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{{trope}}{{Needs Image}}
{{quote|''"One cannot damage history, because history cannot be changed. I went back in time to steal this because history says it disappeared, and history says it disappeared because I went back to steal it. [[You Can't Fight Fate|Past, present, future; it's all written in stone, my dear.]]"''
|'''Warp''', ''[[Teen Titans (animation)|Teen Titans]]'', "How Long Is Forever?"}}
Through [[Applied Phlebotinum]], [[Functional Magic]], or some other means, our heroes [[Time Travel|travel back to the past]]. In the past, they wind up being responsible for the very events that underpin their own "present." This creates a chicken-and-egg scenario, in which the looping sequence of events has no clear beginning. The result of breaking the zeroth law of [[Time Travel]]: do not cause the event you went back to prevent.
This is also the basic premise of how [[Time Travel]] would work, according to Albert Einstein. Simply put, even if it were possible to [[Time Travel|travel back in time]], you would not be able to change any events in the past, because they've already happened. No matter what your intentions, everything that you did would only fulfill the past. The only thing that would change is your perception of the events. (Hm, this somehow explains [[
This is sometimes referred to as a "time loop" paradox, particularly when a character, object, or piece of information was never originally created, but exists solely because of its own existence. Also known as a "bootstrap paradox," from the classic Heinlein short story, ''[[By His Bootstraps]]''. It's also called an "[[Temporal Paradox|ontological paradox]]" on [
[[Tricked
For further discussion of this trope, see Wikipedia: [[wikipedia:Novikov self-consistency principle|Novikov self-consistency principle]] and [[wikipedia:Predestination paradoxes in popular culture|Predestination paradoxes in popular culture]].
Since many examples of this trope aren't revealed until late in the story, and the existence of a loop can itself be a [[Spoiler]], consider yourself spoiler-warned.
Importantly, this trope is not to be confused with [[Groundhog Day Loop]].
{{examples|Examples:}}▼
== Anime and Manga ==
* In ''[[Simoun]]'', {{spoiler|Dominura and Limone [[Time Travel|travel back in time]] using the Emerald Ri Maajon, purportedly to stop Simulacrum from using the Simoun. To avoid a [[Temporal Paradox]] that would prevent them from meeting, however, they instead teach the very Emerald Ri Maajon that got them there to the local inhabitants and show them how to use the Simoun that they have lying around... thereby ensuring that history unfolds exactly as they remember.}}
* In ''[[El
* Takahashi's ''[[Fire Tripper]]'' one-shot story (in some ways a dry run for ''[[Inuyasha]]''), avoids the trope almost completely. One can trace the time lines of both characters, and they never "loop" themselves. There is ''one'' small loop though that leads to a [[Fridge Logic]] moment after the show is over. {{spoiler|Where did the bell come from?}}
* Mendo from ''[[Urusei Yatsura]]'' traveled to the past to try to prevent himself from acquiring his fear of darkness and cramped spaces, but he got so angry at his younger self that he ended up attacking his younger self and thereby causing his own phobias.
* In ''[[Martian Successor Nadesico]]'', {{spoiler|Inez Fressange, whose first clear memory is being lost in a desert at age 8, discovers that she got there through time traveling from the future... which is now the present, as she's taken [[The Slow Path]] back. She meets her younger self just before the temporal disturbance that triggers the loop.}}
* In ''[[Tenchi Muyo!]] in Love!'', the criminal Kain attempts to go back in time to kill Tenchi's mother, Achika, so as to prevent Tenchi from ever having been born. Tenchi and company go back in time to stop him, and the climactic showdown forces Achika to utilize her power to the point that she shortens her own lifespan in order to protect her future son, thus causing her premature death that Tenchi had already experienced in the present/future.
* During the (rather long) Day 1 of the Mahora Fair sub-arc in ''[[Mahou Sensei Negima]]'' we get to see a Time Loop following Negi's use of it. Negi redoes the same day four times to make sure he has enough time to spend with every student. At various points Negi will run into students he hasn't run into yet because he's not that far in the loop. Setsuna, Asuna, Konoka and Kotaro all go along with Negi at one time or another in this loop. Naturally when Time Travel isn't a neat parlor trick it stops being so stable... or loop like, and quite [[Timey
* In ''[[Sailor Moon]]'', Chibi-Usa is able to exist because {{spoiler|she "stole" the silver crystal from Usagi in the future, returned to the past, and saved Usagi's life in the battle with the Death Phantom.}}
* In ''[[Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle]]'' - avoiding spoilers and the five paragraphs of text that it would require to fully explain it- something the main characters do halfway through the story is directly responsible for the creation of the lead female's hometown as we first saw it.
** Later combined with reincarnation, parallel universes, and cloning to induce an extreme [[My Own Grampa]] scenario.
** {{spoiler|[[Face Palm|And now the big bad is determined to start everything over again]].}}
* ''[[
** ''Episode of Bardock'' shows that when Goku's father was defeated by Freeza, he was somehow thrown into the past. There he defeats a ancestor of Freeza, who manages to tell his race of the Saiyans and their super forms before dying.
* In ''[[Natsu no Arashi]]!'', Kaya's diary was lost sixty years ago. So, Arashi time-leaps back to 60 years ago, grabs the diary from before it was lost, and brings it to the present. Which, as Hajime immediately explains, is why it went missing in the first place.
* When the heroes of ''[[Rave Master]]'' reach what was once the Kingdom of Symphonia they discover, along with the grave of Resha Valentine, a skeleton wearing a necklace identical to one Elie was wearing, complete with engraving, that she had purchased from a store. Many volumes later, characters go back in time. {{spoiler|Elie lost her necklace while in the past. Also, Sieg Hart sent Haru and Elie back to the present but is forced to remain in the past himself. This is when Sieg realizes that ''he'' was the skeleton they found back then. That knowledge in mind, he takes first opportunity to snag the necklace back and puts himself into position to be found fifty years later.}}
* In the Bamboo Rhapsody episode of ''[[Suzumiya Haruhi]]'', {{spoiler|Kyon travels back 3 years and ends up being the cause of Haruhi attending his highschool}}. When Kyon complains that this contradicts Mikuru's explanation of [[Time Travel]], a [[Sufficiently Advanced Alien|sufficiently-advanced Yuki]] brushes it off with, "since there's no conclusion to the paradox theory, there's no way to prove there's no paradox." The
* In ''[[
* During the Great War in ''[[Kyo Kara Maoh
* Yuki Saiko of ''[[Silent Moebius]]'' has a mysteriously great deal on renting her apartment and cafe (in Tokyo, no less). Then she gets sent back in time to 1999 before the Project Gaia catastrophe and meets a young man named Tohru and the two fall in love. It turns out that he grows up to be her landlord. The TV series also hints that he has something to do with the [[Tyke Bomb]] project that produced her.
* In the ''[[Lupin
** Oh, and his initial reason for hating Lupin was because in the future, Lupin's [[Identical Grandson|identical descendant]] hooked up with the girl he liked the day he was planning on proposing to her. [[Disproportionate Retribution]] anyone?
* When [[Kinnikuman|Geronimo]] goes through a trial to become a true Chojin, he enters a canyon where he and his sister got lost as children, but were saved by a mysterious stranger. While he's there, he finds another little boy and girl who've gotten lost, whom he saves. After saving them, he realizes that ''he'' was the mysterious stranger, sent back in time to save himself and his sister via STL.
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== Comic Books ==
* Maybe the best example is given by ''[[Universal War One]]'': the whole plot is based on not one, not two but ''three nested stable loops'', without any [[Plot Hole]].
* Brilliantly subverted in the comic strip ''[[Calvin and Hobbes]]''. It's 6:30 and Calvin doesn't want to do his homework, so he decides to [[Time Travel]] forward to 8:30. Then he can pick up the now-finished homework, bring it back to 6:30, and goof off the rest of the evening. But it doesn't work. There's no homework to pick up at 8:30 because Calvin never actually did the
** The best part came, of course, when they BOTH decided to go after 7:30 Calvin, because he was the one who was supposed to be doing it. That didn't work either.
*** Eventually, it indirectly does work. Both the 6:30 and 8:30 versions of Hobbes wrote a story about [[Lampshade Hanging|how stupid Calvin was to attempt this plan in the first place]]. It got Calvin an "A+" for creativity.
* In ''[[
* The elves in ''[[Elf Quest]]'' are only on the planet because their alien ancestors ("the coneheads," later termed "the High Ones") were attracted by the human tales of elven beings. The coneheads shapeshifted into elven beings and turned their spacecraft into a palace, then, as they were landing, were flung back to the caveman days, where all their powers stopped working and they were nearly killed. The few survivors founded some cultures that became the elves that begat the stories that prompted the coneheads to attempt to land in the first place.
** Later on, the magic-user Rayek attempts to stop the event that flung the High Ones into the past. It's pointed out that those who were born as a result of this event would cease to exist should he succeed, but he doesn't care (except, it seems, for the few he knows personally). He's talked out of it by the three people most dear to him, who choose to suffer the same fate as the planet; as Rayek can't bring himself to erase them, he stands aside and lets the event happen as it already has.
** His plan, more specifically, was to merge the two magical spaceships (the actual one and the one that took [[The Slow Path]] for 10000 years) and prevent the time loop by making the spaceship ''stable'' through the power of applied [[Object Paradox]].
* In the [[Marvel Universe]], [[
* In the [[Elseworlds]] book ''[[Superman: Red Son]]'', it's revealed that Superman was sent back in time as a baby, because {{spoiler|Lex Luthor was the ancestor of Jor-L, and therefore Krypton is actually Earth in the future. That might explain why the ''Red Son''-verse doesn't have Kryptonite.}}
** Ironic in that {{spoiler|Jor-L sends his son to the past, as opposed to another planet, because he dislikes how placid humanity has become. Humans think they've learned all there is to learn and now just ''"have nothing left to do but wait and die"''. Jor-L hopes that sending his son to the past will change that. However, the antagonism between Superman and Lex Luthor is what inspires [[Cut Lex Luthor a Check|Luthor]] [[You Can't Fight Fate|to engineer the Golden Age]] Jor-L hopes to avert.}}
* In one story, [[Superman]] is shown a vision of the future, and sees a superhero codenamed Sirocco (which means The Desert Wind in Persian). Later, when Superman visits Iran and befriends Sirocco's present self, he accidentally calls him by that name. The man says the name is cool and asks Supes if he can use it for his codename.
* The original [[Legion of Super-Heroes]] seems to be an example of
* The final pages of ''[[Ultimate Fantastic Four]]'' #53 show that {{spoiler|Reed sends his Cosmic Cube back in time 30,000 years to the planet Acheron, where Thanos finds it}}, which precipitated his rise; when he lost it, {{spoiler|he influenced Reed to create it}}.
* In ''Tales From the Bully Pulpit'', Teddy Roosevelt gets help from the "Teddy of thirty minutes from now" (a reference to the ''[[Bill and Ted]]'' example below). At the end of the story, the main characters remember to go back and fulfill the time loop before going off on their adventures.
* In ''Amazing [[Spider
** [[It Got Worse|It gets worse...]] Not only did Arno not get the retina scan he needed (the scanner was destroyed in the fight), {{spoiler|he is suddenly returned to the future, only to discover that the bomb had detonated prematurely and killed his family.}}
* [[Alan Moore]]'s ''[[Supreme]]'' has two stable time loops, one forming the main plot of the initial plot arc, and a second in a single issue as a comic parody of the trope. It's strongly implied that {{spoiler|the mysterious "Supremium" substance that both originally gave Supreme his powers and acts as his "Kryptonite" is what all time-looped matter eventually becomes.}}
* [[Larry Hama]]'s ''[[Nth Man:
* ''[[
** {{spoiler|Rip Hunter}} himself is also a stable time loop: he reveals that he's {{spoiler|Booster Gold's son, who only will come into being because Rip Hunter drafts Booster Gold into his current job as secret protector of the timeline}}
* Best one ever: The whole reason for Imperiex's existence during ''Our Worlds At War'' is that the multiverse is flawed, so he seeks to destroy everything to re-create it. As a force of nature, he can't be destroyed: to wit, when he seems defeated, his energy was merely absorbed by Brainiac, who then starts a plan to assimilate the universe with that power. Superman has a huge problem: If he destroys Brainiac, Imperiex gets free and can "hollow" the multiverse. But if he leaves Brainiac be, the multiverse will be assimilated. What does Superman do? He arranges for a Time portal to be opened and pushes Brainiac/Imperiex (who are the size of a PLANET) into it, taking them to... a milisecond after the Big Bang. Their essences get in the way of nature, forming our flawed multiverse instead of the "perfect" one that should have been, but making sure that neither is a problem from there on out in the present.
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* One Silver Age Superman story featured Kristen Wells, a researcher from the future who traveled back in time to find out who the mysterious superhero "Superwoman" was. Unable to find her anywhere, she eventually realizes it was she herself, so she puts on the Superwoman costume and uses future technology to do all the superheroic feats that future history books claim Superwoman did.
* In [[The New Universe]], it is revealed that the Old Man is an older Ken Connell, who was thrown back in time and, thanks to the power of the Star Brand, lived for centuries before accidentally initiating the White Event and giving his younger self the Brand.
* One ''[[The Simpsons (animation)|Radioactive Man]]'' comic from the 1960s features a villain being sent back to the 1860s via a [[Applied Phlebotinum|Trans-spatial Stair Climber]]. When a damaged robot appears out of thin air, he repairs it and programs it to kill Radioactive Man before placing it in a time capsule due to be opened in 100 years time. At the end of the comic, the robot is damaged by Radioactive Man before being hit by Dr. Broom's Time Machine Gun - and sent back to 1863. When Fallout Boy wonders about who built the robot in the first place, Radioactive Man reminds him that "we're dealing with two mad scientists, and that's a [[Incredibly Lame Pun|pair o' docs]] left well enough alone."
* The [[The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck
* [[X-Men (Comic Book)|Rita Wayword]] was captured and changed into the [[Multi
* [[She
* {{spoiler|[[Marvel Zombies]] turns out to be this in Marvel Zombies Return.}}
* Robo finds himself in one of these in ''[[Atomic Robo]] and the Shadow from Beyond Time'', where three future versions of Robo instruct him to learn the ''hell'' out of hyperdimensional mathematics so he can return to that point in time-space to defeat the [[Eldritch Abomination]] they're fighting. It's not a ''true''
* When [[Sonic the Comic]] did an adaptation of [[Sonic CD]] (a game where time travel is one of the main mechanics), it pulled off a loop so neat that, in the last part of the story, they could reprint an unedited page from an earlier issue and have it make perfect sense and not seem like laziness on the part of the writer or artist. (The first time the page appeared, the audience perspective is that of present Sonic; the second time, we're following future Sonic, [[It Makes Sense in Context|who's been shrunk]].)
* In ''[[Dial H for Hero
* [[The Mighty Thor|Thor's]] grandfather, Bor, was defeated in battle against Frost Giants. He did not expect them to use magic, and therefore wasn't protected when a sorcerer cursed him and turned him into living snow. He told his son, Odin, to find a stronger sorcerer and undo the curse, but Odin stalled for years. When Thor was born, Odin noticed he had Bor's eyes, and was ridden with guilt Bor's spirit came to him and told him he'd be forgiven if he adopts a child who's father he'd kill in his next war. As it happens, Odin's next war was against Frost Giants as well, and the child whose father he killed was Loki. Thus was Loki adopted as an Asgardian. {{spoiler|The truth is Loki was the sorcerer who turned Bor into living snow. He returned back in time to do that, and then he appeared to Odin as Bor's spirit and told him to adopt the child. Then he went to his younger self and instructed him exactly what to do and say so to incite war between the Frost Giants and the Asgardians, so he'd be adopted as an Asgardian and become the man he's today.}}
== Fan
* The ''[[Harry Potter]]'' [[Slash Fic]] ''Mobius'' by geneticallydead.{{context}}
* ''[[
** His attempt to use Time Loop Logic (see Real Life below) as a manually-performed perfect algorithm was... less than successful. The output: {{spoiler|'''DO NOT MESS WITH TIME'''}}
* ''[[Kyon
* In the ''[[G.I. Joe]]'' story ''[http://www.fanfiction.net/s/6575772/1/Yabba_Dabba_Joes Yabba Dabba Joes]
* The ''[[Ranma ½]]'' fic ''[http://www.fanfiction.net/s/261328/1/Paradox Paradox]'' has a stable time loop despite the name. {{spoiler|Shampoo strands Ukyou and Ryouga in the past, where they become the real parents of Ranma who is stolen at birth by Genma.}}
* One ''[[Harry Potter]]'' fanfic (the name escapes me}{{verify}}) had a four
* In the ''[[
* In another ''[[Harry Potter]]'' comedy slashfic (possibly ''Harry Potter and the Sword of Gryffindor''?{{verify}}), Hermione steals a time turner for the purposes of [[It Makes Sense in Context|"kinky sex" that will also hurt Death Eaters.]] This is explained by Hermione at the time saying that she sort-of got it through a time paradox, but not to worry about it. Later, Harry is sent to put it back in the Department of Mysteries at the same time as stealing it in the first place. On the way, he runs into Mad-Eye Moody, who says that the DoM is being guarded after the events of ''[[Harry Potter and
* The [[Marvel Universe|Marvel-verse]] fanfic ''[http://archiveofourown.org/series/10104 Dreams of the Waking Man]'' {{spoiler|is all about one giant stable time-loop.}} In the far future, Deadpool helps Cable and Hope to return to the present, which causes a chain of events that influences the entire Marvel universe {{spoiler|and ensures Deadpool will always be in the Future to help Cable and Hope to get back to the present.}}
* The ''[[Harry Potter]]/[[Sailor Moon]]/[[Ranma ½]]'' fic ''[[The Girl Who Loved]]'' incorporates at least ''three'' stable time loops, including the canon one responsible for Chibi-Usa's presence in the past. Another involves several people from the Crystal Millennium era going back to the 1990s to ''pretend to be the Black Moon Family'' and ensure that the Senshi's conflict with them remains basically bloodless.
* ''[https://www.fanfiction.net/s/12682621/1/The-Parselmouth-of-Gryffindor The Parselmouth of Gryffindor]'' by "Achille Talon" -- an ambitious [[Alternate Universe Fic]] for ''[[Harry Potter]]'' -- at one point has Hermione (in possession of the Time Turner) receiving ''written instructions'' from her future self on how to ensure that a stable time loop responsible for saving her life happens.
== Film ==
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* ''[[Bill and Teds Excellent Adventure]]'': Bill and Ted demonstrate remarkable [[Genre Savvy]] by using Stable Time Loops to their advantage. For example, in the first film Ted's father has lost his keys; when Bill hits upon the idea of setting things up using time travel, he suggests they could go back, take the keys, and hide them somewhere; they immediately check the location and the keys are there. They're also careful to remind themselves that they need to set things up when they're done with the history report, otherwise it won't happen.
** Also, they hear their future selves call Rufus "Rufus", which is why they use that name for him later when they become the future selves. He never actually tells them his name.
** The climax of the second film revolves around this, as both Bill and Ted and [[Big Bad]] Denomolos try to use the same plan against each other; the boys disarm Denomolos with a sandbag and trap him in a cage, but he produces a key and a new gun. When the gun turns out to be a [["BANG!" Flag Gun]] (that says "Wyld Stallyns Rule!"), the boys point out that only the winners can play that game, and they set up the key and gun to fool him.
* In ''[[The Final Countdown]]'', the USS ''Nimitz'' [[Time Travel|goes back in time]] from the early 1980s to just before Pearl Harbor. {{spoiler|During their trip, one of their crew is left on an island and ends up [[The Slow Path|staying there]]. Forty years later, he's running a defense company that helped design the carrier in the first place...and was the man who had sent Martin Sheen's character, an employee of his company, to be onboard the ''Nimitz'' at that time.}} This not only meant that person was present for the events but sending him to the ''Nimitz'' delayed her departure, which could have been what put her in the right place at the right time to be sent back in time.
* ''[[Donnie Darko]]'': {{spoiler|The entire movie takes place in an unstable time loop, and the whole plot centers on trying to close it. When Donnie transports himself and the jet engine that killed him back in time, it closes the loop and negates everything that happens in the movie.}} However, this is never explicitly stated, resulting in a certain amount of [[Mind Screw]].
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** Then in the sequel to ''that'', the Terminatrix reprograms SkyNet tech to awaken it, thus resulting in the [[Turned Against Their Masters|Machine Rebellion]], which ultimately leads to that same SkyNet sending back the Terminatrix to awaken itself...
** Also, in the first film Kyle tells Sarah a message John gave him to memorize. In the second film we see that Sarah has given the message to John, so he can give it to Reese. So who wrote the thing?
*** A very, very detailed analysis of the time loops in the Terminator series is available [https://web.archive.org/web/20140218141118/http://www.mjyoung.net/time/terminat.html here]. That site makes the interesting argument that what we see probably is not the ''first'' version of the loop; information such as Kyle's message was initially generated in an earlier cycle, and mutated with iteration until the versions converged, and we're seeing the final 'stable' cycle.
* The premise of ''[[
* ''[[Star Trek IV:
{{quote|
''Scotty:'' Why? how do you know he didn't invent the thing! }}
** In the [[Novelization]] of ''IV'', Scotty says that he ''did'' invent transparent aluminum, and that it was ''necessary'' to show him how.
** The same thing also happens when Kirk sells the glasses he got from McCoy for some needed money. He even lampshades it.
{{quote|
'''Kirk''': And they will be again. That's the beauty of it. }}
* According to Miller in ''[[Repo Man]]'', ''all of human history'' is a
* In ''[[
* In ''Time Rider'', the protagonist from the present unwittingly goes back to the wild west and meets an attractive young woman. After getting to know her (at ''her'' insistence), she asks about a necklace, which he claims his grandmother gave him. Through the course of the film, he gradually realizes that no, these aren't a bunch of really intense historical re-enactors, while she comes to understand that he really is from the future. {{spoiler|Just before he returns to the present, she snatches the necklace and holds it up, wordlessly and clearly explaining why she did it and who she will become. [[Squick]]}}
* In ''Split Infinity'', A.J. goes back in time (via [[Mental Time Travel]]) to 1929. It turns out that she was responsible for saving the house and the barn from the stock market crash.
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** The same could be said of the glasses found during the excavation. The glasses weren't left behind in the past, they were left in an alternate universe. (and if they had the "foresight" to leave the glasses in place in the alternate universe so they could find them in the future of the normal universe just because they knew to leave them in place in the alternate universe past...).
* ''[[La Jetee]]'' has two loops in it. The first one starts when the protagonist witnesses a murder as a child and the image of a young lady screaming in horror is burned into his memory. This memory is what allows him to travel back in time from the post-apoctalyptic future, and what causes him to try to escape his superiors and start a new life in the past. {{spoiler|He is shot by his masters while in the past, with his younger self watching, completing the loop.}} The second loop occurs when the man travels from the ruins of post-WWIII Paris into a future where civilization has returned to its peak, gathers supplies, and goes back to his own time so the supplies can be used to rebuild society and allow that utopian future to occur.
* Another more odd-ball yet stable time loop is a Spanish movie called ''Timecrimes'' Which features a man who, bored with his lonely day, starts spying on the neighbor girl. He witnesses a man in a red mask after her, in his attempt to warn her and chase the guy he eventually ends up in some mad scientist's lab where a temporal pool has been created, he is told to hide in it and sent back into the past. In the past he tries to save the girl but ends up missing him by seconds, finds his car missing so he can't follow the man after he seems to vanish down the road, later that night he sees the man assault the girl, chasing her into her house where she eventually leaps to her death. After this and seeing the masked man's eyes he ends up back at the mad scientists lab he pleads for the man to send him back into the past. The scientists agrees and while in the past the main character tries to find the man with the red-mask and ends up stealing his car and wrecking it into a tree. He then 'becomes' the red masked man, repeated all the previous steps and learned that he himself caused his own time loop by tricking his past self twice into the time-chamber.
* ''[[The Time Shifters]]'' avoids this trope for the most part, as time is shown to be subject to change. At the end, however, {{spoiler|a dying man from the future recognizes one of the Feds, who likes to invent gadgets, as the future inventor of a temporal displacement device, which will open the door for time tourism. The Fed then notices an interesting device near the now-dead man and decides to hold on to it, not knowing it is a time machine}}.
* ''[[Back to The Future]]'' has one moment that looks like an example: the scene where Marty is in the past and he plays Johnny B. Goode, by Chuck Berry. Chuck's cousin hears it and calls him to hear it on the phone, implying that's where he got the idea for the song. However, given that Marty has clearly not [[You Already Changed the Past|already changed the past]] when the movie starts, and Chuck could not have heard enough of the song and Marvin had no opportunity to write down or memorise the lyrics, it should be obvious that this was an example of [[Alternate Timeline]].
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== Literature ==
* [[Diana Wynne Jones]] is fond of this. There is a simple one in ''[[Aunt Maria]]'' where the protagonist and her mother go back in time while turned into cats to watch events unfold, only to become responsible for the events in the first place.
** In [[The Magids|Merlin Conspiracy]], (this is a doozy): Nick's part of the story begins with him sidestepping into other universes willy-nilly. A man named Romanov shows up to kill him. After he spares Nicks life, Nick later follows him to his personal island/mini-verse, where he is deathly ill. While taking care of Romanov, a [[Knight Templar]] and his two wards (Joel and Japeth) show up to finish Romanov off while he's down. They are dispatched, and one of the boys treads on an egg. Nick laughs. Several universe hops later and Nick winds up in Blest, where there is a ten year difference between Romanov's world, and the two boys are now the [[Big Bad]] [[Chessmaster
* There was a short sci-fi story where a king, who is is always coming up with crazy and unhelpful schemes to improve his small country discovers that a time traveler is helping his advisers to offset the impact of his schemes. He captures the time traveler and forces him to take them both into the future so he can how things will turn out. They arrive in ten years in the future and that the country is prosperous beyond his wildest dreams, so he asks a passerby "What was the big change that brought about this golden age?". The passerby answers "It all turned around when the crazy king disappeared ten years ago and the advisers started ruling the nation". As the king wonders why he disappeared a decade ago, the time traveler shuts the door to his time machine, leaving the king in the future.
* In [[Douglas Adams]]' ''[[The Hitchhikers Guide to The Galaxy (
** Far from the only
** As explained by Ford Prefect, every form of [[Time Travel]] in that universe is a Stable Time Loop.
** Zaphod Beeblebrox is his own ancestor and descendant.
** That series of books is definitely [[Timey
** What's more, in the first book, it's suggested that the origin of life was caused by the Infinite Improbability
* In the story ''The Red Queen's Race'' by [[Isaac Asimov]], an attempt to change history by sending modern scientific knowledge back to the ancient Greeks is subverted when the person translating the information finds out about the plan. The translator creates a
** A
** Also implied in "The Final Question" ("Can entropy be reversed?") when the Cosmic AC has finally compiled enough data to come up with an answer (despite the end of the Universe) and says {{spoiler|LET THERE BE LIGHT!}}
* In [[Jack Chalker]]'s ''[[Downtiming the Night Side]]'', a modern-day security officer is drawn into a time-loop by an incident instigated by himself, {{spoiler|a [[Time Travel|time-travelling]], [[Gender Swap|gender-swapped]] version of himself, and their estranged children, none of whom would exist had he not been pulled into the time loop in the first place}}.
** Not to mention they {{spoiler|go back and close down each time loop so that they never actually happened, leaving the protagonist deeply confused as to how he/she still exists. The person she's with tells her basically to shut up and deal with it.}}
* The entire plot of ''[[
** Plus, Artemis' adventures in the past are implied to inspire his younger self to research the faeries and begin exploiting them in his schemes.
* Lester Del Rey's 1951 short story "...And It Comes Out Here" features a time machine that's created by a time loop.
* In ''The Last [[Chronicles of Thomas Covenant]]'' Linden travels to the past to get the Staff of Law, since it is nowhere to be found in the present, since she picked it up in the past... [[Nice Job Breaking It, Hero|And because she picked it up in the past it didn't exist during the intervening years]], meaning that [[Big Bad|Lord Foul]] and his allies grew stronger because its power wasn't opposing them for all that time.
* In the [[Thursday Next]] Novel ''The Eyre Affair'', Thursday meets herself, and receives the news that the [[Big Bad]] is alive, and is told to travel to Swindon. As a result of the travel, she ends up caught in an patch of Bad Time, and arrives to deliver the message.
** Later in the series, it's revealed that the various methods of [[Time Travel]] work on the assumption that someone '''will''' invent [[Time Travel]], and deliver that technology to their current time. This starts causing trouble when people find that [[Time Travel]] '''won't''' be invented.
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* The Robert L. Forward novel ''Timemaster'' demonstrates the use of a Stable Time Loop generated by a wormhole (technically, a "closed timelike curve") as an offensive weapon.
* [[Harry Harrison]] dumps ''[[The Stainless Steel Rat]]'' into Stable Time Loops so often that Jim treats it as a normal occurrence. Usually they're fairly brief, but ''The Stainless Steel Rat Saves The World'' is a novel-length stable time loop. Or more accurately, it's one stable time loop after another for the whole book, with one ''unstable'' time loop for variety.
* Another [[Harry Harrison]] book, ''[[The Technicolor Time Machine]]'', hinges on several Stable Time Loops. The premise is that a movie studio is about to go bankrupt, and so in desperation they try funding a seemingly crackpot physicist who's working on a time machine in exchange for the use of the completed model. It works, of course, so they take a camera crew back in time to film a historical about how the Vikings discovered America - they don't have to pay for sets or actors this way, and they can get the whole film done in a couple of days so they'll be able to show the bank that they have an asset they can monetize when the next loan payment becomes due. When they find the Viking that history says is the discoverer, however, he seems completely uninterested in attempting the journey... until they nudge him with a little bribery and technical assistance. A few other [[Self
* The [[Robert A. Heinlein]] short story "[[All You Zombies]]" uses the same device. The protagonist tells a bartender a story in which he {{spoiler|introduces his mother, actually himself before a sex change, to his father, actually himself after the sex change. He is also the bartender, sent back in time to recruit himself into the time-travel police.}}
** In ''[[The Door Into Summer]]'', {{spoiler|the protagonist travels into the future and sees machines he's almost sure he invented. So on that hunch, he finds a time-machine that can send him back. He makes some arrangements, returns to the future by [[Human Popsicle|cold sleep]] and lives happily ever after knowing the people who tried to ruin his life got their just deserts.}}
* James Hogan uses a Stable Time Loop approximately 50,000 years long in the third book in the ''Giants'' series.
* A short story by Anne Lear, ''The Adventure of the Global Traveller'', has [[Sherlock Holmes]]' nemesis Moriarty steal the Time Machine (from [[The Time Machine|H.G. Wells' story]]), only to have it break down (and completely disintegrate) [[Pushed in Front of
* [[Time Travel]] in the ''[[Dragonriders of Pern]]'' books by Anne McCaffrey operates on this principle. Much of the [[Time Travel]] is undertaken knowing in advance that it will work ("since I've already done it, I might as well go do it..."). What isn't, is of the form "I think I'm the one who did it, so I'd better go do it..."
* ''Behold the Man'' by [[Michael Moorcock]]: Karl Glogauer tracks down the real Jesus, son of Mary, and finds that he's an idiot; so he...
* ''[[
** One time loop is Henry and Clare's marriage. From Clare's perspective, she meets Henry when he travels back in time to her childhood, lands in her backyard, and introduces himself as her future husband. From Henry's perspective, he meets Clare when he runs into her in a college library and ''she'' tells ''him'' that she's known future-him for most of her life and that they're going to get married. So when did they meet for the first time? [[
* In H. Beam Piper's short story ''Flight from Tomorrow'', a tyrant in the very far future forces a scientist to create a time machine for him as the ultimate escape route, and he uses it to flee into the past from a rebellion at the beginning of the story. He is not expecting a Stable Time Loop - quite the contrary - but the scientist not only left out some important information but sabotaged the machine, so that he went back not to the time he had researched, but to the mid-twentieth century. The tyrant is hunted down and killed as a plague-carrier. The scientist in his own time explains to the rebels that they cannot pursue the tyrant into the past, or they will meet the same fate; the scientist's audience realizes that a mysterious artifact from the distant past must be where the tyrant's body was covered over with concrete to prevent further contamination.
* In ''[[The Anubis Gates]]'' by [[Tim Powers]], the protagonist, Brendan Doyle, becomes the victim of [[Grand Theft Me]] in the 1800s and realizes that he is destined to be the poet, William Ashbless, whom he was researching in the present day. Partway through the book, he panics on realizing nobody ever ''wrote'' Ashbless's
* ''[[Discworld]]'':
*
** Specifically, Ridcully's argument relies on the old "you can't step on an ant if you don't exist." His logic is that if they're in the past NOW, then they've already been there thousands of years ago, when it was now. Therefore, anything they do, they've already done (because it's the past and the past has already happened), and it's vitally important that they do whatever they do, because if they didn't, they wouldn't have done it and they'd have done the different thing instead.
** ''[[
** On a smaller scale, minor recurring character Mrs. Cake is a psychic who is known to answer peoples' questions before they ask them; she then insists they ask, to stabilize the time loop, or she'll get a migraine.
*** In ''[[Interesting Times]]'', Hex answers a problem before it is asked. The wizard in charge eventually enters the problem to appease causality, but not until hiding in the privy for an hour and a half.
** In ''[[
** Played with extensively in ''[[
** In ''[[
*** Also the first paragraph of the book takes place later in the story, despite being chronologically first.
** In ''[[
* ''[[Harry Potter and
**
*** Probably it was a mistake made by J. K. Rowling, who did not realise that killing your past self would have caused a paradox. In-universe, it could be explained by Hermione being nervous about what they are doing that she makes that mistake - or else [[Fridge Horror|someone made that mistake, but was able to send notice of what he had done]].
*** Or, they could have lied to her.
* In ''[[Literature/The Green Futures Of Tycho|The Green Futures Of Tycho]]'' by [[William Sleator]], the protagonist learns to use his time machine from his future self, who only knows how to use the machine because he learned it from himself.
* Possibly subverted in the ''[[Star Trek]] [[Deep Space Nine]]'' [[Expanded Universe]] trilogy ''Millennium'', which involves a convoluted Quasi-Stable Time Loop in which the actions of a future Picard, Vash, and Nog help cause the creation of their alternate future, followed by the retroactive ''destruction'' of that same future. During the story both Dax and Miles O'Brien continually insist on maintaining a
* In the ''[[Warhammer
* In ''[[
* [[Dragonlance]] Legends reveals that humans, elves, and ogres can time-travel only to observe. This is how it's ''supposed'' to work. Throw in the ''unnatural'' races, which were not created at the beginning of time, like dwarves, gnomes, and kender, and you have problems. So, {{spoiler|Raistlin '''would''' be caught in a stable time loop which essentially just causes him to kill himself over and over again every 400-odd years...if it weren't for Tas and his powers of [[Temporal Paradox]].}}
* Played with in Kurt Vonnegut's ''[[Slaughterhouse
* ''[[The Man Who Folded Himself]]'': A young man inherits a belt from his uncle that allows him to travel to any time in the past or future. In doing so, he meets multiple alternate versions of himself, eventually reaching the point of Ultimate Narcissm, in two extremes. He winds up in sexual relationships with his multiple selves. The second extreme is where things get twisted and yet allows the
** This is specifically ''not'' an example of this. The book lays out the rules for how its time travel works, and they necessarily exclude stable time loops. In fact, the Dan at the end of the book is explicitly not the same as the Dan at the end of the book, for reasons that should be obvious if you've read the end of the book.
* One book continuity of ''[[
* The William Tenn short story "The Discovery of Morniel Mathaway" is built around a stable time loop that involves an art historian meeting the object of his research.
* The short story entitled ''The Sky Looked Strange Today'' involves a man driving on the freeway when he is distracted by [[MacGuffin|a peculiar aurora on the horizon.]] When he looks back at the road, he crashes into a taxi cab that has started a pile-up, but time slows down for everything but the man. He gets out of his car into a motionless world when suddenly, his "guardian angel" appears and tells him that his next door neighbor caused the crash. He takes the man back in time, one hour earlier, and leaves him to figure out how to stop the pile up. In an impulse effort, the man slashes his neighbor's tires and, feeling he has succeeded, takes a cab to work before his past self sees him. As he rides in the cab, he notices the aurora again. Unfortunately, so does the driver. The man forgot that his neighbor works for the cab service. So, the neighbor rear-ends a car, causes the pile up, and just before the man is killed by his past self (still distracted), he says his odd last words: [[Title Drop|"The sky looked strange today..."]]
* ''[[To Say Nothing of the Dog]]'' is built entirely around this trope. The main characters spend virtually the entire length of the novel time traveling back and forth to the Victorian era, trying to correct the actions of one of them that threatens to change the entire course of history.
* Used quite effectively in Simon Green's [[Deathstalker]] series. Simon Deathstalker and his companions {{spoiler|receive superpowers by passing through the Madness Maze, an alien artifact built to combat a terrible menace that the aliens knew about. After the protagonist dies his true love, Hazel D'Ark, is driven insane by grief and resolves to go back in time and become so powerful that she can prevent it from happening. It turns out that ''she'' is the horrible unknowable menace the Madness Maze was originally designed to fight.}}
* In [[Andrey Livadny]]'s ''Ark'', {{spoiler|all the worlds encountered by the main character turn out to be biospheres built into the titular ''Ark'' for the various alien species on-board, an enormous [[Generation Ship]] literally built out of the Moon by humans thousands of years before in order to basically follow the ''[[Star Trek]]'' mantra. Most of the logs are lost, and the ship's AI has no idea where they are or even what year it is. Without the crew to aid in maintenance, the ''Ark'' is in a dire state of disrepair. They manage to find a yellow dwarf star nearby with a habitable planet. Since the spherical craft was never meant to land (imagine the tidal forces from a Moon-sized object), they are forced to drop it in water in hopes of cushioning the impact. They do as much as they can to brake before hitting the atmosphere. The main character, who is now an electronic consciousness in the ship's computer, separates the command module from the rest of the ship and lets it fly away from the planet with himself and the ship's AI still in it. The ''Ark'' somehow manages not to break apart on impact, although it creates massive tsunamis and empties out the sea they hit. Most of those on-board survive (probably due to some sort of [[Inertial Damping]]). One of the first people to get out is an old shepherd who introduces himself as Noah. The novel ends with the protagonist returning to the planet after several thousand years and teaching the inhabitants several important values, including "[[The Ten Commandments|Thou shalt not kill]]."}}
* Time travel in [[Poul Anderson]]'s novel ''There Will Be Time'' seems to require these.
* In "Explain the Internet to a 19th Century Street Urchin", from the book ''[[Everything Explained Through Flowcharts]]", these are some of the more favorable outcomes. The non-temporal outcomes usually result in your death.
* The ''[[
** The events of the novel ''The Stone Rose'' begin because Mickey sees a statue of Rose in the British Museum. By the end of the story {{spoiler|the statue still hasn't been made, so the Doctor carves it himself}}. In the same book, a vial of mysterious liquid turns out to have been created by the Doctor, by running the dregs of the vial through the TARDIS's [[Matter Replicator]], and taking the result back in time.
** The Fourth Doctor short story "Breadcrumbs" has the Doctor going to a lot of trouble to collect various three-dimensional data fragments and run them through a reversed Matter Disperser in order to find out what they are. The last fragment is very close to a wormhole, and he just has time to register that the "message" is another Fourth Doctor, before he gets sucked into the Vortex, and ends up on a deserted island on an unknown planet. His only hope is to rewire the Matter Disperser correctly, and transmit himself as a series of three-dimensional data fragments...
* ''[[There and Back Again]]'' by Pat Murphy has a mysterious note in the protagonist's handwriting that appears at the beginning of the book, and a mysterious message asking for help that gets a number of secondary characters to arrive at the climax of the book in time. Both turn out to have been sent by the protagonist himself at the very end of the book, after he goes back in time.
* A common theme in the [[
* There is a short story about a man who, while his wife is away, encounters a girl in her 20s who looks a somewhat familiar wearing a strange-looking dress that comes out of the woods. She talks to him a little and then goes back to the woods. She proceeds to return several times and, eventually, tells him that she is from the future. Time travel is a possibility where she's from, but the government has banned it for fear of changing the past. Her father secretly built his own time machine before his death, as he belied that time is immutable and everything has already happened. In the meantime, the man's wife starts to act a little strange towards him, as if she suspects he is spending time with another woman. The girl is missing for several days, and then comes back saying that this is her last visit, as the time machine is about to break down due to lack of maintenance. There may be enough left in it for one more trip. As she disappears into the woods, he follows her but sees only a bright flash of light. He returns to the house and {{spoiler|looks in the attic for something, only to find his wife's old things, which also include the same strange dress the girl wore, the same dress his wife wore on the day they met years ago. Everything suddenly clicks in his head, and he realizes he had been married to her all along}}.
* ''[[Warrior Cats]]'' also features one. In ''Starlight'', the cats find a perfect (and uninhabited by other cats) spot to live. If there had been other cats, they wouldn't have been able to stay there. Later, in ''Long Shadows'', {{spoiler|Jayfeather travels into the past and convinces the cats living there to leave for the mountains, which he could not have done had he not lived there. Then, Rock appears and tells Jayfeather that he remembers that Jay's Wing (the cat everyone mistook Jayfeather for) disappeared after the cats left for the mountains. Because of this, he takes Jayfeather back to his own time, causing his memories of Jay's Wing's disappearance.}} Also, in ''Outcast'', Jayfeather met the Tribe Of Rushing Water, and learned their customs. Then, in ''Sign Of The Moon'', {{spoiler|he travels back to The Ancient Cats and teaches them the Tribe's custom, allowing them to become the tribe.}} However, both times Jayfeather is trying to create said time loop.
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* A millennia-long time loop is central to the plot of Aleksandr Zarevin's ''Lonely Gods of the Universe'', although it's not revealed until the second half of the book. Of course, the characters realize that the time loop is far from stable and will inevitably collapse after 5 or 6 cycles (what that means is anybody's guess), destroying everyone and everything in it. They spend the rest of the novel trying to break out of the time loop, namely by {{spoiler|preventing their births}}, while making sure that their present selves stay alive. Let's just say the temporal mechanics get very confusing by the end.
** A smaller time loop occurs in the middle of the novel. The main character is asleep in his apartment, when he hears a loud thud in the next room. He finds a strange object that appears to have been neatly sliced diagonally. Not sure what to make of it, he throws it in the back of his closet and forgets about it. A year later, him and his friend are experimenting with a strange machine they built, which appears to be a mix of a teleporter/portal. One of the tests is a long object specifically made for this. In the middle of the test, power cuts out, resulting in a [[Portal Cut]]. However, the part of the object that went through is nowhere to be seen. The main character quickly runs out and brings back the other part from his closet, explaining what must have happened. Eventually, they get additional funding and turn it into a [[Time Machine]].
* Comes up in [[
* ''[[
* In Barrington J Bayley's novel "The Fall of Chronopolis", a gay man called Narcis travels back five years to seduce his younger self away from the latter's boyfriend. Five years later, they realise someone will soon arrive to destroy their relationship. The book doesn't explain how the traveller didn't ''remember'' this had already happened.
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== Live Action TV ==
* One of Jim's ''[[The Office|Office]]'' pranks involves sending Dwight faxed warnings from "Future Dwight".
* In one episode of ''[[The Red Green Show]]'', one of Ranger Gord's educational shorts had him teaming up with his future self and going back in time to prevent a forest fire. After the two meet and team up with Past Gord, Future Gord explains his information shows the fire will be caused by lightning, which strike [[Butt Monkey|Red and Harold.]] The three Gords violently put out the fire and after looking like the usual [["Everybody Laughs" Ending]], the three Gords decide to go to the future and celebrate. However, sparks from the time machine taking off end up causing the fire in the first place.
* ''[[The Adventures of Brisco County Jr]]'' has the titular character go back in time to meet himself and take a necessary [[McGuffin]] out of his own hands. Which is exactly what happened a few episodes ago.
* ''[[
** {{spoiler|Not to mention becoming the ancestor of Delenn, one of the show's main characters, whose own decision at the start of the war, started the chain of events that led to Sinclair's [[Time Travel]].}}
* In the first season of the new series of ''[[
** The episode "Blink" also repeatedly uses it. At one point, the Doctor pre-records his half of a conversation with another character; when the other character has the conversation, it's written down, and the Doctor works off it to record his half. Also, his half is recorded as an easter egg on 17 specific DVDs; when the Doctor tells a video executive which discs to put the recording on, he's working from a list someone in the future made of DVDs that have the video on them.
** Also used "for cheap tricks" (his words) in "Smith and Jones"; when Martha first meets the Doctor, he stops in front of her on the street, takes off his tie, and walks off. When they meet at the hospital again, the Doctor can't ever recall meeting her. At the end of the episode, he goes back in time and takes his tie off in front of Martha in order to prove that the TARDIS is a time machine.
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** The Fifth Doctor story "Earthshock" also is an example {{spoiler|A ship is sent back in time and causes the extinction of the dinosaurs, the dominance of ''Homo sapiens'' and the creation of the ship. It also kills Adric.}}. So, really a win-win situation.
** There's also "City of Death", in which an alien whose mind was split several ways across time after his space-ship landed on Earth and exploded. His past selves hid various treasures to be found by his future selves (including multiple copies of The Mona Lisa!), which were to be sold off and used to get the materials to create a time machine so he could go back and prevent the explosion - something The Doctor might have helped with had he not discovered that the same explosion was the "lightning bolt" that stirred up the primordial soup to begin creating life on Earth...
** Is [[Time Travel for Fun
*** This episode also features possibly the most pointless stable time loop ever conceived. Young Amelia is thirsty, so the Doctor jumps back in time several hours and steals a drink. He then returns to the present and gives the drink to her. The reason she's thirsty in the first place is that a few hours ago [[Mind Screw|someone stole her drink]].
**** Given that Steven Moffat frequently writes in lines that poke fun at Dr Who tropes (Curse of Fatal Death is a long string of these!) this drink-loop is probably employed as an in-joke at how much the trope is being abused in this episode. In fairness though, they do acknowledge it on screen in this episode (and again in The Impossible Astronaut) that they're only able to do all this time-looping because the universe is collapsing.
** "The Curse of Fenric" reveals that Ace only exists as the result of a stable time loop: she befriends her grandmother as a young woman, and when disaster strikes sends her to a specific address in London with Ace's infant mother.
** "The Shakespeare Code" is a minor example - the Doctor quotes lines from Shakespeare's works to the man himself. Some of them he recognises, but some of them he hasn't got around to writing yet.
*** This is fairly common in the [[Historical Domain Character]] episodes. Donna gives [[
** In "Time," the second part of the 2011 Red Nose Day comedy special, we get three of these in as many minutes, two of which play this trope straight (Amy doesn't understand what her future self said, but still says it herself, even though the Doctor doesn't even explain it to her, and the Doctor waits for his future self to tell him which lever to use despite having no idea despite the time loop being a few seconds long) and the third of which justifies it:
{{quote|
Future Rory: It just sort of happens.
Present Amy, flirtatiously: Hi.
Future Amy, flirtatiously: [[Screw Yourself|Hi.]] }}
** As of ''A Good Man Goes To War,'' the Doctor's ''name'' turns out to be one of these. The meaning of the word was apparently already established when he chose it, but due to centuries of crosstime adventuring, it turns out 'doctor' means healer ''because of him.'' However, in some places, [[Beware the Nice Ones|it means 'mighty warrior' because of him.]]
** {{spoiler|River Song's whole existence is a series of these. She is named after herself (twice!), she is directly responsible for her parents hooking up, she's indirectly responsible for her being conceived in the TARDIS, etcetera.}} In "Forest of the Dead" the Doctor manages to save her imprinted memory, because he figured his future-self wouldn't leave her to die, and his future-self, knowing that he ''didn't'', thus created a way to save her...
** In ''Let's Kill Hitler'', Amy and Rory make a crop circle as a dramatic gesture to leave a message in time to get the Doctor's attention. They were most likely inspired by River Song's various messages to the Doctor previously in the series. However, {{spoiler|it turns out that their best friend Mels is River, and this is her first time meeting him as an adult. So this incident is probably where she got the idea for leaving unusual messages like this.}}
*** Heck, River's whole life is a giant time-loop! She only starting using her signature catch-phrase of "Spoilers!" after the Doctor used it on ''her'' the first time.
* In the [[Time Travel]] episode of ''[[Ghostwriter (TV series)|Ghostwriter]]'', the kids in 1928 solve their case by sending Ghostwriter to 1993 to find out how the case was solved, then bring the info back and use it to solve the case. As the kids in 1993 are reading old 1928 newspapers about the case, the pages start to turn
* ''[[Terminator]]: The Sarah Connor Chronicles'' - {{spoiler|Fischer only survived Judgement Day and taught the machines the things he did because he was in prison -- thrown their due to his future self planting a backdoor into military computer systems, having logged in, of course, with his own retinal scan.}}
** On the other hand, this is explicitly part of an
* ''[[Heroes (TV series)|Heroes]]'': Anything to do with Hiro's adventures with Kensei.
** Near-miss at the end of the second season when {{spoiler|Peter Petrelli ''almost'' becomes responsible for the end-of-the-world timeline he visited earlier, through his efforts to prevent it...but drops the [[Idiot Ball]] after holding tight all season, and destroys the virus}}.
* Referenced several times in ''[[Star Trek: Deep Space Nine]]'' episode "Trials and Tribble-ations". The Temporal Investigations agents specifically loathe Stable Time Loops. Also, Bashir is hit upon by a woman who has the same name as his great-grandmother. After commenting on the fact that nobody knew his great-grandfather, he attempts to argue to O'Brien that he '''has''' to go sleep with her in order to ensure his own existence. O'Brien dismisses the notion, causing Bashir to declare that [[Fridge Logic|he can't wait to see the look on O'Brien's face when he finds out Bashir never existed.]]
** Also happens in ''Past Tense'' where Sisko, Bashir and Dax are sent back into Earth's past and Sisko has to stand in for a civil rights leader (who died for the cause) in order to allow the Federation to exist. It is [[Lampshade Hanging|later noted]] how similar Sisko looks to the historical figure.
** The Prophets form a part of one. Sisko meets them in 2369, informing them that they are the gods of the Bajorans. That they sent the Bajorans "Orbs". Thing is, the Prophets live in a wormhole, and exist outside of time. From their wormhole, they can simultaneously access any era of history (Shown when they bring an ancient Bajoran to the present, then take him back to his time). So the Prophets, upon being told that this is what they do... do it. They send the orbs back in time, and begin acting as gods to the ancient Bajorans, causing the culture that Sisko gets to know... and then tells them about on his first meeting.
** Sisko's own existence. Sisko is the Emissary of the Prophet, and discovered the wormhole. This caused the prophets to {{spoiler|Possess Sisko's mom, so she'd marry Sisko's dad, ensuring Sisko's birth}}. The only reason the Prophets did this, is because they met Sisko in the future (and being outside linear time, realized the role they played in his life, and thus took it upon themselves to make it happen).
* And referenced almost explicitly in the ''[[Star Trek:
* In the premiere episode of ''[[Primeval]]'', Nick Cutter discovers a human camp (and human bones) in the Permian, as well as a camera with a picture proving his vanished wife had been there. In the first season finale, having been reunited with his wife, they travel back to the Permian where Helen convinces him to take her picture...which he suddenly realizes is the picture he'd discovered previously, and that the camp they just set up is the one he'd discovered originally. An actual change does happen to the past, however, which confuses things.
* In the ''[[Stargate SG-1]]'' episode '1969,' the team travels back to the title year and has to figure out how to get home, meeting a young General (then Lieutenant) Hammond, two hippies, and a young Catherine Langford. General Hammond sends a note back with them that Captain Carter is not allowed to read until after they go through the gate. The note contains cryptic instructions as to how to get home, as well as instructions from General Hammond to his younger self to help the visitors (that from his POV writing the note he has already helped). It is later revealed that General Hammond has been waiting for years for the sign that it is time to send the note (evidenced by a large cut on Captain Carter's hand).
** Still on episode '1969', when the SG-1 team manage to travel back to the future, they accidentaly ended up jumping several decades in the future, far from their own time, arriving on a deserted SGC. There, they meet an old Cassandra (the human girl they rescued on a planet attacked by the Goa'uld on season 2), who was expecting them in order to guide SG-1's return to their time, implying that sometime between their return and her meeting with them in the future, she was told to meet them there so they could return to their time.
** Some [[Wild Mass Guessing|fan theories]] have it that this episode might be the entire reason that SG-1 exists. Hammond knew that the team had to be these specific people, because that's who he saw when they went back in time, so that's who he put on the team. Confused yet?
*** It might even be the reason that the whole Stargate Project exists, by getting Catherine Langford and the government interested in restarting her father's investigation of the strange artifact.
* ''[[Star Trek: Voyager]]''. In "Time and Again" Voyager witnesses the destruction of a civlisation. When Janeway and Paris are accidentally sent back in time a few days before the incident, it turns out that the crew's attempt to rescue them is what triggers the disaster. Fortunately Janeway stops the attempt and the timeline [[Reset Button|returns to normal]].
** Features prominently in the three-part episode "Future's End". Captain Braxton, from the 29th century, goes back to the 24th century in a single-passenger timeship to destroy Voyager to prevent a 29th century disaster. Voyager fights back, causing the timeship's systems to malfunction and transport both ships to Earth in the late 20th century. The timeship crashes on the surface somewhere around 1967, and Voyager arrives safely thirty years later. Janeway sends down an away team to track down some temporal readings that might indicate a way back to their time when they encounter the now-aged Braxton, who admits that a wealthy 20th century businessman named Henry Starling found the remains of the timeship before he could get to it. Starling then proceeded to reverse engineer the timeship's technology, and used it to kick off the Information Age as we know it with crucial inventions such as the silicon transistor and the integrated circuit. This technology would of course develop over the centuries into computers such as Voyager's in the 24th century, and later the timeship's in the 29th century, which would then get thrown back to the 20th century and crash land...
* The ''[[
* In the fifth season of ''[[Lost]],'' John Locke may have just created one of his own: {{spoiler|while [[Time Travel|time travelling]] to 1954, he tells Richard Alpert (immortal spokesman of the Others) his exact birthday, and encourages him to consider young John for a leadership role.}} Considering his current relationship with the Others, he may have pretty much written his own destiny.
** An even bigger one occurs in "He's Our You" and "Whatever Happened, Happened": {{spoiler|Ben torments and manipulates Sayid and others in the future. Sayid then travels back in time and shoots 12 year-old Ben, attempting to prevent Ben's later misdeeds. Kate, Sawyer, and Juliet, in order to save Ben, take him to the Others. This leads to Ben becoming the ruthless individual who later torments them, and who causes their time travel.}}
** According to [[Mr. Exposition|Daniel Faraday]], this is how time travel in the ''Lost''-verse works, except for Desmond for some damn reason.
{{quote|
** In yet another loop in the fifth season, in "The Variable", {{spoiler|''Faraday himself'' is killed by his mother when he travels back in time to before he was born. His mother therefore ''knows'', throughout Faraday's life, that she killed (the future) him, yet she accepts this "sacrifice" and uses every opportunity to strictly direct him along his destiny.}}
** Also in the fifth season, {{spoiler|Richard gives a compass to Locke, who then travels through time for a while and gives the compass to Richard in the 1950s.}} Where did the compass come from? Who manufactured it? Where did it go? Also shouldn't it age into dust? Perhaps it did age into dust, and Richard then created a new one which he gave to Locke and which became the same compass that had aged into dust.
** Let's just say that ''[[Lost]]'' has confusing time travel. However, the clearest, unambiguous example of a
** The plane crash itself. {{spoiler|The Losties crashed, travelled back in time, and caused The Incident. The Incident released a large amount of electromagnetic energy, which would later be the cause of the plane crash. In other words, they caused the crash. After it had happened (from their timeline's perspective).}}
* [[Stephen Colbert]] (circa 2009-2509 or so), the main character in [[The Colbert Report]], failed to stop Stephen Colbert (circa 2005-2009) from electrocuting himself, then took his place as host in order to be hosting the show in 2500 to come back in time
* In ''[[Kamen Rider Kabuto]]'', {{spoiler|despite the fact that the Hyper Zecter was destroyed, the fact that Tendou had all ready attained it in a parallel time means he can send it back to himself from that future so he can have it to give to himself later when this time comes around. Yeah.}}
** Lampshaded in the movie ''God Speed Love'' where {{spoiler|Tendou gets the Hyper Zecter legitimately and uses it to go back in time to give himself his belt.}}
* In the ''[[Supernatural (TV series)|Supernatural]]'' episode "In the Beginning," Dean's actions help to set many elements of the series in motion, from encouraging his father to purchase the [[Cool Car|Impala]] that Dean later drives, to accidentally focusing the attentions of the [[Magnificent Bastard|Yellow-Eyed Demon]] on his mother, Mary. [[Word of God|The creator of the show]] noted that the
** It was stated that what had happened was fate, and that Dean wouldn't have been able to change the outcome. He had been sent back just to witness the events.
** Which is weird, because an angel later goes back in time to try to change it all. {{spoiler|She}} fails, of course, but it has nothing to do with fate.
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* The [[Dawn French]] comedy [[Anthology Series]] ''Murder Most Horrid'' has an episode in which French plays an inventor working on a time machine. Her simple-minded husband's behaviour becomes so erratic that she bludgeons him to death with a wrench. After serving time for his manslaughter she returns home, completes the machine and travels back to try and stop herself, only to discover that the presence of herself from the future was what caused her husband to behave so annoyingly in the first place. She was even accidentally responsible for the wrench being in just the right place for her past self to pick it up...
* In [[Children of the Stones]] the village of Milbury seems to be caught in a loop where similar characters go through the same set of events again and again. At the end of the series, as Professor Brake and Matthew leave the village, Joshua Litton arrives. Litton is identical to Rafael Hendrick, who had been brainwashing the villagers. The implication is that the story is about to start again.
* The "Boom Boom Machine" in ''[[Fringe]]'' originated from a
** {{spoiler|Somewhat amusingly, future-Walter realizes that he has no choice but to send the pieces of the machine back through time in order to complete the loop, and calls attention to the fact that this represents a paradox.}}
== Music ==
* In live performances, the ''[[Flight of the Conchords]]'' song 'Bowie' is usually preceded by a description of Bret and Jermaine travelling back in time and meeting David Bowie, to whom Bret plays his Bowie's own songs, and even leaves an "easy to play Bowie song book".
* The [[
* "One For the Vine", on the [[Genesis (
* Show Of Hands song The Bet is about a man who finds ten grand next to a car crash, takes it, bets on horses with it, wins ten grand and... yeah, you see where I'm going with this.
== Radio ==
* The ''[[
== Tabletop RPG ==
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* [[Planescape]]'s ''Faction War'' features a double time loop. Considering that the person stuck in it tried to overthrow the [[Powers That Be|Lady of Pain]], he had it easy.
* Rulified by the german RPG ''[[The Dark Eye]]'' in which time travel follows a simple law: you cannot change the past, as it had already happened and you'll just end up doing what you did to create the present you're currently living in. If by some chance the hero does discover some [[Temporal Paradox|hopelessly contradicting action]], be prepared for time to [[Good Thing You Can Heal|heal itself]]. Oh, and the universe has [[Clock Roaches|wardens]] against such misuse, too.
* Get ready for a [[Mind Screw]] - in [[The Chronicles of Fate]] [[Tabletop Games|tabletop RPG]], the ''entire multiverse'' is one gigantic
* Bizarre version from ''[[Warhammer
** Another example is of the ork warlord Grizgutz and his army who, after setting off into the warp, arrives shortly before they left off and decides to hunt down and kill his previous self so he can own a spare of his favourite gun. The confusion results in the war-band being stopped in it's tracks.
* [[Multiverser]] features a whole complex system of resolving time loops and paradoxes. [https://web.archive.org/web/20140306153342/http://www.mjyoung.net/time/theory.html Details here.]
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** You can even get an even more immediate time loop by sending a mech back in time using a chronoporter. Then, you undo the original build order for the chronoporter and before time catches up, you let the mech build a chronoporter at about the same place. Because the chronoport (the action of sending a unit back in time) is bound to the unit and independent of the chronoporter, the mech will then travel back in time with the chronoporter it just built to build the chronoporter to be sent back in time.
** Amusingly, a Grekim unit can also literally become its own grandfather.
* In ''[[Sonic the Hedgehog (2006
** Of course, the events of the entire game were erased from existence in the end, so yeah.
** [[Sonic Generations
*** And this would have stopped them from being dangerous - Super Sonic wasn't used until after 1996 anyway, so it wouldn't matter, and after it was used, the Final Bosses came from Eggman's emerald collecting.
*** Actually, the world would still have been screwed. {{spoiler|The Black Arms would have taken over anyway, and it took the Eclipse Cannon - which in itself requires all 7 Emeralds to be at full power - to destroy the Black Comet and stop the invasion.}}
* In ''[[The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time]]'', Link meets a man in the future who is angry that someone in the past used the Song of Storms to wreck his windmill. This teaches Link the Song of Storms, and he goes back in time to use it and wreck said windmill.
** Meanwhile, ''[[Oracle of Ages]]'' has quite a few of them, such as defeating the Great Moblin in the present and receiving a Bomb Flower as a reward, then giving said Bomb Flower to the Gorons in the past, who use it to destroy the rocks that collapsed on the Goron Elder while also promising to use its seeds to grow the patch of bomb flowers that the Great Moblin had taken control of in the present.
** Subverted by the ending of ''[[Ocarina of Time]]''. The Time Loop that would have resulted here was so incredibly unstable that the [[Alternate Timeline|timeline split instead]]. Now we have 2 universes, one leading into ''[[The Wind Waker]]'' and the other one leading into ''[[Twilight Princess]]''. Yeah, it's even more [[Mind Screw]] than the actual Stable Timeloops.
*** Shortly after the release of ''[[Skyward Sword]]'', [http://www.warpzoned.com/?p=16645 the series' official chronology was released,] revealing a ''third'' timeline: If Link had died during the fight with Ganon, then the events would have continued into ''[[A Link to The Past]]''.
* In ''[[Escape
** A fun part is occasionally, you may be given a gun by your future self. You can use the gun to shoot your future self and carry on as normal. {{spoiler|Of course, when you meet your past self, you yourself will eventually be shot}}.
* In ''[[Ever 17]]'', the main character {{spoiler|(revealed to actually be a 4th-dimensional being known as "Blick Winkel") travels back in time from 2034 to 2017 to save two other characters from certain death, only to find that if he immediately reveals their survival to the others, that will create a [[Temporal Paradox]] preventing him from coming back in time in the first place--so instead he is forced to hide their existence and manipulate the others into setting up the event in 2034 that results in him being "summoned" in the first place.}}
* [[Fate/stay
* Even though the entire ''[[Prince of Persia]]'' series is based on time travel, the example that stands out most is when the Prince continuously encounters a strange creature through his travels in ''[[Prince of Persia]]: The Warrior Within''. {{spoiler|As it turns out, the strange creature is actually the Prince himself, transformed into "The Sand Wraith" after he found the mythical mask that could be used to change his fate, he then had to go back in time and meet his past self in all those locations. The kicker? The last time the two meet, instead of The Sand Wraith dying, which happened the first time you saw it, this time you kill your past self and resume the story in the same part as your past self, but you're really your future self. Get it?}}
** The main plot uses this as well. The Prince goes back in time to kill the Empress before she can create the Sands of Time, not realizing that {{spoiler|killing her is what creates the Sands in the first place. Thus, the Sands exist because the Prince went back in time, but the Prince went back in time BECAUSE of the Sands, which would never have existed if he gone back in time, which is how the Sands were created, and so on and so on. This leaves the player wondering which event caused which?}}
* ''[[Legacy of Kain]]: Soul Reaver 2'' seems to have one. Once Raziel finds the Reaver broken in half and {{spoiler|sticks it back together, he threatens Morbius with it, but for no particular reason}} throws it away. The most logical thing for Morbius was to {{spoiler|take the fixed Reaver, and give it to William back in ''Blood Omen 1''. Then Kain makes two Reavers meet, creating a [[Time Paradox]], which breaks William's Reaver. The broken Reaver is left on William's grave, thus a loop is established.}} There are actually more of these, but this loop is special, {{spoiler|considering that the second Soul Reaver appeared out of nowhere}}.
* The first ''[[Fallout]]'' game has the [[Player Character]] trying to find water for their fallout shelter after its water chip is broken. It ends with the PC staying in the post-apocalyptic Earth and heading off to start a new life. The sequel has a random encounter in which the player, now controlling a descendant of the character in the first game, travels back in time to just before the first game and ends up in the shelter. The only way to return to your own time is to break the shelter's water chip...
* A Stable Time Loop is essential to the plot of ''[[
* Strangely enough, this trope is seen in the original, ''[[
* ''[[Shadow Hearts]]: Covenant'' ends with {{spoiler|the character Karin Koenig being sent back in time some 25 years as a result of her journeys with the main character, Yuri Hyuga. There, the first person she meets is Yuri's father, and it's strongly implied that she goes on to become Yuri's ''mother''.}}
** And this raises the question of where Anne's Cross came from.
** In the good ending, {{spoiler|Yuri kills himself, letting himself be impaled on a rock spire, to avoid having his soul destroyed by the Mistletoe's curse. With his last thought}}, he sends himself back to the beginning of the first game. As he waits for the train, there are hints that {{spoiler|this time he will save Alice from what killed her the first time.}}
** Regarding that good ending, Yuri actually {{spoiler|seems aware of the stable time loop ("Here comes that train again."), which raises questions of its own}}.
* ''[[Soul Nomad and The World Eaters]]'' features one of the most bizarre examples of this trope: During an early cutscene during a [[New Game
** Not only bizarre, but also [[Squick]] of possibly {{spoiler|[[Selfcest]]}} overlapping with {{spoiler|[[Foe Yay]]}}/HoYay. In one of the ending where you play as the heroine, you basically travel the world together with {{spoiler|[[Heel Face Turn|one of the aforementioned World Eaters]]}}, romance subtext included. It's still vague whose soul becomes whom (fans generally assume Gig became {{spoiler|Raksha}} while Revya became {{spoiler|Thuris}}, but another theory is that {{spoiler|Drazil}} waited the two souls to fuse together before splitting them apart. So you get either you romancing a half of your reincarnated alternate-dimension self or you romancing your reincarnated alternate-dimension partner, [[Running Gag|but you can call him Gig]]. But, hey, at least it proves that even [[Person of Mass Destruction|Gig]] [[Jerk
* The ''[[Jak and Daxter]]'' series is basically one big stable time loop, with the first two games being both prequels and sequels to each other. At the end of [[Jak and Daxter The Precursor Legacy|the first game]], Jak discovers a huge portal through time. When activated at the start of [[Jak II Renegade|the second game]] it unleashes the Metal Head race into the world, and Jak and Daxter are immediately sent to the distant future. {{spoiler|There Jak discovers that he was actually born in the future, and helps his younger self go back into the past to be raised safe from harm so that he can become his old self and defeat the Metal Head leader.}}
** The vehicle they used to ride through the huge portal was created by {{spoiler|Keira in the future}} based on the specifications of the vehicle she found in the
* The end of the second stage and the beginning of the eighth stage of ''[[Gradius]] V'' are both set in the same timeframe and same battleship, with the past and present versions of the [[Cool Ship|Vic Viper]] running through segments of the stage alongside each other. The game records the actions of your 'past' version to replay in the second run-through.
* ''[[Time Splitters]]: Future Perfect'' had numerous examples of this. One of the earliest examples is also one of the most memorable - you are given a key by your future self that you need to progress, and later pass the key on to your past self, leaving its initial existence unexplained.
** As well in the You Genius U-Genix, when you find Dr. Crow, Cortez {{spoiler|explains the entire plot of eternal life to the main villain before the main villain has any chance to learn about it. Cortez seems to believe this is a version of Dr. Crow from the future, not knowing it was the only Dr. Crow that had not learned of the plot yet, effectively kick-starting the problem. Of course, younger Crow shows up only moments later, but Crow has already learned of the plan for eternal life, removing the necessity of younger Crow to explain it, and leaves with younger Crow's time machine.}} Cortez then shouts [[Atomic F
* ''[[Sam and Max]] Season 2'' has the player create at least two stable time loops. The first involves {{spoiler|taking a boxing glove from a character's present self and giving it to his past self - one would initially assume that the boxing glove is the same one from Season 1, but it can't be, since it turns out to be on an infinite loop.}} The other time loop involves {{spoiler|traveling into the near future - so near as to be the next episode - and picking up an object, which causes the player character to be interrupted by someone calling from outside the window, asking for that object. The player character automatically tosses him the object, and receives another in return. In the next episode, the player character ''becomes'' the person outside the window, and must do what he remembers he did - an action that makes no sense without prior knowledge, even to the game's player.}}
** Then, in Season 3, Sam and Max have to use the astral projector from the Devil's Toybox to alter the actions of their ancestors Sameth and Maximus, to get the Devil's Toybox from Egypt and into the basement where they found it. The only way Sameth and Maximus did it in the first place was with information they wouldn't know at the time; not getting the box would probably destroy the universe.
*** There are other things. How do you know that the vampire elf needs to bite Jurgen the Vampire Hunter in the past? Because you've met Jurgen before in the present, as a vampire.
* The [[Infocom]] [[Adventure Game]] ''Sorcerer'' features a
** Its sequel, ''Spellbreaker'', features a two-in-one: you have to establish ''two'' Stable Time Loops in two different locations (with time limits on each), or else be wrung from existence by the ensuing paradox should you try to leave the hourglass. Early on in the game, you find a magic zipper that functions as your Bag of Holding; going back to that location in the past, you find a sack in its place, and have to swap the two (and all the contents thereof) before the rising water kills you. Elsewhere, there's a disused cell containing a moldy spellbook, entirely illegible save for one useful spell; when you return there in the past, you have to put ''your'' spellbook where you found the moldy one in the future (memorizing as many spells from it as you can first!) and leave the room precisely as it was (or will be) before the guards arrive.
* The DS game ''[[Time Hollow]]'' is rife with these, mostly because {{spoiler|more than one person can adjust time.}}
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* Near the beginning of ''[[Tomb Raider]]: Legend'' there is a flashback to Lara's childhood in which she set off an ancient device. Her mother then pushed Lara out of the way, looked into a ball of light and had a confused conversation with a mysterious figure (who the players can't see or hear) before disappearing. At the end of the game Lara inadvertently opens up a time portal and it is revealed that she was the person her mother was talking to at the start.
* In ''[[Vandal Hearts]]'', the NPC {{spoiler|Leena}} is sent back in time, and is then revealed to be the party member {{spoiler|Eleni}}, who had [[Easy Amnesia]] until that point. The loop aspect comes in with the character's pendant, given to the earlier version by the later version.
* This trope is brought up [[Tear Jerker|tragically]] in ''[[Wild
* The plot of ''[[Taiyou no Shinden Asteka II]]'' (a.k.a. ''Tombs and Treasure'') is that the player characters are searching for Professor Imes, who went missing while exploring the ruins of Chichen Itza. One of the ruins is "The Tomb of the High Priest". The ending reveals that {{spoiler|the professor went back in time and ''became'' the High Priest}}.
* An unusual example in ''[[
** {{spoiler|Then one in ''[[
* The indie game ''Original War'' is all about this, with the Americans and Russians sending soldiers into the distant past to fight over the game's [[Phlebotinum]]. Whoever wins the war keeps the [[Phlebotinum]], but near the end of the Cold War the losers send a strike force back in time to steal it...
* The [[Infocom]] [[Interactive Fiction]] game ''Trinity'' contains both a major and a minor loop. The minor one involves an umbrella lost by a woman in London that you retrieve; when you go back in time to just before the bomb is dropped on Nagasaki, you give the umbrella to a girl, who will grow up into the woman you met in London. {{spoiler|The entire game is a
** {{spoiler|"Small" explosion being a relative thing of course. They still are enough to take out a city -- in other words, the main character in ''Trinity'' stops the creation of a superweapon that could destroy a whole state and instead creates the 'smaller' atomic weapons that still are quite powerful.}}
* ''[[
* ''Sunset Over Imdahl'', a freeware game made with [[RPG Maker]], contains such a loop {{spoiler|the plague, the one that killed all of your loved ones, the one that you were sent back to try to stop? You were the carrier. A chill's running a marathon down your spine, isn't it?}}
* In [[Bookworm Adventures]] Volume 2, {{spoiler|1=[[Evil Counterpart|EviLex]] doesn't exist at all, but in reality is a time travelling Lex. This
* In [[City of Heroes]], the Menders of Ouroboros are a time-travelling group dedicated to keeping the timestream straight. The first one you meet accidentally creates a
* ''[[
* Present in the OEL [[Visual Novel]] ''[[Mirai Imouto]]''. Misaki travels from the future to the present, {{spoiler|and tries to find a way to prevent her brother, Hiseo, from dying due to his heart condition. One of the reasons she wants to prevent his death so much is because in her past (the story's present), her brother spent most of his time before his death with some random girl (future-Misaki), and present-Misaki grew up into future-Misaki remembering that she wasn't able to spend much time with Hiseo before he died.}}
* In [[SaGa|Final Fantasy Legend III]] the party is warned by their Elder that people in the Past are looking for the [[Cool Ship|Talon]] Units. In said Past they meet the said Elder and ask where they can find Talon Units. Past Elder also is thinking about naming a town and asks for a name.
* In the first ''[[Breath of Fire]]'', {{spoiler|Nina is accidentally catapulted back in time. Before this occurs, Ryu and the others can meet a winged girl with amnesia who looks strikingly like an older version of Nina... After she vanishes, they can jog her memory and re-recruit her.}}
* [[Chzo Mythos]]: The Man in Red's reason for existing is to ensure reality maintains a stable time loop.
* In ''[[
** The other half ot the Black Beast is equally paradoxical: The Black Beast's existence requires the fusion of Ragna and Nu's Azure Grimoires. Ragna's Azure came from {{spoiler|the remains of the Black Beast.}}
** In the prequel novel ''Phase 0'' it's revealed that {{spoiler|the time displaced Ragna sans memory ''is'' the original hero "Bloodedge". Ragna only calls himself "Ragna the Bloodedge" to honor the name of that hero, whose sword and coat he inherited. Also, the only reason Mitsuyoshi calls himself Jubei in the present is because Ragna kept calling him that. After Ragna died fighting against the Black Beast, Mitsuyoshi took the name Jubei in honor of his fallen friend.}}
* An odd example from ''[[Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: Echoes of Time
* The key to Karazhan used by players in ''[[World of Warcraft]]'' is acquired when they perpetuate a stable time loop centered on an object. After collecting the fragments of Khadgar's broken key, they take it to Medivh to be repaired. Medivh cannot immediately repair it and so instead gives the player a spare; the key he is repairing will be given to Khadgar to be broken in the future and collected by the players to be repaired by Medivh yet again.
** The entire point of the quests in the Caverns of Time is to ensure that time remains stable. The Infinite Dragonflight are doing their best to change the history of Azeroth for their own ends and it's up to you to stop them. Canonically you are victorious and their efforts are ultimately futile.
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*** "No wonder I started drinking."
* In ''[[Dragon Quest V]]'': {{spoiler|The Hero as a kid meets up a young man in Whealbrook who interested in seeing the Gold Orb you're carrying. The said orb later to be destroyed by Ladja before the first [[Time Skip]]. You learn that the Gold Orb is needed to raise the Zenithian Castle to the skies from underwater. You then visit the fairy castle, travel back in time using the mirror, find your younger self, and switch the decoy orb with the Gold Orb. The orb Ladja destroyed was a fake, and the young man early in Whaelbrook was your older self.}}
* In [[
* In [[Spellforce]] {{spoiler|Rohan is both the [[Big Bad]] and [[Big Good]] of the game thanks to this. As a young man, he travels forward in time, kills his elder self and attempts to recreate The Convocation, a spell which nearly destroyed the world the last time it was cast. As he grows older, he has a [[Heel Face Turn]], and travels back in time in an attempt to repair the world. In that time he becomes embroiled in the plot to stop his younger self's schemes, setting in motion the events which lead to his own murder.}}
* There seems to be one in [[The Witcher]]: {{spoiler|The magical boy Alvin shows the ability to teleport himself to safety when in great dangers, but not having direct control over where he appears several times during the game. The last time he simply vanishes and is never heard of again. However, the Grand Master and founder of the Flaming Rose order seems to know Geralt way and repeats words that he had said to Alvin before he disapeared. He also has the same amulet as Alvin does, but it appears much older and worn. Apparently Alvin not only teleported through space but also time and his experiences during the war between the Knights of the Flaming Rose and the elves inspired him to found the Order in the past.}}
* In ''[[Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors
* In ''[[Do Don Pachi]] DaiFukkatsu'', {{spoiler|1=EXY, at the end of ''DoDonPachi dai ou jou'', tries to go back in time to prevent the Blissful Death Wars--that is, the events of DOJ, and destroy the cause of the wars. Not only does she fail, but in doing this, she also ''causes the Blissful Death Wars in the first place!'' If there's any saving grace in all this (due to the unclear meaning of the ending monologue), it's that your fighting simply prevented the wars from degrading into something even worse.}}
* In ''[[Bastion]]'', activating the Bastion's [[Reset Button|Restoration Protocol]] rewinds time. {{spoiler|But it doesn't allow Rucks, Zia, Zulf, or The Kid to stop the Calamity from happening again.
* [http://www.kongregate.com/games/I_smell/no-time-to-explain?acomplete=time No time to explain] You are watching tv when yourself from the future, with armor and a laser gun, bursts through your wall. He is dragged away by a giant lobster, and drops his laser gun. You use it to save him. When you defeat the giant lobster (and included alien mothership), {{spoiler|yourself from the future gives you his armor, and tells you to go into the time warp and warn yourself from the past. You do. And are dragged away by a giant lobster. guess who tries to save you...?}}
* ''[[Escape From St.
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* In ''[[Stickman and Cube]]'', Cube purchases a time machine on eBay. The time machine then travels to the future by itself, and when it returns, Cube sends it back. Through time. To before they bought it. The guy who sold them the time machine finds it, and, having no other use for it, puts it on eBay...
* In probably one of the shortest and most succinct versions of the trope, Fuzzy of ''[[Sam and Fuzzy]]'' engages in a Stable Time Loop in [http://www.samandfuzzy.com/archive.php?comicID=202 this strip.]
** Not quite as short as [http://www.nuklearpower.com/2005/03/24/episode-531-time-for-a-new-space/ this one] from ''[[
*** Equally as short is [http://faultylogic.comicgenesis.com/d/20071006.html this] Faulty Logic page, on why you shouldn't rob your future self.
* [http://www.nuklearpower.com/2009/09/19/episode-1174-oh-thats-what/ Here's another] ''[[
{{quote|
'''Sarda''': What you deserve is ''so much worse''. }}
** [[
{{quote|
'''Black Mage:''' Okay, I have a theory. It's called: '''I never knew it possible to care less about time travel.''' }}
* The Space theme of ''[[Irregular Webcomic]]'' was stuck in one complex
** Of course, parts of the time loop were unstable, as Iki Piki's Splanch is now, theoretically, infinitely old.
* [https://web.archive.org/web/20110508145241/http://starslip.com/2008/08/07/starslip-number-843/ This] ''[[Starslip Crisis]]'' strip is utterly shameless and straight-faced about this trope. When strips had individual names it thanked Heinlein
* The entire Surreptitious Machinations story arc of ''[[General Protection Fault]]'' was ultimately about ''stopping'' a Stable Time Loop that a tyrant was using to stay in power.
* Occurs in ''[[Sluggy Freelance]]'' during the {{spoiler|"[http://sluggy.com/comics/archives/daily/050124 Oceans Unmoving]"}} [[Story Arc]], thanks to a godlike who decides "[http://sluggy.com/comics/archives/daily/060201 Life's SO much funner with the paradox rules turned off!]"
* The ultimate fate of {{spoiler|Unicornmotorcycle Sparkelord}} in ''[[
** {{spoiler|Sparklelord is unique in that he's half-unicorn exiled from another dimension, half-motorcycle stuck in a time loop. Something like that, anyway.}}
* Every instance of time travel in [[Umlaut House]].
* It's pretty safe to say that the majority of the plot of ''[[Homestuck]]'' is ''built'' out of Stable Time Loops, both intentionally and accidentally created. To describe ''all'' of them would probably take up most of this page.
** See the [https://web.archive.org/web/20130501112339/http://mspaintadventures.wikia.com/wiki/Weird_Time_Shit Weird Time Shit] page on the MSPA Wiki (massive spoilers). The most prominent examples being {{spoiler|John receiving the same bunny for his birthday thrice,}} and {{spoiler|an ectobiology session where John basically creates himself, his friends, and their guardians, who are sent to Earth at different points of time by meteor-defense-portal-displacement.}}
*** Best of all, the latter actually leads to the former. After {{spoiler|Dave gives John the first bunny, John gives it to baby Rose, who fixes it with her sewing needles thirteen years into the future and gives it back to John, who then gives it to baby Jade. Jade has it taken from her accidentally by an [[Alternate Universe]] version of ''her grandfather'', named Jake. He then fixes it up again, and tunes it up to be incredibly dangerous, before sending it back to her. It gets waylaid on the way, allowing [[Punch Clock Villain|Jack Noir]] to take it and use the Black Queens [[Ring of Power|Ring of Orbs Fourfold]] horribly mess up John's session. The bunny eventually gets back to John a third time, [[Big Damn Heroes|just in time to]] [[Crowning Moment of Awesome|save him from]] [[Big Bad|Jack Noir]], but not before things become so irreparably damaged that they need to ''restart their universe'', through an [[Apocalypse How|apocalypse of at ''least'' Class X-4]] to fix it.}} And best of all? The {{spoiler|restarted time line is ''the one Jake comes from''.}}
{{quote|<span
**
*** To clarify: {{spoiler|Doc Scratch, a being powered by the Green Sun, set forth a plan that would end in Earth and Alternia being destroyed. Earth was destroyed by the Sovereign Slayer, another being powered by the Green Sun, while Doc Scratch personally manipulated events on Alternia to lead to the destruction of the universe. The circumstantially simultaneous destructions activated the Tumor, a giant bomb that, when activated, will create the Green Sun. Ironically, the people who put the Tumor in place thought they were trying to destroy the sun...}}
*** {{spoiler|On top of all this, the Green Sun is located at the center of a "region" known as paradox space, which as the name suggests eats logic and shits "It just did, now shut up about it". Distance and time interact in incomprehensible ways, so that you have to know the proper route to not only ensure you end up ''where'' you're going, but you get there at the right time too; going three feet to your left could rocket you a million years into the future, and you'd never even notice until you got there.}}
** A more minor example, which still emphasises the nature of Weird Time Shit, is when Present-Karkat is on his bulletin board, having an argument with Future-Karkat. Eventually Future-Karkat logs off, having left Present-Karkat in precisely the right state of mind not to take any crap from Past-Karkat when he logs in. (Not only that, but Present-Karkat changes his typing colour from grey to candy-red to make a point ''because'' Future-Karkat is "already" doing it.)
* Meimu, the [[Big Bad]] of the "Rethinking the Natural Law" arc in ''[[
* [[Bob and George]] [http://www.bobandgeorge.com/archives/010619c Information ontological paradox] causes one here.
* A major one in ''[[Two Evil Scientists]]'' occurs when Tails attempts to {{spoiler|bring Sonic and Mega Man back from the time periods Quint sent them to, only to accidentally rescue the titular scientists from their former self-destructing fortress, after which they suddenly became dangerous - which was the primary reason Tails was trying to bring Sonic and Mega Man back.}}
* Shelly of ''[[Wapsi Square]]'' managed to take advantage of time loops and places where time flows in different directions to arrange the [[Vision Quest]] gone wrong in her childhood that had a huge influence on her character.
* Lampshaded in [http://omega_key.comicdish.com/index.php?pageID=100 The Omega Key]{{Dead link}} when the characters discover that they themselves, via time travel, were responsible for the destruction that they thought they were wrongly accused of.
{{quote|
* This probably happens in [http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/comic.php?date=20040126 this] ''[[Girl Genius]]'' strip. The time window that Bang sees the first time happens after the second one from the point of view of the characters in the window. Gil calls Bang a maniac in the first one, probably because she pointed a gun on them in the second one, which she did because "earlier" he insulted her.
* ''[[
{{quote|
** Then there was the time he built a time machine for the sole purpose of going back in time to stop himself from building a time machine, because [[Logic Bomb|he knows he'll end up building a time machine and misuse it]].
== Web Original ==
* This is essentially one of Dr. Insano's backstories as part of ''[[
* In ''[[Red vs. Blue]]'', Church creates an uncountable number of
** Local [[Cloudcuckoolander]] Caboose makes the following unintentionally profound statement when Church talks to him about his experiences with the timeline: "Time LINE...? Ehh, time isn't made out of LINES. It is made out of circles. That is why clocks are round!"
* [https://web.archive.org/web/20131028020354/http://www.alternatehistory.com/discussion/showthread.php?t=98287 In Illo Tempore] contains at least two stable time loops across four millennia.
* The Flash game ''No Time To Explain''. Your character is chilling at home when a future version of himself appears out of thin air, warning you of imminent danger. Seconds later, a giant crab grabs him and carries him away, leaving you to use his weapon to save your future self. After defeating the crab, {{spoiler|your future self upens a time portal back to the beginning of the game before dying. You travel back to your past self's living room, and try to warn him of the danger your future self warned you about. Seconds later...}}
* [http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/443631 Robutt] a robot is trapped in a time loop wherein it constructs itself out of junk, sacrifices its battery to power the new version, which gets in a time machine and goes back to do it again.
* ''[[A Very Potter Sequel]]'' features a
* The 2011 time travel [[Story Arc]] in ''[[The Packrat (Webcomic)|The Packrat]]'' explains why Buchla modular synthesizers have no keyboard: Packrat scared and angered Don Buchla and destroyed his synth prototype with his time machine keytar.▼
== Western Animation ==
▲* The 2011 time travel [[Story Arc]] in ''[[
* In ''[[Duck Dodgers]]'', the queen of Mars finds out the one moment in his life that inspired Dodgers to become the person (or duck) he is, and sends Marvin the Martian back to prevent it. When he arrives, though, he finds that Dodgers was just a waterboy then. Refusing to believe that they were wrong, Marvin tries to make it happen the way it did, and fails his mission to stop it in the process.
* In ''[[
** Later, the aforementioned [[Chekhov's Gun]] comes into play, which gave him a birth defect that enabled him to fight the Brainspawn. He ends up trapping himself with the Brainspawn, and they send him back in time, so he can avoid falling into the cryogenic tube, and live out his life in the 2000s. It turns out Nibbler is the reason he fell (Nibbler never went back in time, he's just ''that'' old). Nibbler convinces him to stay by saying he might have a chance with Leela in the future, and thusly helps himself fall alongside Nibbler. In a clever twist, on an earlier flashback episode, you can see Fry and Nibbler's shadows just as Fry falls into the tube.
*** If you look carefully at the pilot episode when Fry puts down I.C. Wiener's pizza on the crygenic lab desk, you can see Nibbler's eye poking from under the desk. Yes, the writers planned that far ahead.
Line 455 ⟶ 454:
*** Also, in the movie, their main method of time travel, the ball, is stated to be a self correcting method. Thusly, any copies made using the time travel are doomed to die horribly at some point. Some last longer than others. Farnsworth and Nibbler state that there can't be any paradoxes, and if there are, such as by the end of the movie where it's revealed there's hundreds of Benders, it rips open a hole in the universe, leading to the events of the second movie.
** The Game actually had {{spoiler|the entire plot, which was a giant [[Shoot the Shaggy Dog]] story about trying to prevent Mom from conquering the world by buying Planet Express, and dying while failing to do anything other than set up a seemingly random joke at the start}}.
* In an episode of ''[[
* Time travel in ''[[
** [[Magnificent Bastard]] David Xanatos uses this to his advantage in "Vows". When pulled to 975 AD, he gives the Illuminati a coin to hold onto for one thousand years, and then deliver it to a young David Xanatos. The coin wasn't worth much in the past, but by the time it reaches him in 1975, it's worth twenty grand, which is the foundation for his fortune. He also gave them a letter to hold onto for 1,020 years, so he'd get it precisely one week before the episode began, telling [[Write Back to
{{quote|
'''Xanatos''': But you won't. Because you didn't. Time travel's funny that way. }}
** Goliath found out that history is immutable to his dismay in the same episode. He tried to convince teen Demona not to turn evil. It worked, but only temporarily.
*** In the same scenes, Demona always knew history is immutable because she already saw it. Future/Present Demona was the one that brought them all to the past in that episode, and then she goes to her younger self. She travels 20 years into the then-future, to 995 AD, and Goliath catches a ride. She shows herself the slaughter of Wyvern castle, that all her rookery mates are dead, and then tells herself to get rid of all the humans. Initially her past self rejects this, and she fights herself. She at first seems to reject what her future self told her, and embrace what future Goliath told her as she is returned to 975. However, by the time those twenty years pass, she makes a plan to do exactly what her future self told her to do, eliminate all the humans from the castle. This causes the scene her future self used to scare her in the first place, resulting in the classic irony this trope generally causes. Future Demona wasn't actually trying to change it though, as she remembered what happened to her past self that night, and knew what would happen, it was all a trick to turn herself evil and turn her into the person she becomes.
**** The final irony of this is that young Demona was simply told "the humans" destroyed our clan. She assumed it meant the humans in the castle, and tried to get rid of them by allowing the Vikings to sack the castle. In reality, it was the Vikings who killed the gargoyles, so this became a classic case of [[Self
** The episode "M.I.A." hints at what could be a possible out within a
* The ''[[Star Trek:
* In ''[[
* In ''[[The Fairly
** ...which actually proves to be only a semi-stable time loop. If it were a ''true'' stable time loop, Crocker would have had AJ's tracker the entire time. Either that, or he 'forgot' that he had it until immediately after Timmy gets back from his time-travel.
*** And the reason Cosmo and Wanda didn't remember having Crocker as a godchild? The past Cosmo was playing with the device Jorgen Von Strangle used to erase young Crocker's memories of having fairies (the device being a reference to [[Men in Black (
*** This loop also indirectly results in Timmy's own existence, as the series of events that brought Timmy's parents together ran parallel to it.
* ''[[Transformers Generation 1]]'' featured a truly epic multi-layer time loop revealed over the course of several episodes. 11 million years ago, A3 led a [[Turned Against Their Masters|revolt against the Quintessons]]; however, in 2006, the Quintessons yanked A3 into their own time to prevent themselves from losing Cybertron. Blaster, Perceptor, Blurr, and Wreck-Gar go back in time to help the rebellion, while the Aerialbots save A3 from the Quintessons. A3 returns to his own time to lead the rebellion. Two million years later, A3, now known as Alpha Trion, meets the Aerialbots, who have travelled back in time from 1986. The Aerialbots persuade him to save the life of a young dock worker named Orion Pax, who he rebuilds into Optimus Prime (and also rebuilds Orion's girlfriend Ariel into [[
* In the ''[[Pinky and The Brain (Animation)|Pinky and The Brain]]'' episode "Brain of the Future," the two mice travel to the distant future in a time machine given to them by their future selves, who had just returned from the distant future. There, they lose the time machine they arrived in but manage to steal a "different" one and return to give it to their past selves...▼
** This also counts as [[Nice Job Fixing It, Villain]], because the reason the Aerialbots were in the past was due to Megatron's [[Time Machine]]; he was trying to use it to set a trap for them and send them back to the literal Beginning of Time, but the other Autobots intervened, causing the device to malfunction and "only" send them two million years into Cybertron's past.
* ''[[Kim Possible (Animation)|Kim Possible]]: A Stitch in Time'' has this. Shego stole the time monkey only because she stole it, went back in time, transferred Ron away from Kim, and then told herself to steal the time monkey. This somewhat changes when the time monkey is is destroyed and the entire timeline that its use created is revoked, [[Ret Gone|along with the very existence of the time monkey]]. So, you destroy it once, it erases itself from ever existing. So Shego never went back in time, Ron never left KP, and nobody ever knew or cared about the time monkey.▼
▲* In the ''[[
▲* ''[[
** And within that wheel, Shego takes the monkey while in the past and escapes into the timestream, so Kim goes straight from the past to face Shego in the [[Bad Future]]. Shego manages to [[Take Over the World]] partly because Kim wasn't around to stop her, since she skipped over that whole time.
** On the other hand, the [[Ret
* The ''[[
* The only time time travel occurred in ''[[
* ''[[
* The intro short for ''[[The Simpsons (
* ''[[
* In ''[[Teen Titans (
** Same episode, Starfire telling Robin about her encounter with Nightwing in the future seems to be what inspires him to eventually take the identity of Nightwing.
* An episode of ''[[
* In the ''[[My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic
* In one episode of [[Justice League Unlimited]], Braniac 5 summons [[Green Lantern]], [[Green Arrow]], and [[Superman|Supergirl]] to the 31st century to help in a conflict as history records show that the three time-traveled once- but Supergirl didn't return, implying that she died. At the end {{spoiler|Supergirl doesn't die, but she enjoys 31st century-Earth more like the advanced society she grew up in, as well as developed a crush on Braniac 5, that she decides to stay voluntarily.}}
== Real Life ==
* You never thought you'd see it, but some non-trivial physicists are [http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/13/science/space/13lhc.html?_r=2 wondering] [http://io9.com/5380647/is-the-large-hadron-collider-being-sabotaged-from-the-future aloud] whether the future is [[Set Right What Once Went Wrong|actively trying to scuttle]] the LHC research project. The string of mechanical difficulties, they say, may be more than mere chance: Whether through [future] human intervention or the universe itself exercising some form of upstream-acting [[Ontological Inertia
** [[Futurama|Mumbo? Perhaps. Jumbo? Perhaps not!]]
** Such a pity -- for this example -- that [[w:Search for the Higgs boson|the Higgs Boson was first seen only a month after TV Tropes and All The Tropes forked]], and was confirmed in March 2013.
* In terms of the theory of relativity, time travel would take the appearance of a ''closed timelike curve'', which is a series of events returning to its starting point - such as time travel returns to the past. That leads to the inevitable paradoxes, but some solutions claim that if time travel is possible at all, it's only possible in a stable form: the only form of time travel possible generates a
** While that may seem supremely useless - what good is a time machine if it can't change anything? - that's not really true. A computer that could only build
*** Less esoterically/more science-fictionally, a time machine that can't change anything would also be just dandy for observation, thanks. (Better, really, since you don't risk stepping on the [[Butterfly of Doom]].) Video from 20,000BC anyone?
* There is apparently a theory out there that human time travellers seeded the young planet Earth with life. This is sometimes known as the [[Fun
* Older theories of cosmology fiddled with the possibility this universe is a
* Some theories of particle physics hold that antiparticles (particles with the opposite charge and parity of a "standard" particle) travel backward through time. It's also widely believed that particle-antiparticle pairs randomly pop into existence from the [
** Considering that experiments in 2023 show that [https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/antimatter-gravity-alpha-g-1.6979540?cmp=rss gravity acts normally on antimatter], "moving backward in time" looks unlikely.
* Then there is the [[w:One-electron universe|"One-electron universe" postulate]], first proposed in 1940 in a conversation between theoretical physicist [[w:John Archibald Wheeler|John Wheeler]] and [[w:Richard Feynman|Richard Feynman]], which hypothesized that all electrons and positrons are actually manifestations of a single entity moving backwards and forwards in time.
{{reflist}}
[[Category:Narrative Devices]]
[[Category:Tropes of Legend]]
[[Category:Time Travel Tropes]]
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