Future Loser: Difference between revisions

{{trope}}

 

{{quote|''"Doing manual labor for a geek we used to make fun of? This isn't supposed to happen until we're, like, 30!"''|'''Dash''', ''[[Danny Phantom]]'' -- "King Tuck".}}

== Comic Books ==

* ''[[Empowered]]'' has this in a kind of [[Imagine Spot]], where kid Emp meets her future superheroine self.

Current Emp: "Thanks a lot, younger version of me." }}

 

* Biff in ''[[Back to The Future]]'' has gone from George McFly's bullying supervisor to waxing George's car, after Marty goes back in time and teaches his dad to stand up to Biff. It sort of works out for everyone, since Biff now has a little humility ''and'' runs his own detailing business. Of course he isn't fantastically rich, but at least he doesn't own the world.

** Biff is still hiding some deep resentment for George and his family, though, because his elderly future self in Part 2 steals the DeLorean and [[Bad Future|changes history]] much to George's detriment.

**** They also mention in the ''Secrets of the Back to the Future Trilogy'' featurette that the chest pains and collapse he goes through after returning to 2015 are the result of Lorraine shooting him dead sometime in the early '90s ([[Fridge Logic|which would explain why Marty didn't find him sprawled next to the car when he got back]]).

** Don't forget that Marty actually showed some [[Genre Savvy]] about this trope. His first fear when Doc appears at the end of the first film, insisting that he come to the future and fix things? That he and Jennifer will grow up to be, if not losers, then at least assholes.

*** Of course that turns out to be the truth (at least until they fix things). Marty agreed to a car race which resulted in him hitting another car. The owner sued, Marty broke his hand, had to give up on his music and Jennifer only married him out of pity. By 2015 he either ends up with both kids in jail or he gets fired.

** Played for irony, since the future self is wealthy, successful and respected (and a huge asshole), while the kid is chubby and unpopular with low self-esteem. The joke is that his priorities as an adult were very different from what they were as a child.

* Played with in the film ''[[Anger Management]]''. The schoolyard bully that made [[Adam Sandler]]'s character's life miserable grew up to be... a Buddhist monk. Who, despite being a monk, still thinks that Adam Sandler's childhood humiliation was hilarious. Adam Sandler ends up getting his revenge the old fashioned way - by beating the crap out of the former schoolyard bully.

* In [[I Am Number Four]], Sam comments that Mark is in "the third year off the best four years of his life".

* ''[[Young Adult (film)|Young Adult]]'': Former prom queen Mavis doesn't seem like a loser in the present: she's got a nice job as a writer of [[Young Adult]] fiction, she lives in New York, has a cute Pomeranian, and has all the [[Hello Kitty]] gear [[The Alcoholic|and booze]] she could ever want but actually she can only [[Write What You Know|write what she knows]] and all she knows is [[Man Child|being in high school]]. Then she loses the writing gig and her ex-high school boyfriend announces the birth of his child, so the obvious thing to do is [[Love Makes You Stupid|go back home and steal him from his wife and child]].

 

== Literature ==

* ''[[Saved by the Bell]]'' had this happen as a dream to Slater (not a jerk, but definitely a jock), seeing himself as a beer bellied drunk in a class reunion, forcing him to rethink his life and his "comfort zone" as a jock.

** At one point, Screech even points out the trope in a tape intended for future students at Bayside:

** The [[Reverse Funny Aneurysm|irony]] is not lost.

* On ''[[Star Trek: The Next Generation]]'' [http://memory-alpha.org/wiki/Tapestry_%28episode%29 Picard dies during an operation due to an old injury from an incident from his rebellious youth of counter-cheating in sports ending in a stab to the heart]. [[Jerkass Gods|Q]] offers him a second chance if he can avoid said incident by reliving that period of his life. After he succeeds (backing out or whatever of cheating at sports and fighting, and having alienating sex with one of his friends) Q sends him back to the point in his life where the injury would have killed him only to discover that {{spoiler|he is a Lieutenant junior grade (between Ensign and Lieutenant) instead of a famous starship captain. Q explains that the injury gave Picard a sense of his own mortality which, possibly unknown to Picard himself, motivated him to make his mark on the Universe. The alternate Picard never lived that experience, and as such drifted thought his career, never getting noticed by anyone. Picard then begs Q that [[Be Yourself|he has learned his lesson]], is given a second second chance, condemns himself to death after a worthy life... and awakens from his death to discover that Q was just jerking his chain again (or might have actually saved his life)}}.

** With Q, you never know if it was really [[All Just a Dream]] or if he actually sent you back in time.

*** [[All the Myriad Ways]]?

* Used with relish in nearly every episode of ''[[Cold Case]]'', the usual example being the former [[High School]] Mean Girl who's been married twice and extremely bitter.

** In the episode "Spiders", a gorgeous blond girl who was devoted to a white supremacist leader was seen years later as overweight and had children with a black man.

* The renewed ''[[Twilight Zone]]'' series - In the episode "One Life, Furnished in Early Poverty", an angry middle-aged man named Gus finds himself transported back in time where he meets his child self. After an incident with a bully, Gus tries to get his past life together by convincing his younger self (who doesn't know he is his older self) to have a better relationship with his father (who died as he grew up). Gus then returns to his own time, and hails a cab where driver happens to be one of the kids that used to bully him.

* A similar case in ''[[Friends]]'', where Monica got a chance to date [[All Girls Want Bad Boys|a bad boy]] she had known from high school. When she does date him, she realizes that he is immature, lives with his parents and never grew up from his high school days.

* The short-lived ''[[My Generation]]'' had this as one of its premises. Ten years after the class of 2000 graduated their lives are not where they expected them to be.

** The popular 'Overachiever' who once could not decide whether he would become a lawyer or a doctor, had to drop out of college when his father went to jail for fraud and they lost their money. He is now a bartender.

* In ''[[Buffy the Vampire Slayer]]'', Warren, after gaining incredible powers, runs into an old school bully and beats the crap out of him. It also provides insight into what made Warren so horrible ("Remember how I couldn't stop crying?")

* Kurt predicts this in the second episode of ''[[Glee]]'', when a bunch of [[Jerk Jock|jocks]] are about to toss him into a dumpster:

** See also the [[Music]] section below.

* Let us also remember [[Married... with Children|Al Bundy]], whose proudest moment in his life is scoring four touchdowns in a single game while in high school.

* In [[Gorillaz]], Murdoc Niccals used to be bullied by a large boy named Tony Chopper (No, not ''[[One Piece|that]]'' one!) when they were kids. Eventually, Murdoc learned to fight back with words and from then on, he had no trouble. Tony Chopper now works at a grocery store and regrets being mean to Murdoc because of his present world-wide rock star fame.

* Toby Keith's "How Do You Like Me Now?" plays with this trope, as he's grown up to be a famous musician while the girl he idolized in high school who never gave him the time of day is unhappy with her adult life. The video drives it home even harder than the song alone.

* In Avril Lavigne's ''Sk8er Boi'', the main character was popular in high school but five years down the line is a lonely single mother, while the boy she rejected for being too "punk" is now a world-famous rock star who's apparently dating the singer.

* Lily Allen's ''22'' is about a woman whose future looked promising when she was 22; but by the time she's pushing 30, she is miserable, stuck in a dead-end job and desperate for a boyfriend. The video plays with this by showing Allen in the toilets at a nightclub, with her haggard-looking older self reflected back at her from the mirror.

* One of the [[Glee]] cast's original songs, ''Loser Like Me'' is about how the Glee kids, who are considered losers now, will become successful in the future, while the bullies won't. Finn's verse fits this trope especially well:

I'll see you when you wash my car. }}

 

== Stand Up Comedy ==

* [[Jon Stewart]] used this in his standup in response to school shootings. He figures the best way to convince kids not to shoot up high schools is to convince them that it ''ends''. So what he proposes is taking them on a time travel field trip to their twenty anniversary high school reunion.

 

 

 

== Web Original ==

 

 

== Western Animation ==

** Timmy actually ''causes'' Crocker to become the nerd version of this, and turn into an [[Agent Mulder]] who's fairy obsessed.

*** To be precise, Cosmo was going to be the one to mess up Crocker's life, but [[You Can't Fight Fate|Timmy ended up doing it anyway]].

* A non jock example: Stewie, in "Stewie Griffin, the Untold Story" from ''[[Family Guy]]'', is 35 years old and still a virgin, lives in a dirty run-down apartment, and actually ''cried'' after having sex for the first time with his "girlfriend."

** There's to say that, probably, he will not end like that anymore: he resolved the problem at the end of the episode, so he should have changed his future.

** This could have also been a [[Continuity Nod]] to the episode "Itchy & Scratchy: The Movie" which ended with a [[Flash Forward]] that revealed that Bart will eventually become Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.

* There's a ''[[South Park]]'' episode where Stan meets his future self: a lazy stoner. They're forced to live together to the tune of a fake sit-com theme. {{spoiler|It turns out to be just an actor hired by Stan's parents to scare him out of doing drugs.}}

* [[Jerk Jock]] Brick Flagg from ''[[Kim Possible]]'' really let himself go during the time traveling movie ''[[The Movie|A Sitch in Time]]''. But that future [[Memetic Mutation|got]] [[Reset Button|reset'd]] away.

** For the record, he wasn't exactly a jerk, just a little more fool-hearty than even Ron Stoppable. A [[Post Script Season]] episode proves that after going to college (after trying for seven years) his future apparently might be looking good.

** Subverted by sorta-brother Jonas Venture Jr... Well, he would possibly be a subversion, as he is ridiculously successful; but being as he didn't even EXIST for a significant period of time, a case could be made that he's just [[Like Father, Like Son]] and not a subversion.

** In a later episode, Orpheus' Master implies that this is what Dean will inevitably become if he and Triana Orpheus ever get together. Then again he might also be messing with her like he does with her father.

* ''[[Jimmy Neutron]]'': Jimmy accidentally screws up the future by giving the local [[Jive Turkey]] a megalomania complex. When Jimmy, Carl and Sheen travel to the future and find out, they find that Carl's a convicted felon, Sheen's a garbage diver and Jimmy's become a dumbed-down idiot who has to constantly do work on his mother-in-law's feet (as he'd married Cindy), instead of the [[Ridiculously Successful Future Self|ridiculously successful future selves that they should have turned into]].

* Dash of ''[[Danny Phantom]]'' seems to know what the future has in store for him and has even lampshaded it a few times. Who knew a guy with poor grades could be so [[Genre Savvy]]?

{{reflist}}

[[Category:Characters As Device]]

[[Category:Time Travel Tropes]]

[[Category:We Will Use An Index In The Future]]