A time travel trope that has real-life examples?: For Want Of A Nail

Brought up in the IP thread here. What we seem to have is two tropes for the price of one. The official description is that someone goes into the past, does some seemingly inconsequential thing, and when they get back, the timeline has been massively altered. However, the laconic version makes no mention of the timeline aspect, and the real-life examples are all something else entirely.

....Whoa.

The real life section is a mixture of (I don't know if we have tropes for all of these) Domino Catastrophe, War Is Unfair, War Is Won By One Side and Accidents Are Accidents.

You beat me in opening a TRS discussion. I am making a wick check right now.

correct (time travel or alternate universe)

• Historical In-Joke
• Harry Turtledove
• Fringe
• Forgotten Fallen Friend
• Western Animation/Freakazoid
• Frequency
• Comicbook/Exiles
• ef - a fairy tale of the two.
• Dude, Where's My Reward?
• Dragon Ball
• Black Hole High
• How Few Remain
• I Domination
• I Knew It!
• Discworld/Jingo
• Lois And Clark
• One More Day
• Red Pill, Blue Pill
• To Say Nothing Of The Dog
• Trail Of Glory
• After the End
• Blackout
• Chrono Trigger
• Decades Of Darkness
• Daydream Surprise
• Halo Combat Evolved
• Johnny Maxwell Trilogy
• Nature Versus Nurture
• Rozen Maiden
• The Nail
• Characters/Tsukihime
• Run Lola Run
• Yamato Nadeshiko
• Red Alert 3 Paradox
• Journeyman

Wrong

• Adolf Hitler
• Codex Alera
• Ironic Name
• Shadow Archetype
• Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated
• Zero Punctuation
• The Gallagher Girls
• The French Revolution
• Muv-Luv
• Legend of Galactic Heroes
• I Heart Huckabees
• Blood+
• Black Vikings
• Forgot to Feed the Monster
• Kamen Rider Double

edited 15th Feb '12 11:07:19 AM by Osmium

Just to make one thing clear: This isn't only a time travel trope. This can be an Alternate History story in which there is no time travel involved, but the writer instead extrapolates what might have happened if a seemingly minor event in the past happened different.

An Alternate Timeline or Elseworld (often in time travel stories) in which one small change has a ripple effect, resulting in massive changes. The technical term (from one of the seminal papers on chaos theory) is "sensitive dependence on initial conditions", but it's better known colloquially as "the butterfly effect". It's a Wonderful Plot is a subtrope where the protagonist is the nail. Butterfly of Doom is a subtrope where no good deed goes unpunished. The Unwitting Instigator of Doom is the character who steps on the butterfly/distracts the hero at the wrong moment/innocently reveals the Big Secret and will be hated for it.

... [sniping poem]

A Deal with the Devil will often have the "nail" as a price, something of seemingly small consequence, that is in fact huge.

A Sub-Trope of What If?, and often a Sub-Trope of Make Wrong What Once Went Right. A Super-Trope of Close-Enough Timeline.

Compare All the Myriad Ways.

Often overlaps with In Spite of a Nail, because many stories wouldn't be that interesting if everything was different.

BTW, that page is using The Scrappy wrong, and I think it means Alternate History instead of Alternate Timeline, because Alternate Timeline is about having more than one continuity for a franchise.

edited 15th Feb '12 12:45:27 PM by Catbert

Well the actual term doesn't actually have to do with time travel, so of course the trope would get misuse. It's about how the smallest overlooked thing can cause major problems (a lot of space program disasters are testament to that).