History Main / FishOutOfTemporalWater

* In ''SoulChess'', a ''Manga/{{Bleach}}[=/=]Anime/CodeGeass'' crossover, [[spoiler:Lelouch]] finds himself going back 136 years BEFORE Britannia invades Japan.

-> I have no illusions of raising this place to a 21st century standard of living, or even a 20th century one. [[WellThisIsNotThatTrope I'm no Connecticut Yankee, just a Seattle Geek who happens to know a few things about the way things work.]] ... For example, I know that spinning a magnet around inside a coil of copper wire produces an electric current. But how strong of a magnet? How big does it have to be, and how fast does it have to spin, before you get anything useful? Does the size of the coil of wire relative to the magnet matter? Does the number of loops in the coil matter? We're rediscovering all these things from first principles.

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[[caption-width-right:349:Meiji era, meet HDTV]]

* ''SaturdayNightLive'' had "Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer", who milked his temporal displacement for all its worth to win cases.

[[folder:Radio]]
* [[http://www.lincsfm.co.uk Lincs FM]], a station in {{Lincolnshire}}, considered by some radio enthusiasts to be stuck in TheNineties.
* Played for laughs with Ed, the security guard in Jack's money vault on ''Radio/TheJackBennyProgram''. He's depicted as having been stuck down there since the Revolutionary War and completely innocent of current events, let alone such "modern" contraptions as wheelbarrows. At least one episode had Jack bringing him up to the surface, and his resultant future shock.
[[/folder]]

[[folder: Tabletop Games]]
* Rapata, aka Mr. Shark, from ''TabletopGame/GeniusTheTransgression''. He's a time-travelling 17th-century Maori navigator. His time machine is a canoe. He's actually adapted fairly well to modern and later times, except when he's really overworked and having a bad day (which is most of the time), in which case he skips planning for the century in question and just stomps down the main street of Seattle in a feather cape, brandishing a taiaha cudgel and screaming the name of whoever's pissed him off this time.

* [[spoiler: Vanille and Fang]] from VideoGame/FinalFantasyXIII were TakenForGranite for 500 years and revived just before the start of the game.
* In ''VideoGame/DarkFall: Light's Out'', Benjamin Barker travels into two different future eras and one period of the past. His confusion at seeing what's become of the lighthouse he'd been checking up on could fit this trope, even if he didn't get the chance to interact with people as a social FishOutOfWater.
* This is the basis to the whole story in ''VideoGame/{{Onimusha}} 3'', as main hero Samanosuke Akechi is sent 500 years forward into modern Paris, just as Jean-Jacques, based on actor Jean Reno, is sent back into Samanosuke's time in a crazy time-travel plot to resurrect Nobunaga. Both of them act properly befuddled by their surroundings, especially Samanosuke.

** This would have been before (on the [[Series/StarTrekTheOriginalSeries TOSers]] timeline) before the Temporal Prime Directive existed. Between them an the TNG crew, it made altering the past a B plot.

* ''ProjectSuperpowers'' does not dwell TOO much on this, but nevertheless, it is about a bunch of World War II superheroes who have been trapped in Pandora's Urn for decades and are released in an alternate version of present day. Black Terror gets this with some of his ideals. Pyroman, on the other hand, quickly adapts and is just amazed at modern [=TVs=].

* Carol Reed from ''OkeNoMonshou'' was the victim of a curse put on her, her mentor and an excavation team that was exploring an ancient Egyptian tomb. As a result, she gets thrown in the past and reaches AncientEgypt...

* Part of the reason why Steve Rogers as CaptainAmerica is able to don his costume without irony and be an idealist in the modern world is because he was a young man in World War II who was so eager to fight that he volunteered for experiments when he wasn't physically fit for duty, and was then locked in suspended animation afterwards until the modern era.[[note]]''Webcomic/{{Shortpacked}}'' [[http://shortpacked.com/comic/book-4/08-the-gospel-of-faz/cap/ lampshaded]] this.[[/note]]
** TheUltimates version of Cap had almost exactly that experience, except that he ended up more traumatized than anyone else. Obviously he got better but still had a scary tendency to beat the crap out of people for violating his personal morals. As opposed to modern heroes who do the exact same thing but have values deemed more palatable because they're modern. The first thing Ultimate Cap did when he woke up? Smash the room, because he thought [[SamuelLJackson an African-American general's]] existence was a Nazi ploy. The trope would definitely be used in the Ultimates Annual when he teamed with Ultimate Falcon though.
* Dan Slott's ''SheHulk'', where obscure Golden Age hero the Challenger shows up at the offices of Goodman, Lieber, Kutzberg and Holliway after being flung into the present day to see if there's any way he can, like, get his stuff and his house back. Stu Cicero tries to assist him in figuring this out, saying that thankfully Captain America's predicament provides ample precedent to work with.

* In PoulAnderson's "Time Lag", Elva, rescued at the end and able to return to her home planet, contemplates how alone she will be. [[spoiler:Her rescuers quickly tell her that her son survived, that one of their number is her grandson [[DeadGuyJunior named for her dead husband]], and that he has a son of his own. And they are all ready to welcome her home.]]

* Harrison averts this in ''Film/StarTrekIntoDarkness''. [[spoiler:Despite waking up a few centuries into the future, he seems to have adjusted pretty well. Being genetically enhanced might have something to do with it, and we never see the actual adjusting. Harrison must have been awake long enough to advise Marcus on quite a few matters, after all]].

'''Someone from TheFuture ends up in ThePresentDay''': In this case, the "fish" will be confused by the simplest things, which are, of course, completely obvious to the audience. Fortunately, they will have brought back lots of AppliedPhlebotinum, just in case there was any doubt that they really were from The Future. They may have a flawed view of ThePresentDay reality influenced by idealizing revisionism of the historians of TheFuture, sometimes disenchanted that they lied. The traveler, unless ''downright awesome at all times'', will almost inevitably be dangerously {{Genre Blind|ness}} and equally likely to nearly get killed almost as much as the next type.

** Zinda Blake, LadyBlackhawk, got catapulted from the 1940s to the present day during a CrisisCrossover. The problem for her is that, even though ''she'' is the one from the past, everybody ''else'' seems to be stuck in TheFifties! She wants to get on with her life, but people keep complaining her skirt is too short and that she belongs in a quiet job instead of gallivanting about in an airplane (Are we sure the rest of the decade didn't come forward with her?). Eventually she tells the stuffed shirts to get stuffed, steals the plane she technically owns anyway, and joins the ComicBook/BirdsOfPrey.

** Zinda Blake, [[{{Blackhawk}} Lady Blackhawk]], got catapulted from the 1940s to the present day during a CrisisCrossover. The problem for her is that, even though ''she'' is the one from the past, everybody ''else'' seems to be stuck in TheFifties! She wants to get on with her life, but people keep complaining her skirt is too short and that she belongs in a quiet job instead of gallivanting about in an airplane (Are we sure the rest of the decade didn't come forward with her?). Eventually she tells the stuffed shirts to get stuffed, steals the plane she technically owns anyway, and joins the ComicBook/BirdsOfPrey.

* Samaritan from ''AstroCity'' is a time-traveler who averted a catastrophe, but rewrote his history so that he has no place in the future. Also Infidel, Samaritan's arch nemesis, is a time-lost villain whose own timeline was inadvertently destroyed by Samaritan's actions. Interestingly, neither of them has much trouble adjusting.

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* The early episodes of ''{{The 4400}}'' deal with the adaptation of the abductees to life in the early 21st century. An African-American man from the 1950s discovers that Jim Crow is no longer around, but restaurants are now non-smoking.

* Creator/StephenKing does this in ''TheDarkTower'' series, using parallel worlds in which time sometimes passes at different rates. Thus a character from the '60s is as shocked as Doc Brown that Reagan is President in the '80s. (But at the finale, she [[spoiler: ends up in a universe where Gary Hart is President instead]].)