Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory: Difference between revisions

* Okarin from ''[[Steins;Gate]]'' has one of these. {{spoiler|John Titor wants him to use it to become the Messiah and overthrow the coming new world order. He calls it “Reading Steiner” which doesn't really mean anything but sounds pretty cool.}}

** Played more plausible than most examples since he usually gains no more than a weeks worth of memory at a time and it still disorients him immensely to the point of [[Idiot Ball]].

 

== [[Comic Books]] ==

* [[Tom Strong]] featured an aversion of this trope. His greatest adversary managed, at one point, to take over the time stream, and used some new technology to open a time gate, pulling versions of himself from all points in his life through the gate and into the timeline. He ended up with the backflow of over three hundred separate memory streams converging on his head all at once- luckily, the [[Clock Roaches|Clock Roach]] guardian he defeated to take over the time stream felt generous enough to send them all back, with the note that the youngest of them will have to go through every single one of the summonings and unsummonings. The mental chaos this event produces drives the villain to madness and probably leads to his downfall.

* In the infamous ''[[One More Day]]'', Spider-Man makes a [[Deal with the Devil|deal with Mephisto]] in order to save Aunt May's life, which rewrites decades of Marvel continuity to create an alternate timeline where he was never married to Mary Jane and he never revealed his secret identity. However, despite this, Spidey is still shown to remember the events of the original timeline. It's even a plot point in certain issues, where characters that knew Spidey's identity beforehand (such as the Fantastic Four) have forgotten, and only by showing his face will their memories be restored. The only people who remember Spidey's identity from the beginning are Mary Jane and his [[Cloning Blues|clone Kaine]], and the recent ''One Moment In Time'' reveals that Mary Jane also remembers the original marriage. Deadpool is also hinted to remember due to the fact that he [[No Fourth Wall|demolished the fourth wall long ago]], but he's never yet used it beyond a [[Take That]].

* Done in [[Paperinik New Adventures]] where, after a time rewrite, a select few get occasional flash-backs to how reality was supposed to be. Odin Eidilon then checks his own memory against a backup memory he had kept in a time-proof safe to confirm his suspicions.

* Humorously [[Averted]] in [[Alan Moore]]'s one-off "Doctor Dibworth's Disasppointing Day". The titular scientist invents a [[Time Machine]] and tries to test it by making at first minor, and progressively more drastic, changes to the past. Each time he does, the narrative helpfully informs us that nothing changes, while the artwork shows the results of massive changes to history. Doctor Dibworth does briefly consider that his own memories are altered as a result of changes to the past, but dismisses that idea as unlikely.

 

{{reflist}}

[[Category:Time Travel Tropes]]

[[Category:Memory Tropes]]