Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory: Difference between revisions

 

{{examples}}

* In ''[[Haruhi Suzumiya]]'', Haruhi {{spoiler|accidentally sets the last two weeks of summer to [[Groundhog Day Loop|repeat endlessly]] because she doesn't want it to end}}. Nobody has ripple proof memory and Haruhi has the least ripple proof memory of all. The rest of the Brigade do however, {{spoiler|experience déjà vu}} at an increasing rate. They've gone through {{spoiler|about 15 thousand repetitions, with realizations of what's going on increasing in frequency}}. Yuki, though, apparently {{spoiler|exists partially outside time or something and remembers every... single... time. Yes, she is now subjectively several hundred years older or something close to that}}.

** And in ''Disappearance'', when {{spoiler|Yuki reshapes the world, she makes it so Kyon has a Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory}}. Everyone else does not, however.

* 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]].

 

* This was in ''[[The Authority]]'', when The Doctor has to relinquish his powers to one of his predecessors (one who was stripped of them for being a depraved omnicidal maniac). The old Doctor stops in the middle of the fight to point out that he can freely travel through time, threatening them with "imagine fighting someone who could shoot you as you emerged from your mother's womb or hold a pillow over your face in a retirement home." He then adds "worse still, imagine the local doctor, back when you were in high school, giving you a funny feeling you'd carry around for the rest of your natural life". He doesn't go as far as raping The Engineer (or if he does it's off-page, or has been changed in the reprinting) but the comic does take a panel to show him kissing her on the back of the neck. He asks her "Hello again, Miss Angela Spica of class 4B. Remember me?" which starts her crying and whispering "oh my god..."

* In the Marvel Universe, Bishop has occasionally ended up like this, due to doing a bit more time-travel than is really healthy... After the '[[Age of Apocalypse]]' timeline was destroyed, and everything went back to normal, he experienced some occasional 'regression' into memories of the now-defunct timeline—up to and including attacking Beast and Cyclops, who were evil in the other universe.

* [[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.

** Also completely averted with the ending, in which the timeline is changed again (to one very similar to the "correct" timeline, but with some differences.) This time, no one remembers the old timeline, including Barry

 

 

* In the animated film ''[[Meet the Robinsons]]'', Lewis retains his memory of his entire adventure, even though through the course of the adventure, he takes several steps to prevent the film's villains from ''existing''. Logically, this would mean the entire plot of the film ''never happened'', though not addressed in the film itself. He's a ''really'' good inventor.

* Naturally, the ''[[Back to The Future]]'' trilogy. It is a bit strange to note, though, that while ''memory'' is proof against the ripple effect, ontology is ''not'': Marty remembers his own timeline in the first movie, and yet he comes close to ''literally fading out of existence'' as history is pushed off-track. It may be that in ''BTTF'', memory is not proof against the ripple effect ''per se'', just a bit insulated from it, and like Marty's photograph, will [[Delayed Ripple Effect|fade slowly as the timeline diverges]]. Or it's just a big [[Timey-Wimey Ball]].

** Marty almost fades away in the first film because he almost changes the timeline to one where his parents never got together and thus he was never born. The timeline he ends up creating by the end of the movie is one where his parents DID meet but under different circumstances and thus he WAS born, but his parents are happier. If memory and ontology were both immune to the ripple effect, then what would be left to change as a result of time travel?

* The disadvantages of this are touched on at the end of ''[[Time Cop]]'', where the hero is surprised to learn he now has a wife and son....

* Sandra Bullock's character in ''[[The Lake House]]'' seems to have this. Of course, the film is one big [[Timey-Wimey Ball]]. The film could have been a knotted [[Stable Time Loop]] if there wasn't that one tree and if {{spoiler|the filmmakers hadn't gone for [[Happily Ever After]] in the last reel.}}

* ''[[Godzilla]] vs. King Ghidorah'', the only Godzilla movie so far to feature time travel, uses this trope. After the timeline has been altered in [[WWII]] so that King Ghidorah attacks Japan for decades instead of Godzilla, the main characters note the difference. Later when it turns out that Godzilla does still exist in this universe except bigger, they note they are the only ones who can identify him and even realize the change in size. The filmmakers seem to have forgotten this when they made ''Godzilla vs. [[Space Godzilla]]'' and everyone acts as if the timeline never changed and Godzilla hasn't been replaced with Ghidorah...yet references to Ghidorah are made and Godzilla is still at the larger scale.

* ''[[Star Trek: First Contact]]''. The Enterprise can see the Borg!Earth timeline, but since they're in the wake of the time disturbance caused by the Borg Sphere, they're unaffected. It's strongly implied that they'd vanish from existance had they not went through the time aperture themselves.

* Brazilian film ''O Homem do Futuro'' (The Man from the Future) has protagonist Zero accidentally going back 20 years to the prom that ruined his life. So he tries to [[Set Right What Once Went Wrong]], and vanishes as history is changed, waking up back to the present day... where he became rich, but is a [[Jerkass]] and the love of his life hates him. So he goes back again, and after leading things to go back the original way he vanishes again... returning to 2011 with memories of the entire time travel ordeal.

 

* The [[The Dark Tower/The Waste Lands|third book]] in ''[[The Dark Tower]]'' series subverted this. Roland was going insane because he was remembering two timelines, one where {{spoiler|Jake died}}, and one where he didn't. Of course, {{spoiler|Jake was having an even worse time about it.}}

* In [[Ray Bradbury]]'s ''A Sound of Thunder'', several time travelers to the past realize that they have changed history when they return to the future and notice changes that no one else recognizes.

* John Barnes's short story ''Things Undone'' varies this depending on the size of the changes made. If something small changes, certain antisocial people will only remember the way the world used to be, and everyone else will only remember what it becomes. It turns out a big change {{spoiler|initially leaves those antisocial people with conflicting memories. If they become more social, integrating themselves into the flow of events, they'll wind up with both sets of full memories. If they stay withdrawn, however, the universe will eventually erase ''[[Unperson|them]]''.}}

* In ''[[Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency]]'', time is altered to destroy most of Coleridge's poem "Kublah Khan" (which now ends at the line "And drunk the milk of paradise"), in consequence preventing a murder and the retroactive destruction of humanity, as well as introducing a composer named Johann Sebastian Bach. Only the time-traveling main characters remember the original reality.

* In ''[[Johnny and The Bomb]]'' everybody but Johnny forgets their time travel experiences, although Kirsty remembers them again after finding a piece of physical evidence.

 

* ''[[Doctor Who]]''

** In "The Time Meddler", the Doctor's companions suppose that, should the Monk succeed in changing history, their own memories would instantly change. While this might seem to exclude the Doctor from this trope, the balance of evidence points the other way, and there's no way for the companions to be doing anything more than guessing. Of course, many fans will angrily tell you that "The Aztecs" conclusively proves that you can't change history at all in the [[Whoniverse]], so the question is moot. Both examples require that you discard the [[Timey-Wimey Ball|overwhelming evidence in the other direction]], of course.

** Though neither he, not other characters from the series have Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory. It ''did'' happen to a kid where the alien spacecraft went through a ''plane'', who could remember the past seven days. Parker on the other hand, if he's not the one piloting the machine, forgets like the rest of them.

* The fourth season of ''[[Fringe]]'' {{spoiler|is largely about exploring the implications of this concept. First with the adult version of Peter recorporealizing in an altered timeline where he died as a child, then with Olivia recovering her memories from the prior timeline at the expense of the ones that correspond with the current version of reality.}}

 

* ''[[Feng Shui]]'''s Innerwalkers have this by default. Once someone has been through the Netherworld, they're basically removed from the timestream, and are thus unaffected by whatever changes are wrought by the chi of the world changing hands. They keep all the memories they have of what the world was like before entering the Netherworld, and thus do not have their memories changed like everyone else's when a shift happens. But the thing is, when something like a critical shift happens, the innerwalker can easily find himself as a much different version of himself from the new timeline, complete with a new name, new history, new enemies and the like, and no one who hasn't been through the Netherworld will remember anything but what the current version of the character is like, leading to ''serious'' [[Mind Screw]].

** A pretty good (and amusing) example is given in a supplement of two Innerwalkers who barely knew each other. A critical shift hits, and they find themselves world famous... and ''married''. They're living together now, to keep up the celebrity mega-couple act, and are quite surprised to be slowly falling in love. The shift ''does'' suggest that if they had known each other, they'd get married, and they're sure getting to know each other now.

* In ''[[Mage: The Ascension]]'' Czar Vargo (a powerful [[Steampunk]] [[Mad Scientist]] mage with a bit of an idealistic bent) attempted to prevent World War One with an unprecedented global display of the power of his technomagic. He pushed reality so far that when it snapped back it erased all memory of him from existence, and to this day the only knowledge of him comes from a tiny handful of eyewitnesses who retained their unedited memories of the event.

* History in ''[[Genius: The Transgression]]'' has been accidentally changed in radical ways a few times despite the best efforts of various groups to preserve the timespace continuum, although neither the general population nor reality itself generally seem to notice. This means that some of the most spectacular world-changing events in the game setting only happened in continuities that no longer exist, and are only remembered by time travellers and a few other scattered people who somehow manage to remember them. As well as a few not so world-changing events, like each and every one of the successful Hitler assassinations.

 

 

* In ''[[Achron]]'', you play a general precisely because of your nature as an 'achronal': an entity outside of time and unaffected by changes to the timestream.

* One of the most interesting ''aversions'' of this trope is the ''[[Journeyman Project]]'' games. The main character is a member of the titular Journeyman Project, a government agency which was created in response to the emergence of time travel technology to keep history from being changed. Changes in time create a temporal distortion that travels only forward in time from the moment of the change. One agent is constantly on duty to monitor for such changes; in the event that one occurs, the agent time-jumps back into the time of dinosaurs, a period of history considered "safe" because any changes would wipe out humanity. A record of all events in human history is kept there and can be referenced against a similar record in the future. The differences allow the agent to pinpoint the focal points and prevent the changes. The only reason this works is because the agent and lithmus record are not actually subjected to the ripple.

** Only the first one, technically, although Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory is generally averted. In the later entries, it becomes possible to detect changes to the timeline without the archive disc. The latter is part of the backstory of ''The Journeyman Project 2: Buried in Time'', where Gage Blackwood (the first game's unnamed Agent 5) is falsely accused of tampering with history for personal gain; the evidence against him consists of mini-temporal distortions originating from several time periods he visited. In the opening of the third game, Agent 3 tries to get the TSA's attention by leaving her [[Jump Suit]] time machine behind, setting off a massive temporal distortion.

* In ''[[Dark Cloud]] 2'', Monica, the time-traveler from the future, naturally retains her memories of what said future ''should'' have been like until Griffon destroyed it from the past. As she and Max work together to restore the future (well, future from Max's perspective, but Monica's ''past'') they run into a small bit of [[Time Travel Tense Trouble]] (for instance, they must create the origin of a factory that Monica remembers as having provided technology to a lab, even though neither the factory nor the lab exists yet.) As they restore these "origin points" and more elements from these locations reappear, inhabitants of restored future villages have no memory of what ''should'' have been there, but they do feel that "something is missing" until the village is completed. In the most notable case, a king from the future is astonished at a change in history ''he'' doesn't remember, but that {{spoiler|Max's mother}} Elena, his contemporary, ''recognizes'' it as an improvement Max and Monica made in [[Time Travel Tense Trouble|the past's future known timeline]] (implying that she is aware of, and remembers, both the original and the improved one.) Meanwhile, their flunkies just roll with it, and presumably their memories were rewritten along with history.

** And it goes without saying: although the [[Big Bad]] is defeated in the present (Max's time,) monumental events threaten the world ( {{spoiler|the Blue Moon turns into the Star of Destruction, and falls from the sky}},) and remains of the battle stay there (such as {{spoiler|the Moon Flower Palace, crashed just outside Palm Brinks}}) the good guys from the future have no knowledge of any this until it actually occurs.

* This comes with the [[Reality Warper]] abilities of the Star Singers in ''[[Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: Ring of Fates|Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles Ring of Fates]]''. Of course it only applies to the one doing the altering at the time. {{spoiler|The multiplayer mode however demonstrates that powerful entities, even if they have current timeline versions, can leak through. One even returning as a boss in the original [[Crystal Chronicles]], and the current versions may have deja vu (or in one case a relapse) of their previous selves.}}

** Not exactly averted. Kain still seemed to remember the original timeline, and that's what was causing his anguish and allowed him to give Raziel one last piece of advice to avert the change{{spoiler|, which Raziel didn't heed.}}

* Played straight in ''[[Singularity]]'' as Renko as well as everyone on the island is perfectly aware of what is happening to the timeline. This is what allows Barisov to attempt to fix the timeline.

* ''[[Dissidia Final Fantasy]]'' states that the warriors are kept called for the next cycle of war - the side that lost will have no memories, though, while the winning warriors remember their last battle.

* This happens to anyone Sissel helps in ''[[Ghost Trick]]'' (by way of going back in time and preventing deaths), himself included. Granted, {{spoiler|the end of the game leaves us on a note where the player (with the help of three other ghosts) just prevented the entire game from happening, so no one remembers except Sissel, who is still dead at the very end, and the other ghosts, restored to their natural lives.}}

 

* Explicitly "[[Hand Wave|explained]]" with the retroactive changes caused by the ''[[Misfile]]'': Ash and Emily can remember their lives before reality was changed because their souls are unavailable to the filing system for updates, so their memories can't be altered by the filing system. The other main character in on the secret, Rumisiel, is an angel, and so is either not included in the filing system or are unaffected by changes to Earth's files.

** Rumisiel may not be ripple proof; he only knew that he'd messed up a couple of files and roughly where to find his victims. His first guess on what he'd done to Ash was that he'd aged her into a teenager.

*** Of course, it's entirely possible that he was [[The Stoner|too high at the time to realize exactly what he'd done]], and only figured it out once he was explicitly ''told''.

** Largely, this is an extremely long-term [[Foreshadowing]] of events involved in the series finale. {{spoiler|It's heavily implied that time travel can never really change history, but the astute reader will know this is untrue because of the smoking thing.}} Which happened ''years'' earlier in real world time.

* This bites Zoe in the ass in ''[[Sluggy Freelance]]''. She is downright ''pissed'' to discover that, thanks to the changes she made to the past, her history exam now includes an essay question on "The War of the Bug Squishers", a war Zoe helped start by going back in time, and consequently, doesn't know how it ended (or even that it's the same war she helped start).

* Not involving actual time travel, but a teacher at the school ''[[The Good Witch]]'' is immune to the effects of the [[Fake Memories|mass memory-altering spells]] that convince everyone else that the past happened differently.

* For some unexplained reason, when history began to change in ''[[Ansem Retort]]'', Riku had this. He managed to get Axel and Zexion to remember the proper timeline when he got them to remember that [[Andrew Jackson]] {{spoiler|(who they fuse into)}} is on the twenty dollar bill, and not [[24|Jack Bauer]].

* In ''[[Schlock Mercenary]]'', when [[Mad Scientist|Kevyn Andreyasn]] and a miniature version of [[Blob Monster|Sergeant Schlock]] went back in time to prevent the [[Bad Future]], Schlock accidentally merged with Future!Schlock and now has ''both'' sets of memories.

* In ''[[Homestuck]]'', it's literally Dave's role as the Knight of Time to keep everyone from getting killed or losing the game {{spoiler|or preventing John and Jade's untimely demise and manipulate the stock market on LOHAC}} by time traveling and warning his past self in the 'Alpha timeline.' And dooming his own timeline for his inevitable death. {{spoiler|Or turning into a feathery asshole.}} So there logically follows there are many Daves running around at any given hour in time loops. And maybe a couple of dead Daves.

 

* [[Zero Punctuation|Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw]]'s short story, ''[http://www.fullyramblomatic.com/features/ttravel.htm Richard and Maureen's Amazing Time Travel Adventure]'' plays with the trope. The main characters of the story are able to invent a time machine and make changes in the timeline merely by speculating about them. As they're doing this, their memories of how things used to be spontaneously vanish.

* At the climax to ''[[Red vs. Blue the Blood Gulch Chronicles]]'', {{spoiler|Wyoming's time-resetting power resets his foes' memory, with the exception of Tucker, whose alien sword prevents the effect and lets him and Church beat Wyoming.}}

 

* In ''[[Code Lyoko]]'', the Return to the Past function doesn't affect the memories of anybody who has been scanned into the Supercomputer (as well as all the Supercomputer's programs—and incidently XANA). However, they only travel to the ''past'' and see it as [[Mental Time Travel]], which avoids some problems (most notably, they always remember ''both'' histories).

* [[Lampshade Hanging|Lampshaded]] in an episode of ''[[Static Shock]]'': A new metahuman with time travel powers who goes by the name of Timezone appears and teams up with Static and Gear; they, along with Ebon, have a time travelling adventure, at the end of which Timezone goes back in time and prevents herself from ever getting powers. She ends up with no memory of the events, and as Richie explains, their adventure now never happened. When Virgil protests that he and Richie both remember the events, Richie advises him [[MST3K Mantra|not to think too hard about it]].

* After [[Johnny Test]] changed Porkbelly's history, he had to take a test about the city's history. He failed it because he remembered the original history and not the new history.

* ''[[Dog City]]'': Baron goes back to the time the pilgrims purchased the new world from the natives and made a better offer: squeak toys. This created a Bad Future where he rules. Somehow, Ace and Eddie had Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory and, after visiting a timeline where Eddie ruled, went back to the past and made an even better offer: a technologically advanced (even for present time standards) fire hydrant the heroes took from the Eddie-ruled timeline.

 

* [http://www.vagabondish.com/wp-content/uploads/wanted-time-traveler.jpg This] help wanted ad.

* [[Stephen Hawking]]'s time traveler party, as mentioned in ''Into the Universe''. No one came... or did they? Maybe he's keeping mum.

 

{{reflist}}

[[Category:Time Travel Tropes]]

[[Category:Memory Tropes]]