Ret-Gone



""All memory of your existence will be wiped from reality. You will die, and no one will mourn.""

- Magic the Gathering, "Door to Nothingness" card

A character seems to vanish off the face of the earth. Sometimes people just disappear, but this is something more. People who should know about it aren't even sure who the person was. Photos look the same, but without them in. Their loved ones either don't exist at all, or are in love with someone else. They never existed. They're not just gone, they're Ret Gone.

Of course, it's hard to write stories about people who don't exist, so there is normally at least one person who remembers the disappeared character's life. Mostly, this will be someone close to the character, such as their friends or family (and it's often just one person) who will do their best to find evidence, while convincing themselves and others that they're not crazy.

Sometimes, without this character, the world is a notably different place, but sometimes, hardly anything has changed at all.

Occasionally, it'll be the character themselves, whose continued existence is the only evidence they've ever been alive. They may be Invisible to Normals, seeing what the world is like without them. Or they may be alive and well, just really, really annoyed. Cases like this can sometimes cause a Loss of Identity if the character fears that they will start to forget themselves.

Common methods of a Ret Gone include killing them off at youth, shunting them into an Alternate History, and removing them from a metaphysical book of history, or rewriting the book itself in-story, although there are plenty of other Applied Phlebotinum tricks. If we actually see the character vanish and become Ret Gone, then that character doubles as a Ripple Effect Indicator.

Named, of course, after the Retcon.

When some shadowy but non-supernatural force erases the evidence of someone's existence in a more mundane manner, they've been Un-Personed. When the writers decide to simply "forget" a character's existence, that's Chuck Cunningham Syndrome, when a Delayed Ripple Effect is used as a story device this will often be used to perform a sort of half-hearted Story Reset which may inadvertently 'remove' some characters from creation.

Keep in mind that doing this to Hitler never works.

As this is a Death Trope, expect spoilers. Compare Time Crash.

Anime

 * This is the fate of at the end of Part 6 of Jojo's Bizarre Adventure. By using his newfound power of  the universe loops back on itself and reality is reset. However, as he is killed before completing the loop, the universe snaps back into a slightly altered version, and  is nowhere to be seen.
 * In the end of the Clow Card arc of Cardcaptor Sakura, Sakura is threatened with something like this should she fail: no one will actually be gone, but everyone will forget that their most beloved person ever meant anything to them.
 * Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle and xxxHolic (also CLAMP series) are connected by a Ret-Gone in which of Tsubasa, the son of reincarnated in the past , gave up his existence in his home world for the  . In order to fill the gap this left in space-time, a new son (who had not previously existed in any world) was created for  ,  .   existence is therefore precarious and could be erased by   death or by the Tsubasa gang correcting the space-time disturbance. The point of Holic has been for   to develop connections to other people that will anchor him to existence when the endgame comes.
 * Additionally, this almost happens to the "twins" described above when their parents have a Critical Existence Failure upon the death of their creator, as when he dies, their parents technically never existed once again, just as they were retconned in originally. The twins end up making a Deal with the Devil just to continue having existed.
 * Also,  of xxxHoLic suffers this once she re-dies. She actually died centuries ago, but a Reality Warper told reality to ignore that for a while. When she sells that "reality ignore my death" effect in a Deal with the Devil of her own, all of a sudden, to most people it is as if she had never kept on living for hundreds of years.
 * Shakugan no Shana has bad guys which consume people's power of existence. In order to prevent a shock to the reality fabric, placeholders ("torches") that resembles the original person are left behind. "torches" slowly burn out, becoming increasingly lethargic while all traces of their existence begin to disappear. At the beginning of the series, Yuji desperately, but futilely, tries to keep a classmate-turned-torch alive and continuously involved with their friends, but their attention inevitably drifts, until she finally fades away.
 * Happened to Chikane from Kannazuki no Miko as requirement for the save-the-world ritual... well, until The Power of Love and The Promise shook hands with each other to Screw Destiny while subverting the Bait and Switch Lesbians trope that anime writers loved so much back then.
 * The Movie of Haruhi Suzumiya -- The Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya—centers around about what you'd expect.
 * Yu-Gi-Oh! GX:
 * The end of the Revolutionary Girl Utena manga has Utena erased from the memories of the entire cast, with the exception of Touga, who mourns her passing worse because he cannot share his mourning with anyone. Only just then, Chuchu dresses up like Utena, and then Anthy walks by, now dressed in a boy's uniform like Utena had worn, so obviously some things have changed - and, as she says, Utena is not gone, but out there somewhere.
 * Same happens in the anime series (minus Chuchu) and Anthy sets off to find Utena again, implying that she wasn't so much "erased" as "moved away" from the other characters' world, which signifies her transition from childhood to adulthood.
 * At the end of Serial Experiments Lain.
 * Pretty Cure:
 * In Futari wa Pretty Cure, the three Seeds have this effect, but the evidence was pretty much all faked in the first place—each sprang into existence at the beginning of the same episode where his/her Ret Gone happened—so it's justified as a non-lethal case of No Ontological Inertia.
 * In Futari wa Pretty Cure Max Heart, this briefly happens to Hikari, but it's a milder form, as Nagisa and Honoka are able to snap people out of it merely by mentioning her.
 * In Futari wa Pretty Cure Splash Star, when Michiru and Kaoru die, only Saki and Mai remember they ever existed, as Saki discovers when she tries to tell her sister Minori that Kaoru (who Minori was close to) is gone.
 * Tenchi In Tokyo,
 * This is the favored tactic of Enfant in Madlax, who can effectively manipulate all information channels on the planet and, thus, erase all traces of anyone's existence, like they did e.g. with Maclay Marini.
 * Higurashi no Naku Koro ni has this happen in Rei, since
 * Happens to ChibiUsa in both versions of Sailor Moon that she is in; in the anime it's due to  in the manga it's due to  . She also gets retgoned after   In the manga, contary to standard Grandfather Clauses, ChibiUsa is able to survive for an unusual amount of time after the point where her birth is made techincaly impossible. The future just becomes very stormy and unstable. In the anime version of this she's almost entirely retgoned however, vanishing from photos. The Sailor Senshi still seem to remember her however, they just can't tell things that are supposed to show her have changed.
 * Chibi-Usa survives because when Galaxia kills Mamoru, she just takes his Sailor Crystal. At that point, it's still possible for him to be revived . However once he's thrown into the Cauldron, he's pretty much dead until Sailor Moon defeats Chaos.
 * There's a fanfic where Usagi gives birth to a different child in place of ChibiUsa. Said child, after over nine hundred years of living in the shadow of a sister who never existed, eventually manages to  Interestingly, this is also one of the few fics to suggest that Usagi would be upset by this situation.
 * In the current story arc of Kinnikuman Nisei, set in the past, Brocken Jr. loses his right arm in a match, thus removing his trademark Red Rain of Berlin attack. In the next match, Jade attempts the move and is shocked to find he can't do it. Looking at a photo shows that Brocken Jr.'s hand is now a hook, therefore Brocken could never have taught the move to Jade. After some time for Jade's mind to adapt to his new memories, he now knows a leg-based version of the move: Brocken's Repatriation.
 * in Clannad. Gradually, everyone forgets that she's been running around the school lately and becomes unable to see or remember her. Eventually, only Tomoya remembers her.
 * Bleach  Still, she's essentially Ret-Gone. Because she's a   she's probably never going to be brought up in canon again, meaning she's never going to be re-introduced to the cast.
 * Also,
 * This is essentially the power of  in Saiyuki, as he shows Sanzo first-hand: literally, 'the power of nothingness'. It also extends to things, though, not just people, but the effect it has on people is what makes it fit the trope.
 * In an episode of Kirby Right Back At Ya!, no one was able to recognize Escargoon when the monster Erasem entered his body, although he never actually disappeared.
 * In Nabari no Ou, this is 's main goal. He.
 * In Puella Magi Madoka Magica, this happens to
 * Time Stranger Kyoko has this happen to the titular character.  She gets better.
 * In Darker than Black,
 * The fate of Kanshuu's victim on World Embryo.
 * Whether it belongs here or elsewhere (there IS an anime though I've not seen it) the Visual Novel One: To the Radiant Season has this as the major plot. You are disappearing from everyone's mind and vanishing from the Earth. The only thing that can bring you back is if you've made a connection with a girl enough for her to remember you.
 * One Piece:
 * An incomplete version occurs in the Dressrosa arc courtesy the powers of the Hobby-Hobby Fruit wielded by Sugar. Her powers allow her to transform anyone she touches into LivingToys, which she can then place under her control. A side-effect of this power is all memory of who she transforms is removed from other people. Physical evidence, such as written reports or statues, still remain.
 * It's frighteningly easy for Ain - from the 12th movie - to RetGone a foe. Her Devil Fruit power can make someone 12 years younger with each use (and she does not have to touch a victim to use it), and can potentially erase a person from existence via multiple uses by reversing them past their birth. While she's never done so on-screen, she tends to use it as a threat after displaying what it can do. And it works. Even the Straw Hats, who usually don't fear death, backed off after she reduced Nami to an eight-year-old and explained what would happen if she did it again.
 * An incomplete version occurs in the Dressrosa arc courtesy the powers of the Hobby-Hobby Fruit wielded by Sugar. Her powers allow her to transform anyone she touches into LivingToys, which she can then place under her control. A side-effect of this power is all memory of who she transforms is removed from other people. Physical evidence, such as written reports or statues, still remain.
 * It's frighteningly easy for Ain - from the 12th movie - to RetGone a foe. Her Devil Fruit power can make someone 12 years younger with each use (and she does not have to touch a victim to use it), and can potentially erase a person from existence via multiple uses by reversing them past their birth. While she's never done so on-screen, she tends to use it as a threat after displaying what it can do. And it works. Even the Straw Hats, who usually don't fear death, backed off after she reduced Nami to an eight-year-old and explained what would happen if she did it again.

Card Games

 * In Magic: The Gathering, the card Door to Nothingness does this, according to its flavor text (see page quote above).
 * So does the card Aether Snap: "May you wake to find you were only ever a dream"
 * You can actually do this to yourself with the Pact cycle, flavor-wise. These involve borrowing mana from the future. When it's time to send mana into the past, if you can't, you erase yourself from existence.
 * Apparently it happened to Zhalfir. Teferi "phased it out" (transported it to the future) to prepare for the Phyrexian invasion, and when it was time for it to "phase in", it couldn't.
 * In Chrononauts, this is done with the aptly-named card "Your Parents Never Met". The chosen player's Secret Identity is revealed, and they must trade it in for a new one.
 * Pre-Crisis, Supergirl fought a villain named Black Flame whose plan to defeat her was to trick the heroine into attempting this. Claiming to be a descendant of Supergirl from the future, Black Flame committed a few random acts of vandalism, and then "generously" let her "ancestor" see archived recordings of the future, where she ruled as a cruel and murderous tyrant. In truth, the archives were fake, and Black Flame was a citizen of the shrunken city of Kandor; she had hoped that Supergirl would expose herself to gold kryptonite to erase her powers to prevent any descendants from having them - which, of course, would render her helpless while not getting rid of Black Flame at all. There was one flaw in the villain's plan -
 *  X-Men: Legacy introduced a character named "Forget-Me-Not", a member of the X-Men whose mutant power made everyone forget he existed the second his existence drifted from their minds. (That's right, this guy is a member of the core team of mainstream Marvel, and has been so since M-Day at least; his heroic actions include fighting the Brood, acting as a soldier during the Age of X, and saving the other members from death, enslavement, and many other horrid fates.) He was used tongue-in-cheek to explain why certain bad guys tend to have something happen to their super awesome weapons at the last moment and things like that. (Why did the team luck out and escape that death trap that seemed flawless? Forget-Me-Not sabotaged it. How could they have survived those rigged explosions that were strong enough to vaporize the island? Forget-Me-Not disarmed it. He seems to be the catch-all way to describe any confusing Deus Ex Machina in the Mutant Books.) The only one who remembered him was Xavier, who put in an "alarm clock" telepathically to remind him of his existence and the guy took it hard when Xavier died during Avengers vs. X-Men

Comic Books
"Michael: Wait! Others? What -- Uh -- What do most people choose? Do they forget, or-- (For a moment, he thinks that he sees a twitch of a smile under that burlap hood.) Hanged Man: No one forgets. No one. Good night, Michael Tenicek. Sleep well."
 * Towards the end of Crisis on Infinite Earths, several universes have been subjected to this. Survivors find that in the new universe, nobody remembers that they ever existed. Those characters
 * There was a truly heartbreaking Christmas special a couple years after the Crisis where the ghostly superhero Deadman is wondering why he bothers going on when a young woman, who can see him, tells him: "We don't do it for the glory. We don't do it for the recognition... We do it because it needs to be done. Because if we don't, no one else will. And we do it even if no one knows what we've done. Even if no one knows we exist. Even if no one remembers we ever existed." Then she disappears into the night, but not before Deadman asks her name.
 * The immortal Hamed Ali was literally erased from existence in Animal Man. His lines became sketchier, he lost his color, he became nothing more than rough pencil lines and design notes, and disappeared into nothing at all.
 * The subject of "The Nearness of You," a bittersweet issue of Astro City in which a man keeps dreaming of a woman he's never met and all her intimate details. It turns out that she was his wife and they were deeply in love, but a supervillain has just made an attempt to control all reality. He was thwarted (it's strongly implied that a Crisis Crossover took place while nobody was watching), but the heroes couldn't restore time exactly how it was before. Her grandparents never met in this new history, and so the man's wife never existed. The man has Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory thanks to their strong love. The Hanged Man (a very powerful Astro City hero) appears to the man, explains the situation, and then gives him a choice: he can either have all his memories of her erased so that he'll no longer be haunted, or he can continue to remember the perfect, pure love of his life—knowing full well that he'll never get to experience it. The man chooses to remember. When the Hanged Man excuses himself and says that he has others to visit, the man asks:


 * Also in Astro City, one of Samaritan's powers (as well as his nemesis Infidel) is immunity to becoming Ret-Gone. Samaritan has already averted the grim future from which he came, and as a result he was never born (an automated taco stand was built where his house was supposed to be.) Once, Infidel accidentally wrote everything out of continuity except for him and Samaritan, at which point they realized that it was pointless for them to keep trying to kill each other.
 * In fact, two of the stories featuring Samaritan strongly hint that the reason why he's been obsessively doing good acts ever since the success of his first mission is to make up for deleting the loved ones of his original timeline. Talk about Survivor's Guilt!
 * This was the origin of Waverider. In a dark future ruled by a tyrant named Monarch, scientist Matthew Ryder time-traveled to the past to defeat him, suffering an accident that turned him into the time-travelling superhero. Waverider ultimately prevented Monarch from conquering the world, but in doing so history was altered, so that Matt Ryder never went to the past and never became Waverider. However Waverider still existed, and eventually joined forces with the Matt Ryder of the new timeline to form the Linear Men.
 * Linda Park, the wife of the third Flash, was Ret Goned by a supervillain at her wedding, just before vows were exchanged. The groom found himself at home, confused and vaguely aware that something was missing, but unable to figure out what it was. Eventually (a year and a half later) she was restored to her proper place and the ceremony resumed.
 * Although Bart Allen (Impulse) could still see and remember her. Of course, his grasp on reality is a little off.
 * In the She Hulk story "Time of Her Life", the Time Variance Authority's method of execution is the Retroactive Cannon, AKA the RetCan, which does this to anyone shot with it. Including, in that very story, Knight Man and Dr. Rocket. Who, you ask? Well, isn't that the point...
 * In a X-Men storyline, the New Mutants (a group of teenage mutants being trained as the next generation of X-Men) were RetGoned by a Sufficiently Advanced Alien called the Beyonder. The only one to remember their existence was Kitty Pryde, who had a magical connection to one of the New Mutants that even the Beyonder's godlike powers couldn't erase.
 * Neil Gaiman seems to be a fan of this. In addition to Neverwhere, he also used this in the Sandman arc "World's End".
 * The situation with Spider-Man's children, if any, was always pretty vaguely defined and caught up in Continuity Snarl. All of them are eliminated wholesale as a result of the One More Day storyline; his now-impossible future daughter even (somehow) shows up to chew him out for being an idiot and taking a Deal with the Devil just before he goes through with it. Fortunately, she's still alive and starring in her own comic in an Alternate Continuity.
 * Another Spider-Man example: "retcon bombs" are the preferred weapon of Hobgoblin 2211, the daughter of that era's Spider-Man. Their first victim is her boyfriend, who helped her escape from her VR prison in the first place.
 * A one-shot 1970's Spidey enemy was Drom the Backwards Man, who was continually growing younger. When Drom gets killed, Spidey realizes that by the nature of Drom's affliction, all memory that he ever existed will probably vanish as well. So Peter narrates a record of the incident on a tape recorder for himself. Just as he finishes the recording, he forgets what he had been talking about.
 * In the Marvel Universe this is the stated purpose of the Ultimate Nullifier - a piece of KirbyTech which will erase the chosen target from history, completely. With the unfortunate side-effect that if the target is imperfectly visualized in the user's mind, the user is the one who's erased. Of course how you can determine if a firing succeeded or failed...
 * Marvel Adventures changes the effect of the weapon completely: it only nullifies differences in power, so that anyone can beat anyone, which is why it can be used to defeat Galactus.
 * Donna Troy's (again) Retcon-ed origin involved her being cursed by a character called the Dark Angel to live a life full of pain and suffering, with her life being restarted and erased from the world's memory—again—when Donna was at her lowest. (In the most recent case, the death of her ex-husband and son, coupled with the loss of her powers). Hippolyta (the Wonder Woman at the time) & her Teen Titans teammate Wally West (The Flash) remembered her due to being outside the timestream when it was rewritten, and Donna was restored to her previous form, complete with powers (because they used Wally's memories to restore her, and he remembered her best with her Wonder Girl powers).
 * The tragic part turned out to be that Wally didn't have much memory or knowledge of the (well-written and positive for both of them)relationship she had had with Green Lantern Kyle Rayner before her latest Ret-Gone - and so of course she came back with only the vaguest memories of her time with him. Then again, that could just be the writers playing with the readers, like the Magnificent/not-so-Magnificent Bastards they tend to be...
 * A later version of The Dark Angel tried to do this to Post-Crisis Supergirl by trapping her in a horrifying illusion without her knowledge. If Supergirl had mentally, physically, or spiritually broken, Dark Angel would have had the authority to erase her. Supergirl survived the test, but Dark Angel decided to erase her anyway, only to be stopped by her boss, The Monitor.
 * In Legion of Super-Heroes, the need to get Mon-El out—because he was written out of Superman's existence—resulted in a confrontation between the Time Trapper and Mon-El. The Time Trapper explained he was behind Mon-El's origin and Mon-El would retroactively cease to exist if he killed him. Mon-El declares that other heroes will arise in his place, and kills him. Fade to white.
 * DC's second Chronos removed himself from history, since this was the only way to prevent his adoptive mother being killed in a car crash. Due to the nature of his powers, he continues to exist, but no one remembers him
 * In Marvel Comics, the Sentry's entire backstory is that he got Ret-Gone'd, which is why nobody remembers the character from Silver Age comics, even though he was active and present then.
 * Speaking of Marvel, Stryfe is forced to keep Cyclops and Jean alive so that he can be born.
 * Rayek in Elf Quest: Kings of the Broken Wheel wants to take the Palace forward in time and merge it with its former self before it went back in time. This, he claims, will erase the entire history of the elves, trolls and preservers, except for those who happen to be in the Palace when the paradox doesn't happen. Confused? In the event, he does take the Palace forward, leaving behind a whole bunch of elves and trolls who are afraid they'll suddenly cease to exist at some point.
 * This is one of the higher-end abilities of Darkseid's Omega Beams in New Gods.
 * This would have happened to Chase in Runaways had he sacrificed himself to the Gibborim to save Gertrude. There would be no trace or memory that he ever existed.
 * In the conclusion of the original Spider-Woman comic series, this was supposed to happen to Spider Woman. After being unable to return her soul to her body, she requested that her friend Magnus casts a spell that makes everyone forget that she ever existed. In the end... the spell was faulty, and she's Back from the Dead.
 * Animal Man gave us Comic Book Limbo - a space where all forgotten comics characters goes. As long as they are there, no one will remember them, and everybody will regain their memories abouth them, when writers will drag them from this terrible place and put in their stories.
 * In the final issues of Shade the Changing Man, Shade (and Milligan) attempted to invert this, and remove Kathy's tragic backstory . It made for an anticlimactic ending, as Shade's personality had come full circle to the socially awkward idealist he was at the beginning, the final page left hanging on his clumsy attempts to reconcile with a woman who no longer had a history with him.
 * As revealed in Justice League Dark, it didn't work. Shade's creation isn't really Kathy, and Shade has gotten so screwed-up as a result, he's no longer sure if there was ever a real Kathy.
 * In a Marvel What If issue, a hero team calling themselves the Avengers formed in the 50s, rather than the 60s as is canon in the main Marvel Universe. In Avengers Forever, Wasp and Captain Marvel (from the present and future Avengers teams, respectively) meet these Avengers, much to their confusion, as they know damn well the team never existed in their timeline, and this is supposed to still be their timeline. The discrepancy is explained by the arrival of Immortus, who wipes out the standing section of time (nearly taking Marvel and Wasp with it) in order to prevent a confrontation between Earth and the Skrull Empire, who had one of its agents impersonating Not-Yet-President Nixon. The now nonexistent Avengers team was later resurrected and reinstated in their place in the 50s as a different team, known as the G-Men, who later became the Agents of Atlas. Phew.
 * One comic I don't remember the name of (appeared in the Swedish edition of The Phantom): a teenage time traveller is hiding in the present day, trying to avoid futuristic robots that want to kidnap him (because he knows of their existence). When the robots find out where (or rather, when) he is, they try to zap him into their time, but they keep getting the wrong kid... and every time, everyone forgets the victim's existence, as though they never existed. The only ones who remember is the time traveller, and the normal kid protagonist (due to some Phlebotinum).
 * Implied in Fables. The Jack of Fables and Fables crossover even has the villain doing this to Little Black Sambo; after Revise had more or less done this to him by censoring his myth.
 * Invoked once by Doctor Strange—to clear his schedule so that he could chase down and defeat a mystical enemy, he cast a spell which made the entire world believe that he had died years ago, and that the physical man they saw was a harmless occult expert named "Stephen Sanders."

Film

 * It's a Wonderful Life, and all the other stories inspired by it.
 * The movie The Forgotten: Telly holds on to memories of her young son who died in a plane crash, and goes through therapy to help her cope. Only shortly after the story begins, her therapist tells her that her son never existed, but was made up by her after a miscarriage. Telly frantically tries to prove that she's not crazy, but every single person who ought to know her son has forgotten him, and every scrap of evidence is missing or destroyed.
 * It's implied that this happens in the Back to The Future movies when history is changed. The first features a photograph which gradually loses photographees.
 * In Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare, Freddy's most recent victims are erased from existence and from most people's collective memories, apparently a side effect of his growing power.
 * The Butterfly Effect: The director's cut ending.
 * Along with the implication that
 * The indie sci-fi film Ghosts of Hamilton Street has this happening to an everyday man. The people in his life are vanishing in reverse chronological order—first his recent acquaintances, then co-workers and finally his oldest friends—and he's the only one who notices the difference.
 * In In the Mouth of Madness, Sutter Cane deletes all memory of Linda Styles once she has completed her role in his plot.
 * In the French film La moustache, a man decides to shave off his mustache of many years, only to be disappointed when no one notices. The thing is, when he points it out, everyone - including his wife - is adamant that he's never had any facial hair. His quest to find the truth - whether he's crazy or at the centre of a conspiracy - endangers his marriage.
 * At the end of Donnie Darko, Donnie travels back in time to eliminate the tangent universe  His very existence   by several main characters he's met since,
 * Happens in Meet the Robinsons when Lewis wipes Doris from existence by
 * In the film vs. of Voyage of the Dawn Treader, the spell to make one beautiful (which in the book is implied to be a Be Careful What You Wish For) takes an even more sinister turn. Lucy wishes to look like Susan and finds that she is Susan—in a timeline where Lucy never existed. Among other consequences, she and her brothers never went to Narnia. Luckily, Aslan intervenes.
 * The German film Reconstruction does this with the protagonist. After certain point in the narrative, he is erased not only from the memory of his friends and family, but also is left with no home (the house where he lived doesn't properly exist). Obviously, the story becomes highly symbolical after that happens, with the possibility of some, most or all events in his story not being real. One of the most radical possible scenarios is that The movie plays with the idea of love itself being an ilusion.
 * Invoked in the Terminator movies, with SkyNet attempting to do this to John Connor, then the rebels attempting to do this to SkyNet. It doesn't actually happen, though, ever. Even Terminator 2 subverts it in the next movie.
 * In the Apocalypse film series movie Tribulation, Eileen Canboro (Margot Kidder) is mysteriously erased from Calvin Canboro's picture of his siblings, though Tom Canboro clearly remembers her. Of course, Eileen is only erased because she was Caught Up in the Rapture and Calvin has accepted the Mark of the Beast, causing him to forget her existence.
 * Earlier in the movie, Tom Canboro finds out that a fellow police officer who he knows is a Christian is not listed in the police department's records after the Rapture.
 * The entire premise of . Whenever the ghost kills one of the protagonist's friends, they not only die but also get completely erased from reality, so none of their other friends or family remember them (also ). By the end of the movie, the protagonist's family has her committed because of her constant rantings about witnessing the horrible deaths of those closest to her — people that, as far as the family knows, have never existed.
 * A version of this is in the movie Flight Plan. The main character is made to think she's the only one who remembers her daughter's existence,
 * Done in The Net, where hackers erase a woman from reality. With hacking.

Folk Lore

 * A popular Urban Legend, usually referred to as "The Vanishing Lady" or "The Vanishing Hotel Room", tells of a woman who stayed at a hotel with her ill mother. The daughter goes out to get medicine for her mother, but returns to find her mother and the room she was staying in no longer exist. She asks the hotel workers for help, but they claim to have no memory of her mother. There are two endings to the story. In the first, the frantic daughter is thrown out of the hotel, never to see her mother again. In some versions, this is followed by her going insane and being committed to an insane asylum. In the second ending, it's revealed the mother had died of the Black Plague while the daughter was out and that her death had been covered up to avoid a city-wide panic. Of course, there's a Plot Hole in this ending. If the authorities had wanted to avoid a plague outbreak, why didn't they quarantine the daughter and everyone else who had come into contact with the mother? A particularly cruel variation is to use both endings, so that the daughter ends up committed and only the audience learns what happened to the mother. The story is frequently set during the 1889 Paris Exposition with the mother and daughter portrayed as British tourists. The legend is the basis for the following fictional works:
 * The 1950 film So Long at the Fair, which replaces the mother with a brother and . Jean Simmons plays the woman and Dirk Bogarde plays the obligatory male hero who helps her solve the mystery.
 * The episode "Into Thin Air" of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, . In the opening of the episode, Hitch says that his film The Lady Vanishes is also based on this legend, though, if so, it's pretty loosely.
 * Alvin Schwartz's Scary Stories series includes a version of this story titled "Maybe You Will Remember".

Literature
""But one night, me and John got really drunk and we sat around telling Todd Brinkmeyer stories, real stories, stories that happened but didn't happen. I think of his face and sometimes I can see it, and it's like a dream you can't quite remember the next morning. And I go back and go over the chain of events and there's places, holes where I know Todd should be.""
 * In the Thursday Next series, starting in Lost In A Good Book, Thursday's husband Landen Parke-Laine gets erased from history through time travel, despite attempts to stop this. The Chronoguard then hold his existence hostage unless Thursday does a task for them.
 * This has already happened to Thursday's father, although because he's an experienced Chronoguard himself, this doesn't prevent him popping up on occasion to give Thursday advice. They've wiped him from history, but they haven't actually stopped him existing yet (although he now has no first name). Don't think about this too hard, and especially don't wonder how Thursday can exist.
 * Balefire, in the Wheel of Time series. When it hits you, it kills you in the (recent) past, with the amount of "backburn" being based on the power of the spell. Everything you did in the past few seconds or minutes never actually happened. This affects physical reality but not the memory of those still around to witness the events, leading to much confusion as people remember dying but are clearly not dead.
 * In Alastair Reynolds' Revelation Space books, this is a risk of messing around with Faster-Than-Light Travel. One alien hints that entire civilizations have been erased this way, and that's only the ones who left evidence behind.
 * Redemption Arc shows a variation of this. In both cases, the only person who remembers the missing person being there at the time of the event was there in the room with them. However, these people didn't vanish from time. A look in the records showed that they did exist, but died years earlier and if they hadn't died, they very likely would have ended up working on the project that they are claimed to have vanished during. This implies that the witness, or at least their memories of the person, was transplanted into an alternate universe where that person was already dead.
 * In the Dragonlance novel Dragons of Summer Flame, those who die while fighting the forces of All-Father Chaos are eliminated completely from existence, including the memories of the entire world. The only evidence they were ever there at all is the empty clothing and suits of armor left behind. Their method of doing so? All they need is for you to see them, and listen to them for a few seconds, so their words can steal your will to exist away. Or touching them will do that too. Chaos The All-Father was not a nice person, and his creations express this very well.
 * In a later book, a group of shadow-wights survive by feeding off the memories of a small village, rather then wiping the villager from existence, allowing the wights to survive indefinitely with their victims none the wiser.
 * A short story titled, appropriately, Gone, describes the fate of a group of treasure hunters who go to an island populated only by shadow wights hoping to find loot. The story is told by way of a diary, with the author repeatedly getting confused (at one point IN THE MIDDLE OF WRITING AN ENTRY, as the person he was writing about gets erased at that very moment) because his past entries mention people who were never there. The final entry is made by the last survivor, who thinks that the entire diary is actually a work of fiction someone wrote as a present for him.
 * All Travelers in The Pendragon Adventure are Ret Gone from their specific worlds after they take their first trip to another territory. They have no histories, no traces of evidence, no sign they ever existed. The people they knew still remember them, but there are no physical records of them and their journals serve as the only other proof of existence. Bobby Pendragon gets this in full, including having his house and family vanishing. Though the fact that Travelers are Ret Gone has helped the Travelers a few times in discovering that someone is Saint Dane.
 * This happens in the anthology book connected to The Black Jewels trilogy. The character Saetan wipes out an entire people in response to his son's death. However, an incredibly minor character, an inn owner, remembers that a merchant from that island was there, but him and everything the man had brought with simply weren't there anymore. Also, his wife, Heketeah, the one actually responsible for the death, remembers them and is utterly terrified at the power it takes to simply erase a whole people. Saetan's friend goes to find the island only to find it's completely gone.
 * At the end of Madeleine L'Engle's A Swiftly Tilting Planet.
 * One of Adam's powers in Good Omens.
 * Happens to the protagonists in the book Superstition.
 * In the Discworld novel Mort, after the title character refuses to collect the soul of a princess who should have died, the universe attempts to carry on as if she had died, causing much confusion as the citizen begin mourning the loss of someone though they don't know who or why. Said princess has to constantly remind people in the same room that she's present.
 * Later, an 'interface' forms, a bubble on the world (which only the magically gifted or DEATH can see) centred on the princess, where the inside is the changed timeline and the outside is 'correct' history in which the princess is dead. The pressure of history causes the bubble to shrink and shrink until the changed timeline would never have existed.
 * This is the main power possessed by the shadow-men in John Dies at the End, though the erasure isn't perfect:
 * This is the main power possessed by the shadow-men in John Dies at the End, though the erasure isn't perfect:


 * Robert A. Heinlein's novel The Number of the Beast has this happen to the heroes. Fortunately, the reason it happens is also the means of their escape—a Time Travel device that allows access to The Multiverse and establishes that they live in a Mutually Fictional Massively Multiplayer Crossover. Within the work's Recursive Canon, a rival "Author" deleted them from their home universe in an act of revenge.
 * The protagonists try this on Hitler in Stephen Fry's Making History. It backfires.
 * The Goosebumps book "The Cuckoo Clock of Doom" involves the protagonist being forcibly transported back through his own life by the clock. He manages to find it again and return to the present before ceasing to exist, but realises that his Annoying Younger Sibling was now never born due to a flaw in the clock. He considers going back and attempting to fix things, but it's left ambiguous.
 * In the short story "The Edge of the World" by Michael Swannick, three high school kids, one girl, two boys, full of hormones and teenage angst, blow off school one day and decide to go look at the edge of the world, which is not far from the American military base where they live. While there they look at caverns carved into the cliffs by ancient monks. They each make a wish - and one boy wishes he had never been born. They get their wishes. They only trace left by the boy is a quickly fading dream-like memory in the mind of the girl.
 * A variant in the Young Wizards series: If a wizard breaks the Wizards' Oath, he loses his wizardry and everyone in the world forgets he was ever a wizard.
 * In "The Time Of Yore" by Michail Uspensky the main hero, a slapdash bloke named Jihar, runs up to his neck in debts and finally pawns his very fame to a greedy merchant. Due to interference of dark magic, the due-bill has this power: nobody in the whole world recognises him anymore, all his heroic achievments are attributed to the merchant, and even the books written about Jihar are changed.
 * Sweet wee Cassie from Animorphs considers preventing a person from being born to be more humane than killing them. It wouldn't normally have been a problem for the poor host who would have been infested against his will, but she happened to have a time machine at the time she came to this revelation. Sorry John.
 * In Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus, it is eventually revealed
 * This happens to Kahlan in the last three novels in the Sword of Truth series. Richard is the only one who remembers her, including herself; Kahlan, in an interesting twist, is rendered amnesiac and is kept as a scullery maid by those who Ret Goned her.
 * The end of Dream Called Time: end up in an alternate timeline where they never existed, due to . They're fine—although, obviously, there's no record of them aside from a few people's ripple-effect-proof memories and the fact that they're, well, there...

Live Action TV
"Kryten: I don't understand. The three of us are here as normal. Cat: The four of us! The four of us! Can't you see me? Can't you feel me? He shakes Lister's shoulder. Lister: Look out, we're getting some buffeting!"
 * In Star Trek: The Next Generation episode Remember Me, this happened to the entire crew of the Enterprise; only Dr. Crusher remembered the missing people. This leads to a rather odd scene in which only Picard and Crusher were left on the ship, and he insisted that it made sense that they could run the ship with only two people - then the computer insists after Picard vanishes that she has always run the entire Enterprise alone. Only after everyone was gone did Dr Crusher figure out that . And it's shrinking.
 * And, of course, this is also Q's main threat to Picard in the first (and last) episode: To wipe humanity itself out so completely that it will never have existed.
 * Yesterday's Enterprise, Tasha Yar finds out she shouldn't exist because she died in the "real" timeline. The episode causes a Time Paradox when Yar "sacrifices" her life to restore the timeline - but later it's learned she was taken prisoner and gave birth to Sela.
 * Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: "Children of Time" (the crew find out they started a colony 200 years in the past and to prevent the non-existence of several thousand people they agree to go back and strand themselves. However, Odo, having lived those 200 years and was distressed that Kira was going to die in this timeline from some severe injury. So he fixed the Defiant and causes the non-existence of those thousands of people.
 * The same plot, with a research facility substituted for the ship and virtual reality goggles substituted for a Negative Space Wedgie, appeared in the Eureka episode "Games People Play." Much like the TNG episode, it comes down to the ludicrous yet creepy statement that the population of Eureka is "two."
 * In the Voyager two parter "Year of Hell" the villain had a weapon that could push matter out of the spacetime continuum. This meant any starship or civilization that got hit ended up never existing..
 * An episode of Stargate SG-1 did it again with a community of people living under a shield dome on an otherwise hellish planet: they all had devices on their heads which wired them into a central mainframe to retrieve knowledge from it. However, the shield was losing power, so the computer slowly shrank it over the years, controlling the excess population in their sleep and sending them out to die in the boiling atmosphere outside, and then editing the remaining people's memories so they thought the town had always been that size and didn't remember the dead ones.
 * Similar to the Torchwood and Buffy examples below, SG-1 also inverts this in an episode where a new character who the audience doesn't remember appears.
 * In Continuum, Cameron Mitchell didn't exist because
 * Alice: What Mel fears has happened to him in the 1983 episode, "Sweet, Erasable Mel" (after Vera accidentally erases his financial records from his new computer). Things temporarily get worse for Mel when he and Alice go to the bank and try to resolve the issue – the banker accidentally presses the "delete" key, not only double-erasing Mel but the banker's information as well! (The banker famously sings, mournfully, "I don't exist!")
 * The Dukes of Hazzard: Coy and Vance, the "replacement Dukes," after John Schneider and Tom Wopat returned to the series in their original roles as Bo and Luke. While the departures of actors Byron Cherry and Christopher Mayer were explained – they were leaving to "tend to a sick relative" – and there was one quick scene with all four Dukes before Coy and Vance left, the "fake Dukes" (as they were sometimes known to fans) are never referred to again, and it is as though they never existed.
 * Twilight Zone: "And When the Sky Was Opened". Three astronauts return from a trip into space and disappear one at a time. As each disappears, only one of the astronauts remembers that the others existed, until he disappears too, then the spacecraft they returned in vanishes as well. Every time someone disappears, the audience sees that day's newspaper, saying something along these lines each time: "Three men return from space", "Two men return from space", "Lone man returns from space", And something about a "miracle birth".
 * One of the episodes of the 2002 Twilight Zone called "Upgrade" was about a woman who wished for a perfect family. She gets her wish, and her children are replaced by more perfect children. However, eventually she is replaced.
 * Nowhere Man has this as the series premise. In the end Veil discovers
 * While passing through pockets of "unreality" where things change at random, the Red Dwarf crew of four pass through one and then start wondering what happened. They're in an unreality pocket but nothing has changed, the ship is normal and all three of them are normal. Meanwhile the Cat is sitting in the front seat, invisible and inaudible, constantly trying to correct them. Luckily for him this doesn't last long; once they exit the pocket he becomes "real" again and the others forget that they ever forgot him.

"Salem: Ah, the days of Bobunk..."
 * The Inquisitor from the eponymous episode does this to people he deems unworthy. He mostly completes this with Lister and Kryten but is stopped by a Stable Time Loop. According to Lister, he programs the Inquisitor's gauntlet to backfire and do this to the Inquisitor himself.
 * In The Sarah Jane Adventures, Sarah Jane gets eradicated, with Maria the only person with any memory of her. And later, Maria gets eradicated, with only her father remembering her. It nearly goes one step further.
 * At the start of the second series of Primeval, Claudia Brown has never existed, though this was foreshadowed. There were other differences, such as that they had a new base, and the identical Jenny Lewis existed.
 * At the end of S3 it is revealed that
 * This is a standard side effect of entering Neverwhere.
 * In The Lost Room, this happens to room 10 of the Sunshine motel, as well as everything in it, in the same event that gave all of the objects inside it extraordinary powers. After the event, the room was never built and the motel owners don't remember it ever existing. It can only be accessed by using one of the objects, the key to it, to open a door (any door).
 * The 4400 once did this to its title characters (all 4400 of them). In one episode, appeared to do it (again) to all but one of them, but it turned out that it was really a dream world created by said character.
 * On Angel, Angel has memories of his son Connor removed from all of his friends minds, so that only he remembers Connor ever existed. The difference here is that Connor still exists, just not in the minds of the supporting cast. Their modified memories of what happened the previous seasons are never fully explained, even after certain characters get their memories back.
 * Inverted on Buffy. Dawn popped into existence, leaving the viewers scratching their heads for a while since all the characters acted as if Dawn had always been with them. It turns out that Dawn is fabricated and all the characters have false memories. Just what their memories of the first four seasons were changed to is never specified, but they all remember Dawn being there alongside them the entire time.
 * A number of the official comics set during the first four seasons have Dawn as a character, with notes attached saying, in effect, "Yeah, she didn't exist back then, but everyone remembers her being there, so..."
 * In the Star Trek: Voyager two-parter "Year of Hell", the episode's villain, Annorax, has a weapon ship that can erase entire civilizations from history.
 * The irony being that the original firing of the weapon caused the villain's Necromantic quest: by completely annihilating his people's enemies, they lost a vital immunity they had gained due to contact with them, causing huge numbers of deaths by disease, and altering the timeline dramatically. Just firing the weapon ONCE caused horrible changes in the timeline and basically removed all of his crew, and a huge amount of their civilization, from existence. How does he decide to fix it? BY FIRING IT OVER AND OVER AGAIN.
 * He also tries to tell Chakotay that temporal changes must be done carefuly, such as when Chakotay suggests erasing a comet that resulted in the Voyager being redirected to this area. Apparently, this comet is responsible for all life in this part of space via Panspermia. Erasing it would be bad.
 * The fact that Annorax is played by Red Forman doesn't help things. Dumbass.
 * In one episode of Quantum Leap, Sam's actions accidentally cause Al to be convicted of murder and executed in the 1960s. Al is immediately replaced by another character (played by Roddy MacDowell) who in the new time line has always been Sam's connection to the Project. When Sam fixes things, Al comes back, with no idea that he had ever stopped being there.
 * The Torchwood episode "Adam" both inverts this and plays it straight
 * In Heroes five years in the future some of the characters had settled down (or undergone a Heel Face Turn) and had families of cute little children, that won't exist now because the future has changed and the mothers of said children have been Stuffed in The Fridge.
 * There's also Caitlin. Peter utterly ruins her life just by crossing paths with her and for all her trouble she gets left behind in a Bad Future that's subsequently erased from existence, again thanks to Peter.
 * In one episode of Smallville, Clark casually says life would be so much easier to everyone if he had never existed. Only he's holding the octagonal key, which then goes on to Retcon the world without him. At first everybody is indeed happier, until he finds out that President Luthor is about to destroy the world. Luckily, as Brainiac kills him with a kryptonite bullet, he
 * The cracks in time throughout series 5 of the revived Doctor Who can do this, starting in "Flesh and Stone". Time travellers can still remember the victims - unless they were part of the traveller's own history, as we learn in "Cold Blood" when . It Gets Worse in "The Pandorica Opens", where In "The Big Bang,.
 * And Stephen Moffat has reportedly said that, as a result of what was necessary to fix this crisis, a number of major events of the preceding seasons have been erased from history, . What this means for the past Companions whose travels with the Doctor hinged on those events is anybody's guess.
 * In the orignal series episode "Invasion of the Dinosaurs",
 * In the Big Finish Doctor Who audio drama Neverland, the Time Lords are revealed to have a device called "The Oubliette of Eternity", which is a dispersal chamber combined with an erase-from-history device. The really horrifying thing that is that until they look at the Ripple Effect Proof records, even a person who has authorized its use many times over is under the impression that it has never been used.
 * During the Sontaran invasion of Gallifrey, the De-Mat Gun worked like this. Expanded Universe implies the Eighth Doctor
 * In one skit, Dave Chappelle took a woman on a Magical Negro ride into a world where her sizeable breasts she'd been complaining about were Ret Goned. It wasn't such A Wonderful Life for her.
 * In one episode of Sabrina the Teenage Witch, this very nearly happens to the entire holiday of Christmas. According to Salem, it has already happened to another holiday, called Bobunk.


 * In the season 3 finale of Fringe, . . The trope is apparently played to full effect regarding, though.
 * Although will have an equivalent in the new timeline,, if the future,  episode is anything to go by.
 * In an homage to It's a Wonderful Life in Dallas a demon shows JR Ewing what everyone's life would be like had he not existed. After seeing how well off everyone would be it convinces JR to shoot himself which concludes the series.
 * In Kaizoku Sentai Gokaiger,

Music
"Nothing shall remain./ Not your memory, your name./ It will be as though you never, ever lived./"
 * "Hands of Doom" by Manowar:

Tabletop Games

 * In Feng Shui, individuals on the losing side of the "Secret War" often suffer this fate. They don't cease to exist, but rather find that the world as they know it has suddenly changed all around them, no one other than themselves (and other time travelers) remembers their version of reality, and they themselves have no past in this new version of reality - no family, no home, no friends, no identity - because they never existed in it to begin with.
 * In Exalted, this is one of the things the penultimate technique of the Charcoal March of Spiders style can do.
 * In addition, one of the Yozis, She Who Lives In Her Name, did this to huge portions of Creation before being sealed away. It's still debated amongst the fandom whether she "merely" destroyed things and erased them from living memory, or whether she rewrote the laws of Creation so that the things she scythed away could never come into existence again.
 * In Mage: The Awakening, the Red Word cult (who worship an alternate timeline so abhorrent that it was aborted from reality into the Abyss, where it attained sentience and got really pissed off), devour people in order to symbolically wipe them from this history. If the do it in their sacred temple, it actually happens with all evidence that the person existed gradually fading away.
 * In the same game, the Cult of the Doomsday Clock are attempting to destroy the Fallen World (i.e., this one) in order to free themselves to Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence. (Needless to say, the heads of the cult are all Abyssal beings.) Their key weapon for this is a Doomsday Clock, which not only erases everything around it, but goes back through time and erases it there, eventually leaving a gaping hole in both the world and history.
 * Though not officially part of the original Mage: The Ascension, online fan-created material suggests that the Syndicate and New World Order factions could do this by way of Unperson, due to their paradigms of magic.
 * Mage: The Ascension - the Arcane background is a sort of "cloaking" from the Universe. Records, memories and evidence for the existence of an Arcane character slip away from the world, slowly at low levels ("You're easy to forget.") while at hight levels people start forgetting you as soon as you leave the room (the five dot version's description is "In other people's minds, you don't even exist."). Oh, and the stat potentially goes up to ten for NPCs (and really powerful or unlucky PCs). Not bad for mages, who really want to hide from the world, but it may become a hindrance other people. Think The Net. The Virtual Adepts can do that. Don't piss them off.
 * In a book on magic for Vampire: The Masquerade, there is a spell that erases the memeories of a person or object from existence completely. However, a character's connections can help them resist, on the principle that it gets harder to make everyone and everything "forget". Also, trying to remove important or big things won't work completely, as the universe will try to fit something else in the hole. For example, if a building in the middle of town is erased from existence, you won't end up with an empty lot; something has to go there, so some other building will appear.
 * The Excrucians in Nobilis aim to do this to all of creation, one aspect at a time. Nobles can, themselves, to a more limited extent make retroactive changes to physical existence and history. A minor element of the game Backstory speaks of the five hundred years of human progress which got unmade, changing history considerably.
 * In GURPS the disadvantage Unique makes one vulnerable to this and the advantage Temporal Inertia makes one invulnerable to it.
 * Also, there is no GURPS 2nd Edition. Even the Warehouse 23 doesn't mention it.
 * 3rd Edition GURPS was a massive rewrite from 2nd Ed, but 2nd Ed is shown on their book list. fnord.
 * The D20 setting Infernum incorporates Ret Gone into its background; get swallowed by a Hellgout (a kind of naturally occuring portal that links Hell and Earth, which usually ends up acting like a black hole) and Earth will basically rewrite itself to wipe out your existence, with any remaining hints that you ever existed being subtle ones, a process referred to in-universe as "The Twisting". For example, the Knights of the Harrowing are the descendents of an order of overzealous Christian Crusaders called the Knights of the Sepulchre, an order dedicated to the reclaimation of the tomb where Jesus Christ resided for three days after being crucified, who deliberately invoked a Hellgout to swallow their fortress so they could lead a crusade against Hell. The vast majority of the deeds they accomplished have either been erased from history, or attributed to other orders. A rare few examples of their symbol, a charging crusader on horseback, are occasionally found on crumbling ruins in either the Holy Land or south France.
 * Inverted in the Mystara D&D setting's Alphatia, which was destroyed in the Wrath of the Immortals campaign-arc and recreated in the Hollow World by the Immortals. To recreate the population, they first resurrected the Empress, then everyone the Empress remembered, then everyone they remembered, and so on. Many isolated villages and antisocial individuals were omitted from the restored Alphatia, as none of the Alphatians who did get restored had missed their presence. For them, being forgotten became the cause of non-existence, rather than the effect.
 * Speaking of Dungeons and Dragons, the Dragonlance setting has rules for fighting the minions of Chaos (also mentioned under Literature.) Die to them, and all you'll leave behind is empty armor and any books that were written about you (the latter of which will be assumed to be fiction.)
 * The very highest level spells of the Destruction Path in the Anima: Beyond Fantasy RPG allows a mage to erase anything from existance. From a single person to an entire species or continent the Uncreation spell completly stops it from ever having existed at all, with the timeline changing to match. Only people with a very high Gnosis (basically how important they are in reality) can even notice that something is different.

Video Games
"Bea is dead. In an alternate future she would've borne your son. In the future past of Space Quest 4, your son would've saved your life. But she didn't so he couldn't - therefore you aren't."
 * Resident Evil Operation Raccoon City. The game replays events from the past and you can eliminate any or all of the characters, and it'll effectively change the Resident Evil timeline and depict it.
 * This is a fairly standard tactic in Achron, due to the time travel game mechanics. Not only do you have to defend your base in the present, you have to defend it in the past lest another player decides to retroactively attack you and retcon your army away.
 * This is also the fate of Serge in Chrono Cross if your party is wiped out.
 * Your party also encounters the "Dead Sea": an area containing the Ret-Gone items from the bleak future of Chrono Trigger that was prevented due to the original destruction of Lavos.
 * In Chrono Cross's ending, Serge does this.
 * Chrono Trigger even gives us the victim's thoughts after she comes back: "Crono! It was awful...I can't recall it all...I was somewhere cold, dark...and lonely. Is that what it's like to...die?"
 * S(h)innosuke's bad ending in Giga Wing has his name
 * The defeat of Chaos (aka ) in Final Fantasy I brings about the end of the Stable Time Loop; as a result,
 * Nobody remembers.
 * Keine from Touhou Project has the ability to eat history. What exactly this entails is never made entirely clear, but is generally believed to involve this, though there are indications that she only erases people's memory of elements of history.
 * Keine made an entire village disappear when you first face her. The other characters notice that there should be a village in front of them, though Yukari Yakumo can apparently still see the village.
 * Kingdom Hearts seems to love this trope.
 * Subverted in 358/2 Days. In the game's climax, . The Ret-Gone appears to be played straight, but in the cell phone game Coded,   Of course, it is also possible that.
 * And of course a straight example of the trope occurs with during the year between Chain of Memories and Kingdom Hearts II:
 * A minor variation on the trope occurs when all the photos owned by the residents of Twilight Town are stolen. Everyone remembers the photos, but the theft is so complete that even the word "photo" is stolen, and is blanked out of the characters' dialogues when they try to say it. And then later, on the final day, Roxas finds that not only has time stopped again, but all those same photos no longer have him in them.
 * The Roxas situation has an even odder example of how the trope works, as the real Twilight Town serves as a 'world without Roxas' look at the Twilight Town inside the simulation - even though we know that the TT Roxas was in wasn't real, it feels to the players like Roxas has been Ret Gone'd. It gets even more Mind Screwy when it appears as though data!TT has affected the real world - the Usual Spot gang coming to see Sora off for almost no reason - and Sora experiences Roxas' pain at being Ret Gone'd, without actually knowing why, seeming to play this trope straight, though in a non-standard way.
 * In Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Time/Darkness,
 * In the Updated Rerelease Explorers of the Sky,
 * In Command & Conquer: Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3 the Soviets travel backwards in time to remove Albert Einstein from history, since it was his Chronosphere technology responsible for the Allies victory in Red Alert 2. When they return to the present, the war was never lost, Einstein never existed, and there is no nuclear technology. Only the three Soviets who travelled back are aware of the change. The events of Red Alert 2 were completely erased. Of course Hitler, having previously been retgonned by Einstein, stayed retgonned.
 * The Allies in Red Alert 2 developed the Chrono Legionnaire which could erase units from the timestream completely over a few seconds while they're left utterly helpless and untouchable. Weaponized Retgone anyone?
 * In Silent Hill 2, over the course of the game, Mary's letter turns blank, then disappears from the envelope, and finally the envelope disappears as well; it was a creation of his mind. Or was it?
 * Used for a non-evil or horrible effect in Siren 2: As a side effect of defeating the Big Bad,.
 * One possible way to die in Space Quest V is via time paradox.


 * One of the many ways to die in The Journeyman Project is to be "uncreated" by the reality distortion wave, which happens if you go to the wrong place in the Global Transporter, or wait too long at the TSA.
 * Pretty much the entire plot of Time Hollow.
 * This is a choice in the final ending of Nie R where  of course the game takes this choice one step further by forcing the deletion of all your save games. Hope you backed them up to a flash drive! At least the game gives you ample warning...
 * The King of Fighters 2003 - XIII:
 * Happens with of Dragon Quest IX after
 * The Prince of Persia: Sands of Time trilogy has this on a rather grand scale:
 * At first, Suikoden Tierkreis appears to be about things coming into existence rather than vanishing from it—but when they appear, the things that were previously there stop being there. This becomes rather important when
 * In Alan Wake, Thomas Zane did this to  He was previously a very famous author, but when , he then
 * With enough mods and hacks, you can do this in The Sims 2. However, if you do it the wrong way, it backfires horribly and ruins your game.
 * This almost happens to Mario/Luigi, Peach, Bowser, and the Lumas at the end of Super Mario Galaxy, thanks to the universe being destroyed (and recreated) by Bowser's black hole.
 * Naturally as a time travel story, this sort of thing was bound to happen in Steins;Gate. In the True End route,, therefore Ret Gone-ing her out of existence. And there's only a vague inference that anyone will ever remember she existed aside from Kyouma. Naturally, her fans like to state her ending as the best end.
 * The sequel to I.M. Meen called "Chill Manor" has the villain take over history. If you get a game over; the player character is erased from history. Forever. And she villain even cackles as she erases you.
 * In Tales of Destiny 2, the party's goal is to erase the goddess Fortuna and her priestess Elraine from time itself., who exist because of Fortuna, are fully aware that doing this will cause the same thing to happen to them.
 * In Infinite Space, this is the fate of anyone who wanders into The Flux (more formally, phenomenon fluctuation sectors), though it is unclear how people figured this out. It's used for a Nonstandard Game Over.
 * In Corpse Party, this is what happens to anyone who dies while trapped in Heavenly Host Elementry.
 * In Tales of Maj'Eyal, "Cease to Exist", one of the Chronomancy spells, allows you to do this to a monster. You have to push it outside of time and kill it there first, but if you manage that, everything that you used outside of time gets restored to you.
 * If Kinnikuman Super Phoenix beats an opponent with his True Muscle Revenger in Kinnikuman: Muscle Fight, the page containing the opponent's history is burnt away. This causes the foe to be erased while the Five Evil Gods and Kinnikuman Super Pheonix look on in laughter.
 * If Kinnikuman Super Phoenix beats an opponent with his True Muscle Revenger in Kinnikuman: Muscle Fight, the page containing the opponent's history is burnt away. This causes the foe to be erased while the Five Evil Gods and Kinnikuman Super Pheonix look on in laughter.

Web Comics

 * In Scary Go Round, Erin Winters disappears through a portal to Hell as an unintended result of her sister Shelley saving the universe. She's confident that Shelley will rescue her, but Bob Crowley tells her that now she's "no longer part of the universe we knew" everyone will soon forget her. Sadly, this seems to be true so far...
 * After insistence from John Allison for over two years that she would never return, Erin had a print minicomic, "Erin Winters and the Bone Throne (of Bones)" and has now popped up in his new comic Bad Machinery as a rookie journalist. She's yet to interact with anyone she knew in her old existence, though!
 * 8-Bit Theater once had a comic that suggested there was a fifth Light Warrior named Bard that Sarda erased from existence for some (likely stupid) reason.
 * The titular Misfile in the webcomic of that name Ret-Gone's Ash's male life and identity to everyone except him/herself and the stoner angel that did it to him/her. Emily's last two years (and acceptance into Harvard) were also wiped.
 * Part of the concern for our heroes is some of the positive changes that this change has wrought. Ash has a better relationship with both parents, and Emily barely avoided being in a severe car accident that could very well have killed her (and this is before getting into their attraction to each other).
 * In TRU-Life Adventures, Scarlett places Jack in a coma-like stasis so he won't ''. It works.
 * In an arc of Gaming Guardians, two new recruits are visiting the Guardians' facilities when one is snatched away by an enemy... and no one remembers him being there in the first place. Except for the other recruit, who has hazy memories but don't know why the other person isn't there. The others thinks it's cute that he has an imaginary friend...
 * In Narbonic this happens to Dave Davenport's . In the Director's Cut re-run of the strip, the comments section ran with this as a joke for a while, insisting that !
 * Cheer Four bullying jerk jocks get turned into cheerleaders. Nobody much notices or cares. The few who do know all decide not to rock the boat since everyone seems happier.
 * In Sluggy Freelance, in the Torg Potter parodies of Harry Potter, it is eventually revealed that the reason everyone keeps talking about "You-probably-don't-know-who" and such is because the character in question accidentally erased himself from history and everyone's memories, so that no-one really did know who even though they knew there had been someone.
 * In Goblins the Psionic Minmax intends to do this to every version of his party that has entered the maze, creating holes that Retgone anything that falls into them. It quickly turns out that while people will have no memory of the object thus removed, they can notice something's going on. As "our" Minmax starts throwing his clothes into the hole, Kin considers the unlikelihood of someone going on an adventure without shoes or pants, and realizes what it must be doing.

Web Original
"Grif: Come on dude, tell us more about the reality bending computer. I'm hanging on your every word. Simmons: I don't wanna talk about it."
 * The SCP series of online Microfiction has SCP-268, which is half this trope, half Unperson. Instead of only erasing records or removing people from history, the wearer is erased from all memories after prolonged use AND becomes practically invisible to everyone, but paper and digital records remain.
 * Recently, the writer Fishmonger was banned from the site, and he demanded that all of his content (which included some of the more iconic SCPs and stories) purged from the site, to the point where none of them are even mentioned anymore.
 * In the Paradise setting, humans are randomly, permanently changed into Funny Animals by causes unknown—and some are gender-switched at the same time. As the "Reality Distortion Field" that keeps these changes Invisible to Normals begins to wind down, gender-bent Changed discover all extant documentation about themselves is retconned as reality itself is edited to reflect their new gender. Their driver's licenses and other identification have newly-feminine names, and all photos all the way back to when they were babies will show a girl instead of a boy (or vice versa). Hence, as far as the world is concerned, the character's original gender is "Ret-Gone"—records will show that the former "he" has always been a "she" (or vice versa). (Memories of those who knew them before are not affected, however. Also, while people who already know them will continue to see them as their original gender, strangers they meet will see them as the new one.)
 * Red vs. Blue: Reconstruction hangs a lampshade on this concept: after the Reds delete the Blues from the Command database, Caboose disappears. Simmons panics, thinking he may have deleted Caboose from existence. Turns out Caboose was just using the bathroom.


 * Taken Up to Eleven in The Book of Stories OCT, where the Book's Unwriting could make not only individuals go Ret-Gone, but also to worlds and possibly to reality itself.

Western Animation

 * In Beast Wars, if Megatron's scheme had worked out, the entire Maximal race would have been negated from history and would never have existed. However, it's revealed in the video game of the series that, had his scheme worked, For Want of a Nail would've kicked in, dooming the Decepticons, their ancestors, as well, because without Optimus Prime there would be no Matrix of Leadership to stop Unicron from chowing down on Cybertron.
 * Subverted in the Futurama episode "Roswell that Ends Well". Fry travels back to the 40's, meets his grandfather Enis, and becomes convinced that any harm that befalls Enis will result in his own non-existence. (Fry even claims at one point "I could feel myself beginning to fade away!") Then Fry's meddling accidentally results in Enis' death, and Fry is surprised to find himself still in existence. As it turns out, a Stable Time Loop is in effect, and Fry is his own grandfather.
 * Another time travel episode has another subversion: In this episode, you can only travel forward in time, albeit at any speed you desire. You can travel backward by going through one Big Crunch and another Big Bang, and as a result there's a universe out there with no Nazis.
 * In one episode of Danny Phantom, Sam gets in a fight with Danny and wishes they had never met. In the presence of a wish-granting ghost. Take a wild guess what happens. Sam herself is unaffected, thanks to a Fenton Device. It's revealed that she's directly responsible for his powers (and his snazzy new shirt logo). The fading-photograph trope (resulting in awkward gaps that wouldn't've actually happened) features heavily (although why the warded copies were on her person in the first place... just go with it). While in the presence of the wish-granter again, she managed to wish everything back to normal (relatively speaking), except for the outfit.
 * Although it is the relationship that is retgonned, not any person. In contrast, when Danny stops his parents from meeting, Jazz was retgonned.
 * In Tripping the Rift, Chode and Gus travel to the beginning of time to witness the creation of the universe, and accidentally kill God, Retgonning his influence from the universe. Upon returning to their own time, Hilarity Ensues.
 * It was actually rather pleasant, up until Chode and Gus brought in the concept of evil with them, which caused an immediate death spiral for all life everywhere. The reason why? Well, with no God to tell people what NOT to do, no one ever had the idea of doing anything bad. No God, No Evil. But once the concept of "Evil" was brought in from the outside, with no fear of divine punishment for any crimes you commit, well, there's no reason NOT to do terrible things, up to and including senseless murder.
 * Ren and Stimpy: This happens to Captain Hoek and Cadet Stimpy (and the narrator) in "Space Madness", after Stimpy pushes the History Eraser Button, which turns out to be Exactly What It Says on the Tin.
 * In "Yesteryear" by DC Fontana, the most popular episode of Star Trek: The Animated Series, Spock is temporarily Ret-Gone until he creates a Stable Time Loop preventing his death as a child.
 * One episode of the Men in Black Animated Adaptation dealt with a crazed alien enthusiast finding a way to time-travel and going back to kill off the founding members of the eponymous organization. A photo displaying the meeting between the founders and a group of aliens has each human disappearing one by one, and everyone instantly forgets them except Jay, who's gained Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory via some Alien Phlebotinum which is also slowly killing him.
 * Taken Up to Eleven on Family Guy, when Stewie learns that his time machine accidentally created the universe, but Bertram kills Stewie's ancestor. Stewie sets everything right, though, since Status Quo Is God and they've already done the Gainax Ending to death.
 * And in another episode, tried to do this to himself with his rebuilt Time Machine after getting too fed up to live with the rest of the family.
 * The Life and Times of Juniper Lee: In the episode "Te Xuan Me", Juniper prevented a thief from stealing dragon eggs. The thief then tried to get back in time to change this by using a secret time portal guarded at a clocktower where Juniper and her classmates went for a field trip. The portal was kept by time wraiths who captured Juniper and her classmates and reformed Earth without them. In the alternative timeline, Ray Ray was the Te Xuan Ze; Dennis behaved like the mainstream Ray Ray; and Monroe said Ray Ray accepted the Te Xuan Ze role better than anybody else he ever met. Ray Ray and the thief were the only people to remember the original timeline. Despite Monroe's protests, Ray Ray rescued everyone.
 * It is often debated among fans of Codename: Kids Next Door whether or not Sally (Numbuh 3's granddaughter from a Bad Future) inadvertently (or even purposely) prevented her own birth in "Operation: F.U.T.U.R.E." by helping to Set Right What Once Went Wrong If true, it may count as the most heroic of Heroic Sacrifices.

Real Life

 * Do you remember the great dictator John Frost? The one that started World War III? No? Well, there's kind of a reason for that.
 * Shh...Help meeee!
 * Richard Calverbrough from Renley's Gap, NSW. Try googling him. See?
 * A huge part of the operation to kill Osama Bin-Laden involved SEAL Team Six going back in time to prevent Barack Obama's assassination so he could order the mission in the first place.
 * Remember the war of 1933 when the city of Atlantis sent the Titan Androlecisys to destroy the east coast of Tasmania? No? Good.
 * I bet you think this is the first 2011 we've ever had. The Mayans stopped their calendar where they did for a reason.
 * It's possible a Ret-Gone has occurred multiple times, but since they never existed, we of course don't remember.