Reset Button/Playing With
Basic Trope: A plot device that returns everything to the status quo.
- Straight: After a horrible day where Alice loses her job, is dumped by her boyfriend, and has her house forclosed all due to one silly mistake, she discovers a magical MacGuffin that returns everything to the day before and she makes different choices to avoid all of the undesirable events.
- Exaggerated: After a world ending disaster, most of Alice's friends are dead, the major government's have been overthrown, and all of humanity has been enslaved by aliens, Alice makes a wish on a star, and just like that, the birds are chirping, the sun is shining, all who was dead have been revived, and nobody speaks of the catastrophe again.
- Justified: The MacGuffin allows Alice to go back in time and make adjustments to the timeline to keep the horrible things from happening.
- Inverted: The MacGuffin upsets the status quo and creates a Crapsack World.
- Subverted: After the aliens invade, Alice finally reaches the magical amulet that's suppose to fix everything. She waves it around and says the magic words, but nothing happens.
- Alternatively: It repels the aliens, but fails to repair the damage caused. The world is never the same.
- Double Subverted: Until she gets upsets, throws it to the ground, causing it to shatter, and the aliens are gone.
- Parodied: There is a literal reset button that Alice carries around with her everywhere just in case something goes wrong. She uses it every time a monster attacks, every time she says something that angers a friend, or when she rips her skirt, or steps on a bug.
- Deconstructed: Alice likes things exactly the way they are. Whenever something happens that might upset the status quo she is currently living, she summons her magical forces and returns things back to the way she likes it. Nothing ever changes for Alice in her village. Nobody ever changes and technology never evolves. Nobody dies and nobody suffers sickness or grief for long, but nobody ever matures and nobody's quality of life improves either, even if they are given the chance. Alice's village becomes a land stuck in a single moment, living blissfully, but without change.
- Alice uses the power to be a tyrant by resetting everything that she doesn't approve of.
- Reconstructed: Alice eventually gets bored of it and decides to let just a few things slip past her magic. Just a few.
- Zig Zagged: ???
- Averted: No device is used to fix everything and the characters end up solving their problems with actual hard work while suffering casualties and never ending up returning exactly to the way things were before.
- Enforced: "The plot has taken a very bad turn and we don't know how to undo everything we did. Let's just put in a magical device that fixes everything."
- Lampshaded: "Push this button and everything is fixed, just like that."
- Invoked: The magical fairy queen decides to use her unlimited cosmic power to return things to the way things were after evil strikes.
- Defied: Alice has the chance to travel back in time, fix her mistakes, and return everything to the way they were before, but decides that taking the easy way out is not the best way to solve all her problems.
- Alternatively: She takes this opportunity for all it's worth, and makes things better (and different) than they were before.
- Discussed: "If we push this button, everything will return to the way they were before? What are we waiting for?"
- Conversed: "That's it? They say a few magic words and it's like nothing that occurred ever happened? What a cop out! What's the point of all that?"
Don't you wish everything would go back to the way they were before you read this page? Back to the Reset Button.