Clock Roaches: Difference between revisions

{{trope}}

 

 

[[The Marx Brothers|Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana;]] Clock Roaches like causality.

One of the possible results of a [[Time Crash]]. When it's people doing it, not some kind of natural force, it's [[Time Police]]. Compare to the [[Necro Non Sequitur]], a gratuitous and Rube Goldberg-y way for time to deal with interlopers. Not to be confused with the [[Butterfly of Doom]], in which the insect punishing the time traveler for interfering with the natural progression of events does so by dying, when it's not just a metaphor to begin with.

 

 

Similar are creatures out for those who mess with space. You may look for examples in [[Hyperspace Is a Scary Place]]. Has absolutely nothing to do with the Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities.

{{examples}}

* ''[[Rave Master]]'': This is the origin and purpose of the [[Eldritch Abomination]] Endless; to destroy the world created by someone's tampering with time.

 

* ''[[Ultimate Fantastic Four]]'': The spider-shaped Argiopes, who would eat any time travel-created doubles to avoid paradoxes.

* ''Time Beavers'', a graphic novel by Timothy Truman, postulates that a race of time-sensitive beavers monitor the Dam of Time, which separates the relative order of the universe we know from utter chaos. The Dam is composed of items of considerable historical importance, such as "Fat Man" and "Little Boy". Several such items are stolen by the Beavers' mortal enemies, a shape-changing species of sentient rats who want chaos to run rampant.

* ''Aztec Ace'' includes "Doxie-Glitches", which are giant monsters that show up when a paradox threatens time and fix it by killing everyone in the vicinity.

 

* ''[[Primer]]'': The main characters become their own Clock Roaches after they realize what they've done to the flow of time. Although their clean up does create several paradoxes anyway...

* This is the role of the main character in ''[[Donnie Darko]]''—since his own world is a splinter universe that might destroy the real one when they merge back together, he has to set things up so that his own world dies and the "real" world survives.

* In the ''[[Final Destination]]'' movies, Death itself manages to act as a Clock Roach. The protagonists have a vision of their own gruesome demise and save themselves along with a group of their friends, and the remainder of the movie consists of Death finding [[Necro Non Sequitur|increasingly gruesome, sadistic, and physically impossible]] ways of correcting the error.

 

* ''[[The Langoliers]]'' in the book and movie of that title by [[Stephen King]]. In the story, several airline passengers find themselves trapped in a moment in the past, which is slowly fading and winding down as the present time moves further and further away, until the moment is completely eaten by the title Langoliers.

* ''[[Cthulhu Mythos]]'': The Hounds of Tindalos chase down time travellers; the only way to hold them off is to eliminate all angles in the immediate area, since they can only travel through these. Note that they're not portrayed as necessary or helpful; they just '''[[Eldritch Abomination|are]]'''.

* In the [[Buffy the Vampire Slayer|Buffyverse]] collection of short stories, ''Tales of the Slayer, Volume 2'', the short story ''Again'' by Jane Espenson has these after Buffy, Willow, and Xander are returned to their high-school selves. The roaches in this case manifest as mobile shadows that attach themselves to things they find in the wrong time, causing excruciating pain as they (presumably) eat them. They appear to be somewhat physical, as Buffy manages to cut one off of her arm, cutting her arm in the process.

 

* ''[[Doctor Who]]''

** The Reapers, [[Monster of the Week|Flying Killer Time Gargoyles]] from "Father's Day". The Ninth Doctor describes them in terms similar to white blood cells—when a paradox is triggered, they clean up the "wound" by erasing everything inside it. "Before" the Time War, the Gallifreyans kept paradoxes in order in a much less destructive way, but now they're gone.

* ''[[Sapphire and Steel]]'': You're never quite sure what the agents of time look like, but you definitely don't want to hang around and find out.

 

* In the [[Big Finish Doctor Who]] audio plays, they have Vortisaurs, creatures who live in the time vortex and are attracted to temporal anomalies. They're usually vicious, but the Doctor manages to tame one.

 

* ''[[Dungeons & Dragons]]''

** The 3rd edition of the game have the Inevitables, constructs born in Mechanus (the plane of absolute law) to enforce certain laws, both natural and invented. One kind of Inevitable, known as the Quaruts, maintain the sanctity of time and space itself.

* ''[[Exalted]]'' has the pattern spiders, the gods that maintain the Loom of Fate, and are basically responsible for the laws of physics. Bend the aforementioned laws too much, and you'll incur their displeasure in the form of a Pattern Bite, which is basically a spider bite, except that the spider is a giant mechanical god-spider responsible for maintaining natural law, and what it bites is not you, but your thread in the Loom of Fate, causing all kinds of unpleasant effects. [[Dissimile|So not much like a spider bite at all, really.]]

 

* ''[[Prince of Persia]]: Warrior Within'' has the Dahaka, a guardian of time that hunts the Prince in order to restore time to its original flow. It's implied that whenever someone changes the past, a Dahaka shows up to deal with it—the first one was ''created'' when the Prince tempered with time, and a second comes up to deal with his second attempt to fix his own mistake in the game. {{spoiler|If you get the [[Golden Ending]], you kill the Dahaka, and the Empress of Time sails away with you. Thus the Sands of Time are not created in the past. (They get created when the Empress is killed.)}}

* In [[Super Robot Wars]], Ingram Pliskin and his {{spoiler|clone}} Cobray are secretly these. According to Ingram in an exposition, every universe is given only one (hence why Cobray's powers didn't manifest until after {{spoiler|Ingram was dead}}), and that their job is to protect causality by ''deleting from existence any force that threatens it''.

* ''[[Blinx the Time Sweeper]]'': All the monsters except the main antagonists are a result of a colossal [[Time Crash]], the plot revolves around eradicating them.

* Apoptosis in ''[[Monster Girl Quest Paradox]]''. Whenever a particular universe deviates from a particular "correct" history, it accelerates the spread of chaos. If left unchecked, the entire multiverse would be consumed by chaos, leaving nothing left. To prevent this from happening, the Apoptosis phenomenon mutates the residents of the offending universe into horrific monsters, who destroy those responsible for the deviations.

 

* Timeclones and altered timelines are not welcome in ''[[Homestuck]]''. Any given Hero has an alpha timeline; mostly this only matters to the Hero whose purview is Time. Either way, any deviation from the alpha timeline, or extraneous instance of a given hero, caused by time travel shenanigans is doomed to die eventually, in some unfortunate and contrived manner if the universe can't scrounge up a good one.

{{quote|There are... others who see time ''differently''. When it is meddled with, they ''notice''. }}

 

* Vector Prime of ''[[Transformers]]: [[Transformers Cybertron|Cybertron]]'' is shown in the [[Expanded Universe]] to have this sort of job, though he's far more personable than most examples and not nearly as unstoppable. The giant, all-consuming rift that shows up in the Time Wars arc of the UK comic fufills the trope more.

** Vector's the guardian of time. He'd be the one to fix it if a paradox were to happen, and presumably, if there were friendly time travelers who had to be eliminated to protect the universe, the unpleasant but necessary task would fall to him. However, if there were an "undo it before the [[Rule of Cool|giant clockwork spaceship/robot]] squishes us" type situation, Vector Prime himself would favor undoing over squishing anybody, and if you knew of a way to fix things bloodlessly and he didn't (though that's hard to imagine) he'd surely listen. He's purely a good guy.