Temporal Paradox/Playing With
Basic Trope: A character travels through time and causes an impossible event or paradox.
- Straight: Alexia accidentally becomes her own grandmother.
- Exaggerated: Alexia brings technology from the 2500's to Ancient Rome, accidentally becomes her own ancestor, and ends up leading to an endlessly long world empire.
- Justified: The "paradox" cleans itself up. Once San Dimas Time reaches Alexia's birth, time rearranges itself so that she always caused those events.
- Inverted: The universe would end because of a natural paradox in it (no meddling necessary), until Alexia sets the time stream right.
- Subverted: Alexia accidentally kills her own grandmother, but when she comes back to the present her grandmother is alive and she herself isn't erased from existence.
- Double Subverted: Turns out it's her grandmother's twin sister. Poof goes Alexia.
- Parodied: Alexia causes a Pradadox, and everyone in the world only wears Prada.
- The world to turn into Bizarro World through increasingly hodgepodge attempts to "fix" the last paradox she caused.
- Deconstructed: Time travel inherently creates paradoxes (paradoxi?) and is thus too dangerous to ever use. Realizing this, Alexia makes one last paradox to save the universe: she kills the inventor of the time machine.
- Reconstructed: ... which was completely pointless: a paradox only seems impossible to human observers, the nth dimensional Time Beavers explain to Alexia that it's all just a giant Timey-Wimey Ball, and she shouldn't worry too much about it.
- Zig Zagged: Alexia killed her grandmother, but what she doesn't know is she was supposed to die anyway, except that's because of a Stable Time Loop, only now she can't exist.
- Averted: Alexia kills Hitler, uses a Timeline-Altering MacGuffin, and sets up an empire using 32nd century technology. The effect? She creates an alternate timeline because the changes were too radical. Her home Earth goes unchanged.
- Alternately, time has a cleanup crew (be it Time Police, Clock Roaches, or the Butterfly of Doom) that can fix any problem, so there aren't ever paradoxes.
- No Time Travel.
- No one changes anything.
- Enforced: "It's a story with Time Travel, of course there has to be a paradox!"
- Lampshaded: "Great. Just great! We've killed ourselves from five minutes from now. Now we have to take their/our place and get slaughtered by our future/present selves or destroy the universe!"
- Invoked: Alexia convinces the Mad Scientist not to use the time machine by convincing her she'll just end up killing one of herself when her Ego clashes with her past self's ego.
- Defied: Alexia takes pains to never mess up time.
- Discussed: "I hate time travel. If we step on a butterfly we'll end up starting World War Three, and then the universe will implode."
- Conversed: "I wonder why anyone uses time machines when it's so easy to make a time travel paradox."
What? You can't head back to and read Temporal Paradox! The universe must be destroyed!