The Fog of Ages: Difference between revisions

'''Treebeard''': I don't remember now.|[[The Lord of the Rings (Literature)|The Two Towers]]}}

 

 

Well, hold on a second... see, one could argue that [[My Skull Runneth Over|there's only so much space the brain can hold, like a video cassette]]. Which means that, if you live long enough, your brain's going to start recording over itself. You might forget where you were born, what your parents looked like, hell, maybe even what your real name is. And it'll be lost forever to the sands of time.

 

Not to be confused with [[Shrouded in Myth]].

 

== Anime and Manga ==

** Played straight in an early post-crisis story where he laments how much advanced medical knowledge (from forgotten civilizations he used to rule) he has lost over the ages. When a modern geneticist hesitates in assisting him with some human testing, he bellows that he has 'forgotten more than you'll ever learn!'

* Det. Christian Walker, the main character of ''[[Powers]]'', is actually an [[Immortality|immortal]] who's been around since caveman days. He just doesn't remember anything before the early 20th century. His [[Arch Nemesis]]/[[Evil Counterpart]] who has been around just as long, on the other hand, seems to remember most of it. However, at the final tragic confrontation between the two, Walker demands to know why the nemesis has done the things he's done, and why the two have been fighting all this time. His enemy pauses, then admits that he can't remember anymore.

 

 

* A point of ''Glasshouse'' by [[Charles Stross]]. Immortality means that humans need to periodically erase their memories to make things more interesting. The protagonist has just done this when the book begins.

* The Struldbruggs in [[Jonathan Swift]]'s ''[[Gullivers Travels]]'' have the opposite problem -- once they turn 100, they get a case of short-term memory loss so bad they can't even remember how the sentence they just finished began. (They don't die of old age, but they do ''[[Blessed With Suck|keep getting older]]'', so they become intensely senile.)

* In [[Stephen Baxter]]'s ''Exultant'', Luru Parz is one of a group of immortals who have survived more than 20,000 years. She claims that they can remember events from throughout their lives, but no more or less clearly than a normal person. Sometimes, events may bring forth a distinct memory that hadn't been recalled in several thousand years. Even so, they must "edit" their memories, but it isn't explained how this is achieved.

* ''[[A Fire Upon the Deep (Literature)|A Fire Upon the Deep]]''. Peregrine Wrickwrackrum, a storyteller among the Tines (a pack of dog-like aliens who form a group mind) claims to have memories from his ancestors going back to the beginning of time, but admits that after you go beyond a few hundred years you can't tell the difference between legend and memory.

** Fairies in general, and Cirno specifically, fall into this category - as [[Anthropomorphic Personification|Anthropomorphic Personifications]] of nature, they are immortal to [[From a Single Cell]] levels for as long as their aspect of nature is powerful enough to support them. Individual fairies may well be [[Time Abyss]] material, but because they are also permanently childish and simple-minded, they often forget everything that happened yesterday, much less a thousand years ago. Cirno, for example, can only vaguely remember the previous occurrence of the flower's odd growth from ''Phantasmagoria Of Flower View'', only after being reminded a few times, and can't remember any of the details, but is fine with it, since she doesn't care, anyway. She simply wants to do what she always does - play, fly around, and pick fights to see if she'll win.

** Fujiwara no Mokou, an immortal, somewhat played this trope straight. In a supplementary material for a manga, it's explained that her rivalry with another immortal that's often thought to have driven her to take the immortality elixir wasn't - she had forgotten about her by the time she was tasked to dispose of the elixir and was more interested in the prospect of, er, being immortal. Her rivalry is more out of a sense that she has something constant in her life, now.

** Another character in ''[[Lost Odyssey]]'' does in fact keep journals; when that character experiences amnesia, the journals prove to be very helpful.

* In ''[[Planescape Torment|Planescape: Torment]]'', this is implied to have happened to Ravel Puzzlewell -- she's certainly not 'all there' when you meet her. As for The Nameless One himself, he is immune to this trope: He ''does'' suffer heavily from memory loss, but it's caused by him repeatedly dying and coming back instead of from living too long.