Fish Out Of Temporal Water / Fan Works

• A Lamb In Hell: The Lamb, coming to modern day Hell (and later Earth) from the significantly less advanced Land of the Old Faith, is constantly astounded by all the sophisticated technology he comes across.
• Displaced (The Legend of Zelda): Half the point of the fic is Zelda struggling to deal with a world that has moved on without her for a hundred years. Barely anyone remembers her family as anything outside of a legend, and those who do remember aren't interested in being ruled by her.
• All Assorted Animorphs AUs:
  • "What if Elfangor using the Time Matrix had unintended consequences?" is about a young Elfangor being transported to Earth a few years after the war is over.
  • In "What if they were Avengers?", Jake was in cryo stasis for decades like Captain America.
• In Jonathan Joestar, The First JoJo, most of the main characters experience this to some degree, particularly with Jonathan himself. Examples include:
  • Mistakenly thinking that hot dogs are made from actual dogs.
  • Interpreting "cool" as its' other definition, believing it means "chilled".
  • Not looking at Jolyne's outfit out of respect.
  • Assuming a photo is a painting because it's in color.
• In Power Girl fic A Force of Four, Zor-L put his daughter in suspended animation before blasting her off into space. Kara woke up many decades later in a strange, unknown and comparatively primitive alien world.
• In Supergirl fanfic Hellsister Trilogy, Kara Zor-El's boyfriend and member of the 31st century super-team Legion of Super-Heroes Dev-Em doesn't like to go back in time to visit Kara. As far as he is concerned, 21st century Earth is primitive and he can't manage to fit in.
• Frozen (2013) fanfictions involving either alternate universes or other situations where the characters are taken out of their Word of God 1840s timeframe involve this trope — e.g. Unfrozen (Anna, meet smartphone!)
• The Back to the Future fanfic Homecoming has Jules, Verne, and Clara fit the "past ends up in the present" version. They find the future intimidating, but adapt well thanks to having a father/husband from the present.
• This trope is employed to surprisingly good effect in the Unexpected Results series, a Trinity Blood fanfic around the premise of a woman from the present getting yanked over 1000 years into the future and landing in the post-Armageddon, vampire-filled Europe in which the series is set. Apart from a couple of relatively minor, and completely justified freak-outs, she copes surprisingly well.
• The Transformers: Prime fanfic Transformers Prime: Time War has Megatron go back into the past to attempt to Set Right What Once Went Wrong (or Make Wrong What Once Went Right, depending on your point of view). So as to prevent his younger self from infusing his spark with Dark Energon. Though he didn't count on Smokescreen, Wheeljack, Knock Out and a few others following him there.
• The Mass Effect Self-Insert Fic Mass Vexations has a subversion: Author Avatar Art ends up 170 years into the future on the Citadel with no idea how he got there. However, since he knows the rules of where he is thanks to having played the game, he's able to adjust pretty quickly (though not as painlessly as he would have hoped).
• Progress is a My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic fic about Princess Luna attempting to adjust to spending a millennium imprisoned in the moon. To give you an idea of how well it goes, she blows up a microwave trying to make popcorn in the first chapter.
• In Kitsune On Campus, a Negima! Magister Negi Magi/Naruto crossover, Naruto digs himself out from the World Tree... 3,500 years after Konoha fell. Being Naruto, he copes it fairly well.
• In Soul Chess, a Bleach/Code Geass crossover, Lelouch finds himself going back 136 years BEFORE Britannia invades Japan.
• In the Halo/Mass Effect crossover The Last Spartan, Master Chief is finally found on the Forward Unto Dawn and is promptly thawed out...131 years after the events of Halo 3. Being The Determinator, he gets over the prospect of never seeing anyone from the 26th century again fairly quickly. Not without his reservations of humanity joining The Citadel or being nominated to become a Spectre though.
• In Mind-Sifter by Shirley S. Maiewski, Kirk goes back in time to the twentieth century. The mind-sifter, mentioned in the Star Trek episode "Errand of Mercy", has rendered him insane. He is periodically lucid, however, and his occasional mentions of things like a turbo-lift puzzle his nurse.
• Played for tragedy in Fallout: Equestria. After Princess Celestia abdicates the throne of Equestria after the Littlehorn Massacre, her younger sister Luna (who had spent the last thousand years sealed in the moon before her redemption) ascends to the throne. This produces the same effect as William the Conquerer being placed in control of Cold War era Britain: complete and utter ruin.
• The ongoing Discworld crossover saga Slipping Between Worlds deals with one of those series of magical accidents in time and space which, with the assistance of several Terry Pratchett characters, abducts a British Army patrol from Northern Ireland in the middle 1980s to the city of Ankh-Morpork. The Toms are in no position to complain about it, as they were seconds away from death in a rather large bomb explosion (everyone at home thinks they are dead). While the end-game is to return to Earth, the displaced squaddies have to adapt to life in a new, strange and potentially lethal place, very, very, quickly.
• This is fairly common in Merlin fics that are sequels in which Arthur (or other long-dead characters for that matter) returns. This trope won't apply if the story has Arthur somehow aware of how things have changed or if he's reincarnated instead, which sidesteps the issue.
• In Marionettes:
  • This is the case of Teddy and Ace, the two Generation 2 Marionettes. The Stallions had no further use for them, unlike Trixie, and just put them in their stasis pods and left them in the basement for over a decade. When the heroes finally rescue and reactivate them, they're understandably shocked to discover that there are now multiple Alicorns, Nightmare Moon was not only real but returned, and Dragon Eggs Z added two more levels of 'Super Neighyan' among other things.
  • A downplayed example: Gypsy has been held against her will for nearly a decade as well, but being a Seer, she's not missed as much as Ace and Teddy, but still admits the last game system she played was a 'Super Neightendo' and she's missed a lot in that department.
• Happens to Rainbow Dash in the My Little Pony fanfic Child of Order. A stunt/experiment gone wrong causes Rainbow to find herself transported 450 years into the future, in what is essentially a hypertechnological version of Equestria. Upon arrival, she crashes, damaging two of her legs (and possibly several internal organs, too), although she does receive prosthetics. Understandably, she's horrified by some of the changes her country has undergone, as well as the fact that everyone thinks she's dead.
• Shard: Aero and the other inhabitants of Totum are residents of the distant past, who find themselves in the present day of Remnant. They manage to adapt relatively well, all things considered.
• The Havoc Side of the Force manages to put someone from the present into the past and future a the same time. Harry Potter and a Bellatrix possessed Pansy ends up in a galaxy far, far away due to a combination of a time-time turner being used at the same time and place as a portkey activating and a magic ritual being interrupted. While technology is far more advanced, Harry still eventually learns that the universe is far younger than he's used to it being when Anakin points out that if Harry's years are what he says they are, then his math is way off to think the universe is over 14 billion years old.
• Played for Laughs in the Sonic the Hedgehog oneshot Shuckster. Because Shadow was created 50 years ago, he speaks in outdated 1950s slang.
• Played with for Lost in Camelot, although mainly for Kenzi than Bo at first, as Bo finds herself surprisingly fond of Camelot despite the displacement; later explained with the revelation that Bo is actually from Camelot, as she was sent into the future when her mother sent her to safety.
• In Power Rangers Mythos, when Tommy Oliver is pulled into the future to form a new Ranger team against the current threat, he mostly copes by focusing on his duty as a Ranger, but he's still thrown by moments such as the idea that it's possible to pause live TV.
• Bloom Fully on the Tall Wall revolves around Homura being sent into a parallel universe that is also hundreds of years in the future from her own. This is her Despair Event Horizon that leaves her suicidal. Homura doesn't have issue adapting, however, because the world is still near identical to the early 2010s.
• Karma in Retrograde has Dabi revert to his sixteen-year-old self as Touya Todoroki due to the effects of a deaging Quirk. From his perspective, he was effectively thrust five years into the future, where his youngest brother is now attending U.A., Izuku has taken Touya's old dorm room, and All Might is retired, shriveled husk while Endeavor has become the number one hero. He also finds it amazing that hair dye is as simple as adding it to shampoo when there used to be an entire process for it.
• The premise of the Temeraire and Assasin's Creed fanfic Trade Winds is that Desmond Miles, the 21st-century protagonist from the AC series, has suddenly woken up in the Alternate Universe setting of Temeraire, in about 1805. Desmond's modern speech patterns and the breadth of his (typical) modern education net him several odd looks, although they pale in comparison to the Assassin-grade fighting skills that he's gained from his ancestors. But in a minor, interesting subversion, the name 'Desmond' was actually far more common in the late 1700s/early 1800s than it is now.
• Fly Me to the Moon explores the idea behind Shadow being born in the 1950s/1960s before being frozen for 50 years. He enjoys contemporary music and his favorite song is Frank Sinatra's "Fly Me To The Moon".
• In Naming, Zelda has been asleep for 1000 years. She can barely even understand the language after so long. Hyrule has degraded a lot since she was put into a spell.
• In Shadow of Another Hero, Zelda goes into a crying fit after learning that she has been asleep for roughly 700 years.
• In Kamino's Ward, Izuku is an enhanced normal human named Captain Kamino (an expy of Captain America) that fights for the right of the newly emerged super-humans. After stopping a bombing on Metahumans by downing the plane carrying the bombs into the water, he is frozen solid for centuries, and wakes up and runs into a changed Kamino, where super-humans call their powers Quirks and are accepted by society, and himself treated as a Symbol of Hope.
• Son of the Sannin has Rin Nohara going through this. As it turns out, after she was killed by the Kirigakure ninjas, she spent over a decade inside a resurrection cocoon kept in Obito's hideout, and by the time she's rescued, everyone in her generation is already pushing thirties while she still remains a teenager.
• Runaway Wind has Ventus waking up during the events of Kingdom Hearts, a decade after Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep, and he doesn't notice how long its been until he happens to run into Axel and recognizes him as a much older Lea.
• Discovery (Marvelouswrites): Ahsoka Tano and several other clones wind up getting carbon-frozen for 43 years longer than intended. They are unfrozen long after the Jedi Order, the Republic, and the Empire have fallen.
• The Reveal in Whispers of the Abyss is that Blot has ventured into the Whispering Abyss before... 800 years ago, after which he emerged in the story's present. At the end, all of his friends decide to clear the dungeon with him, and emerge another 800 years into the future.
• OSMU: Fanfiction Friction has Orla as this, just as she is in canon. She doesn't know what fanfiction is, and when told that it's made-up stories about Odd Squad she seeks to apprehend the "miscreants" that are writing the stories.
• Pokémon Journeys: Hisui Legend: Ash and Chloe are this. The former is a bit more downplayed, as he's quite familiar with being taken to other worlds already, but the latter definitely plays it straight, being the first time she actually gets involved in such an adventure.
• Mike's New Ghostly Family: Due to being imprisoned inside the animatronic bodies and left to rot in the dark for decades, the ghost children ended up missing out more than forty years of technological and societal advancements that happened during their absence, to the point that things like internet, video games, laptops, smartphones, majority of the movies and novels and etc., which we take for granted, were completely alien to them. Mike Schmidt spends a good deal of time and money to get them up to speed.
• Limitless Potential: When X is first discovered, he has to adapt to the fact that he spent over a century inside his capsule, and his creator, Dr. Light, is long dead. Later, after Roll is rebuilt with a new body and has her memories transferred, she too is shocked to learn that everyone in her family, including Dr. Light and the original Mega Man, is long gone.
• God Help the Outcasts: Link (literally). He was frozen for twenty thousand years in a block of ice and was thawed out by scientists. Dr. Cockroach apparently had a difficult time trying to teach him about how to behave in modern society.
• In Freedom's Ring, the Walls society that Ilse hails from is approximately equivalent to the 1800's in technology, lacking amenities such as electricity, and the known human population is confined to a single territory behind the aforementioned Walls with most of the outside world unknown to them. Thus, when Ilse finds herself in modern real-life New York City, Ilse is understandably flabbergasted by the vastly superior technology, huge number of different cultures due to humanity establishing itself around the world, and differing cultural values.
  • Later, members of Paradis' government and military - including Queen Historia, Hanji, Levi, Kitz, Rico, Eren and other members of the 104th - also experience this when they travel through the Gate to modern Earth in order to gain international military support against the hostile intentions of the World Union.
• Dandelion Tongue has Union Leader Ventus waking up in the Land of Departure with no memory of his later life. In terms of technology, the biggest shock to him is his first ride in a Gummiship.
• Metal Gear: Green: When the MSF members from the 1970s find themselves three hundred years in the future, they find themselves unable to comprehend the situation at first, before quickly adapting to become one of the strongest forces, if not the strongest force on the MHA earth.