manages to do so, but as a result, the timeline she inhabits no longer exists and everything in it are "reborn" into their main timeline counterparts. Realizing this, she invokes her Superpowered Evil Side, Nightmare Purgatory, to take her revenge on Discord before the "rebirth" is complete. She realizes at the last moment she's dangerously close to becoming She Who Fights Monsters and manages to stop herself from finishing the job, preferring to fade away as Twilight Sparkle instead of becoming a monster, even if no one, not even her, will ever know.
  • The write eventually did another story were the Twilight from the final loop subtly alters things to create a universe were Eclipse never existed at all and Discord was defeated straight up.
  • Later in actual canon, its revealed Twilight failed because a previous Twilight didn't have a Heel Realization and became Nightmare Paradox, and undid the Set Right What Once Went Wrong to keep punishing Discord.
  • It's revealed that this is the goal of the Anti-Hooviet Rebels that Shining Armor meets in his arc. 25 years ago, the Shadow of Chernobull, a reality bending imagination monster was released from Pandora's Box by the Hooviets. After devouring countless existences and imaginations, it becomes General Admiral Makarov, the Big Bad of Shining's arc, who prevented the Hooviet Empire from collapsing when it was supposed to and ultimately attempting to warp the world to his own ends. The goal of the Rebels (and Shining Armor) is to lure the Wolf to Makarov so it can erase him from existence and return everything to how it would have been had he not escaped. Shining ultimately successes in doing so, waking up in a world where the Hooviet Empire no longer exists and everything is more peaceful and good.
  • This turns out to be Amicitia's entire purpose as Spirit of Happy Endings. She travels to various Grim Dark worlds and interferes to nudge an event in the right direction to do this trope. This includes the various timelines that Nightmare Eclipse brought ruin to.
  • The main universe is this: Amicitia sacrificed herself to create Shining Armor, making a divergent timeline where Discord was beaten on the Day of Discord.
  • Discord and company's endgame involves Rewriting Reality to alter the world into having always been a chaotic hellhole. The CMC manage to ultimately restore everything, and Apple Bloom gets to alter history however she sees fit while repairing the damage, and takes the opportunity to alter history to change things for the better. This includes giving the Tales 7 an overall happier end, with Starlight's death now being a Heroic Sacrifice to save thousands of lives and Sweetheart gaining Healing Hands from the Fantastic Nuke that destroyed their civilization, letting her save her sister from a grisly demise.
• Too Far: Diamond Tiara accepts a deal with Discord to get a do over and avoid causing Dinky to be Driven to Suicide by her bullying (which finally caused Diamond to realize her actions have consequences).
• Twilight Then, Twilight Now Universe fanfic The Magnificent Six: This is the villain's big plot, and it is used to divide the new Elements of Harmony: Applejack, being the original Element of Honesty, is swayed to join the villain and stop the Götterdämmerung that resulted in the current present. The other five, being native born to the present, find this insulting and horrifying and fight her to stop her going through with it. Grey-and-Gray Morality is invoked because, as much as it's only natural the mortal elements would want to preserve their own existence, Applejack has an unquestionable point that the present is a nightmare compared to the Equestria when she was born, and so one has to wonder if undoing the Bad Future (from Applejack's perspective) is really so wrong.
• Would It Be Worth It: During the Season 5 finale, Twilight decides to go back even further than Starlight did to stop Our Town from ever existing and thus negate her entire reason for her revenge plot. Ultimately averted, as her own future self does this trope to warn her that doing so would end no different than Starlight's plans and bring about a Bad Future even worse than the ones Starlight made. Said future is never shown, but it's implied that her Spike ended up not making it back and that Starlight or Twilight herself is the villain the alteration would let take over.

Naruto

• lie in reverse: Like in canon, teen Sasuke is out of his mind over his grief for Itachi. So, when his younger self summons him to the past, teen Sasuke will do anything to ensure his brother's survival and avenge him, i.e., raze Konoha to the ground and eliminate the corrupt politicians who forced him to kill the Uchiha Clan. He mostly succeeds — he kills Danzo and, by threatening the Third Hokage (who still dies in the Suna/Oto Invasion), he gets Itachi to be reinstated and the other councilors to be demoted. Furthermore, Sasuke's younger self is never marked by Orochimaru nor he abandons the village. Unwittingly, teen Sasuke's actions also impact positively preteen Sasuke, mostly because the latter realizes how rude, cruel, obsessed, and overall unhappy he will become. This results in him appreciating his team and slowly but surely healing from his trauma.

Neon Genesis Evangelion

• A Crown of Stars: Daniel travels back and forward in time bringing Shinji and Asuka along with him to fix the mistakes of the past.
• Doing It Right This Time: As usual in Evangelion Peggy Sue stories, one of the primary goals of Shinji, Asuka and Rei is averting The End of the World as We Know It. Another goal is fixing the unholy mess that was their relationship and learning to get along better with each other (which will lead to unexpected results known as the "Israfel Special").
• Going Another Way, features this through Rei Ayanami, horrified at what the Third Impact truly wrought, going back in time to change a few things around in order to prevent the disaster. The biggest change she made was influencing Gendo Ikari's thoughts subtly enough to make him leave Shinji in the care of Yui's brother so as to ensure Shinji would be less of an emotional wreck. Everyone gets occasional flashes to their previous lives in dreams meanwhile.
• Once More With Feeling (Crazy-88): Lilith misunderstands Shinji when he says he wants to go back, and she sends him back in time. Shinji gets shocked but he decides that he will use that chance nevertheless to atone for everything that he did and did not]. He is so determined to win the Angel War, protect his surrogate family and make amends that his behaviour gets Misato puzzled, since she does not understand why he goes out of his way to help everyone and make them happy (and he cannot tell her he feels guilty for leaving her, Asuka and Rei dying and obliterating the whole humankind).
• Subverted in RE-TAKE. Shinji of End of Evangelion wakes up in the past, just after the battle with Leliel. He tries to set right everything that went wrong to prevent the End of Evangelion. It turns out he's only making life better for an alternate version of himself, and there's nothing he can do to change that. He eventually accepts it, and returns to the Crapsack World future he belongs to. Though there is an implication of a Happy Ending for him, so it's all good.
• The Second Try: After surviving on their own in the post-TI world Shinji and Asuka wake up one day and find they have traveled back in time. Shinji quickly thinks of looking for some way to prevent the end of the world, but Asuka was too depressed to try at the beginning, and he needed to convince her.
• Thousand Shinji: When the Necrons had all but conquered the galaxy, the Warhammer 40000 gods decided that the only way to fight them was travelling to the far past and rewriting history.

Pokémon

• Pokémon Reset Bloodlines: Cyrus succeeds in learning how to manipulate reality and destroys the entire universe, erasing everything and everyone from existence. Arceus manages to save Ash before he disappears too, sending him back to the past with his memories intact so he can prevent it from happening. However, the timeline is rewritten in the process, and many things end up changing, creating an entirely different universe.

Rurouni Kenshin

• Out of Time: Subverted when a time traveling Kenshin considers trying to save Tomoe, but discards it when he considers how the timeline could be screwed up (and then finds out he's arrived at too late a time to change it anyway). Also subverted by Saito, who not only doesn't try to change the status quo despite the opportunity and motive, but risks his life attempting to keep it instead.

RWBY

• Relic Of The Future: The setup of the fic is that after the heroes deal a mortal blow to Salem which costs the lives of everyone except Jaune and leaves a war-torn Remnant in ruins, Jaune makes a deal with Salem before the latter fully expires. She uses the Relics' combined magic to send Jaune over a decade back in time, thereby giving Jaune a chance to fix things for the better and achieve a much less pyrrhic victory... and giving Salem's past self a new chance to survive and win should Jaune fail with all the timeline alterations his presence causes.

Star Wars

• Back From the Future : Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader (accidentally!) travel back in time to Clone Wars The Clone Wars era , to stop Palpatine's /Darth Sidious' rise to power, Order 66, destruction of Jedi Order and Republic, Padmé Amidala's Death and Anakin Skywalker's younger alt-version of Darth Vader fall to The Dark Side.

Stargate

• The Stargate SG-1 fic "Ending Before We Begin" features another of Ba'al's clones attempting a variation of the original's plan in Stargate: Continuum; rather than go back a few decades and deprive Earth of the Stargate, he instead only goes back a decade in time. As part of his plan to take power, he makes one very positive change that is ultimately for his own benefit; using his future knowledge, Ba'al retrieves the corpse of Charlie O'Neill after his accidental death (leaving a dead clone in Charlie's place), and brings him back to life in a sarcophagus, intending to use Charlie as a hostage to force Jack O'Neill to obey him.
• In the Stargate Atlantis fic "The Second Failsafe", after meeting the time-displaced Elizabeth Weir, Janus became aware that in the new timeline created by her actions, Atlantis would survive but Doctor Weir would be killed by the Asurans. In order to prevent this, he travelled into the past and impregnated a teenage Elizabeth in the hope that their daughter would be able to change things for the better, Ultimately Everleigh Weiland (Elizabeth's father had the girl given up for adoption but she was assigned to Atlantis by the NID) is able to stop Michael becoming a threat and insert a kill-code into the Asurans, but at the cost that she ultimately sacrifices herself to save Atlantis, although Janus is able to help Everleigh Ascend.

Worm

• This is the premise of Recoil. A certain battle has Gone Horribly Wrong and Taylor is sent back in time to try and do better.

Unsorted

• In the Warhammer 40,000 Fanfic/Roleplay by post story Abaddon Quest, there's a rather amusing Inversion, the eponymous Chaos Lord and his flunkies travel back in time to kill the God-Emperor as a baby, which is to say they travel back to Make Wrong What Once Went Right. Considering /tg/'s opinion of Abaddon, Failure Is the Only Option. As is Hilarity.
• In the Animorphs fic Animorphs 55: The End, after the deaths of the other Animorphs, Cassie (on the not-advice of the Ellimist) retrieves the Time Matrix and essentially blackmails the Ellimist and Crayak to reset the timeline to change the outcome of the final battle with the Yeerks. As a result, Rachel is saved, Ax directly kills Visser One after the Yeerk tries to escape by leaving Alloran, and Tobias retains his ability to morph even after he gets 'stuck' in human form, but Jake's parents are killed when their Yeerks refuse to surrender.
• Happens a lot in Buffy the Vampire Slayer fics. The time traveler is usually either Buffy, Spike or Angel. Rare cases in include Dawn (like in this fic Breaking Novikov) and Xander (like in this fic Seeds of Time). Almost all time travel fics happen in order to change the events of the past (mainly Buffy's second death, thus erasing seasons 6 & 7) and most likely than not, getting a certain pairing together (especially Spuffy).
  • A particularly distinctive example of this occurs in the Angel fic Impact, when Cordelia, through sheer chance, is sent back from just before Darla gives birth ("Offspring") to just before Doyle’s death ("Hero"). She immediately seizes on the opportunity to undo Doyle's death, and even leaves notes for her past self so that Angel Investigations can avoid the worst of the challenges they’ll face in the future once she returns home.
• In the Changing tides series, Laurel brings her past self, Diggle, Tommy, Roy, and Thea 16 years into the future. She then shows them the first two years of Oliver's exile, the first two years of his return (both are shown as videos made by downloading memories), and finally tells them details that happened after and as a result of the events of those early years. This is done in the hope that this knowledge will allow them to prevent the worst of the tragedies that await them. The third installment, deals with them having been sent back to their original time and starting to attempt to do exactly that.
• The Element of Time: After things epically head south in the final battle against the Juubi, Naruto is given the chance to travel back in time and fix everything by a powerful interdimensional warrior named Felix Yoshoryuu. With help from this warrior, plus multiple allies that later join the cause, he sets off to save as many people and foil as much evil as he can in his newly granted second chance. But unfortunately, with this time travel having inspired a powerful threat from the same interdimensional world as Felix to attempt his own devastating plans for the ninja world, it soon becomes clear that this new timeline will come with just as many dangers (if not more) as there were before.
• In HetaOni, Italy has been rewinding time again and again so that everyone can get out of the Haunted House alive.
• A very common goal of certain loopers in The Infinite Loops is to prevent something that went wrong in baseline.
• In the Smallville fic New Beginnings (Smallville), when Clark uses the Legion Ring to reset time to stop Linda Lake, Lois steps in and causes them both to be sent back to the time of the pilot episode (although Lois goes into a coma and initially assumes it was all a dream before she is sent to Smallville and meets Clark directly). With his new advance knowledge, Clark is able to easily defeat many of his early opponents and assemble the Fortress of Solitude ahead of schedule, as well as gather the Justice League into an official team a year or so in advance (as well as save Kyla, Alicia, Tim and Wes to become heroes themselves).
• Rosario Vampire: Brightest Darkness: During the climax of Act III, Tsukune and his group all launch an attack on Kiria's facility to prevent him from using the Chrono Displacement spell to remake history in his own image. Everything that can go wrong does go wrong, and everyone is killed in the ascent except Tsukune, who is himself mortally wounded by Kiria before Kiria himself is killed by Luna. Luna, having gone insane with grief as a result of Rason's death, is fully prepared to allow the world to be destroyed by the spell, which Kiria has succeeded in casting, but Tsukune manages to persuade her to instead change the date of the spell to one day in the past so he can go back and save everyone. With his knowledge of the future, Tsukune is able to ensure that everyone survives the attack.
• New Girl (mortimermcmirestinks): The purpose of the ETC Lab experiments that created the new timeline was to prevent the hundreds of deaths brought on by the Hiss invasion. When Emily, Arish and Langston regroup and confirm the situation — that they are living in a wildly different timeline — they question if they should undo the newer timeline, Langston admitting that the canon timeline wasn't exactly pleasant.
• Wesley's Mulligan: A misplaced time travel spell sends Wesley back in time from season five of Angel to season 3 of the original show, when he was a vastly different person. He uses his knowledge of the past and improved strategy, fighting skills, and ruthless pragmatism to Set Right What Once Went Wrong, both in small ways like stopping some minor villains a little earlier and in big ways like trying to save Fred from Pylea early and keep Faith from ever losing her way.

Episode or Character Plots

• Hero Chat:
  • Played for laughs with time-traveling hero Bunnyx. When things get really bad, she can go back in time and fix them. That means that when someone has a stupid idea and Bunnyx does nothing, they treat it as a sign that they're in the clear.
    Bunnyx: If I don't come back in time to stop you, how bad an idea can it really be?
  • Played more seriously in one short, where Chloe is having a really bad day, and then she notices that Alix has the tell-tale signs of having time-traveled. Alix admits that Chloe got Akumatized, so Alix immediately jumped back in time to stop it—akumatized heroes are horrifying to deal with, so it was better to prevent it altogether. Alix promises Chloe that this was the first time she was akumatized in this timeline, after her redemption.
• In A Magical Evening while it didn't exactly go wrong as the first timeline didn’t end badly. It did end with both couples being outed and Hildegard and Clio’s parents dying in an accident. Sofia, using her amulet, goes back to when she was a child to get a second chance in a new timeline to create a better outcome. She does this by stopping Cedric before Wormwood can discover Sofia and Lucinda’s relationship and also prevents him from discovering Hildehard and Clio’s and telling the council. Due to this, neither of them are outed and instead end up in a Marriage of Convenience with only certain people knowing. Sofia also prevents Hildegard and Clio’s parents from dying in the accident.
• There Was Once an Avenger From Krypton: As we learn in Chapter 34 of The Girl Who Could Knock Out the Hulk, Doom and original Reed's goal is to defeat Thanos with minimal damage to Earth and humanity. When time travel failed, they started to explore the Multiverse and came up with their plan to get the Celestials to Cosmic Retcon the universe to add the various crossover elements in order to make the world stronger.

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