I Hate Past Me/Playing With

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Basic Trope: Someone meets their own past self and can hardly stand them.

  • Straight: Maxine goes ten years back in time to assist her younger self in an important mission. She spots her younger self engaged in melee combat and mopes about how poor a fighter she was.
  • Exaggerated: She then decides to kill her younger self, despite the unfortunate implications (or may decide nonexistence is preferable).
    • Alternatively, Maxine goes back three hours into the past and remarks about how inept she was at fighting.
    • even moreso, she goes back in time to right before entering the machine, and hates how terrible she used to be at boarding time machine
  • Up to Eleven: Maxine goes back a very short period of time (anywhere from a day to several hours) and remarks about how stupid she was.
    • Maxine create a time machine solely so she can inflict Cold-Blooded Torture on her past self, because she hates what she was that much.
    • After going back in time, Future Maxine realizes how much Past Maxine sucks. Then she remembers that she's Past Maxine, not Future Maxine. Ouch...
  • Downplayed: ???
  • Justified: Maxine has gone through quite a bit of Character Development since her younger years.
  • Inverted: Future Me Scares Me
    • Alternatively, Maxine is in awe at how cool she was in the past.
  • Subverted: Maxine watches her past self for a moment, and decides she was actually a pretty good fighter.
  • Double Subverted: ...But still manages to find fault with herself.
  • Parodied: Maxine calls her past self a loser and runs off while laughing.
  • Deconstructed: Maxine is so fed up with her past self's actions that she jumps in and knocks her aside in order to take over and do things the "right" way. The dazed past Maxine is trampled and killed before she can realize what has happened... whoops.
  • Reconstructed: Past Maxine survives, vows she'll never get upstaged like that again, and puts herself through much Training from Hell in order to make it so, thereby becoming the Maxine who hated her past self in the first place.
  • Zig Zagged: ???
  • Averted: Maxine has no strong opinions about her past self.
  • Enforced: ???
  • Lampshaded: ???
  • Invoked: Maxine makes a list of all the flaws she had in the past, so she can more easily hate herself.
  • Exploited: The villain accompanying the present Maxine remarks, "If you hate her so much, why don't you go over there and do something about it?", setting up the Deconstructed situation above.
  • Defied: Maxine makes a list of all the good qualities her past self had, so she can convince herself that she wasn't all that bad.
  • Discussed: Maxine tells her past self that she is her older incarnation, and her past self asks "So am I a disappointment to you?"
  • Conversed: Maxine tells her past self "If you were my daughter, I wouldn't let you carry on like this."

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