History Main / RetGone

* The end of the ''RevolutionaryGirlUtena'' manga has Utena erased from the memories of the entire cast, with the exception of Touga, who mourns her passing worse because he cannot share his mourning with anyone. Only just then, Chuchu dresses up like Utena, and then Anthy walks by, now dressed in a boy's uniform like Utena had worn, so obviously ''some'' things have changed - and, as she says, Utena is not gone, but out there somewhere.
** Same happens in the anime series (minus Touga remembering and Chuchu in Utena's outfit) and Anthy sets off to find Utena again, implying that she wasn't so much "erased" as "moved away" from the other characters' world, which signifies her transition from childhood to adulthood.

* In ''Anime/PuellaMagiMadokaMagica'', this happens to [[spoiler:Madoka in the final episode, after she uses her newly obtained powers to rewrite all of reality so that witches are not born from the corruption of Puella Magi. Homura's upset (seeing as the whole reason she became a MagicalGirl and went through her GroundhogDayLoop ordeal in the first place was to keep Madoka alive), but Madoka herself is pretty cool about it. Madoka's little brother also remembers her, but everybody else just thinks he has an ImaginaryFriend.]]

* In "Yesteryear" by DCFontana, the most popular episode of ''WesternAnimation/StarTrekTheAnimatedSeries'', Spock is temporarily RetGone until he creates a StableTimeLoop preventing his death as a child.

* The VisualNovel ''[[VisualNovel/OneKagayakuKisetsuE One: To the Radiant Season]]'' has this as the major plot. You are disappearing from everyone's mind and vanishing from the Earth. The only thing that can bring you back is if you've made a connection with a girl enough for her to remember you.

* In ''[[CommandAndConquer Command & Conquer]]: RedAlert3'' the Soviets travel backwards in time to remove Albert Einstein from history, since it was his Chronosphere technology responsible for the Allies victory in ''Red Alert 2''. When they return to the present, the war was never lost, Einstein never existed, and there is no nuclear technology. Only the three Soviets who travelled back are aware of the change. The events of ''Red Alert 2'' were completely erased. Of course Hitler, having previously been retgonned by Einstein, stayed retgonned.
** The Allies in ''Red Alert 2'' developed the Chrono Legionnaire which could erase units from the timestream completely [[NightmareFuel over a few seconds while they're left utterly helpless and untouchable]]. Weaponized Retgone anyone?

* In ''VideoGame/TalesOfDestiny 2'', the party's goal is to erase the goddess Fortuna and her priestess Elraine from time itself. [[spoiler: Reala and Judas]], who exist because of Fortuna, are fully aware that doing this will cause the same thing to happen to them ([[spoiler: [[TheAtoner Judas,]] in fact, wants it to happen for most of the game]]). [[spoiler: Reala's bond with Kyle later saves her from unexisting, while Judas's ultimate fate is left ambiguous.]]

* In ''CorpseParty'', this is what happens to anyone who dies while trapped in Heavenly Host Elementry. [[spoiler: This includes four of the nine main characters, and presumably all the side characters who died. The five survivors are the only ones who remember that they ever existed once they return to the real world.]]

* At the end of DonnieDarko, Donnie travels back in time to eliminate the tangent universe [[spoiler: by dying.]] His very existence [[spoiler: is forgotten]] by several main characters he's met since, [[spoiler: though all of them remember him in their dreams. ]]

* In one skit, [[ChappellesShow Dave Chappelle]] took a woman on a MagicalNegro ride into [[AlternateHistory a world where]] her sizeable breasts [[BigBreastsBigDeal she'd been complaining about]] were Ret Goned. [[ACupAngst It wasn't such A Wonderful Life for her.]]

* The the Three Nobles of Yliaster did this to Yliater member Clark Smith after he deliberately disobeyed them, changing the past so that his birth never occured. (At least, that's what they claimed happened to him. Seeing as it did not undo any of the crimes he was responsible for, like the murder of Sherry LeBlanc's parents, there may have been more to it than it seemed.)

* This is essentially the power of [[spoiler: Ukoku Sanzo's Muten Sutra]] in ''{{Saiyuki}}'', as he shows Sanzo first-hand: literally, 'the power of nothingness'. It also extends to things, though, not just people, but the effect it has on people is what makes it fit the trope.

** From that same season, every mention and memory of The Beast was erased from our dimension by the Svea priestesses. Of course, mentions in another dimension's book and memories of someone who wasn't around when the erasures took place were unaltered.

* The subject of "The Nearness of You," a bittersweet issue of ''AstroCity'' in which a man keeps dreaming of a woman he's never met and all her intimate details. It turns out that she was his wife and they were deeply in love, but a supervillain has just made an attempt to control all reality. He was thwarted (it's strongly implied that a CrisisCrossover took place while nobody was watching), but the heroes couldn't restore time ''exactly'' how it was before. [[ForWantOfANail Her grandparents never met]] in this new history, and so the man's wife never existed. The man has RippleEffectProofMemory thanks to their strong love. The Hanged Man (a very powerful AstroCity hero) appears to the man, explains the situation, and then gives him a choice: he can either have all his memories of her erased so that he'll no longer be haunted, or he can continue to remember the perfect, pure love of his life -- knowing full well that he'll never get to experience it. The man chooses to remember. When the Hanged Man excuses himself and says that he has others to visit, the man asks:

** Also in AstroCity, one of Samaritan's powers (as well as his nemesis Infidel) is immunity to becoming RetGone. Samaritan has already averted the grim future from which he came, and as a result he was never born (an automated taco stand was built where his house was supposed to be.) Once, Infidel accidentally wrote ''everything'' out of continuity except for him and Samaritan, at which point they realized that [[GoKartingWithBowser it was pointless for them to keep trying to kill each other.]]

** The irony being that the original firing of the weapon caused the villain's {{Necromantic}} quest: by completely annihilating his people's enemies, they lost a vital immunity they had gained due to contact with them, causing huge numbers of deaths by disease, and altering the timeline dramatically. Just firing the weapon ''once'' caused horrible changes in the timeline and basically removed all of his crew, and a huge amount of their civilization, from existence, so in desperation, he fired it ''again'' to fix his mistake, managing to restore everyone, ''except'' for the colony in which his wife lived! This has lead to his 200-year-long crusade to resurrect her that has failed every single time, leading him to become obsessed enough that he's now essentially waging a one-man-War [[RageAgainstTheHeavens against time itself!]]

* In the ''Series/StarTrekVoyager'' two-parter "Year of Hell", the episode's villain, Annorax, has a weapon ship that can erase entire civilizations from history. [[spoiler:The plot is resolved when Janeway's kamikaze attack on the weapon ship ''causes the weapon ship itself to be erased from history'', ironically bringing about the very goal that Annorax had been trying to accomplish: the restoration of his wife, whom he had carelessly erased in the episode's backstory.]]
** The irony being that the original firing of the weapon caused the villain's {{Necromantic}} quest: by completely annihilating his people's enemies, they lost a vital immunity they had gained due to contact with them, causing huge numbers of deaths by disease, and altering the timeline dramatically. Just firing the weapon ONCE caused horrible changes in the timeline and basically removed all of his crew, and a huge amount of their civilization, from existence. How does he decide to fix it? [[WhatAnIdiot BY FIRING IT OVER AND OVER AGAIN.]]
*** [[That70sShow Dumbass.]]
*** He also tries to tell Chakotay that temporal changes must be done carefuly, such as when Chakotay suggests erasing a comet that resulted in the ''Voyager'' being redirected to this area. Apparently, this comet is responsible for all life in this part of space via {{Panspermia}}. Erasing it would be bad.

* At the end of ''VideoGame/BioShockInfinite'', [[spoiler: Booker [=DeWitt=] commits interdimensional suicide to ensure that his evil alternate self, Father Comstock, never exists to threaten the multiverse. Because its creation was masterminded by Comstock, Colombia also ceases to exist and the events of the game never take place.]] However, TheStinger reveals that [[spoiler: Booker and Elizabeth live on in some universe, now freed from the cycle of events that had made the lives of their other selves so hellish.]]

** Same happens in the anime series (minus Chuchu) and Anthy sets off to find Utena again, implying that she wasn't so much "erased" as "moved away" from the other characters' world, which signifies her transition from childhood to adulthood.

* ''{{The 4400}}'' once did this to its title characters (all 4400 of them). In one episode, appeared to do it (again) to all but one of them, but it turned out that it was really a dream world created by said character.

** In the series 7 finale, The Great Intelligence attempts a massive RetGon on The Doctor himself. It almost works.

* In ''Literature/TheVoyageOfTheDawnTreader,'' the spell to make one beautiful (which in the book is implied to be a BeCarefulWhatYouWishFor) takes an even more sinister turn. Lucy wishes to look like Susan and finds that she is Susan -- in a timeline where Lucy never existed. Among other consequences, she and her brothers never went to Narnia. Luckily, [[NightmareSequence Aslan intervenes.]]

* In ''TheVoyageOfTheDawnTreader,'' the spell to make one beautiful (which in the book is implied to be a BeCarefulWhatYouWishFor) takes an even more sinister turn. Lucy wishes to look like Susan and finds that she is Susan -- in a timeline where Lucy never existed. Among other consequences, she and her brothers never went to Narnia. Luckily, [[NightmareSequence Aslan intervenes.]]

* In ''Anime/PuellaMagiMadokaMagica'', this happens to [[spoiler:Madoka in the final episode, after she uses her newly obtained powers to rewrite all of reality so that witches are not born from the corruption of Puella Magi. Homura's upset (seeing as the whole reason she became a MagicalGirl in the first place was to keep Madoka alive), but Madoka herself is pretty cool about it. Madoka's little brother also remembers her, but everybody else just thinks he has an ImaginaryFriend.]]