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Butterfly of Doom
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Want to go back in time to stop your parents from losing their retirement money in the Dotcom crash? Save a loved one from a fatal accident? Nudge a closet a little to the left to avoid hitting your toe? In some universes, you're not just going to run into You Can't Fight Fate, but into Finagle's Law on a grand scale: the Butterfly of Doom. Any and every change made in the past will always have an unintended and horrible side effect, no matter how unlikely. By simply throwing a stone at a tree in the Cretaceous period, once you arrive back at the present, you could find that civilization is now dominated by anthropomorphic frogs, the Confederacy won the civil war, electricity and modern medicine were never discovered, Pangaea never broke apart, or ketchup’s primary ingredient is now blueberries. Much like a temporal Monkey's Paw, you might succeed at changing the thing you intended, but at a terrible cost. Telling your parents to move their money elsewhere gets them arrested for insider trading; the loved one you saved develops a wasting terminal cancer; the closet you moved is now on a weak floorboard and crashes through it, destroying your house. To repair the damage, it's usually necessary to travel in time again to Set Right What Once Went Wrong — more specifically, to set right what you made go wrong. A Fantastic Aesop and a Sour Grapes trope, the Butterfly of Doom is intended to drive home that any attempt to change history will be met with the wrath of Fate itself, and you'll never end up better off. It can overlap with It's a Wonderful Plot, in which the butterfly is you. Godwin's Law of Time Travel is a Sub-Trope in which the thing that you change leads to Hitler winning World War II. This is one of the techniques that writers use to ensure that Time Travel doesn't interfere with Status Quo Is God. Others are that Time Travel creates Alternate Universes, that creating a Temporal Paradox obliterates reality or unleashes the Clock Roaches to eat offenders, and that Time is resilient and can absorb changes without breaking. See also Finagle's Law, Hitler's Time Travel Exemption Act, Schrödinger's Butterfly, Rube Goldberg Device, Rube Goldberg Hates Your Guts, Necro Non Sequitur, Non Sequitur Causality and Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory. Contrast Save This Person, Save the World and Merged Reality. Unrelated to Butterfly of Transformation or its subtropes. Not to Be Confused with another common trope resulting from the Butterfly Effect, Disaster Dominoes, where a small accident or event sets off a whole chain of increasingly destructive events. Also not to be confused with Moth Menace, which is about a literal lepidopteran causing harm. For the trope where a butterfly symbolizes one's death or resurrection, see Butterfly of Death and Rebirth. |
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In the third book of The Pendragon Adventure, The Never War, the characters at first think that to make the turning point go correctly, they must stop the destruction of the Hindenburg. However, they ask the Traveler from Third Earth (the far future) to analyze what would happen if they did it. It turns out that the world would be destroyed if they went through with it. After a rather huge misunderstanding because one character didn't get that last bit of info, they manage to let time go on its proper course. And then, in the later books, Mark brings incredibly advanced technology into the past, jump-starting the computer industry and advancing technology's development. Of course, also thanks to Mark, we also get the future dystopia seen in Raven Rise because of a stupid decision he made in 1939. |
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Pratchett plays with theories of time travel/the Butterfly Effect a lot. A good example is Night Watch, where despite the fact that when John Keel, an important figure in the storyline, is killed because Vimes turns up 30 years in the past, Vimes ends up taking his place more-or-less seamlessly. Lu-Tze, the history monk, muses on the nature of time: and later... |
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Hours 'Verse: In Hamuko's timeline, the Investigation Team was killed in the fight with Adachi. With no one to stop Izanami, she causes enough despair to cause Erebus to break the Great Seal, allowing Nyx to bring about the Fall. Later while talking about the various Alternate Timelines, Philemon implies the divergence was even earlier: Hamuko not reaching out to and acting as mentor for her version of Yu like her brother did with his caused the two timelines to drift from each other far enough that Chronos couldn't or wouldn't sustain the different versions. | |
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Terminator: Invoked in the series — in that it is the machines' plan to alter their present by meddling with the past. Yet curiously averted in that they kill a whole bunch of people other than Sarah or John seemingly without affecting anything. Terminator Genisys brings this even further even by establishing the "crushed butterfly" that creates an Alternate Timeline: once John Connor undergoes an Unwilling Roboticisation in the future, the history up to that point is altered. |
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Played straight in Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones where the events of Warrior Within have undone the events of Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time meaning the Vizier from Sands of Time is still alive and still searching for the eponymous sands, sacking Babylon in the process. | |
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The Worm fic Security! (Worm) subverts this trope, as the SI uses Contessa's power (Path to Victory) to ensure that any changes he makes to the timeline due to his mucking about with his future knowledge don't cause any major unintended side effects. Until Scion decides that Michael and Taylor are too dangerous, and attacks the world before anyone was properly ready. | |
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All-Star Squadron: The robot Mekanique is sent back from the future by the evil scientist Rotwang to prevent a car accident that will kill a small girl and a naval officer. Somehow, this change will prevent the rise of the rebel leader Maria in Rotwang's future who leads a slave rebellion that threatens to overthrow the ruling elite. | |
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Marvel Comics' 2013 event Age of Ultron features an alternate universe in which the sentient robot Ultron has annihilated mankind and taken control of the entire planet. Wolverine goes back in time in order to kill Ultron's creator, Hank Pym, only to discover that in the new timeline, the murder of Hank Pym caused the Avengers to disband, which in turn caused Asgard to lose the Asgardian/Latverian War, resulting in a present where the sorceress Morgan le Fay conquered most of Earth, and Iron Man leads a resistance of broken heroes trying to keep New York from falling into her hands. | |
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Used Star Trek Online. During the "Ghosts" Featured Episode, your character and his team must go back in time to Drozana Station of the 23rd to stop the Devidians from causing havoc with the time stream. One of your crew members will make sure you invoke the Temporal Prime Directive, meaning you can't go around and muck with the time stream all willy-nilly. The first time you go back in time, you don't have much of a choice to muck with the time stream when you end up encounter Dr. McCoy - saving lives from the Devidians takes priority over everything else and you help pioneer a way to counteract the Devidians' absorptions. The second time, after you destroy a comet the Devidians were using to perform their time travel shenanigans, the Black Ops group you're aiding says they'll make sure everything you've done is kept off the books. It's done again in the finale of the Federation's "Klingon War" storyline. You chase Ambassador B'Vat through the Guardian of Forever and learn that his arrival had changed history with the original Enterprise destroyed. You arrived just in time to stop that and you go on to rescue Miral Paris. The Iconian War storyline mission "Butterfly" deals with this trope. In order to either stop the Iconian War or delay it, the Delta Alliance works with the Krenim to use Annorax's time ship to try and alter history. They do run some tests to figure out which is the best, which they determine is preventing the USS Yamato from finding Iconia in the first place, which is only the best because Romulus was restored, even though the Romulan Star Empire was still in power. When they put it into action, it turns out that, oops, Romulus is now fully assimilated by the Borg and aiming for the rest of the Beta Quadrant. You're forced to create a Close-Enough Timeline to prevent this from sticking. |
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In Zero Time Dilemma, Zero loves to tell stories revolving around this trope, all leading to an aesop of "life is simply unfair." This turns out to be his central life philosophy and motivation behind his actions. The whole timeline is set in motion because of a single snail on a trail that caused a jogging woman to take a different route. For that, Eric's mother died, Akane's dad was wrongly convicted and her mother committed suicide, leading to the events of 999, and Sean lost his life when his surgeon died in a car accident. All of this led to Brother having to deal with the grief of losing his friend, and set up the events of both VLR and this game. Because of this, Brother hates SHIFTers, and considers the fact that they can jump to alternate timelines where life is better for them to be unfair. | |
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Venom (2021): Discussed in issue #25 ("Butterfly Collectors") by Doctor Doom, who knows whereof he speaks when it comes to time travel. Normally in the Marvel universe, time travel just results in creating an alternate reality, but Doom has a time machine that can ignore those rules. But even he is careful to avoid the metaphorical butterflies, such as killing a past version of himself for being an annoyance (and wiping his memory so he doesn't become hell-bent on trying to kill his future self). Eddie, meanwhile, lands in the 1940s and grabs the nearest symbiote... only to learn after doing so he's changed the outcome of World War 2, which gives him a Freak Out. | |
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Also subverted in Onimusha 3: Demon Siege. Samanoske is stuck in present day and can therefore not affect events in the timeline, but Jaques in ancient Japan can and has to due to the Genma mucking around with time travel and causing the current mess in the first place. The two end up being time janitors, in a way. | |
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Sonic the Hedgehog (Archie Comics) did this for the "Mobius: 25 Years Later" storyline - King Sonic goes back in time to fix what was tearing Mobius apart, but accidentally creates a timeline where he accidentally pushes himself out of history and allows Shadow to be the world's savior. Shadow ends up being a cruel ruler, leading to Sonic, Tails, Knuckles and Knuckles' daughter Lara-Su to overthrow Shadow and set things right. | |
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Continuum averts this in a weird way. Time travelers come in two factions; Narcissists who want to use time travel to change history, and the Continuum which wants to keep things just as they are. The war between the two has a known ending; the Continuum wins. The Continuum must win, because if the Narcissists keep changing the past, existence vanishes in a Puff of Logic. All existence. Thus, for the good of everyone ever born, there are no butterlies of doom. Not "the Continuum must stop them or existence will blink out." Rather, the butterflies at no point in the time stream happen, and this is known because existence still exists. That doesn't mean Narcissists won't try to change things (they believe existence can change) or that things happened the way you think they did. If a Narcissist has a plan to insert a butterfly of doom, it fails. Of course, since you might not know what that plan is, you don't know exactly how history unfolded. For example, if a Narcissist tries to go back in time to stop Lincoln's assassination, it's entirely possible the narcissist killed John Wilkes Boothe - and a member of the Continuum replaced him. The Continuum operates by Blue-and-Orange Morality; since everyone, everywhere, at all times winks out if the timeline is damaged, ensuring even the most horrible events in history play out as recorded is paramount. Put another way, the Continuum would defend Pol Pot because letting Pol Pot be stopped - contradictory to the historical record - causes all existence to stop, ending countless lives. |
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Reboot (Miraculous Ladybug): Somehow, Marinette's alterations to the timeline have led to Adrien not escaping to their school like in the original timeline, instead being sent to a boarding school across town. | |
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In Rebirth, Noah somehow travels back in time to the early days of the zombie apocalypse to correct his mistakes. Much of the conflict is him desperately trying to change things without triggering this effect. | |
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Ultimate FF: Miles Morhames, the Ultimate Spider-Ham, says that there is one thing that sets which universes live and which ones die: In those that live, Reed and Sue had a child. | |
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Angel. In "Birthday" the demon Skip shows Cordelia (with the help of Monday Night Football replay and onscreen graphics) how her life could have been different if she'd just moved in one direction as opposed to the other during a party in the series premiere and met a Hollywood talent agent instead of the series protagonist, becoming the famous star of a comedy television series instead of a Fainting Seer whose visions are killing her. The downside being, Angel is now the Fainting Seer, effectively an insane, depressed wreck owing to his loneliness and the visions. Horrified by the state of her best friend/Love Interest, Cordelia demands that Skip take her back to her proper timeline. | |
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Runaways: Mentioned, though not actually applicable, in the time-travel arc: | |
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In Blind Chance Witek is trying to catch a train. Depending on him making it or not (and failing or not a spot check), his entire life is going to go in completely different direction. But it's not the train itself that is the catalyst. The events in the train station are just the aftermath of a much more important event. After his father's death, Witek asks the dean for a few days to think things over. The rest of the story, including catching (or not) the fated train, follows from the choice that he made during this quiet downtime. | |
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Invoked in the 2014 Cosmos series. Neil deGrasse Tyson uses three butterflies in a cloud of white moths to represent the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere because the variations needed to radically change the climate are so mathematically small—no butterflies, and the Earth freezes, three more butterflies and it heats up. He also mentions the "butterfly effect" of chaos theory (tiny changes in starting conditions lead to entirely different results) when explaining the difference between weather (chaotic) and climate (not). | |
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This is parodied in Reds!: A Revolutionary Timeline, where the alternate history version of the Alternate History Forum appears, and the members discuss the alternate timeline... and the exact same kinds of arguments crop up. | |
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In the Simpsons Treehouse of Horror segment "Time and Punishment", a malfunctioning toaster transports Homer to the prehistoric past. He remembers some advice Grandpa gave him regarding this very trope, then instantly forgets it to squash a bug. When he returns to the present, Ned Flanders has taken over the world and turned it into a cheerful dystopia where Happiness Is Mandatory. His attempts to fix the timeline cause alternate futures that range from even worse to just plain weird. When one of his sneezes causes all of the dinosaurs to drop dead, he moans, "This is gonna cost me." note Ironically enough, this results in a future that seems perfect for him: his sisters-in-laws are dead, his family is rich, the children are polite... but then he learns that donuts apparently don't exist in this timeline when he uses the word and nobody knows what he's talking about. He disappears into the past to try again, before we see that it rains donuts in this future. Homer eventually snaps and just starts whacking everything with a baseball bat, creating a future that's actually pretty near normal, except everyone has weird, elongated, lizard-like tongues. | |
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Fringe: In a roundabout way, the show reveals in bits and pieces that the entire plot of the series and the fate of multiple universes all pivoted on a single inadvertent action by a time traveler: an Observer's presence distracting the red universe's Walter Bishop from discovering a cure for his son Peter's illness. This minuscule action caused Walter's blue universe counterpart to bridge their two universes to save Peter, and then kidnap him to be a Replacement Goldfish for his own Peter. This dimensional mess destabilized the physical laws of both universes and jeopardized the timeline that would spawn the time-travelers in the first place, forcing them to take a direct role in correcting the original mistake. | |
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The season 2 finale of The Orville sees history radically changed for the worse as a result of Kelly's decision in the previous episode. Past!Kelly, having seen her own future and undergone a failed memory wipe, decides not to go on a second date with Ed. As a result, she and Ed never joined the Orville. Without them, neither did Gordon or Claire. The Kaylon have taken over the galaxy in this new timeline in which Kelly and Gordon never got word to the Krill and Isaac never bonded with Claire and her sons, meaning he never developed the sense of kinship with biological lifeforms that prompted him to turn against his own race. | |
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Heroes: A big part of the show, with time travel (mainly by Hiro Nakamura, and later Peter Petrelli) and precognition being used to fix, worsen, and then repair the future many times. Featured most prominently in the episode, "The Butterfly Effect", where Future Peter screws up the past so badly, that he leaves things for Present Peter to fix since he had "stepped on too many butterflies." Possibly subverted, or at least morphed into You Can't Fight Fate, during Volume 4 where all of the things that happened in the "averted" future are happening anyway (Sylar can heal and shapeshift, Nathan has turned on the mutants, Sylar-As-Nathan is gunning for president, etc.. Heavily subverted with Charlie. Through Hiro's intervention, she is saved from her brain tumor and Sylar's murder-spree. But she is kidnapped and stranded in the 1940's in order to manipulate Hiro. Before she went, she was an insatiable reader and had the super-power of 100% perfect memory - someone with enormous potential to alter history for good or evil. Yet she does...nothing, instead choosing to work a factory job and settle down. |
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Loki: Agent of Asgard inverted the trope as the villain (King!Loki) was doing the time travelling (they tried to cause their own creation earlier) and not only did this make the world a better place (no Angel/Asgardian war, made Odin actually admit that he loves his children etc.), but messed up the timeline so much that they'll never exist. What can you say, one day you eat a man-sized otter as part of a ploy to get a sword made and the next thing you know a woman who ate the ring you stole when she was a baby is asking whether you are cos-playing as yourself. |
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The majority of the first Back to the Future movie is Marty trying to reverse the effect of his having saved his father from being hit by a car. | |
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Harry Potter and the Cursed Child; After Albus and Scorpio use a Time Turner to save Cedric's life by making him lose the first task of the Triwizard Tournament, he feels so humiliated that he joins the Death Eaters and kills Neville. As a consequence of this, Nagini never died, and Harry could never kill Voldemort, leading to a Bad Future where Voldemort ruled Britain. | |
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In the second loop of Drainus, Irina goes back in time to redo the events of the game but try to save Layla from a Heroic Sacrifice this time, but notices that the enemy forces have gotten stronger. Gehnie expalins that this is the result of "the Chaos", in which even slight differences from the original timeline, like Irina deviating from her words to Layla in the first loop, can have a drastic effect on the new timeline. As it turns out, this is all a subversion. The Big Bad, Governor-General Izumo, had also gone back in time; with his knowledge of the future, he's able to make better tactical decisions. | |
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Invoked in one episode of Darkwing Duck where Darkwing and Gosalyn accidentally travel back to when Darkwing was a kid. Gosalyn tells Darkwing not to interfere in the past, so Darkwing leaves rather than stop the King, an Elvis-themed villain with a shock-wave guitar, from committing a robbery. Then it gets inverted where not interfering in the past is what causes the present to change, creating a world where the King rules the city. Thus, Darkwing and Gosalyn have to go back to the past in a rare occurrence where Set Right What Once Went Wrong meets You Already Changed the Past (with a dash of Stable Time Loop as Darkwing inspired his younger self to become a hero). | |
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The Community episode "Remedial Chaos Theory" is all about this. It's decided that a roll of the dice will dictate who has to leave and pick up a pizza, so the one rolling the dice will be creating six different universes, all based around what the characters would or (or in some cases, wouldn't) be doing in the two or three minutes that the pizza is getting picked up. All outcomes except for one involve the group somehow creating a conflict in these few minutes. In the real (best) outcome, Abed stops the dice from falling, Jeff goes to get the pizza, and the group gets along fine while he's gone. In the "Dark" outcome where Troy leaves to pick up the pizza, Pierce dies, Annie goes insane and Shirley becomes an alcoholic because of Pierce's death, Jeff loses an arm, and Troy loses his larynx. Abed acknowledges that it's the darkest timeline, and makes everyone felt goatees so they can all be "evil" versions of themselves. | |
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There is a variation of this in Seven Days. It's stated that simply backstepping (going back in time one week) already changes the timeline because the Sphere materializes and changes air currents, causing airplanes to land a bit sooner/later and the like. Of course, it was never explained further than that. | |
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Time Squad: Planet of the Flies, a parody of Planet of the Apes. Tudrussel squashes a fly in the Stone Age, altering history so that the world is ruled by giant flies. Complete with a ruined Statue of Liberty scene. "You maniacs! You blew it all up!" | |
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Project Almanac has David and his friends using time travel to enjoy themselves in the past, but once David decides to use it to instead fix things, the results are awful: first, a blackout caused by the time machine broke the leg of the school's basketball star, taking them out of the playoffs, and thus causing a plane crash because the guy's pilot father would've otherwise attended that game; an attempt to fix that makes David's best friend be ran over by a car; and trying to prevent that accidentally brings along David's crush, who ends up erased from history. | |
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In Xiaolin Showdown Omi decides to use the Sands of Time hoping that he can save Chase Young from being turned evil by Hannibal Bean. In doing so, however, Hannibal turns Master Monk Guan instead, and not only is Master Monk Guan shown to be even more dangerous on the Heylin side than Chase Young (forcing the monks out of the temple and trapping Master Fung in the Ying Yang world), but he's shown to be completely loyal to Hannibal. | |
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Discussed on the Dream SMP. When Ranboo talks to Sam after Tommy's death, he insists that if he had talked Tommy out of griefing George's house, things might've turned out differently and Tommy not have died. Sam says that might not necessarily be the case, and that Dream might've found another reason to exile him anyways, leading to the same result, and urges Ranboo to not blame himself for Tommy's death. This is not far from the truth; Dream was going around griefing builds with Puffy and blaming Tommy for it weeks before Tommy and Ranboo griefed George's house. | |
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Subverted in an episode of Scrubs appropriately entitled "My Butterfly", where a butterfly affects the events of the day, ending in the death of a patient. When the butterfly changes where it lands, the episode features an alternate future, but the patient that J.D., Dr. Cox, and Turk are involved with still dies on the table. | |
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Mary Skelter 2 in its entirety is what happens when a Nightmare alters the past to spare Little Mermaid from her death in the backstory. How does it end? Little Mermaid lives while every other member of the Blood Team meets a horrible death. When said Nightmare regains her memory of the original timeline and explains the situation to Little Mermaid, they agree to re-rail the timeline to the first game's version of events. Doubles as a Necessary Fail for Red Riding Hood, whose reckless behavior is partially to blame for Little Mermaid's death. | |
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The main character of the Korean crime drama Signal shows fear of this after some disastrous results of meddling in the past involving two cold cases. | |
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Time Hollow. The player makes small changes to the past and watches the subsequent results. This is also the plot for the PS2 game Shadow of Destiny which was written by the same maker of Time Hollow. Dude loves his time travel. |
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In Manly Guys Doing Manly Things, the Commander once went back in time to win the Vietnam War for America...only to find that this prevented the Rambo franchise from existing. And that's just a world too horrifying to contemplate. So he went back in time again to stop himself. | |
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Supernatural: In "What Is And What Should Never Be", Dean is tricked into believing a Djin has taken him to an Alternate Universe where his mom never died, and none of his family members became Hunters. Everyone's living happily, but as a consequence, his relationship with Sam is estranged because of their lack of time together, and all the people he saved as a Hunter died in their "accidents" without the brothers there to prevent them. Luckily, it was All Just a Dream. In "In the Beginning", Dean is actually taken back into time by Castiel, who warns him that any attempt to save his mother will inevitably result in the death of the innocents he has saved. Subverted in that no matter what Dean did, things ended up going exactly the same way anyway. In "Appointment in Samarra", a non-time-travel-related version happens when Dean becomes Death for a day and fails to reap a twelve-year-old girl, the butterfly ensures that things go badly for everyone near her. For example, a nurse gets off early because her help wasn't needed and dies in a car crash. His husband sees her die and attempts suicide by car accident. Presumably, this kind of thing would continue forever. |
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In the episode "Sword of Righteousness", Earthworm Jim uses said sword to go back in time and shave Abraham Lincoln's beard at the Gettysburg Address ("Well, that's a big goodbye to my credibility.") to see if his face on the penny will change. When he gets back, he finds Peter Puppy dressed like Colonel Sanders: | |
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The Fifth Act has this when Cloud accidentally time travels to Crisis Core. It starts with Cloud curing Genesis of his degeneration which results in him getting a new lease on life and not defecting. Which results in Sephiroth never going crazy because he still had his friends... and results in Angeal defecting and betraying Cloud due to suffering degeneration alone and becaming desperate for a cure. Which results in Cloud falling to madness and getting possessed by Jenova. | |
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Koala Man: In the show’s universe, Australia literally exists 15 hours in the future from America, and thus has a “Red-Hot Rule� that forbids warning anyone outside of Australia of any impending disasters. However, in 1912, a young Maxwell sends a telegram back to the Titanic to warn them of their impending disaster, triggering a bizarre chain of events that results in America becoming a war-torn, anarchic wasteland and Hollywood a floating island separate from it. | |
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In the Lilo & Stitch: The Series episode "Melty", the duo use Jumba's time machine to attempt to simultaneously capture the experiment and impress Lilo's crush Keoni, but after experimenting different methods it becomes apparent that each iteration causes something to go horribly wrong, often by setting off a Rube Goldberg-esque chain of events (one involving an actual butterfly). In one case, they accidentally go forward instead and are met by an apocalyptic world directly stemming from their actions on that day. | |
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This is played with in Donnie Darko; the setup is the same, and the plague of strange events that follow lead him to return in time and allow himself to be in bed when an airplane engine crashes into his house, thus saving his girlfriend's life in a roundabout way. A subversion: in the original timeline bad things happened ''without'' Donnie around to stop them. More than that, the DVD Commentary says that Donnie's purpose was to give the plane engine a reason for existing, preventing the collapse of the universe. | |
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Like the movie that inspired it, the series Frequency has 2016 cop Raimy warning her father Frank of his death in 1996. But doing so creates a ripple effect so the long-missing Nightingale serial killer survives for another 20 years...and his new victims include Raimy's mother. Raimy is thrown that her boyfriend Daniel no longer knows her. She realizes that in the original timeline, Daniel was a patient of Raimy's mother, Jules, when Raimy came by for a visit and they hit it off. In the new timeline, with Jules long missing, there was no reason for Raimy to go to the hospital that night and so she and Daniel never met. |
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The Green Futures of Tycho by William Sleator involves a time traveler teenager making repeated trips into the future. Each time he discovers a bad future, and tries to fix it in the present or past. Each time, his actions only make it worse. He eventually realizes the reason ( In all futures, he has the time machine and he's using it to control events), but not before he gets his time-traveling Evil Overlord future self chasing him to stop himself from messing up the past (present for the teenager) that lead to his present (future). | |
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DC Super Hero Girls (2019): Discussed in the episode #EnterNightSting, when a Future Badass version of Bumblebee travels back in time and meets her past self. The two talk about the theory, which confuses Supergirl. | |
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Used in the UK series Misfits, where Curtis uses his time-travelling ability to go back to the night he and his girlfriend Sam were arrested for drug possession. His initial attempts to change things only make things worse (such as Sam ending up stabbed by the dealer), but he eventually manages to change things enough that neither of them is killed or arrested and "jumps" back to the present, where it looks initially like an inversion; he's back to being an Olympic athlete and Sam is alive. Then he realises that without him there to save them, almost the entire main cast were murdered back in the first episode. | |
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Eva Bell aka Tempus began with the power to create localized bubbles that allow her to manipulate the passage of time, by slowing everything around her down while speeding herself up. This later developed into a full-on ability to travel through time. What makes her notable is that her power breaks one of the fundamental laws of time travel in the Marvel Universe: That one is unable to change their own universe's past, and that any changes will result in the creation of a new universe. Tempus's power allows her to travel through her own timeline at will, sometimes with catastrophic changes to the future she's unable to anticipate (such as a small change in the past wiping out the family she had in the future). | |
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In the film Frequency, a shortwave radio and the Northern Lights allow the main character to communicate with his father thirty years back in time, which saves the father's life. His survival leads to the protagonist's mother (a nurse) going to work the next day when she didn't in the original timeline, preventing a Serial Killer from receiving a fatal overdose of medicine in the hospital. Since the murderer already had an obsession with nurses, and realizes she saved his life, this has worrisome consequences. | |
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In the Stargate-verse film Stargate: Continuum, Ba'al has gone back in time and stopped the Stargate from reaching the United States in WWII, also killing Mitchell's great-grandfather, who was also transporting the Stargate to the US. This is made more interesting when the main characters, who know about the normal timeline, ask to be allowed to fix things, only to be told by General Landry that the people in this timeline don't ''want'' to be involved in big intergalactic wars. They like things just fine the way they are. | |
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The American Dad! episode "The Best Christmas Story Never Told" has a plot somewhere between A Christmas Carol and It's a Wonderful Life. The Ghost of Christmas Past transports Stan back to his youth in 1970 to re-teach him "the true meaning of Christmas", but Stan runs off to assassinate Jane Fonda, blaming her "hippie liberalism" for secularizing the season. At a Hollywood party, he happens to bump into the drug-addled Martin Scorsese and persuades him to go clean. As a result, Scorsese never directed Taxi Driver, so John Hinckley Jr. was never inspired to try and assassinate Ronald Reagan as a love offering to Jodie Foster, so Reagan's public image never got the boost it needed for him to be re-elected. The weak-willed Walter Mondale instead became President and quickly surrendered the country to the Soviets. | |
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Millennium (1983) conclude with a runway "timequake" obliterating the future, because of an accidental change made to the timeline in the present. | |
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In episode 12 of Inanimate Insanity II, Test Tube and Lightbulb accidentally time travel back to the first episode of Inanimate Insanity. Once he understands what's going on, Test Tube is extremely Genre Savvy, making sure he tries not to change anything in the past knowing that that will change the future in a terrible way, going so far as to attempt to resolder a twig he accidentally snapped. But it wasn't Test Tube snapping a twig that he should worry about, as Lightbulb's usual shenanigans change the events of the episode, by causing Salt and Pepper to win the challenge instead of Lightbulb and Balloon. When Test Tube and Lightbulb return to the present, they find themselves in Inanimate Insanity Infinity: a never ending Object Show created by Salt and Pepper purely for their own amusement. | |
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Terminator Genisys brings this even further even by establishing the "crushed butterfly" that creates an Alternate Timeline: once John Connor undergoes an Unwilling Roboticisation in the future, the history up to that point is altered. | |
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Mr. Young: "Mr. First Impression". Adam going back in time to make a better first impression on Echo leads firstly to his getting fired, then to Echo dumping him for a criminal kingpin, and finally to elephants beating humans in a war for control of the Earth. | |
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In Big Finish Doctor Who, the Seventh Doctor gently tells Ace that it's "just a story we tell the butterflies", and that she should stop looking for one single moment in her life that will magically change everything. | |
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While The Umbrella Academy (2019) is basically based around this trope (along with the whole "superpowered family with issues" thing), Episodes Six and Seven of season one epitomize it. Five is at the Commission trying to find out the cause of the apocalypse, while his siblings deal with things in 2019. Luther and Allison spend some time bonding and head off to see Allison's daughter before the world ends, Diego learns the truth about Reginald's death from Grace, Klaus gets sober and sees Dave, and Vanya finds Reginald's journal and realizes that Leonard is lying to her. Unfortunately, that episode is titled "The Day that Wasn't". Five time travels to the start of that day with his news about the person set to cause the apocalypse, and erases everything that had happened. "The Day That Was" is definitely worse: without Allison there, Luther has a breakdown and gets drunk; Klaus dies (though this isn't permanent); Five collapses from an untreated injury; Vanya goes off with Leonard and leaves the city; Diego gets arrested; and Allison leaves to confront a murderer alone. It doesn't end well. | |
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In Memento Vivere, a Final Fantasy X fanfiction, the time-travelling protagonist, Rikku, asks herself this question repeatedly over the course of the story, as the actions she takes could potentially negate Yuna's future destruction of Sin. | |
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In the "Elegant Chaos" arc of Transformers: More than Meets the Eye, Brainstorm travels back in time, with the hope of influencing Megatron's life so that he doesn't turn into the vengeful, murderous, power-hungry warlord who not only formed the Decepticons but started the civil war that killed millions. Ultimately he fails and eventually realizes that it is because he travelled back in time that the war began. Nice Job Breaking It, Hero. Roberts is kind enough to show us the appalling potential consequences of a lack of the war too, though. Cybertron's corrupt government is not overthrown because the Decepticons never rose up against it and in time was hijacked by Functionalists, religious fundamentalists who enforce an increasingly strict social hierarchy with themselves firmly at the top. As time goes on they become powerful enough to bring into force 'obsolescence chips' which can insta-kill any Cybertronian not deemed useful enough - or who proves too rebellious. By the present day, Cybertron is a totalitarian police-state where constant surveillance, casual racism, and punitive mutilations are the norm. Then Rewind, whose memories were altered due to all the time travel, tried to kill Megatron's protoform in order to cause this future to come to pass. Because while it was absolutely horrific for Cybertron, it was a huge positive for the rest of the galaxy, which wasn't subjected to the horrors of 4 million years worth of Cybertron civil war. Rewind wasn't quite right in the head at the time. |
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Mortal Kombat 9. By doing some minor things to avert a Bad Future, Raiden ends up making his and Earthrealm's future doomed. For instance, preventing Motaro from killing Johnny Cage causes Shao Kahn to kill Shang Tsung and empower Sindel; Sindel subsequently slaughters nearly all of Earthrealm's warriors. Similarly, when Raiden prevents the Lin Kuei from turning Smoke into a cyborg, they grab Sub-Zero instead. | |
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Comes up in several episodes of Farscape: In season three's "...Different Destinations", the crew find themselves sent back in time by a freaking out Stark while visiting a monastery saved from destruction by Peacekeepers. In addition to the Broken Pedestal for Aeryn when she learns the great hero of the battle turned out to merely be the company cook, the crew has to deal with an escalating series of alterations to the timeline with catastrophic implications for the future (including, at one point, the planet ceasing to exist) as they attempt to keep events on their historical course (Harvey having told John of the theory of time's elasticity, and that events steered near-enough to course will lead to time self-repairing). Eventually they set things more or less right and return home, but the women and children who originally survived instead ended up being slaughtered in the "fixed" timeline, and the crew is unable to go back again to save them. The danger of this is further highlighted by the Einstein in season four's "Terra Firma," warning that using a wormhole to travel to a point in time in one's universe before the time one departs can have disastrous consequences. The following episode, "Kansas", follows up on this when John accidentally travels to his own past and his arrival somehow changes time so his father is fated to fly the doomed Challenger mission. The crew manages to avoid making any major ripples as they trigger a series of events which Crichton recalls led to his father withdrawing from the mission (specifically shacking up as a teenager with Karen Shaw in the back of his dad's four-bynote actually Chiana in the back of John's truck, with Noranti using a bit of mind control to alter the exact memory at an abandoned house, which caught fire and nearly killed him, only for his dad to rescue him and beg off the mission until he recovered). By the end, the episode actually wavers on how much their actions are avoiding the Butterfly of Doom, or are actually the result of a Predestination Paradox. |
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In Smallville, Clark goes back in time to save Lana's life. However, in preventing the accident, his dad, no longer having a reason to stay and console Clark, goes straight to his meeting with Lionel Luthor. The scuffle that ensues causes him to have a heart attack, ultimately killing him. | |
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Berserk: In The Reveal, it turns out that the entire plot has been carefully constructed by the Idea of Evil. It has, in its time, created demons, assembled the Godhand (its demigod-like emissaries), controlled human history and eventually shattered the boundary between fantasy and reality to disastrous effect. How? It distributed Behelits to just the right people at just the right times; human nature and the laws of physics (down to the last detail) took care of the rest. | |
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Spoofed in Danger 5. Our heroes travel back in time to World War II and despite Pierre frantically trying to convince them of this trope proceed to kill Nazis with abandon, party with their younger selves, and Set Right What Once Went Wrong. This results in a Bad Future — not because of anything they did, but because they were stuffing about instead of concentrating on their original mission: KILL HITLER! | |
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Several alternate universe/timeline episodes of Stargate SG-1 feature worlds where it seems like only one small thing has changed, but often, that leads to something even more horrible happening. A good example is "2010", where contact with one group of aliens leads to the slow but inevitable destruction of Earth's human population. | |
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Little Glimpses plays this darkly, giving "The Cutie Re-Mark" a Happy Ending Override. As it turns out, any change to events, even something as small as Twilight and Starlight standing off to the side when Rainbow gets her cutie mark, can have consequences. Because Rainbow Dash saw them, she couldn't stop thinking about the weird alicorn that shouldn't exist, which led her to be distracted while crossing a road and accidentally caused an accident that killed her parents. Celestia, realizing that Rainbow is a future element of harmony, adopts her, and things spiral further from there. | |
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The End of Eternity: The constant changing of the potential timelines by a secret trans-temporal time agency resulted not in unpredictable chaos but in a static history, because the time agency tried to erase, with the best intentions, every invention, trend or development that they regarded a danger to mankind and human life in general... erasing wars, but also deliberately killing all attempts at space exploration over the millennia. In the end, only the destruction of the time agency itself allowed the restoration of mankind's original timeline: a life full of risks in search of the Unknown, but also with the potential to colonize the galaxy and survive into the distant future after the Earth's sun had gone nova. | |
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Directly parodied with the Quantum Weather Butterfly, flocks of which played a big part in Interesting Times. The Quantum Weather Butterfly uses its ability to affect localized weather phenomenon as a form of self-defense, and possibly a way of attracting mates. "Hey baby, look at this thunderstorm!" (And of course, Pratchett Shows His Work by pointing out that the fractal nature of the edge of the Quantum Weather Butterfly's wing makes it quite finite in area, but nearly infinite in perimeter, which is one of the seeming paradoxes of fractal surfaces in real life.) Alas, no. While probably a deliberate 'error' attributed to Discworld logicians, the statement in the book is actually less mathematically sound: |
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The Alternate History Forum, home of Look to the West and Decades of Darkness among others, is divided on the issue. There are purists ("step on a butterfly and everything changes") and non-purists ("consequences of an event ought to follow on logically: things take a while to change, and sequences of reasons can be made"). People who don't include any "ripple" of changes are laughed at. To quote veteran member Jared "In 1618, Australia will be discovered on time and the effects [of a sedentary yam-farming aboriginal civilization] will spread. Anyone asking "Great! How does this changed Australia affect World War 2?" will be fed to the blobfish." This is parodied in Reds!: A Revolutionary Timeline, where the alternate history version of the Alternate History Forum appears, and the members discuss the alternate timeline... and the exact same kinds of arguments crop up. However, a key general note: the 'of doom' aspect is avoided in all but deliberately dystopic timelines (things change, often without directly described causal relations to the original point of divergence — but the changed things are often a mix of good and bad). |
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Almost the entire point of all events in ×××HOLiC. Interesting that Yuuko's symbol is the butterfly, though that falls under another butterfly trope. | |
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Pinky and the Brain: Parodied. In one of the comics, the duo goes back in time a few hours to prevent their past selves from opening a savings account at a bank that will be robbed afterwards. (They have a time machine that Brain planned to use to go to the future to get the money plus interest.) When they return to their own time, they find that the world is now ruled by ostriches. (No, really.) | |
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Steven Universe: In "Steven and the Stevens", Steven accidentally travels back in time with a magic hourglass, and tries to stop Yellowtail's boat from getting stuck in Greg's carwash, preventing Greg from performing with his son at Beach-a-Palooza. It works, but Yellowtail's truck accidentally crashes into a telephone pole and causes a huge fire at the carwash. This puts Steven off of any more attempts at using the "time thing" to change the future. | |
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Phineas and Ferb: "Phineas and Ferb's Quantum Boogaloo" featured an adult Candace going back in time to bust Phineas and Ferb for the rollercoaster and returning to her own time to learn it was now a Bad Future. As it turns out, her effort to bust her brothers not only created a wave of child-proofing hysteria, but it causes the helicopter that Perry the Platypus grappled onto to escape from Dr. Doofenshmirtz to change course since it was part of one of the services Linda called to have the boys rescued, and to get himself injured by Doofenshmirtz's evil scheme backfiring, instead of Doofenshmirtz like in the original timeline. This allowed Doofenshmirtz to ride the wave of hysteria and take over the Tri-State Area, turning it into a ruined industrial dystopia where fun and creativity are outlawed, kids are kept in People Jars until they reach adulthood, and everyone is forced to change their name to "Joe". | |
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Perhaps not even needing a mention, Steins;Gate relies much on the butterfly effect theory. In fact the visual novel (and anime to a lesser extent) analyze much of the science after everything had Gone Horribly Wrong. | |
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In The Journeyman Project, the Temporal Security Agency works to prevent this trope from happening, and each Agent - including Gage Blackwood, Agent 5 - is tasked with reversing any changes that some other time traveler would have done to the past. Ironically, the TSA made their own change to the past by hiding its Historical Log disc in 200 million BC, though it's lampshaded in that the area it's situated in will inevitably be destroyed by a volcanic eruption. | |
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The Kamen Rider 40th anniversary movie Let's Go Kamen Rider is all about this. OOO and Den-O chase a monster back to the era of the original Kamen Rider and accidentally leave behind an O Medal. When they return to 2011, that single Medal has allowed villain organization Shocker to Take Over the World and put four decades' worth of Kamen Riders on the ropes. The movie Super Hero Taisen GP: Kamen Rider #3 uses a similar premise, with modern-day Shocker remnants creating a history-altering machine that introduces a third Kamen Rider, this one still loyal to Shocker, who kills the Double Riders in battlenote Press materials suggested that Rider #3 was created in 2015 and sent back in time. Again, this means Shocker is in charge of the world in the present, and almost all the Kamen Riders are their willing soldiers — including Kamen Rider Drive, until he remembers the original timeline and starts trying to fix things. |
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The movie Super Hero Taisen GP: Kamen Rider #3 uses a similar premise, with modern-day Shocker remnants creating a history-altering machine that introduces a third Kamen Rider, this one still loyal to Shocker, who kills the Double Riders in battlenote Press materials suggested that Rider #3 was created in 2015 and sent back in time. Again, this means Shocker is in charge of the world in the present, and almost all the Kamen Riders are their willing soldiers — including Kamen Rider Drive, until he remembers the original timeline and starts trying to fix things. | |
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The film Mr. Destiny starring Jim Belushi as Larry Burrows, an unhappy middle aged office employed loser. He blames the state of his life on the moment he struck out in a high school baseball game. A guardian angel-like figure named Mike (played by Michael Caine) changes the past so that he hit the ball. Larry is now the president of the sporting goods company he worked and married to the owner's daughter. However, he soon learns that his alternate self's other decisions have a number of problems: his father is now divorced (on "his" advice, no less), he's having an affair with an Ax-Crazy co-worker, his best friend is now afraid of him, he's been involved in some shady schemes with the other executives who are now plotting to get rid of him after noting his "change of heart" and his wife from the original timeline is now married to someone else. | |
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Timecop 2: The Berlin Decision: The villain, who was one of the former students of the protagonist's father (a physics professor and time travel theorist), has a heated argument at a lecture in 2002 about whether time travel implies an obligation to undo the tragedies of the past. His teacher warns him about the possibility that something worse may happen in their place. | |
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Fish Story is one big butterfly effect, tracing from the initial recording of a before-its-time and rapidly forgotten musical number to how that particular bit of music sets in motion a chain of events that saves the world. | |
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TimeRiders is centred around stopping people from a seemingly hopeless future from changing the past. Only the odd book has no massive effect on the future due to something being changed in the past as its main plot. In TimeRiders, Kramer tries to lead Hitler to victory and manages to eventually take over Nazi Germany himself. However, when the Time Riders try to gather information by sending two members into 1955, a time portal mishap leads to a couple of German soldiers fusing together and dying. After seeing their corpses, Kramer eventually goes insane and commits suicide by activating a nuclear "doomsday weapon", leaving nothing but savage mutants on the planet. In Day of the Predator, an assassin (later proven to be a Hitman with a Heart when he doesn't kill Chan) is sent to kill young Edward Chan, one of the biggest contributors to the invention of time travel. Thankfully, we see very little of the Bad Future that would occur. But when the humans accidentally wind up in dinosaur times, a previously undiscovered dino species watches them and learns to talk and use tools. As a result, New York City of 2001 is replaced by a jungle containing a nomadic tribe of humanoid reptiles. In Doomsday Code, the Time Riders find themselves in the middle of a History-changing battle. Time is in a state of flux until the battle is over. In Eternal War, the Eternal War in question is the result of Abraham Lincoln not being around to win the American Civil War. In Gates of Rome, the Project Exodus team tries to secretly influence the Roman Empire to adopt democracy. Instead, everyone but Rashim is killed and Emperor Caligula uses the support units the team had as his personal bodyguards, leaving him to rule for far too long. In City of Shadows, the team run into Jack the Ripper and figure out that they have to let him get away with his murders; he is actually an aristocrat, and the discovery of that would leave London in ruins. |
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The basis for the Command & Conquer: Red Alert Series. The whole thing started when Einstein went back in time to kill Hitler, resulting in WWII taking place between the Soviets and the Western Allies. And in Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3, the Soviets go back in time to erase Einstein in order to save the Soviet Union, weakening both the Aliies and the Soviets(no nukes) and creating the Empire of The Rising Sun, resulting in a three-way world war. |
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In Ghost Trick, Sissel is the Butterfly of Doom who can travel back in time and manipulate minor events—and he uses this power to save people rather than to destroy. | |
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In Lilith the protagonist travels through time to prevent the germination of the Triacanto, a parasite that will decimate mankind and force it to live underground-and to do so she has to find every single first bearer of every infection strain before it matures and starts infecting others and neutralize it in a way that will provoke their death, fully knowing that both this act and whatever she does to destroy the Triacanto will cause small and large alterations of the timeline, even going on the mission in the full knowledge she'll prevent her own birth. By the time she finally tracks down the source of the Triacanto, the Danes kept colonies in North America until they lost them to Britain in the 18th century, the defeat of Cortez' expedition against Aztecs with horses, steel weapons and resistance to smallpox caused the birth of a hybrid Aztec-Spanish culture after Spain managed to overrun Mexico anyway, Japan started expanding after Tokugawa Ieyasu died at Sekigahara and went on to conquer Korea and colonize North America to the Rockies, Joseon turtle ships (sent in a failed attempt at getting British help to regain Korea) intercepted the Crossing of the Delaware leading to the defeat of the Colonials in the "Rebellion of the Thirteen Colonies" and Britain eventually conquering North America to the Rockies, and the Great War did not start until 1933, after Germany fagocitated Austria and the Tsar found himself a puppet of the Duma. Then Lilith returns to America after the Revolutionary War and meets up with the survivors of the US Founding Fathers trying to get Japanese help for their cause.... Subverted in "The Stone Frontline"-while the circumstances prevent her from neutralizing the Triacanto before it matures, forcing her to kill dozens of people to neutralize it, she fails to alter the course of history as everyone she kills would have died anyway at that precise point in time, either shortly before or during the Battle of Caporetto. "End of the Hunt" reveals that there had been previous Hunters before Lilith, and each of them caused their own alterations before failing to destroy the source of the Triacanto. |
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The Back to the Future trilogy: The majority of the first Back to the Future movie is Marty trying to reverse the effect of his having saved his father from being hit by a car. Over the course of the trilogy, changing the past has nothing but positive effects for most of the characters. But not intentionally. In fact, almost all of Marty's intended timeline changes end up nearly erasing him from existence. All the positive changes came from unintentional changes — most notably his "Darth Vader from the planet Vulcan" schtick, intended to spook George into asking Lorraine out to the Enchantment Under the Sea Dance, instead gave him confidence to become a professional science-fiction author. |
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In Super Robot Wars Reversal, Raul and Fiona Graydon attempt to not use this trope when they and their friends are tossed back five years into the past. When they get to a crucial point in history (the Grand Finale of Zambot 3 and Mobile Suit Gundam Wing: Endless Waltz), they suffer a Heroic BSoD before deciding to Screw Destiny and make sure things happen differently. Things get even worse as you find out that the mechanics found designs of future units such as the Nu Gundam and the Black Serena and have built them five years before they should and allowing you to defeat the Big Bad. When you return to their normal time, they learn that their changes brought about good futures. | |
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Played with, and ultimately subverted, in Red vs. Blue: Church gets transported a thousand years into the past and then uses the time to come up with plans to prevent the accident that caused him to travel through time in the first place. The loop repeats dozens of times but everything he tries never changes anything. This is due to the fact that he never traveled through time at all, but merely believed he was doing so because the AI Gamma was deliberately torturing him and trying to drive him through despair via a simulation. | |
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An Animorphs Super Special dealt with a villain changing time. Some things were better, some things were worse; World War II, of course, was one of the affected areas. Much of the conflict of the book is over whether to restore the world or keep it the new way (in which Hitler was just a driver but the world appears to be a fascist nightmare with the Yeerks much closer to winning), and what justifies preserving bad pieces of history. There was also another storyline where we find out what would have happened if the main characters hadn't run into the alien who gave them superpowers and warned them about an alien invasion. In fact, Cassie's history teacher Ms. Paloma makes a reference to the butterfly thing in Book 7, The Stranger. See here. |
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Hysterically parodied in a The Whitest Kids U' Know sketch. Every time Trevor and Sam try to change history, random things happen (because that's how physics works). They go back in time and kill Hitler; JFK turns into a panda bear. They stop two Godzilla-esque monsters from attacking each other and cause the Vietnam War. After preventing 9/11, one of the character's sister starts to disappear from a picture (a parody of Back to the Future). In response, they scream "We have go back and save 9/11!" | |
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The Children of the Lamp series has a non time traveling example. Philipa (a djinni) grants an innocent wish of removing all foie gras from New York city. But it takes a horrible turn in that through an unusual series of events it destroys her mother's body in a volcanic eruption. Fortunately her mother is a djinni thus she was able to survive and a friend had earlier been in an accident that had left that friend brain dead. | |
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Rosario Vampire: Brightest Darkness Act III: When Luna discovers from her evil sister Falla that Rason is destined to die during the fight against Kiria, she promptly leaves to find a way to change his fate. Unfortunately, it's revealed in chapter 40 that Luna was supposed to be present in the original timeline during the fight against Kuyou, and save Astreal from death at Kuyou's hands; with Luna's departure, Kuyou torches Astreal with no effort. On top of it all, Falla, heartless bitch that she is, knew that Astreal was doomed to die without Luna all along and deliberately neglected to inform Luna as such until it was too late. | |
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The Cardcaptor Sakura fic Shadow of the Dragon features such an example in chapter 8; Sakura uses the Time Card to travel back in time by one day to save Tomoyo's mother from dying in a car crash courtesy of a drunk driver, but as a result, her classmate Reiko Ichimai is hit by said drunk driver instead. According to Cerberus/Kero and Yue, regardless of what Sakura tried to do, someone was going to die that day, and her interference just changed who died and when. | |
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In The Accursed Kings, King Louis X's wife is imprisonned for treason and adultery, making it impossible for him to sire a trueborn son and heir. When she finally consents to a divorce in exchange for her freedom, her letter is intercepted by Evil Chancellor Marigny. Had he not done that, Louis would not have resolved to murdering his wife and abandonning her sisters to their prison; their mother would not have had murdered Louis in turn (as well as his son by his new wife) in order to put his more forgiving brother Philippe on the throne; Philippe V would not have needed to pass the Salic Law, which bans women from ruling France, in order to secure his claim over Louis's daughter's; his nephew Edward III of England would not have invoked this very law to demand the French crown; and the The Hundred Years War might not have happened. | |
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Mystery Science Theater 3000: The host segments of the Time Chasers episode play around with this trope, with Crow going back in time to prevent Mike from getting shot into space. Unfortunately, Mike dies in this alternate fate-line and his Jerkass older brother Eddie ends up on the SOL instead. Crow goes back in time again to tell the earlier version of himself not to warn Mike, and, as a result, the earlier version of himself gets stuck in the past where he will presumably remain, as an employee of the cheese factory where Young Mike worked. In another episode, featuring The Time Travelers, Gypsy quizes Tom on what to do if he found a portal to the 1920s. When he suggests that he'd go back in time and become the greatest gangster ever, Gypsy proclaims he just caused the future to become a nuclear wasteland. When Tom calls her on that, Gypsy says that it always happens. In the Prince of Space episode, Bobo gets sucked into a time portal and Pearl, who normally despises him, insists upon getting him back by citing this trope; she's concerned that Bobo mucking about in time will erase her favorite pasttime, slot machines. Three episodes later in Invasion of the Neptune Men, Pearl is fully prepared to leave Bobo behind in Ancient Rome until Observer brings this trope up again, this time suggesting that he might erase Pearl's favorite snack food, Chicken in a Biskit, which galvanizes her to action. |
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The entire Future Trunks Saga in Dragon Ball Super is one big butterfly effect that messes up two timelines. As Goku Black and Future Zamasu point out, it was Future Trunks' time traveling that allowed their rise since he created a timeline where Goku didn't die from the heart virus. If Goku had died, Present Zamasu would have never become interested in Goku and taken his body using the Super Dragon Balls, which leads to Future Zamasu joining his past counterpart, killing the gods in every universe, and them eventually attacking Earth to punish the Earthlings for Trunks' crime. Furthermore, Goku would have never even met Zamasu if Trunks didn't return to the past again to get help fighting Goku Black, since Goku only went to U10 to see if Zamasu was Black, leading to a Stable Time Loop. Some minor examples also occurred during the Android Saga of Dragon Ball Z. Future Trunks' presence in the past results in, among other things, Goku contracting the heart virus six months later than he was originally supposed to, Androids 19 and 20 showing up at South City instead of 17 and 18, Androids 17 and 18 activating Android 16, and Androids 17 and 18 being stronger than their alternate counterparts. It also results in a timeline where Trunks never encountered Cell in the past and came back to defeat 17 and 18 in the future, only for Cell to kill him and take his time machine, causing more problems in the past. Needless to say, this whole trope is a slight point of angst for Trunks for obvious reasons, though fortunately for him, the end result at the end of the saga is largely much more positive than the future he came from partly because of this trope - the Z-Fighters are more prepared for the Androids than they were otherwise, Goku dies only after sacrificing himself to prevent Cell from blowing up the Earth (and decides to not come back despite the Dragon Balls being around to revive him), any damage and deaths are undone by the Dragon Balls because Goku is around to recruit Dende as the new Kami of Earth, and Android 16 turns out to a Morality Pet for his cyborg "siblings", who already decided they'd rather just cause mischief and chase after Goku rather than start a killing spree (or even deliberately killing anyone aside from Goku), eventually resulting in them both undergoing a Heel–Face Turn, which obviously has further consequences later on in Super when Android 17 of all people ends up being the MVP of the Tournament of Power by virtue of being literally the last fighter standing and providing crucial support to Goku and Frieza in their final clash against Jiren, nevermind having the awareness and empathy to wish for the restoration of the erased universes, which ended up saving everyone from immediate destruction. Though, from the point of view of the the actual overseer of the timelines, the Supreme Kai of Time Chronoa, Future Trunks' actions were ultimately for the best in the long run, and outright tells him that the good he has done outweighs the bad, whether it be intentional or otherwise, in contrast to the opinion of Goku Black and Future Zamasu, and that her only punishment for him causing a timeline split is to recruit him to the Time Patrol to keep more mallicious bad actors from altering the time stream further, though for Future Trunks, this isn't really a punishment since he enjoys his new job. |
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Family Matters: When Steve Urkel invents a time machine, he and Carl go back to the 70's when Carl and Harriet are first moving into the family home. We don't see the younger couple, but Carl leaves a note for them about companies to invest in that will become massively successful in the future. When Carl and Steve return to the present day, the Winslows are obscenely wealthy (also, Rosie O'Donnell is president). However, Harriet has grown distant and is now seeking a divorce. When Carl asks how will that affect their kids Eddie and Laura, she has no idea who he's talking about because they never had children: "Sure I would have wanted a little boy or girl, but you were always too busy wheelin' and dealin'." Naturally, Carl has no desire to live in this new reality. | |
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In the Star Trek: The Original Series episode "The City on the Edge of Forever", McCoy accidentally travels back in time and instinctively saves the life of a social worker when he sees her about to get by a car. She in turn becomes the driving force behind a political movement which ultimately delays the United States' entry into World War II, the result of which is that the world falls to Nazi Germany and Starfleet never forms. | |
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In the Pony POV Series, This trope begins causing problems for Queen Chrysalis. She managed to see how things turned out for her prime self and altered her plans accordingly. However, she failed to take into account that her new choices would cause others to make new choices and so on, which is ultimately a major reason her plans fail. She puts on a bigger attempt to conceal her evil nature, including giving a "The Reason You Suck" Speech to Prince Blueblood to earn the Mane Six's favor. Not only does this end up tipping off Twilight anyway despite her not making her canon self's mistakes, but even after brainwashing Twilight instead of sending her to the mines, it's Blueblood who ends up rescuing Cadence and exposing her in the Wedding Hall precisely because she gave him said speech. She also just fired her Bride's Maids and making the Mane Six them from the get go instead of waiting and not brainwashing them, as that was ultimately a waste of her time in canon. Said bride's maids ultimately figure out what's going on, and rescue the Mane Six from being captured when Chrysalis goes berserk in the Wedding Hall following Blueblood's interference. While this does allow her to take over and occupy Canterlot for far longer, in the long run her changes result in Cadence overthrowing her as Queen of the Changelings and her death, which causes her to be reincarnated and her original persona and self being destroyed in the process. Discord is smart enough to know better than alter major historical events even when he has the opportunity to do so, as he knows unless they're altered in a very well thought out manner (which he lacks the patience for) they'll cause this trope to come into effect. In part, this is because he's Chaos and thus this trope falls into his domain. |
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In Day of the Predator, an assassin (later proven to be a Hitman with a Heart when he doesn't kill Chan) is sent to kill young Edward Chan, one of the biggest contributors to the invention of time travel. Thankfully, we see very little of the Bad Future that would occur. But when the humans accidentally wind up in dinosaur times, a previously undiscovered dino species watches them and learns to talk and use tools. As a result, New York City of 2001 is replaced by a jungle containing a nomadic tribe of humanoid reptiles. | |
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The The Templin Institute episode What if the Romulans Never Entered the Dominion War is Exactly What It Says on the Tin, with the Romulans never finding evidence that the Dominion was planning to invade their home world unlike in canon. Without the Romulans or any outside interference against the Dominion, the Starfleet-Klingon alliance would inevitably be defeated, with the Dominion even invading Federation worlds like Earth to crush their spirit and eventually destroying the Romulan empire. However, the Dominion would be weakened by both the war effort and the morphonic virus that crippled the Founders, breaking the Dominion into rival factions and leaving them and the galaxy vulnerable to the Borg Collective. said, it can also be argued that even without the evidence of an invasion, the Romulans wouldn't have stood by and allowed the Federation to get destroyed, and they were already prepared for war against the Dominion since they were able to destroy 15 bases immediately after declaration. However, the Romulans do tend to overestimate themselves, so they could easily enter the war too late to shift the tide towards the Alpha and Beta Quadrants. | |
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In Hot Tub Time Machine, in which the protagonists are transported from 2010 to The '80s in a hot tub, they are smart enough to avert this. They even reference the butterfly effect. They set out to do everything their '80s selves would've done in the same way they would've done it. Then played straight in the end, when at the very last minute one of them decides to stay as his past self and re-live his life with everything he knows about the future. Then subverted in that this ends up being a really positive thing for everyone involved. | |
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Futurama: In "Roswell That Ends Well", the Planet Express crew goes back in time to become the Roswell Incident. When Professor Farnsworth finds out that Fry's grandfather is there, he gives him the classic advice for people going back in time: "Don't do anything that will change history. Unless you're supposed to do it, in which case, for the love of God, don't not do it." Of course he does by killing his grandfather but the effects are minimal because he realizes that he is not vanishing, so his grandfather can't really be his ancestor. However, he takes the extra step of thinking this disqualifies his grandmother from being his grandmother and sleeps with her, inadvertently becoming his own grandfather. Farnsworth gets fed up after this incident and decides to just attack Roswell and steal their ship back. "Screw history! Let's just get the hell out of here!" When that plan actually works, the Professor triumphantly shouts "Choke on THAT, causality!" In Bender's Big Score, time travel plays a huge role in the plot. There's even mention of a failsafe in the universe itself that erases impossibilities created by time travel, like the same person meeting themselves, that prevents the butterfly effect from having a dangerous effect. It comes up again in "The Late Phillip J. Fry", where the Professor makes a time machine that only travels forward in time resulting in seeing the big bang twice as the universe resets itself and squashing the current timeline versions of themselves, stopping a paradox. |
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In Justice League Elite, Manchester Black tries to use the reality-warper Eve to alter history so that Superman was killed before his powers developed, but she claims that there is no way for her to make such a drastic change to the universe without tearing reality itself apart. | |
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Yomiko apparently did try to change history so the Battle of London never happened, but it caused so many fractures in history that the timeline would end up crashing altogether. She would eventually rewrite her loops so her attempts to change history never happened, causing her to forget the details of what she did. | |
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Played straight in Chrono Cross, although most of it is just Serge. Once you sort through Chrono Cross's labyrinthine plot, it retroactively applies it to Chrono Trigger in a huge way. In a nutshell, after Crono and friends defeat Lavos and create a good future, Lavos in the past - in an attempt to avert its own destruction - pulls a supercomputer called FATE from the newly created future back in time, to fight with an organic computer that the planet has called in from an alternate future where Lavos never landed on the planet. FATE wins and, in an attempt to make sure that its current existence doesn't prevent its future creation and, thus, create a time paradox, it starts guiding human events to make sure everything happens according to plan. The Lavos that was defeated by Crono, meanwhile, has merged with Schala and formed into a being that is attempting to devour all of spacetime. Schala, for reasons that aren't really clear, winds up altering spacetime herself in order to save an infant Serge from a panther demon, causing Serge to mess up FATE's plan and suddenly become the centrepiece to approximately two dozen people's schemes for saving, destroying, or conquering the world. Basically, Crono altering the future by killing Lavos causes a dozen or so beings with the ability to manipulate time to immediately launch into an elaborate web of overlapping gambit schemes to try and ensure that the new future does or does not come to pass. And that's the ''short'' version! |
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Life Is Strange features heavy butterfly symbolism: Max gains her time rewinding powers after taking a picture of a blue butterfly, a butterfly icon shows up any time you make an action that will have consequences, and the first episode is titled Chrysalis. Starting in Episode 3, Max makes changes to the past that have unexpected ripple effects. Most notably, preventing the death of Chloe's father creates an alternate timeline in which Chloe is severely disabled and in constant pain and her parents are being bankrupted by medical bills. Finally, in episode 5, when the hurricane from Max's visions hits Arcadia Bay, Chloe realizes that Max saving her life is what caused the storm destroying the city. Max has to make the choice to either go back to when she took the butterfly picture and let Nathan kill Chloe, or sacrifice Arcadia Bay to keep her best friend/girlfriend alive. | |
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Mushoku Tensei: Jobless Reincarnation: Hitogami can predict the future and lay out a plan to reach a given end state. However a small change in the present he does not know about will ruin the plan. Similarly, when he deploys too many apostles the future becomes too mutable for him to read. Orsted is using a "Groundhog Day" Loop in an attempt to kill Hitogami. Through multiple loops he has more or less identified all of the potential butterflies but two. Orsted has identified all of the apostles except for one, and each loop that single hidden apostle always disrupts his plans. This ultimate trump card is the seemingly-harmless Gisu. The Rewind Miko, a girl whose unique ability lets her remember each of the previous loops. Usually she dies before she can have an impact on events but something Orsted changed in the last iteration ended up saving her life. When a boy she had come to love died she tried to rewrite history with her power; this caused Rudeus's birth and the Mana Calamity in the next loop, completely upending Orsted's knowledge. |
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Magic: The Gathering had this in the Tarkir storyline. In it, the Tarkir planeswalker Sarkhan goes back in time from a present where Tarkir was ruled by non-Dragon khans and Dragons don't exist, because their progenitor Ugin is dead. Sarkhan's intention is to halt Ugin's death at the hands of Nicol Bolas so he can be alive in the present to solve a problem on another plane. He succeeds...and returns to a present where Tarkir is ruled by Dragons and Sarkhan doesn't exist (or, at least, shouldn't). | |
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The Fairly OddParents!, In the episode, "Father Time!", Timmy accidentally melts his father's sports trophy with heat vision, so he does the logical thing and... goes back in time and prevents his father from winning the trophy in the first place. This creates a Bad Future in which Timmy's dad is a Big Brother-esque dictator who enforces happiness on the population and has a major complex about the lost trophy. Timmy goes back and fixes the mess by winning the trophy in his father's stead, and everything returns to normal. Well...except that Timmy and the Internet have swapped names. In the other episode, "The Secret Origin Of Denzel Crocker!", Timmy travels back to March 15, 1972 to try and prevent the incident that turned Denzel Crocker in the fairy-obsessed miser he is today. Timmy instead ends up causing said incident, and is then banned from ever returning to March 1972. In the process, he also somehow causes George McGovern to win the 1972 presidential election, as he's then warned against interfering with said election win despite having caused it in the first place. In "Twistory", Timmy wishes the Founding Fathers to the modern day to help him write a report. It eventually results in a future where the American Revolution failed and electricity hasn't been harnessed, forcing Timmy to go back and fix it. |
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T.U.F.F. Puppy: The episode "Watch Dog" involves Dudley deciding to use a time-traveling stopwatch to get the last donut in the break room before Kitty, despite Keswick's warnings. It only takes the mere act of traveling back in time for Dudley to end up in an alternate universe ruled by Snaptrap, and he spends the rest of the episode trying to get the watch back (which got stolen by Snaptrap's robots after nearly getting arrested for doing a Big "NO!" while not wearing pants), later with the help of the alternate versions of his allies, to Set Right What Once Went Wrong, both ways with zero explanation of the chain of events that led to both Snaptrap taking over or the timeline being restored. | |
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Teen Titans: Referenced by Cyborg when he gets stranded in the past in "Cyborg the Barbarian", and he intends to remain in his exact position and not touch anything...until he sees he's literally standing in-between two Onrushing Armies. The ending implies it was a Stable Time Loop all along. | |
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The developers of Until Dawn refer to the mechanic behind the game's branching storyline as the butterfly system, with a butterfly motif appearing in the trailers. And sure enough, given that this is a Survival Horror game, some changes can end in doom, making this a case of the Butterfly Of Doom being enacted on the player. | |
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Parodied in Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, "Time Machine 2": since the present sucks so much, why worry about changing it? | |
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In The Wise Man's Fear the Cthaeh, an entity unable to leave a single tree, has perfect knowledge of all possible futures, and whenever it speaks to someone, it manipulates them into causing the greatest possible harm with just a few words. Policy on handling those who speak to it is to shoot them dead from half a mile away, leave the body to decompose, and if a crow descends to eat the body, shoot the crow. And perhaps as a reference to the trope name, it spends its time setting up whatever little details it can so as to kill very specific butterflies that've come anywhere nearby. | |
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And Shine Heaven Now: Yomiko apparently did try to change history so the Battle of London never happened, but it caused so many fractures in history that the timeline would end up crashing altogether. She would eventually rewrite her loops so her attempts to change history never happened, causing her to forget the details of what she did. The last time time travel was involved, an attack by the I-Jin of H.G. Wells accidentally killed Integra's Indian grandfather, which caused Integra to become the airheaded, clingy, WASP Fundamental instead of the strong-willed Integra who earned Alucard's respect. And then the timeline crashed. (Of course, Yomiko fixing the timeline by preventing it altogether means she doesn't remember any of this.) |
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The sixth season of Sonic for Hire involves the Butterfly Effect due to Sonic, and eventually other people, traveling through time and subsequently messing with the spacetime continuum. One example includes a timeline where there's no such thing as sliced bread. Instead it's called "torn with your hands bread". | |
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Although the Legacy of Kain series generally runs on You Can't Fight Fate, this trope occurs in Blood Omen when Kain goes back in time to kill William the Just before he becomes the Nemesis, thereby causing the sequence of events that leads to the genocide of Nosgoth's vampire population by the Sarafan. However, the events are not the result of vengeance on the part of the timestream itself but it was precisely calculated by Moebius the Timestreamer. | |
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The Invader Zim episode "Bad, Bad Rubber Piggy" starts out with Professor Membrane explaining on his show that, as tempting as it sounds, purposely changing the past would create more problems than it solves (Such as a giant fish in a bear-suit rampaging). Zim, of course, plans to do just that to get rid of Dib, but the effects of his attacks Dib's younger self eventually go from 'make Dib more decrepit' to 'give Dib's massive bionic exoskeleton more weapons from the professor.' | |
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Invoked in a Robot Chicken episode when a kid says that a butterfly's wings flapping can cause storms etc. The other kid smashes the butterfly, causing an earthquake in Japan. The geisha quickly steps on another butterfly, causing an erupting volcano which melts one of the kids. The remaining kid rips a third butterfly in half, and Godzilla appears to burn the geisha's house. | |
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A Chance for a New Dawn: The simple act of Bernadetta changing to the Golden Deer house early results in Monica coming back to the Black Eagles much earlier, several of the Golden Deer's early missions having their objectives changed, and Lord Lonato being turned into the first Black Beast instead of Miklan. | |
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Fairy Tail: This is the Defense Minister's argument against using the Eclipse Gate to travel back in time to kill Zeref. Since Zeref is such a huge part of their history, killing him in the past could have drastic consequences. Then it was revealed to the readers later on that Zeref is the one who proposed the concept of the Eclipse Gate, meaning the plan was doomed to failure from the start and wouldn't have ended well at all. This is Zeref's ultimate goal in the final arc: to empower himself with Fairy Heart and travel back in time to before Natsu's death 400 years ago to save him, which would have the side effect of destroying the current timeline and replacing it with a new one. Zeref hopes that the new timeline will result in a better world than the current one, though, since for one Acnologia won't exist in it. |
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Happens many times in Timeless, most notably in the first episode. After returning from the Hindenburg explosion in 1937 and changing history so fewer people are killed, Lucy finds out A) her mother, who was dying of lung cancer, is now perfectly fine, B) her younger sister, Amy, has been erased from existence, and C) she's engaged to a man she has never met before. | |
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Used for a joke in Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater where there's a point in the game where you can kill the young version of future turncoat agent Ocelot. Doing so ends the game instantly, with the game telling you that you created a time paradox. If you do this in the HD Rerelease you also get a trophy stating that all the problems in the series are solved, thus it's over. You still get a Game Over though. | |
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In one episode of The Mighty B!, Bessie travels back to prehistoric times to find dinosaur bones to earn a Paleontology badge. While there, she constantly tells Happy not to touch anything. When she ends up angering a trio of dinosaurs, Bessie is forced to return to the present without Happy (but ends up taking the dinosaurs with her). While she's gone, Happy decides to indulge himself until she gets back. Upon returning to the present, they find that dogs have become the dominate species on the planet. | |
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SpongeBob SquarePants: In "Back to the Past", SpongeBob and Patrick accidentally stumble upon Mermaid Man and Barnacle Boy's time-traveling warehouse and wind up at the time where the younger MM and BB froze Man Ray in tartar sauce. Patrick accidentally eats the tartar sauce that was meant to trap Man Ray; as a result, Man Ray escapes and takes over Bikini Bottom, resulting in a Bad Future where Bikini Bottom is renamed Man Ray-opolis. | |
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One particular incident which was a footnote in Warhammer 40,000, Ork warlord Grizgutz lead his Waaagh! off to war the course of it brings him back home. Because FTL travel for most relies on going into the Warp, which has at best an orthogonal relationship to physics in realspace, he arrives home before he left to go to war. He then did what he felt was reasonable (for an Ork), he decided to kill his doppleganger to have a spare of his favorite gun. The resulting confusion made the Waaagh! stop in its tracks. | |
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Averted by Chrono Trigger in that, while major changes to the timeline (such as the entire plot of killing Lavos) will, of course, have major effects, minor things, such as opening a treasure chest in the past, will, at most, have the effect of making the corresponding treasure chest empty in the future, yet you can get the future chests, then go back in time and open the past ones with no consequence... Killing monsters doesn't do a thing; they'll even reappear when you enter the area. Played straight with Porre in Chrono Cross. Remember the small country whose people you told not to be selfish? They destroy Guardia with the help of Dalton, are implied to have killed Crono and Marle, and gain a strong influence on Zenan. Played straight in Chrono Cross, although most of it is just Serge. Once you sort through Chrono Cross's labyrinthine plot, it retroactively applies it to Chrono Trigger in a huge way. In a nutshell, after Crono and friends defeat Lavos and create a good future, Lavos in the past - in an attempt to avert its own destruction - pulls a supercomputer called FATE from the newly created future back in time, to fight with an organic computer that the planet has called in from an alternate future where Lavos never landed on the planet. FATE wins and, in an attempt to make sure that its current existence doesn't prevent its future creation and, thus, create a time paradox, it starts guiding human events to make sure everything happens according to plan. The Lavos that was defeated by Crono, meanwhile, has merged with Schala and formed into a being that is attempting to devour all of spacetime. Schala, for reasons that aren't really clear, winds up altering spacetime herself in order to save an infant Serge from a panther demon, causing Serge to mess up FATE's plan and suddenly become the centrepiece to approximately two dozen people's schemes for saving, destroying, or conquering the world. Basically, Crono altering the future by killing Lavos causes a dozen or so beings with the ability to manipulate time to immediately launch into an elaborate web of overlapping gambit schemes to try and ensure that the new future does or does not come to pass. And that's the ''short'' version! |
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The Butterfly Effect, named for the effect that names this trope. It's also notable for the protagonist not only learning that messing with time can have disastrous consequences, but also realizing that he himself is the product of someone tinkering with fate. The world cannot be righted unless he does not exist. Only in the director's cut, however, not the original theatrical release ending. | |
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Flashpoint involves The Flash suddenly awakening in a Crapsack World and trying to figure out what caused the change to the timeline. It turns out that it was all caused by The Flash going back in time and saving his mother's life. Somehow this resulted in such changes as Bruce Wayne having been shot by the mugger while his parents are still alive, Wonder Woman and Aquaman being murderous dictators, Cyborg replacing Superman as the world's #1 Big Good superhero, and Frankenstein killing Hitler. This is then averted by the ending, where Pandora uses Flash in order to create a new timeline which is different but no worse than the old one (though don't ask comic fans their opinion on that). | |
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Achron allows for rather odd situations involving chronoporters (time-teleporters) and battles. For example, by sending units back in time to fight alongside themselves, if the original units are damaged in the ensuing battle, the future versions will be also damaged when the next timewave comes by. Eventually, this can resolve into a much weaker army than was originally used. Also, these sorts of time-manipulation tricks can allow for armies to go back to attack economic or production structures to disrupt opponents. For example, killing that one marine who built all the resource processors that made the construction of the army that's harassing you in the future even possible. So, by killing one marine, you defeated an entire army. note Of course, the opponent can retroactively protect the marine or even send one back from the future to ensure its own existence.It should be noted that much of the game is built on these sorts of tactics. It should also be noted that it's not segregated to the story: you can play with these temporal shenanigans yourself. In multiplayer. |
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Blackadder Back and Forth is a brilliant example of this trope. In the story, Baldrick (accidentally, Blackadder meaning it as a scam to win a bet with his guests) invents a working time machine. They're sent on a dare to use it and to bring back a catalogue of different items including a centurion's helmet and the Duke of Wellington's boots. After Blackadder succeeds, it emerges that he has changed the course of history as a result: After finally arriving at the battle of Waterloo, he squashes the Duke of Wellington with his time machine just before the battle begins, steals his famous boots and causes the French to win the fight. As a result, Blackadder returns to an alternate-reality Britain which has been ruled by the French for 200 years — as a result of his tampering — following Napoleon Bonaparte's victory at Waterloo, and just in time for garlic pudding. He becomes especially disconcerted when he sees Archdeacon Darling wearing a tutu and exclaims "We've got to save Britain!" before going back in time to try and rectify everything. He also has a run-in with William Shakespeare, earlier on in the story, whom he attacks for the interminable suffering of school pupils that would happen for the next 400 years as a result of having to study his plays at length, leaving William completely discouraged as a playwright but dropping his ballpoint pen in the process. Later on, in the alternate reality, William Shakespeare is revealed to have been known only for "inventing the ballpoint pen." Eventually he learns to manipulate history consciously so he becomes the king in the present and marries Maid Marian. | |
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In the My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic season 5 two-part finale "The Cutie Remark", Starlight Glimmer, in a fit of rage over the Mane Six breaking up her village of "equality", enacts a time travel spell to prevent Rainbow Dash's first Sonic Rainboom, preventing the Mane Six from gaining their Cutie Marks at that point and creating their future bonds. Twilight constantly goes back to stop her, but each time she does so, it just creates a worse and worse future - One where King Sombra conquers Equestria, one with the Changelings in charge, then Nightmare Moon, Tirek, Discord, the Flim Flam Brothers, then ultimately nothing but a barren wasteland. Twilight ends up dragging Starlight into this last timeline to show her what she's doing. She doesn't take it well. | |
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Doctor Who: The Doctor has mellowed a bit when it comes to messing around with history. The First Doctor, in "An Unearthly Child" is so paranoid about the possible ramifications of this trope that he is convinced that the mere idea that a device such as the TARDIS exists could irreparably change the course of human history. In "Father's Day", Rose goes back in time to visit her father before his death but ends up saving him from his fatal accident. The resulting tear in the fabric of reality lets through a host of aliens who feed off time energy and kill a lot of people. In "The Shakespeare Code", the Doctor lampshades this to put Martha at ease in her first-time time-travelling. "The Fires of Pompeii" both plays this straight and subverts it. Donna asks the Doctor why he can't warn the city of the impending volcanic eruption, only for him to say that it's a fixed point in time that must not be tampered with. At the end, as the volcano is erupting, Donna pleads with the Doctor to help, so he rescues one family (the one they've gotten to know throughout the episode) and puts them outside of the city with what appears to be no consequences. While the show is mostly immune to this trope, with characters messing through time willy-nilly, it is used occasionally. The episode "Turn Left" is probably the most striking example, with an It's a Wonderful Plot twist. The butterfly in question, as the title indicates, was turning right instead of left at an intersection. In "The Pandorica Opens", it happens in a big way when the TARDIS explodes and rips up time, so much so that every star in the universe is never born and he only reason life exist on Earth is that the TARDIS is exploding at all points in time. To fix it, the Doctor has to take the Pandorica to the TARDIS and have it explode, sending all the atoms of the old universe everywhere in every point of time, effectively Big Bang 2, but he will be stuck on the other side of the rip. He gets better, though. In "The Wedding of River Song", River Song tries to subvert reality by not killing the Doctor. The result of this is that all of time and space coexist in the same eternal instant, with anything unable to happen until the proper events of the timeline are carried through. Mocked in "Thin Ice", where new companion Bill worries about doing this. The Doctor assures her she must be careful, like their other poor companion who just stepped on a butterfly and erased himself from existence! That's why she can't remember him. The lesson being that little things don't have that much of an impact. "Rosa": The villain, a racist from the far future who can't kill due to an implanted Restraining Bolt, is trying to prevent the Montgomery Bus Boycott from happening. To do so, he has to resort to other means, like arranging for a different bus driver, or straight-up vandalizing a bus, and the Doctor and her friends have to work hard to keep history on its rightful course. It's directly stated that history is created by small decisions. "Space Babies": Ruby questions the possibility of drastically altering history by stepping on a butterfly, but the Doctor scoffs at the idea that someone would step on a butterfly. Then Ruby actually does accidentally step on a butterfly and instantly turns into a lizard person. The Doctor quickly revives the butterfly and she turns back. The Doctor decides to take these things a bit more seriously, resolving not to try messing with Ruby's origins. |
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Played with in 11/22/63. While changing the past does have major negative effects, some of them are the result of the timestream shattering. For example, saving Kennedy leads to a massive Los Angeles earthquake the same week, which could not possibly have been a direct result. | |
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And in Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3, the Soviets go back in time to erase Einstein in order to save the Soviet Union, weakening both the Aliies and the Soviets(no nukes) and creating the Empire of The Rising Sun, resulting in a three-way world war. | |
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Avengers: Back to Basics: In the final arc, Kamala is extremely cautious about revealing any information about the future, including the simple fact that she is from the future, in order to avoid altering history and causing a potentially disastrous paradox. | |
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"End of the Hunt" reveals that there had been previous Hunters before Lilith, and each of them caused their own alterations before failing to destroy the source of the Triacanto. | |
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In an episode of Penguin Musume, Kujira learns that she confessed her love to Sakura when they were both young girls (Kujira was raised as a boy.) Embarrassed into action, Kujira takes the Time-Penguin-X1 (yes, that's what it's called) back to prevent herself from confessing. After older-Kujira realizes she's made a horrid mess, she works to repair the timeline, causing her younger self to instead make a marriage vow. | |
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Prince of Persia: Warrior Within actually uses this trope, but with a twist — instead of unexpected consequences, there is an actual guardian of time that hunts the Prince in order to restore time to its original flow. Played straight in Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones where the events of Warrior Within have undone the events of Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time meaning the Vizier from Sands of Time is still alive and still searching for the eponymous sands, sacking Babylon in the process. |
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Backward With Purpose: Al tries to be the butterfly and not the hurricane, with mixed results. He first goes charging into the past for selfish reasons and tries to make a major change, but in the end he sabotages some of the good future that could have been brought about. During subsequent trips he generally aims for smaller changes, but these can still have large negative consequences which he can't ever take back. | |
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Played with in Time Chasers, where a nerdy scientist invents a time machine, and then has to go back in time and prevent an earlier version of himself from giving it to a Corrupt Corporate Executive. The original versions of the scientist and his girlfriend end up dying while the "earlier" versions of them manage to keep the time machine from falling into evil hands. | |
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Dragon Ball Multiverse: Many of the universes where the villains won are the result of a seemingly minor change in the timelines that snowballed into the heroes losing. Universes 1 and 10 had the Kaioshin eradicate every threat they found. Freeza being dead, the Saiyans never had a technology or power boost and never became space pirates. Universe 3 diverged when Bardock put to good use his prophetic visions and managed to take Freeza down, with Saiyans taking over the galaxy, Kakarot never being sent to Earth, and then Raichi taking revenge on the Saiyans. Piccolo Daimao also fused with Kami, through yet unknown circumstances, with an evil Piccolo being the dominant personality. Universe 4 diverged when Majin Buu opted to quickly absorb Vegeta when he threatened to remove Fat Buu from his cocoon rather than plead with him. Goku is then forced to fight on his own, where he is horribly outclassed; even his Hail-Mary of expending his full power to blow Buu up failed miserably and Buu simply absorbed him as well. Universe 6 diverged when Goku did not warp back to Earth to save Gohan against Bojack and give him a pep talk. Universe 7 diverged when all the Nameks decided to fuse into one being to take down Freeza, losing forever the ability to create Dragonballs in the process. Universe 8, where Freeza and his family won, came about because Krilin killed Vegeta on Earth before Goku could stop him. Since Vegeta doesn't show up on Namek, he's not around to provide an extra distraction to Freeza or his henchmen, which eventually culminates in Freeza killing everyone on Namek (except Goku, who remained alive to destroy Freeza's capital). Universe 13, where Kakarot never hit his head and thus never lost his Saiyan mentality. So, instead of him becoming the cheerful and kindhearted man in canon, he becomes a ruthless killer who is more than a little mentally unbalanced. It goes without saying that humanity isn't around in U13 anymore. Universe 14 diverged when Trunks never came back to the future after his U17 counterpart got killed by Cell, thus ensuring the cyborgs could have free reign. Universe 16 diverged when Vegito made the choice to not remove his shield aura effect when inside Boo, and remained fused forever, freeing everyone and destroying Kid Boo before he could destroy the Earth. Also, Enma did not listen to his request to reincarnate him into Oob, so in this universe there is no Boo. Universe 17 diverged when Vegeta did not strike Cell in the back and distract him. This allowed Cell to overpower SSJ2 Gohan. Universe 19 diverged when Raditz killed Goku on Earth, according to the french novelization. This led to them attacking Helior with reduced numbers, and Helior probably weathered the assault, and stepped up their game. Universe 20 diverged when Broly survived his second coming, after being thrown into space by the heroes, and did not burn in the Sun. |
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Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt had a non-time travel version inspired by Sliding Doors (see the film folder) in the What If? episode "Sliding Van Doors". Kimmy never got in the Apocalypse Cultist van, with impact on the other three main characters (Titus missed his Lion King audition, Lillian never found tenants, and Jacqueline didn’t get her stewardess job) and as the writers noted, Kimmy's absence made many people's lives worse. | |
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"The Message": (Implied Trope) A lot of effort is spent to make a time traveller the "pure observer", meaning they leave zero impact on events. George Kilroy wasn't content with that, and wrote Kilroy Was Here. The story ends after that transgression. | |
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This is also the plot for the PS2 game Shadow of Destiny which was written by the same maker of Time Hollow. Dude loves his time travel. | |
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The movie Sliding Doors had a non-time travel variation. The movie recounts two chains of events, which follow the protagonist either missing the subway or getting on just in time. | |
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Going Another Way: Inverted. Only two changes are done to the timeline — Shinji being sent to live with his uncle instead of an uncaring teacher and Rei not being burdened with a part of Lilith's soul. The butterfly takes care of all other changes, but in this case, it's a changed for the better (logical, considering the canon). | |
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The Girl Who Leapt Through Time. Though Makoto never tries to change anything particularly big (she uses it for stuff like repeating a karaoke session over and over for several hours), once or twice she changes something small that has massive and unexpected repercussions. After several failed attempts at matching a friend with a girl who who likes him by leaping back in time, she finally gets it right. He borrows Makoto's bike, the brakes snap and both he and the girl die in a train accident that Makoto herself only narrowly avoided earlier. Fortunately, Chiaki was around to fix things. | |
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Brian in Family Guy goes back several years in time with Stewie to see where he had buried a ball in the episode "Back to the Pilot". Stewie warns Brian not to touch anything or to talk to anyone, for doing so could alter their present time. Once the duo returns to their original time, Stewie discovers that Brian had told his past self about the September 11th terrorist attacks, which caused his past self to stop the attacks from ever happening. Sounds good, right? Sure, the lives of 3000+ people were saved, but the action caused George W. Bush to lose his reelection for U.S. President in 2004, which motivates him to have all the southern states secede from the rest of the country and declare a second civil war, but with nukes being used and causing the death of over a million people. Whoops. The duo go back in time again to fix the mess, only for Brian to do more dumb things like giving his past self the idea to create Harry Potter. Stewie eventually decides to go back to the very point where their past selves first time traveled and he shoots Brian in the kneecaps while screaming at him and his past self to go back home. Current Brian realizes that doing this will erase their existence since the time traveling shenanigans would have never happened. Naturally, the two of them disappear while the original Stewie and Brian are back in their own time with Peter and his drinking buddies from the pilot episode showing up in the same crudely drawn animations. | |
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Some minor examples also occurred during the Android Saga of Dragon Ball Z. Future Trunks' presence in the past results in, among other things, Goku contracting the heart virus six months later than he was originally supposed to, Androids 19 and 20 showing up at South City instead of 17 and 18, Androids 17 and 18 activating Android 16, and Androids 17 and 18 being stronger than their alternate counterparts. It also results in a timeline where Trunks never encountered Cell in the past and came back to defeat 17 and 18 in the future, only for Cell to kill him and take his time machine, causing more problems in the past. Needless to say, this whole trope is a slight point of angst for Trunks for obvious reasons, though fortunately for him, the end result at the end of the saga is largely much more positive than the future he came from partly because of this trope - the Z-Fighters are more prepared for the Androids than they were otherwise, Goku dies only after sacrificing himself to prevent Cell from blowing up the Earth (and decides to not come back despite the Dragon Balls being around to revive him), any damage and deaths are undone by the Dragon Balls because Goku is around to recruit Dende as the new Kami of Earth, and Android 16 turns out to a Morality Pet for his cyborg "siblings", who already decided they'd rather just cause mischief and chase after Goku rather than start a killing spree (or even deliberately killing anyone aside from Goku), eventually resulting in them both undergoing a Heel–Face Turn, which obviously has further consequences later on in Super when Android 17 of all people ends up being the MVP of the Tournament of Power by virtue of being literally the last fighter standing and providing crucial support to Goku and Frieza in their final clash against Jiren, nevermind having the awareness and empathy to wish for the restoration of the erased universes, which ended up saving everyone from immediate destruction. | |
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"Timewaves" are the result of the change in history in the very loose film adaptation of A Sound of Thunder. | |
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Star Trek: Voyager: Another fine example of how one man's repeated attempts at changing the past to find the "perfect" timeline he accidentally erased leading to ever more disastrous consequences is the two-parter episode "Year of Hell" from the 4th season. Things are spiraling out of control, precisely because the timeship is based on the idea of Laplace's Demon which is contradicted by both Quantum Mechanics and Chaos Theory. He keeps erasing entire species from existence to restore his species to their former glory, only for unanticipated consequences (one species introduced antibodies that saved his from being decimated by a plague, another prevented some other species from conquering them, etc.) to leave his species still weak or actually worse off. In the end the original timeline can only be restored by destruction of the timeship (which had existed "outside time" while aboard centuries of subjective time passed), which Captain Janeway brings about by ramming it with the Voyager, destroying both ships in the process and "resetting" the timeline back one year. | |
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Inverted in The Time Machine (2002), wherein Alexander Hartdegen's repeated attempts to go back in time to save his fiancée Emma inevitably go wrong. Later, the Uber-Morlock explains that the reason he cannot save Emma is that her death was his prime motivation for building the time machine. | |
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Legends of Tomorrow: The existence of time traveling superheroes means that the Legends can never make the timeline exactly the way it originally was — it's always a case of Close-Enough Timeline. That being said, there are certain moments/events that they can never time travel to for fear of risking this, since they are so pivotal to shaping history, such as anything having to do with Jesus, including his crucifixion and eventual death. | |
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Charmed (1998): In "Centennial Charmed", Cole remakes reality in an attempt to get Phoebe back. In this altered timeline, fourth sister Paige was killed as a teenager which meant when Prue died there was no way to restore the Charmed Ones' Power of Three. As a result, there was nobody on the side of Good strong enough to defeat the Source of Evil and the world is now almost completely overrun by demons. Cole and Phoebe are still married, but she hates him and only stays to ensure he doesn't have Piper (the only sister she has left) killed. | |
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Though, from the point of view of the the actual overseer of the timelines, the Supreme Kai of Time Chronoa, Future Trunks' actions were ultimately for the best in the long run, and outright tells him that the good he has done outweighs the bad, whether it be intentional or otherwise, in contrast to the opinion of Goku Black and Future Zamasu, and that her only punishment for him causing a timeline split is to recruit him to the Time Patrol to keep more mallicious bad actors from altering the time stream further, though for Future Trunks, this isn't really a punishment since he enjoys his new job. | |
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In Captain Underpants and the Terrifying Return of Tippy Tinkletrousers the titular villain briefly time travels to the past to free himself from ice he'd accidentally trapped himself in, only to come back to the present and find it a ruined wasteland. While he's not entirely sure what he changed, the reader is informed of how this happened: the night he ended up traveling back to was the same night that George and Harold successfully managed to terrify a group of bullies into changing their ways, but since Tippy appeared in front of them in his time machine (which coincidentally looks like the ghost George and Harold made up), they ended up going insane instead. Mr. Krupp was blamed and swiftly fired; since he wasn't around for George and Harold to hypnotize into becoming Captain Underpants, the villains from the first three books went unopposed, ultimately destroying the world. Thankfully, Tippy manages to fix his mistake. | |
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Averted in Feng Shui, where the universe actively resists attempts to change it. To illustrate it, the sourcebook gives the classic example of a man going back in time to kill his own grandfather. If Johnny Fong goes back in time and kills his grandfather, he returns to the present to find that his name is Johnny Wong now, but nothing else has changed. In Feng Shui, world history bows to the whims of the people in control of the world's feng shui sites, and anything done by insignificant time travelers just gets corrected. | |
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Butterfly of Doom | |
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Directly referenced in the fist chapter of the first Code Lyoko novel, "The Butterfly at the Bottom of the Sea". The butterfly is the minuscule disturbance of a cable deep beneath the Sea of Japan, and the end result is XANA's revival and Aelita's memory loss. | |
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Butterfly of Doom / int_fb1f271c | type |
Butterfly of Doom | |
Butterfly of Doom / int_fb1f271c | comment |
In the Lilo & Stitch fanfic, Empire of the Pacific, Lilo and Stitch use Jumba's time machine to go back and prevent the deaths of Lilo's parents. However, doing so causing the duo to wind up in an alternate universe where the entire Pacific region has been taken over by an evil version of Stitch. As the story unfolds, we quickly find out that keeping Lilo's parents alive prevented her from ever meeting Stitch, since she never had a reason to visit the pet store where she met the blue alien. And we're reminded that Stitch was created for the sake of evil, and him never meeting Lilo also consequently meant that he was never taught how to be good. | |
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Butterfly of Doom / int_fdfc695c | type |
Butterfly of Doom | |
Butterfly of Doom / int_fdfc695c | comment |
Slayers Trilogy uses this a lot. In fact, the butterfly is the symbol of the Lord of Nightmares since it represents chaos. | |
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Butterfly of Doom / int_ff9ab17f | type |
Butterfly of Doom | |
Butterfly of Doom / int_ff9ab17f | comment |
Both mocked and utilized in Star Trek: The Next Generation by Q in "Tapestry". While changing the past would certainly alter one man's future, it's incredibly self-centered to think that changing one person would change everything. | |
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