Fantastic Romance

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For romances that not only involve the use of fantastic plot elements, but are literally impossible to pull off unless one or both parties are chronically defying the laws of physics, traveling through time, reality warping, dimension hopping, or defying culturally accepted norms and standards regarding the mingling of fantastic, non-fantastic, or other fantastic races.

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If a character is Trapped in Another World and then gets embroiled in such a romance, they often end up saying I Choose to Stay. If they are forced apart, or decide to return to their own worlds, then they are Star-Crossed Lovers. They may still get a Doppelganger Replacement Love Interest back at home. Such relationships often result in the creation of a Half-Human Hybrid.

Compare Magical Girlfriend and Interspecies Romance.

Examples of Fantastic Romance include:

Anime and Manga

• Vision of Escaflowne.
• In Fushigi Yuugi, Miaka and Tamahome.
• Eureka Seven has this as the driving force between the two leads.
• In Inuyasha, Inuyasha and Kagome.
• In RahXephon, one of these drives the entire plot.
  • To explain further (massive spoilers ahead): Ayato and Haruka were middle-school sweethearts, but the impenetrable Tokyo Jupiter field went up while she was on vacation, trapping him inside and her out when they're fourteen. Thanks to the field's time-dilation effects, three years pass for him and fifteen for her. Thus, Haruka is twelve years older than him when she manages to rescue him from Tokyo. Furthermore, he has lost all memory of her (and technically isn't even human anymore). She, however, has spent the whole time pining for him. Eventually, he once again falls in love with her, and that love drives him to use his Humongous Mecha's full potential and become a god. In the end, he recreates the world so that the two of them can be together.
  • The fact that it is heavily influenced by the short story The Dandelion Girl helps explain a lot.
• In Voices of a Distant Star, the teenaged romantic leads are separated by Faster-Than-Light Travel, so that by the end, the 15-year-old girl's text messages aren't received by her boyfriend until he's 24 and beginning to move on. It is every bit as heartbreaking as it sounds.

Comics

• In Headstatic, there's a couple who have a Reincarnation Romance like this, who always find each other in every life they live.

Film

• Avatar
• Somewhere in Time
• Time Rider. A man is accidentally sent back in time and falls in love with a woman: he ends up becoming his own great grandfather.
  • Well, at least that means there's gonna be another guy capable of stopping the Flying Brains...
• The Lake House.
• Enchanted.
• The Terminator, where Kyle Reese is sent back in time to protect the mother of future human resistance leader John Connor and ends up fathering him as well.
• Stardust
• The Princess and the Frog, wherein both romantic leads spend the majority of the courtship and marry as magically transformed frogs.
• Doc and Clara in Back to The Future III.
• The title character in Don Juan Demarco tells several fantastic tales, all involving gorgeous women, set among beautiful scenery.

Literature

• The Time Traveler's Wife.
• In Slaughterhouse-Five, Billy Pilgrim engages in such a relationship with Montana Wildhack in a Tralfamadoran zoo. His marriage back on planet Earth is similar, but one-sided. His proper wife just thinks he's gone nuts. And maybe he did.
• His Dark Materials, where Lyra and Will come from different universes. They don't get the option of staying with each other however, and have to return to their respective worlds at the end of the story.
• Twilight: Edward should have died in the flu epidemic, about 100 years ago.
• The Dandelion Girl: "Day before yesterday I saw a rabbit, and yesterday a deer, and today, you."

Live Action TV

• The "Time in a Bottle" story arc on Port Charles.
• "The Girl In The Fireplace" of Doctor Who. Also The Aztecs, and any of the common Classic episodes where the companion stays in the time period because they met someone.
  • The aptly named series 2 episode "Love And Monsters": a perfectly normal man has a relationship with a woman's face set in a slab of cement. It Makes Sense in Context.
• Captain Jack Harkness and Captain Jack Harkness, who the first Jack stole the identity from in 1940s Britain when he died in the Torchwood episode "Captain Jack Harkness".
• Lost in Austen.
• Phil of the Future, though not till the end.
• Pushing Daisies: Chuck should be dead.
• Primeval has Matt and Emily, both of whom are from different time periods than the show's main one. Matt is from the future, Emily is from the past. They turn into Star-Crossed Lovers when Emily goes back into her own time. But she's back as of 5x03.

Video Game

• Saya no Uta: The main heroine, Saya is not a human. And you'll realize how impossible it is for the protagonist to love her under normal circumstances.
• In Mitsumete Knight, the Asian (the main male protagonist) can have such romances with Anne, a Cute Ghost Girl with a tangible body, and his Fairy Companion Piko, a being emanating from his heart. Both relationships end up with a But Now I Must Go from the girl.
• In Hatoful Boyfriend, even disregarding the whole pigeon thing, the heroine's relationship with Fujishiro Nageki ends with the revelation that he committed suicide five years ago, and his time as a ghost has come to an end.

Web Comics

• In Sluggy Freelance Torg and Alt-Zoe, as well as Torg and Valerie fit this role, the former being from different dimensions, and the latter from different eras in history.
• Dreamless
• Freefall: Florence, a Bowman's Wolf, is technically an AI, while Winston is a genetically-modified human. They aren't supposed to feel attraction for each other.
• YU+ME: dream ends up being this, with the revelation that Part I was all part of Fiona's coma dream, meaning that Lia, not to mention her other friends, don't exist in reality, and Sadako locking her out of the dreamworld. Part II sees her find a way back into the dream world to find Lia.
• Homestuck has a few, but probably the most fantastic and romantic of them all is John/Vriska. They are different species and from different universes, she can communicate with him at any point in his timeline, and they first interact when she tries to mentor him to become stronger so they can defeat the game on whom the fate of the world depends which they are all playing. When they finally meet, it is after Vriska has died and they're only communicating through a dream bubble... or, rather, Vriska is talking to an alternate timeline version of John who never met her.
• Slightly Damned hits this one straight on, with the main pairing being the child-like Fire Demon Buwaro and the shy and introverted Water Angel Kieri