Time Travel Tropes

Basic Information

Time Travel Tropes are genre tropes and speculative fiction tropes specific to stories involving Time Travel.

List of Time Travel Tropes

• A Little Something We Call Rock And Roll
• Alternate History
• Anachronism Stew
• Bad Future
• Beethoven Was An Alien Spy
• Born In The Wrong Century
• Butterfly Of Doom
• Cant Take Anything With You
• Changed My Jumper
• Clock Roaches
• Connecticut Yankee
• The Constant
• Contemporary Caveman
• Crystal Spires And Togas
• Delayed Ripple Effect
• Equivalent Exchange
• Excellent Adventure
• Fashions Never Change
• Fish Out Of Temporal Water
• For Want Of A Nail
• The Future
• Future Badass
• Future Loser
• Future Me Scares Me
• Future Slang
• Godwins Law Of Time Travel
• Grandfather Paradox
• Grays Sports Almanac
• Groundhog Day Loop
• The Gump
• Have We Met Yet
• Hello Again
• Help Yourself In The Future
• Historical In Joke
• Hitlers Time Travel Exemption Act
• I Am John Smith
• Identical Grandson
• Im Mr Future Pop Culture Reference
• Intangible Time Travel
• In The Past Everyone Will Be Famous
• In Spite Of A Nail
• It Will Never Catch On
• I Want My Jet Pack
• Kid From The Future
• Make A Better World
• Meanwhile In The Future
• Mental Time Travel
• Mister Sandman Sequence
• My Own Grampa
• Necessary Fail
• Never The Selves Shall Meet
• Newspaper Dating
• No Backwards Compatibility In The Future
• Ontological Inertia
• Our Time Travel Is Different
• Out Of Time Out Of Mind
• Place Beyond Time
• Popular History
• Portal To The Past
• Present Day Past
• Reality Quake
• Reset Button
• Reset Button Ending
• Ret Gone
• Ripple Effect Proof Memory
• Rubber Band History
• San Dimas Time
• Sci Fi Writers Have No Sense Of Scale
• Screw Yourself
• Self Fulfilling Prophecies
• Set Right What Once Went Wrong
• The Slow Path
• Stable Time Loop
• Temporal Paradox
• Temporal Sickness
• Terminator Twosome
• This Is My Boomstick
• Time And Relative Dimensions In Space
• Time Dissonance
• Time Machine
• Time Master
• Time Police
• The Time Travellers Dilemma
• Time Travel Tense Trouble
• Timey Wimey Ball
• Tricked Out Time
• Trust Password
• Unstuck In Time
• Wayback Trip
• The Web Always Existed
• What Year Is This?
• Which Me?
• Who Shot JFK?
• Wild Stallion Rule
• Write Back To The Future
• Ye Goode Olde Days
• You Already Changed The Past
• You Cant Fight Fate
• Zeerust

See Also

• Autoinfanticide
• Fate and Prophecy Tropes
• Novikov Self-Consistency Principle
• Time Travel Characters
• Temporal Tricks
• Temporal Safehouse

Sources

Bibliography

1. TV Tropes Wiki entry

Game and Story Use

• Some of these tropes are associated with specific takes on how time travel works and what can go wrong with it. The risk of actual logical inconsistencies makes picking the right combination of tropes even more tricky than in other genres (such issues happen all the time in actual stories and can usually be gotten away with, but one should be aware of them). Understand them and choose carefully.