What Year Is This?: Difference between revisions

== Anime and Manga ==

* ''[[Haruhi Suzumiya]]'' example: While fixing the FUBAR Yuki created due to emotions, Kyon uses her [[Exactly What It Says on the Tin|Emergency Escape Program]] to get out. He lands in summer, feeling extremely warm in his sweater (it was winter then), and he realizes he has travelled through time. His first instinct is to find out where he is, followed by when is it. And since nobody would feel happy about being assaulted by an apparently delusional guy in a winter coat, he decides on [[Newspaper Dating]] instead.

== Comic Books ==

* In a [[Marvel]] UK ''[[Transformers Generation 1]]'' story, when Galvatron travels back in time to 1986, he asks this question of a passing human. The human answers before running off in terror.

* In ''[[The Mighty Thor]]'' #371, a time-travelling lawman appears out of thin air and asks a bystander "What's the date, citizen?" He has to ask a second time, less politely, before the bystander pulls himself together enough to reply.

== Fan Works ==

* Played with in the ''[[Drunkard's Walk]]'' "Steplet" [http://www.accessdenied-rms.net/dw-tmods.shtml ''The Melancholy of Douglas Sangnoir'']: When asked by [[Haruhi Suzumiya]] if he is a time traveler, Doug replies, "That depends on what year it is."

* Appears in ''[[Terminator]]'', although questioning under gunpoint is required to receive the (incomplete) answer.

** The questioned police officer, whom Kyle Reese has just disarmed, gives him the date and day of the week, but balks and looks confused when Kyle demands to know the year.

'''Willie Loomis:''' 1972.

'''Barnabas Collins:''' "1972"? }}

== Literature ==

** Later in the story Dibbler (who is not a time traveller) asks him what year it is.

* The main character of the novel ''[[The Time Traveler's Wife]]'' time-travels involuntarily, and ends up disoriented in other times so often that friends and family close enough to know about his condition will sometimes tell him the year before he has a chance to ask.

* Averted in book seven of ''[[The Pendragon Adventure]]''. When Bobby asks passers-by on Quillan about things absolutely anyone would know, their response is to back away slowly.

* ''[[Doctor Who]]'': The Doctor did this in far too many episodes to count. Answers like the one given above usually pointed him in the direction of his latest adventure in the process.

** Once the Fifth Doctor asked an English medieval peasant this question, and in an amusing nod to the times, the man's reply was something along the lines of "Wait, wait, I know this.."

* ''[[Babylon 5]]'': Asked by {{spoiler|The commander of [[Unstuck in Time|Babylon 4]]}} as soon as he is told where Sinclair and Garibaldi came from.

* Played for laughs in the episode of ''[[Monk]]'' where Sharona, his original assistant, came back. When she arrived, Adrian was rinsing his eyes with water to get the dust out following a vacuum-cleaner accident. When he saw her instead of his current assistant, he rinsed his eyes again and then asked her what year it was.

== Video Games ==

* ''[[Final Fantasy XIII-2]]'', in which the playable characters Serah and Noel travel throughout time, but the question often isn't unexpected, because people know that there are strange things going on with time and in some cases also know of the fact that they're time travelers. Serah, however, gives the exact line in a dream version of New Bodhum in The Void Beyond and only earns an insinuation that's she's gone loopy, because it's a fantasy world in which she never started a time travel journey.

* In ''[[Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha A's Portable]]: The Gears of Destiny'', Vivio was [[Genre Savvy]] enough to ask this to an unusually young-looking Yuuno who seemed perplexed when Vivio called him Head Librarian, confirming her fears that she had somehow landed in a [[Time Travel]] story.

== Web Animation ==

* In ''[https://web.archive.org/web/20111228235845/http://www.filmcow.com/thecloaknew.html The Cloak]'', the disembodied head of Robert Mitchum uses this phrase, despite not actually having traveled through time.

== Web Comics ==

* [[Fans|What is]] [[Unusual Euphemism|the darwinfisting]] [http://www.faans.com/facing-the-future-4-of-15/ date?!]

== Western Animation ==

'''Kid:''' Uh, 2008.

'''Time Traveller:''' ''(laughs)'' Good luck buddy! ''(portal and traveller both disappear)''. }}

== Real Life ==

{{reflist}}

[[Category:Narrative Devices]]

[[Category:Exposition]]

[[Category:Time Travel Tropes]]

[[Category:Stock Phrases]]

[[Category:This Index Asked You a Question]]