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Then in all likelihood, you'll have a Time Crash on your hands.
When you've gone and broken ''time'', [[Divide
Garden-variety temporal wedgies need not apply in this trope. This is not about your usual temporal inconveniences, the kind that [[Ret-Gone|make your best friend vanish from the time line]], put [[Adolf Hitler]] in the Oval Office or make medieval Japanese the ''lingua franca'' of the 21st century -- that is, the sort that can be solved by a simple trip back in time to [[Set Right What Once Went Wrong]]. A good and proper Time Crash should have some large-scale, [[Reality Is Out to Lunch|reality-breaking]] effects: holes get punched in the fabric of space-time, the [[Clock Roaches]] show up and start eating people, things that should happen one after another happen the other way around instead, or worse, ''simultaneously'', etc.
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A Time Crash is not a simple thing to solve, either: usually, it involves either some serious [[Applied Phlebotinum]] or [[More Dakka|enough firepower]] aimed at the right [[Eldritch Abomination]]...if it can be fixed at all.
A form of [[Divide
{{examples}}
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* The ''[[Astro City]]'' story "The Nearness of You" is about a character who's haunted by memories {{spoiler|of his no-longer extant wife}} after a Time Crash.
* ''[[Zero Hour]]'': [[Green Lantern|Hal Jordan/Parallax]] deliberately triggers one of these destroying the entire timeline with the purpose of [[In Their Own Image|rebooting the universe his way]]. Fortunately, some heroes are pulled outside of normal time to deal with it.
* Happens during ''[[Crisis
** Happens ''again'' in ''[[Infinite Crisis]]'', where some of the people directly involved with the first Crisis are dissatisfied with its results, and so they temporarily divide the one stable universe into several unstable ones again, then mix it back together after shuffling the parts around a bit.
** During ''Infinite Crisis'', the [[Justice Society of America]] had a story arc in which they travelled back in time. During the journey to the present, they hit the Time Crash created by the original Crisis.
* The final story arc in ''[[Major Bummer]]'' is about the attempt to repair a Time Crash.
* One occurs in issue #7 of the short-lived ''[[Bill and Ted]]'' comic book.
* Back when ''[[The Dandy (
* This is the reason ''[[Flashpoint (Comic Book)|Flashpoint]]'' happened. {{spoiler|[[The Flash|Barry Allen]] wanted to save his mom from being killed by the Professor Zoom and succeeds. However, doing so caused time to futz up, creating a world where most heroes are dead or out to kill each other!}}
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* The movie ''[[Film/Millennium|Millennium]]'' concludes with a massive paradox barreling its destructive way into the future whose time travel efforts caused it.
* In the ''[[Back to
** The reasoning is fear of paradox: what if Jennifer seeing her future self faints, falls badly, breaks her neck, and thus can't be there to go back in time to startle herself? If you're a dabbling mad inventor who ''doesn't know'' if paradoxes might do really quite unpleasant things to reality, advocating caution is almost uncharacteristically pragmatic. (How ''do'' you do a controlled experiment to see if some event X destroys the universe, anyway?)
** As a [[Shout-Out]], {{spoiler|Spock Prime}} implies to Kirk that this will happen if he ever meets himself in ''[[Star Trek (
* ''[[The Philadelphia Experiment]]'' has this happen as an unanticipated side-effect of experiments in building an [[Invisibility Cloak]]. A Navy destroyer from 1943 and an entire Midwestern town from 1984 get [[Mass Teleportation|sucked into]] the resulting vortex, which has to be stopped (from within) lest it [[The End of the World
== Literature ==
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* [[Discworld]]'s History Monks (the Monks of Time, the [[The Men in Black|Men in Saffron]], from No Such Monastery) exist to prevent this sort of thing happening. Again. They've managed to piece things back together, but a Time Crash is used to explain why Ankh-Morpork has a Shakespearean theater on the same street as an opera house, and why there have been so many Battles of Koom Valley.
** Fan's attempts to create a complete series timeline seem to always end up with inconsistencies - [[Word of God|the author cites that same Crash as the reason]].
* In [[
* M. Shayne Bell's short story "Lock Down" is about a team of time travelers trying to repair the continuum after one of these.
* ''[[A Tale of Time City]]'' is about three children who want to ''prevent'' this from happening when their town, Time City, falls apart.
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** In a less humorous example, Rose causes a Time Crash in ''Father's Day'' when she saves her father from dying at a predetermined time. [[Clock Roaches|Flying Killer Time Monkeys]] [[Nice Job Breaking It, Hero|come out and eat everyone on Earth.]]
** Also, the mastermind behind the cracks in the time field in [[Doctor Who|NuWho]] season five was trying to cause one of these, referred to as a "total event collapse" in-series, {{spoiler|by remotely taking control of the TARDIS and blowing it up. It actually works, and the Doctor and co. only narrowly prevent the universe from never having existed.}} As a result, every star in the universe is completely extinguished in the 2nd century A.D., and only the residual heat and light from {{spoiler|said TARDIS explosion}} keeps life on Earth going until 1996, where the sky is bright orange by day and empty at night, Richard Dawkins is the leader of a "star-cult", the British Museum has exhibits of petrified Daleks and Cybermen, and Rory is an Auton who takes the place of the [[Wandering Jew]] in folklore. As of {{spoiler|the end of Series six}}, we still don't know why.
** ''The Wedding of River Song'': The entire universe goes pear-shaped when River refuses to kill The Doctor, even though it's meant to be a fixed point in time. Her failure to do so results all of earth's history happening at once - people travel by intercontinental steam trains and cars tethered to hot air balloons; pterodactyls are a nuisance in public parks; [[
* In ''[[Eureka]]'', the latest meddling with time causes one of these, causing 1947 and 2010 to merge at an exponential rate, which would eventually annihilate time itself.
* In [[Star Trek:
* One episode of ''[[Sliders]]'' has Quinn meddling in a world where time moves backwards... somehow. He changes the events that lead to his incarceration and the death of a police officer that was the double of someone he loved in his world, and a wormhole akin to [[Clock Roaches]] appears. We never know what happened to that world, as the heroes manage to slide out before things get serious, but we know messing with time created that paradox and the professor wonders if "[[The End of the World
== Tabletop Games ==
* In the Looney Labs game ''[[Chrononauts]]'', you play a bunch of time travelers meddling with history. If there are ever 13 unresolved [[Temporal Paradox|Temporal Paradoxes]] on the board, the space-time continuum collapses in a [[Puff of Logic]] and everyone loses.
** Unless you're [[Exactly What It Says
* In the [[Tabletop Game]] ''[[Continuum]]'', the rogue time travelers known as Narcissists are called thus because they're self-centered enough that they're trying to ''cause'' these. In fact, the Sahara Desert was created when the Narcissist kingdom of Antedesertium was destroyed in a massive Time Crash called Interregnum. Of course, [[Perspective Flip|they think]] they're trying to [[Set Right What Once Went Wrong]]. (Appropriately enough, another name for them is the Crashers.)
* Ontocylsms in ''[[GURPS]]: Infinite Worlds'' start with rewriting history and get more devastating from there.
* The premise of the ''Time Spiral'' block in ''[[Magic:
* More of a time explosion than a crash, but in ''[[Mage: The Awakening]]'', the collapse of the Celestial Ladder and the fall of Atlantis was such a magical clusterfuck that time itself grew extremely unstable around it. It's why no one's able to accurately place ''when'' Atlantis fell, despite certain mages being master-class postcognitives, why they can't even solidly place whether it actually happened in the past or was a future event cast backwards by the sheer weight of the event, and why they can't tell if anything like Atlantis will ever come into being again.
== Video Games ==
* ''[[
* It's not apparent from the start, but this is the central premise of ''Shrapnel'', an [[Interactive Fiction]] by [[Adam Cadre]]. {{spoiler|The protagonist and an ill-fated time traveler are caught in a particularly vicious and inescapable Time Crash caused when the time traveler's time machine was damaged by a piece of shrapnel. Cause and effect cease to exist, and the protagonist experiences several key events in [[Anachronic Order]] and dies multiple violent deaths with no lasting aftereffects before discovering the nightmarish truth.}}
* Speaking of [[Interactive Fiction]], ''All Things Devours'' is all about averting a time crash. The timeline in the universe doesn't take kindly to paradoxes, and will promptly "censor" them with a [[Stuff Blowing Up|huge explosion]]. [[It Got Worse|What's more]], the lab housing the time machine is in the middle of Boston, and the military experimenting on it have no idea what they're doing.
* In ''[[
** The really futzed up part is, the heroes do basically exactly that to stop her.
* In ''[[Ratchet and Clank]] Future: A Crack In Time'', one of these is caused in the backstory by {{spoiler|the Fongoids abusing time travel to the point where the space/time continuum grew thin enough to breach.}} The resulting [[Negative Space Wedgie]] took out 83 star systems before Orvus and the Zoni sealed it with the Great Clock. History would have repeated itself permanently had {{spoiler|Alister Azimuth}} succeeded in abusing it as a time machine. Which it's not supposed to be used as.
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* ''[[Pokémon Mystery Dungeon]]: Explorers of Time/Darkness/Sky'' has this in spades, certain parts of the present start to break down or have time stopped when the Gears of Time are stolen, as well as in the [[Bad Future]], messing up the deity that [[Time Master|Controls Time itself]] tends to have this. Not even Celebi, a legendary [[Pokémon]] that could travel through time could escape for long.
* This was the goal of [[Big Bad]] {{spoiler|Time Master}} from ''[[Freedom Force]]'' when he tried to break the Celestial Clock. At the end of the game, {{spoiler|Man-Bot makes a [[Heroic Sacrifice]] and locks himself inside the clock to allow the rest of the heroes to escape. Wraiths of Chaos begin attacking the clock because of his presence there, locking Man-Bot in an [[Endless Struggle]] to keep the Celestial Clock going and prevent another time crash from happening.}}
* In a particular test chamber in ''[[
{{quote| ''Alright, this next test may involve trace amounts of [[Time Travel]]. So, word of advice: if you meet yourself on the testing track, [[Never the Selves Shall Meet|don't make eye contact.]] Lab boys tell me that'll wipe out time. Entirely. Forward and backward. So do both of yourselves a favor and just let that [[Screw Yourself|handsome devil]] go about his business.''}}
* In the original ''[[Command and Conquer Red Alert|Red Alert]]'', using the [[Teleporters and Transporters|Chronosphere]] [[Critical Failure|too much]] could trigger a mild form of these - a swirling distortion in the map that fried any nearby units or buildings with lightning or tore them apart as it roved around at random. Which naturally led to some players using as many Chrono-based abilities as possible in hopes of triggering one near their opponent's base.
* It is implied that this was supposed to be the true objective of {{spoiler|Rasputin}}'s masters in ''[[Raidou Kuzunoha vs. the Soulless Army]]'', as the entire timeline has been clearly warped in a ''big'' way by way of devil summoners and alternate dimensions. Said fellow decides to blow the mission off.
* In ''[[Blinx the Time Sweeper]]'' the titular [[Time Police|sweeper]] has to fix the [[Clock Roaches|damage]] caused by a [[Endofthe World As We Know It|rather large]] one of these.
* Plays heavily in the plot of ''[[
* In a nutshell, this is basically what happens in ''[[The 3rd Birthday]]'', the underwhelming third installment of the ''[[Parasite Eve]]'' games. [[Mind Screw|We're still trying to figure out just how it leads to mutant monsters snatching people through dimensional holes.]]
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* There was a recent arc in ''[[Irregular Webcomic]]'' in which every plot thread created a time paradox at once and the universe was destroyed as a result.
** Followed by an entire arc of black black panels, and an entire arc of everyone hanging out in the afterlife.
* In ''[[
* Parodied in the webcomic ''[[Beaver and Steve]]''. The characters go back in time and Steve eats the apple that was supposed to fall on Newton's head; thus, Newton never invents gravity [sic] and in the future everything floats. Then, they travel back in time again and launch an apple at Newton's head but it ends up bludgeoning him to death. Finally, they travel back a third time and end up killing their own past selves. At this point, Beaver remarks, "Well, I'm no expert on temporal physics but my guess is the universe will implode." And then it does.
* In ''[[
== Web Original ==
* ''[[Yu-Gi-Oh!: The Abridged Series
== Western Animation ==
* A ''[[
** In the main ''Futurama'' universe: at the end of ''Bender's Big Score'' Bender creates so many time paradox duplicates that he makes a tear in the fabric of reality. This becomes a major plot point in the sequel ''The Beast With A Billion Backs''.
** The most apt ''Futurama'' example has to be "Time Keeps On Slipping", in which the removal of [[Unobtanium|chronotons]] causes time to skip randomly. Professor Farnsworth explains the ramifications thusly:
{{quote| "At this rate, by Tuesday it will be Thursday, by Wednesday it will be August, and by Thursday it will be the end of existence as we know it!"}}
* Chronos did this in the "Once and Future Thing" episode of ''[[Justice League Unlimited]]''. Time started to crack and fall apart, and killed several people before it was stopped.
* In ''[[Transformers]]'', this is known as a time storm, and happens whenever someone makes a massive change to history. Cases include the Quintessons bringing Alpha Trion forward in time to cause the original Transformers Rebellion to fail, Megatron killing Cyclonus, and [[
** By ''[[
* In the "It's About Time" episode of ''[[The Penguins of Madagascar]]'', several future versions of Kowalski show up as a result of his experiments with a [[Time Machine]]. This ends up creating a vortex that threatens to wipe out reality (according to Kowalski, anyway) and ends only after the machine is destroyed.
* In the ''[[
* In ''[[X Men the Animated Series]]'', Apocalypse tried to cause one of these so as to rebuild reality as he saw fit once the dust was cleared.
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