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{{trope}}
{{quote|''Things have their shape in time, not space alone. Some marble blocks have statues within them, embedded in their future... Any moment now, Janey's watchband will break. Somewhere, the fat man is already lumbering toward the shooting gallery, steps heavy with unwitting destiny.''|'''Dr. Manhattan''', ''[[Watchmen (comics)|Dr. ManhattanWatchmen]]'''}}
 
{{quote|''One of the major problems encountered in time travel is not...about changing the course of history - the course of history does not change because it all fits together like a jigsaw. All the important changes have happened before the things they were supposed to change and it all sorts itself out in the end. The major problem is quite simply one of [[Time Travel Tense Trouble|grammar.]]''|'''Douglas Adams''', ''[[The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy/The Restaurant At The End of The Universe|The Hitchhikers Guide to The Galaxy]]''}}
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It's like being Time's own personal [[Unwitting Pawn]].
 
This does not necessarily mean that [[You Can't Fight Fate]]. For example, if Bob wanted to go back in time to stop Alice's death, he could simply convince his past self that Alice still died in the future. Following this logic, Alice never dies at all -- andall—and Bob suddenly remembers how several months ago, some "other" Bob came up to him insisting that Alice was going to die of ''something'' and the two of them had to go save her, which they did, so she's still very much alive and well all along. ([[Mind Screw|Do you have a headache yet?]]) Or to avoid the headache and ensuing paradox, Future Bob could go back and save Alice in such a way that Past Bob still thinks that she died.
 
Needless to add, [[Time Travel Tense Trouble|grammar can sometimes become thoroughly useless]] at trying to put the point across, as all sense of tense gets thrown of the window. This trope is easier to observe rather than analyze.
 
Note that [['''You Already Changed the Past]]''' implies [[Only One Possible Future]], which is the version of [[You Can't Fight Fate|fatalism]] found in many [[Older Than Feudalism|older]] works, such as Greek Drama, that don't involve time travel.
 
This trope ''arguably'' makes the most sense when considering time travel from a scientific point of view, see the [[wikipedia:Novikov self-consistency principle|]] on [[wikipedia:Novikov self-consistency principle|The Other Wiki]].<ref>Novikov's self-consistency principle was named "the [[Law of Conservation of History]]" by [[Larry Niven]] in his short piece "The Theory and Practice of Time Travel," published at least ten years prior to Novikov's work. Of course, [[Larry Niven]] is a [[Science Fiction]] writer, which may explain why [[Sci Fi Ghetto|nobody cares]]. Alternatively, this is an illustration of something called [[wikipedia:Stigler%27s's law of eponymy|Stigler's Law of Eponymy]]: nothing ever gets named after the first person to discover it.</ref> However, the number of time-travel plots that it allows for are extremely limited and the logic gets complicated ''very'' quickly. This, however, also has the side-effect of creating a '[[Functional Magic|self-correcting universe]]' usually by a slew of [[Contrived Coincidence|Contrived Coincidences]]s (ie. if you try to shoot your grandfather the gun will jam; if you try poisoning him he will recover; if you try strangling him you will be overcome; if you wear [[Power Armor]] from the future you will have second thoughts; if you try [[Beyond the Impossible|sending a bomb back through time and detonating it directly inside his chest]] the time machine will break down). This can also lead to a scenario where the ''only'' reason why the past is not changed is because someone else says 'you cannot' and you take his advice. Meaning ''the advice itself'' is a part of the universe's self-correcting nature.
 
Thus, most time travel stories that involve altering the past will provide some of the characters with [[Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory]]. This makes less sense, but it makes for a narrative convenience. If a You Already Changed The Past plot is used, the time travel will probably be a one-off thing, since repeating it would most likely get tedious.
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== Literature ==
* ''There Will Be Time'' by [[Poul Anderson]]. A substantial number of humans have had the innate ability to [[Time Travel]] since before recorded history (possibly because it was inserted into the genome by future travelers). So little of human history is known exactly, and the book's scope is so great (from Jesus' crucifixion to a far-future [[After the End|postapocalyptic]] revival of civilization--atcivilization—at ''least'') that the inability to change the past comes up only rarely--butrarely—but the protagonist is nearly broken {{spoiler|when his Byzantine wife dies of an illness because other travellers have abducted him to the future}}.
** It is established fairly early in the story that it is impossible to change anything that the hero knows about what will happen. Every attempt he makes to save his father (who died in WW-II) is prevented in some way.
* Eoin Colfer's ''[[Artemis Fowl]]'' Time Paradox {{spoiler|The matter is discussed before they actually [[Time Travel]] and Artemis presumes that whatever happened in the past cannot be changed. It turns out he's right. It also lets a huge variety of crazy actions take place.}}
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** He encounters the brand-new original manuscript of a poem he'd studied in his own century, and wonders how it would pick up the stains he'd seen on it in his own time. A poet he recently met then walks in carrying some food, puts it down, and picks up the manuscript with his greasy hands to look it over.
** He encounters a 17th century book with an inscription in it that shakes him up. He later travels accidentally to that century, and on encountering the then-new book, writes the pig-Latin inscription addressed to himself that he would read in the future.
* The climax of ''[[Harry Potter and Thethe Prisoner of Azkaban (novel)|Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban]]''. They go to the past to save Buckbeak and Sirius, and Harry wants to see a mysterious figure that he believes to be his father. {{spoiler|Buckbeak never died; the thumping sound was the executioner taking his frustration out on a fence (pumpkin in the movie). The mysterious figure was Harry from the future saving himself, his dad really is dead. Then they save Sirius, who rides off with Buckbeak. Plus they hear a couple strange noises, which turns out to be their [[Time Travel|time traveling]]ing selves.}}
* ''[[To Say Nothing of the Dog]]'' by Connie Willis involves [[Time Travel|time traveling]] historians (which first appeared in her ''Doomsday Book'')who spend a lot of effort to repair the "incongruity" caused when one of them inadvertently brings a cat forward from [[QueenVictorian VickyBritain|Victorian England]] (they're extinct in 2057). This involves trying to make sure that the cat's owner winds up with the "Mr. C" that her diary specifies after they've accidentally introduced her to a different man. {{spoiler|It turns out that all perceived incongruities are the continuum's self-correcting system.}}
* ''Blackout'' and ''All Clear'', also by Connie Willis, have a similar example. Some historians go back to [[WWII]] era, then find that they can't get home. They agonize over every little thing they do, worried that the slightest change might cause the Germans to win the war. {{spoiler|It turns out that the things they did, the people they saved, and so on, were exactly the tipping points to let ENGLAND win the war. Their future, in which the thirdThird reichReich fell, predicates on them getting stuck in the past and doing the things they're convinced will ruin everything.}}
* [[Time Travel]] in the ''[[Pliocene Exile]]'' novels works this way. Of course, since [[Time Travel]] ''must'' take you back six ''million'' years (and then only works in one spot in France), it's rather difficult to know exactly what the [[Time Travel|time travelers]] already did.
* Used extensively in ''[[Suzumiya Haruhi]]'' this seems to be the whole purpose of future(er) Asahina. Who is suspected to be the superior of Present(or rather not-so-future) Asahina, and puts her younger self trough all the missions and trouble she already went trough herself. So she already changed the past because she will order herself to go to the past and change it so she can get to the future and order herself to change the past.
* Minor example in ''[[Young Wizards|So You Want To Be A Wizard]]'' by [[Diane Duane]]: Nita and Kit are stopped for a moment on their way to a world gate by a loud bang on the other side of a door they are about to open. It turns out at the end of the book {{spoiler|that it was Nita herself, coming back from the future a little earlier than planned and trying to avoid meeting their younger selves}}.
* This was true in the novel ''[[The Time Traveler's Wife]]'' by Audrey Niffenegger. The main character was constantly going into both the past and future, but everything was pre-set. Everything he did when he went into the past, he had "already done", and once something happened, he could never change it; in situations where he already knew what was going to happen, he had to act in the way he had already acted, he didn't have any choice.
* Douglas Adams' ''[[The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy]]'' universe works this way. in the second book, ''[[The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy/The Restaurant At The End of The Universe|The Hitchhikers Guide to The Galaxy]]]]'', while stranded on prehistoric Earth with an exodus' worth of incompetent aliens who are plainly going to begin colonizing, Ford Prefect tells Arthur Dent "This doesn't change the past, this is the past."
* [[Isaac Asimov]]'s short story "The Red Queen's Race" has a character who tries to ''make'' this trope happen. {{spoiler|He was asked to translate several modern books on physics into ancient Greek, with the work being beamed back into humanity's past. History fails to change because the translator was very careful to leave out most of the advanced material.}}
** Specifically, {{spoiler|the translator only includes information which would account for discoveries and advances already present in our own time line.}}
* ''Unborn Tomorrow'', a short story by Dallas McCord Reynolds. A wealthy man wants a private eye to locate a time traveler from the future and get the secret of eternal life. He believes such time travellers would go to the Oktoberfest, where everyone would be too drunk to notice anything strange about them. The secretary is surprised when her boss curtly turns down this chance to get drunk on someone else's money. The private eye explains that he's already taken the assignment three times, and each time the time travelers sent him back to this point in the time line, with a massive hangover from drinking too much German beer. There's no way he's getting another hangover piled on top of the previous three, not for any amount of money!
* ''The Skull'' by [[Philip K. Dick]]. An assassin is sent back in time to kill the founder of a subversive religion before he gives a famous speech, only to realize that the Founder is himself -- thehimself—the 'miracle' that inspired the religion's creation was him appearing after he'd been killed (he'd arrived at the wrong point in time) thus 'coming back from the dead'. The [[Rousing Speech]] supposedly given by the Founder never actually happened, but was a result of history being embellished after his death.
* An interesting example in ''The Redemption of Christopher Columbus'' by [[Orson Scott Card]]. The book takes place in an technologically-advanced, but dying, Earth and the protagonists are trying to find at which point in history they need to change events. While researching Christopher Columbus, they find that a vision he wrote about in his diaries was actually a hologrammatic projection sent from a parallel future to their own.
* Happens quite a lot in ''[[Count and Countess]]'', in which the two eponymous characters exchange letters with each other despite living more than a hundred years apart. Notably, Elizabeth, living in the 1500s, knows that her ancestor Matyas Hunyadi (in the 1400s) held the throne of Hungary for a very long time. In an attempt to save Vlad Dracula's life, she warns him not to try to make a grab for the throne, or he will probably be killed. As a result, Vlad stays as far away from Hunyadi as possible. {{spoiler|Which gives Hunyadi plenty of time to rouse the Black Forces against Vlad and stop him in his tracks.}}
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* ''[[Star Trek: The Original Series]]'' ("Assignment Earth")
* Early seasons of ''[[Andromeda]]'' used this, but it degenerated into [[Timey-Wimey Ball]] territory after a while.
* The first [[Time Travel]] episode of ''[[Stargate SG-1]]'' ("1969") can be perceived as following this logic, but none of the subsequent [[Time Travel]] episodes in the [[Stargate Verse]] can -- theycan—they all involve alternate timelines instead.
** Though it seems SG-1 held to the "Alternate timelines/universes" first. The 20th episode of Season 1 had the "Quantum Mirror" which put Daniel Jackson in an alternate timeline/universe. "1969" was the 21st episode of Season 2.
** [[Stargate: Continuum]] shows the present universe being [[Delayed Ripple Effect|erased]] by Baal's actions in the past. As a part of the SG-1 team consciously try to outrun the phenomenon, the stargate wormhole somehow shields them from it. So, while there are alternate realities in the [[Stargate Verse]], those may be unrelated to time travel. Either that, or the writers [[Timey-Wimey Ball|just can't decide]].
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== Tabletop Games ==
* In Palladium Books' ''Transdimensional Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles'', the GM was to have an important recurring character recognize the characters in a future era even if they hadn't met him yet in a past one.
* In the time-traveller role-playing game [[Continuum]], it's an ironclad article of Spanner faith that there is only one universe -- includinguniverse—including one past and one future. A player will meet fellow spanners who've been affected by changes that are in the player's Yet, and you'd better do them or risk Frag.
 
 
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*** The game actually features two completely different forms of time travel, and it is implied that use of the first tore the universe a new one enabling the second.
* In ''[[Prince of Persia]]: Warrior Within'', The Prince travels to the Island of Time in hopes of preventing the Sands of Time, the source of all his misfortunes, from ever being created. He defeats the Empress of Time, {{spoiler|only to discover that she ''is'' the sands in corporeal form, and that the events that led him here were of his own making.}} The second half of the game is about the Prince deciding to [[Screw Destiny]] and subvert this.
* In ''[[Ōkami|Okami]]'', the evil Orochi was defeated by a legendary hero named Nagi and a miraculous white wolf, who died in the attempt. The wolf was actually Amaterasu in physical guise, and was resurrected a century later as you, the player character. But then you travel back in time and discover -- youdiscover—you were the one who defeated Orochi then too, and the wolf who died was a different version of you.
 
 
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** Sarda did this to himself. As a young wizard, he time-traveled back to the beginning of the universe, only to find that a White Mage had gotten there first. After living through all of creation being formed around him, Sarda planned to put that White Mage into a pocket dimension before she could go back in time to the universe' start...only for that pocket dimension to be the beginning of the universe.
{{quote|'''Sarda:''' So now I know how she got there ''and'' what it feels like when I utterly screw with someone's lifelong ambitions.}}
* In ''[[Sluggy Freelance]]'' Bun-Bun's whole adventure in [[Timeless Space]] was based off this trope. As [httphttps://adsarchives.sluggy.com/dailybook.php?datechapter=06020148#2006-02-01 Uncle Time put it], "Life's ''so'' much funner with the paradox rules turned off."
* In ''[[Homestuck]]'', only [[Time Master|Dave, the Knight of Time and Aradia, the Maid of Time]] get to go back in time and create [[Alternate Universe|Alternate Universes]]s. Everyone else, no matter how much they've screwed around with the timeline, can only make [[Stable Time Loop|Stable Time Loops]]s, and the Trolls regularly insist that they've already lost the game and that [[You Can't Fight Fate]]. It probably helps that all in-universe timechanging items have built-in failsafes against causing paradoxes.
* How [[Time Travel]] works in [[Umlaut House]], as Volair explained to his future son [https://web.archive.org/web/20141228124932/http://maskedretriever.com/uh/d/20030624.html here]:
{{quote|Volair: "You can't change the future, Pierce. Past, future, it all fits together like a big, freaky jigsaw."
Pierce (Who just accidentally broke the [[Unresolved Sexual Tension|UST]] between his future parents): "So the future you knows we're here?"<br />
Volair: "No, but I will if you tell me the date you're from." }}
* A borderline example in ''[[Nodwick]]''. Zorion [https://web.archive.org/web/20110425003907/http://nodwick.humor.gamespy.com/gamespyarchive/index.php?date=2006-12-20 visited] the future and was upset to see there's only [[Dung Ages]] and [https://web.archive.org/web/20070907121930/http://nodwick.humor.gamespy.com/gamespyarchive/index.php?date=2007-01-10 a crater] instead of his hometown now. [https://web.archive.org/web/20071114211630/http://nodwick.humor.gamespy.com/gamespyarchive/index.php?date=2007-04-04 How] this could happen, indeed?
* Time travel in ''[[The Way of the Metagamer]]'' runs entirely on predestination. This doesn't stop it from being ludicrously convoluted.
* In ''[[The Adventures of Dr. McNinja]]'', Chuck Goodrich is a time traveler from the future who comes to avoid [[The End of the World as We Know It]] play with this tropes. it's not like you ''can't'' change the past...you can change ''[[Failure Is the Only Option|how]]'' it will be [[The End of the World as We Know It]].
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{{quote|'''Professor''': Choke on that, causality!}}
* The standard rule for time travel in ''[[Gargoyles]]''.
** Goliath tried to convince Demona in the past not to turn evil, and she seems to take it all to heart. Unfortunately, one guy, even the love of your life, telling you to "stay good" is trumped by centuries of of being [[Humans Are Bastardsthe Real Monsters|brutalized by humans]]. It's a true [[Tear Jerker]] to realize that Demona and Goliath were once really and truly [[Happily Married]].
** Xanatos uses this to his advantage. He gives two period coins to the Illuminati, along [[Write Back to the Future|with a letter]]. The coins are like pennies in the past, but by the present they're very valuable and are the coins that started his fortune. The letter of course, is to tell him to do just that.
** Later, Goliath attempts to use the time-travelling Phoenix Gate to save Griff from being killed during the Blitz in WWII London, after being accused of abandoning or murdering Griff by his companions. With incident after increasingly improbable incident occurring that indicates the universe has decided Griff is its new [[Chew Toy]], Goliath ultimately concludes that fate will not allow Griff to get home and uses the Phoenix Gate to bring Griff back with him to the present, thus causing his original disappearance.
** Mid-way through the Avalon arc, the Arch-Mage [[Took a Level Inin Badass|Took A Shitload Of Levels In Badass]] via a self-inflicted [[Stable Time Loop]]. Full details on that page.
** Goliath winds up in a [[Bad Future]] (really [[All Just a Dream]]), and Elisa keeps egging Goliath on to use the Phoenix Gate to fix things. This is a hint that Elisa isn't what she seems, as by now, she should know how the Gate works.
* Used on an episode of ''[[Justice League Unlimited]]''. Brainiac 5 imports heroes from the past because history mentioned an incident where heroes traveled to the future. He tries to avoid mentioning how it turned out, of course, just to be sure things go the way they're supposed to, with only two of the three returning.
** {{spoiler|Nobody dies. Supergirl just decided to stay in the future.}}
* In the ''[[Darkwing Duck]]'' episode "Paraducks", Gosalyn warns Darkwing not to interfere into the past when they went back in time to his childhood. At first he doesn't and returns to the present, only to find that S.H.U.S.H. doesn't exist, the King, a two bit thug from Darkwing's childhood has taken over St. Canard and he serves as the King's cowardly lackey, never became Darkwing Duck. They go back and time and shut down the King for good and give little Drakey Mallard (Darkwing) the courage he needed.
* ''[[The Fairly Odd ParentsOddParents]]'' special "The Secret Origin of Denzel Crocker": Timmy and 21st-century Cosmo were the ones responsible for {{spoiler|making Crocker lose his fairy godparents ''and'' giving him the opportunity to partially get around the ensuing mass mindwipe}}, which also indirectly led to his own birth due to {{spoiler|the disappointed scientists at Crocker's presentation in the '80s [[Rule of Funny|investing in Dinkleburg's parachute pants]] and causing him to break up with Timmy's mom, thereby getting his parents together.}}
* Somewhat subverted in the ''[[Invader Zim]]'' episode "Bad, Bad Rubber Piggy" had Zim send a robot rubber piggy into Dib's past at crucial points to kill him, only he survives by an inch each time (though everytime he comes close to death he's given robotic body parts from his father due to losing his own) and after many mishaps, he sends a piggy to the past to warn him not to send any piggies to the past in the first place. Unfortunately the premise of the piggies was they replaced something in the timeline they're sent to and one replaces Zim's brain at the end.
* In ''[[Powerpuff Girls]]'' Mojo Jojo goes to the past to kill the adolescent Professor Utonium before he can create the Girls. The Girls pursue him. It turns out that in the past Professor was a lazy ass and a bully with no interest in becoming a scientist and creating the Girls, if it wasn't for Mojo's interference and the consequent encounter with and rescue by the Girls that gave him inspiration.
* In the season 2 episode "It's About Time" of ''[[My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic|My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic]]'', Twilight Sparkle is visited by her future self (from a week later, looking entirely worn) and told "whatever you do, don't..." with the sentence being cut off. Past Twilight then spends the whole week worrying about and trying to prevent whatever happens during the next week, with each incident causing her to gain the looks of Future Twilight, indicating she hasn't changed the future at all. {{spoiler|She only then learns later that nothing actually happens. So she goes back into the past to tell her past self "Whatever you do, don't... worry about the future" only to end up being pulled back into the future right where it cut off for Past Twilight, setting the events into motion for the whole episode.}}
* Played with in ''[[Beast Wars]]''. While it is entirely possible to change the past and thus the future, thus finally answering Dinobot's soul searching about the nature of time travel and what that means for free will (if the past is immutable, than our ability to choose anything is a cosmic illusion). By changing the past, Dinobot learns that it is possible for an individual's choice to matter to the universe. Ironically however, with this new knowledge, it means that Megatron can change the past for the worst, and that the only choice Dinobot has is to invoke this trope.
 
{{reflist}}
[[Category:Time Travel Tropes{{PAGENAME}}]]
[[Category:Fate and Prophecy Tropes]]
[[Category:Plots]]
[[Category:YouTime AlreadyTravel Changed the PastTropes]]
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