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Clock Roaches: Difference between revisions
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[[The Marx Brothers|Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana;]] Clock Roaches like causality.
Time, like [[Death Takes a Holiday|Death]], hates being tampered with. It uses things like [[
In cases like these, time likes to get its hands dirty and ensure a less ironic and more graphic end to these revisionist historians with the help of Clock Roaches.
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Clock Roaches are time's clean-up service. They eat and destroy people and things that directly threaten time with a [[Temporal Paradox]]. Like roaches, they "eat up" the crumbs and mistakes of time travelers, and if they directly make nuisances of themselves, eat them as well. Also like roaches, you can never kill them all, nor hope to survive against their mindless fury for long. At best, you can delay them, and hope to fix whatever it is you've messed up and marked you as Roach-Chow.
The concepts of Clock Roaches probably stems from the difficulty in representing the threat of creating a time paradox. It's hard to ''show'' that the whole of existence is about to slip down the [[Timey
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.
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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
== Anime and Manga ==
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* ''[[World of Warcraft]]''
** The Bronze Dragonflight and their hired help (i.e. the players) are this.
** The Infinite Dragonflight that attempts to change the timeline is universally villainous - only two out of four of their attempts even try to have a weak [[
** Their goals have been muddied even further with confirmation in ''Wrath'' and ''Cataclysm'' that the Infinites are a corrupted future version of the Bronzes. While still [[Clock Roaches|Clock Dragons]], they're useing their ability to modify time instead, hence the greater danger they pose than most people tampering with time.
* In the ''[[Final Fantasy XI (Video Game)|Final Fantasy XI]]'' expansion "Wings of the Goddess", The avatar Atomos is a mindless being that eats 'dispensable' time, including the memories anybody might have of alternative timelines that have become endangered due to the intervention of time travelers. All of this ends up dumped in the Walk of Echoes, a graveyard for everything that might have been.
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