But for Me, It Was Tuesday

"In the Spring?" "More specific." "On a Wednesday?" "Oh, right! It was laundry night; I had a hard time getting the blood out of my robes."

Chun-Li: My father saved his village at the cost of his own life. You had him shot as you ran away. A hero at a thousand paces.
M. Bison: ...I'm sorry. I don't remember any of it.
Chun-Li: You don't remember?!
Bison: For you, the day Bison graced your village was the most important day of your life. But for me, it was Tuesday.

— Street Fighter

A critical event that started The Protagonist on their journey was an action by The Antagonist (or vice versa). The instigator, however, has long forgotten this event, because to them, it wasn't really notable as they have likely done many similar acts; this response shows up whenever a character is unable to remember a particular event that greatly affected someone.

This can be seen as a form of narcissism coming from the victim, who will automatically assume that the one responsible would specifically remember the event because of how important it is to them, and can go hand in hand with Unknown Rival. Sometimes the act is not especially reprehensible, or was fairly mundane for all parties involved rather than just the one giving the response (e.g. a death during a relatively routine war or invasion).

That said, this response usually shows up to highlight just how evil a villain is. After all, if The Hero is upset over their murdered father, and the Big Bad barely remembers killing the guy, then clearly the villain has murdered a lot of people in their life, and they have a pretty callous attitude about it. It can be done in a casually hurtful manner, but a Card-Carrying Villain may even mock the hero as being nothing special, just to be a bit more of a Jerkass. Very frequently associated with The Sociopath with a Lack of Empathy; to such a person, whatever reprehensible act they just did is just like any other mundane activity to a normal person in terms of emotional impact.

The alternate scenario, where this response comes from a hero unable to remember foiling some villain's scheme or putting them in jail simply due to how many bad guys they've defeated/put away, can really tick off a villain. This is especially true if the forgotten enemy was a mook in their previous appearance(s). Alternatively, the hero may have saved someone who is now a devoted fan of them as a result, but when the rescuee later shows up to thank the hero, they could be hurt by their idol failing to recognize them.

See also A Million Is a Statistic. Compare Forgotten First Meeting, Offended by an Enemy's Indifference, and He Had a Name. Contrast Reminiscing About Your Victims and Would You Like to Hear How They Died?. Not the First Victim is an unusual case that can fall under this or Would You Like to Hear How They Died?. If a character only thinks this is happening but the apparent perpetrator really didn't do it, it may be Not Me This Time.

noreallife

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Example subpages:

• Anime & Manga
• Comic Books
• Fan Works
• Films — Live-Action
• Literature
• Live-Action TV
• Video Games
• Webcomics
• Western Animation

Other examples:

Comic Strips

• A heroic example in one arc of The Phantom, after the titular hero comes across a sniper who he'd previously skull-marked. Prior to the confrontation, the sniper had been reminiscing about how, in their last encounter, he'd shot the Phantom, only for the hero to get back up when by all rights he shouldn't have, and that incident left the sniper in absolute terror of the Ghost Who Walks ever since...but when they come face-to-face, Phantom admits to himself that he doesn't remember the guy at all.

Films — Animated

• Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse: This turns out to be the backstory of the Spot, who is revealed to have been a random scientist in the previous film who was hit on the head with a bagel thrown by Miles Morales. Then he got mutated into a multiversal superbeing when Miles destroyed Kingpin's Collider, and thus blames Spider-Man for his life going wrong. He is very upset to learn that Miles has no memory of who is and considers him nothing more than a Villain of the Week. Furious about being forgotten, the Spot dedicates himself to becoming Spider-Man's nemesis, and powers himself up to Reality Warper levels that make him a threat to the entire Multiverse.

Manhwa

• Yureka:
  • Myria hates the protagonists for something they did to her, but they have no idea what it is. Subverted/parodied in that Myria can't remember what it is until another character taunts her about it.
  • Happens again with Team Fallen Angels, though they manage to remember after a few hours. Heck, there's implied to be a lot of guys seeking revenge on the "heroes", none of whom they recognize.

Music

• The B-Side "Tombigbee" by Tori Amos begins with almost these exact words. It most likely refers to the plight of Native Americans under the early expansionist American government.
  To you it's another day
  To me it's a grim reaping
  Just another shooting star
  Hanging on your wire
• The extended version of Rob Cantor's "Shia LaBeouf", which, as the name suggests tells the story of an unnamed protagonist's conflict with Shia LaBeouf, who in the song is a cannibalistic serial killer, features the lines:
  Legendary fight with Shia LaBeouf
  Normal Tuesday night for Shia LaBeouf
• Phil Collins' "In The Air Tonight" inverts this, in that the singer, the one wronged, recognizes that the person to whom he is singing may not remember the incident that he can't forget:
  I've seen your face before my friend,
  But I don't know if you know who I am ...
• "Just Another Day" by Lisa Dames is a story of a woman who was raised by a single mother, who herself dies in a car accident soon afterward. She uses the chorus to show that her loss isn't that big in the grand scheme of things, and that she will be okay no matter what happens:
  No one called from the White House to say
  The president's making this a holiday
  People still ridin' in the subway alone
  It didn't stop anybody's big league game
  Or sinners from fallin' on their knees to pray
  Traffic's still movin' real slow all over LA
  For the rest of the world, oh yeah
  It was just another day
• "The Entertainer" by Billy Joel is a non-villainous (probably) example from the point of view of the one doing the deeds:
  I am the entertainer; I've been all around the world
  I've played all kinds of palaces, laid all kinds of girls
  I can't remember faces, don't remember names
  Ah, but what the hell, y'know it's just as well
  'Cause after a while and a thousand miles
  It all becomes the same
• The Jack of Hearts from Bob Dylan's Lily, Rosemary, and the Jack of Hearts apparently has a very interesting love life, according to the lost verse (which appears in many cover versions of the song, most notably that of Joan Baez):
  Lily's arms were locked around the man that she dearly loved to touch,
  She forgot all about the man she couldn't stand who hounded her so much.
  "I've missed you so," she said to him, and he felt she was sincere,
  But just beyond the door he felt jealousy and fear.
  Just another night in the life of the Jack of Hearts.
• "Insensitive" by Jann Arden approaches this from the victim's point of view:
  You probably don't remember me, it's probably ancient history
  I'm one of the chosen few who went ahead and fell for you
• Inverted in "A Winter's Tale" by David Essex, which about how though his Christmas was defined by his break up, for everyone else it was Tuesday.
  Though it meant a lot to you and me, on a worldwide scale? It's just another winter's tale.
• The song "With Her Head Tucked Underneath Her Arm," first sung by Stanley Holloway, is about the ghost of Anne Boleyn seeking revenge on Henry VIII for executing her. Unfortunately, King Henry can't even tell which of his six wives she is:
  One night she caught King Henry, he was in the canteen bar
  Said he, "are you Jane Seymour, Anne Boleyn, or Catherine Parr?
  For how the sweet san fairy ann do I know who you are
  With your head tucked underneath your arm?"

Religion & Mythology

• This is a theory behind why contemporary historians (such as Josephus) did not mention the Bethlehem Massacre — Herod the Great was such a deadly monarch that to record every minor massacre or other act of murder on his part would have required several scrolls. (He massacred numerous members of his own family, for Heaven's sake! Regularly!) This is a common response to the idea that the massacre was either a legend or that Matthew (lone reporter of this incident) made it up to discredit Herod and provide an origin story to Jesus that was like Moses and other figures.
  • There's also the theory that it was recorded at the time, but as time went by and records were lost, it wasn't considered important enough to remember, again because of all the horrendous crimes Herod committed. For killing wives and sons of anyone important, he regularly wrote to Emperor Augustus in Rome asking permission. For killing anybody else, he could mostly just put it down to a "police action" in his Acta, assuming he bothered to record it at all.
    • To give some further perspective on that: the year Herod the Great may very well have perpetrated the massacre, ca. 4 B.C., was also the year he immolated 2 religious teachers and about 40 youths over a religious conflagration that flared up in Jerusalem, and executed his son Antipater II. It was also the year he died, after which his son Herod Archelaus took control of Bethlehem and the surrounding area. Archelaus, for his part, began his reign with the massacre of an estimated 3,000 Israelites (possibly including some of the witnesses of the Nativity and subsequent Wise Men's visit) for opposing his ascension. In view of these atrocities, the overnight slaughter of a few babies in Bethlehem (the most reliable estimates range from a mere 4 to no more than 20 babies) could easily have gotten lost in the shuffle.
• The Romans crucified hundreds of people per year. Crucifixion was basically the death penalty for any capital criminal who wasn't a Roman citizen. So to Rome, Jesus's death was just another one.
• For Christians, the Trial of Christ was a defining moment of the faith. For Pontius Pilate, it was just another day of clearing his docket by trying another self-proclaimed prophet/Messiah. While Pilate probably did remember the trial, it being one of several incidents that nearly landed him in hot water with the increasingly paranoid Emperor Tiberius, and a political hot potato he'd made every effort to dump into Herod Antipas' lap instead, it probably didn't rate any higher in significance in his official Acta report to Rome on the year's events than those two highway robbers he'd also crucified at the time. All of Pilate's Acta are now lost to us, having evidently perished along with a great many other bureaucratic records with the fall of Rome.
• A couple decades later, Suetonius mentions that Emperor Claudius dealt with some "Chrestus Riots" in the city of Rome by expelling a number of Jews. These very likely refer to arguments between Jews over this new "Chrestus" (Christian?) sect coming to blows, but we can't be absolutely sure. Suetonius didn't see fit to say anything more about these riots, since he and most Romans knew that Jews in Rome were always squabbling over something, and Romans of the time generally showed contempt to Jewish or Christians beliefs (if they mentioned them at all). It may well have not been until the Second Century that most Roman historians even became aware of Christians (especially as being distinct from Jews, instead of a Jewish fringe sect). Until then, a lot of Christians might not have even thought they were a distinct sect too.

Theatre

• Cyrano de Bergerac: Cyrano plays it chillingly fair at Act II Scene IV when he is writing a love letter to Roxane while the poets talk about his battle of one men against one hundred at the Porte de Nesle:
  First poet: We were stayed by the mob; they are crowded all round the Porte de Nesle!...
  Second poet: Eight bleeding brigand carcasses strew the pavements there—all slit open
  with sword-gashes!
  Cyrano: [raising his head a minute] Eight?...hold, methought seven.
  [he goes on writing]
• In Hamilton, Aaron Burr demands that Alexander Hamilton apologize for remarks recently made against him; Hamilton responds that Burr needs to be more specific, because he's talked a lot of shit about Burr over the years. Subverted in that Hamilton sends Burr "an itemized list of thirty years of disagreements:" Hamilton remembers everything he's said about Burr, he just wants to know what the particular burr under his saddle is.
• Schmucks: Lenny Bruce eventually figures out that he slept with waitress Mary Lenahan and assumes she's been cold-shouldering him for that reason. Turns out that she was a prostitute and didn't even remember the incident.
• Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street: Judge Turpin, who had Sweeney Todd convicted on false charges and then raped his wife and became his infant daughter's guardian, doesn't recognize him for most of the musical, until Todd comments "But then, perhaps the face of a barber — the face of a prisoner in the dock — is not particularly memorable."

Web Animation

• DEATH BATTLE!
  • This is the stated reason why Guts manages to defeat Nightmare in their battle. Guts has always fought impossible odds against terrifying demonic forces due to the brand on his neck attracting them like moths to a flame, and yet Guts has also always managed to come out on top if only through sheer dumb luck and unstoppable willpower; Nightmare and the Soul Edge really aren't anything he isn't already accustomed to.
  • The fight animations for Samurai Jack vs. Afro Samurai, Sanji vs. Rock Lee, and DIO vs. Alucard all end with the cut-to-credits screen of the victor's series.
• If Pokedex Entries Were Literal: Garchomp quotes the Trope Namer in If Pokédex Entries Were Literal (Volume 60) when confronted by Taillow twenty years after he killed his mother.
  Garchomp: I ate your ma or something years ago? Don't take it personal, son. For you, the day Garchomp graced the sky was the most important day of your life. For me... it was a Tuesday.
  Taillow: It was a Wednesday!
  Garchomp: I'm quoting Raúl Juliá, little guy. Jeez.
• The Most Popular Girls in School: In Episode 72, Mackenzie's idol, Jeannie Halverstad, doesn't even recognize her at first, despite clearly talking with her phone the episode before, and having met her at Cheer Nationals many episodes before that.
• In the RWBY episode "The More The Merrier", Jaune Arc and Cinder Fall meet for the first time since the Fall of Beacon and the death of Pyrrha Nikos. Jaune breaks into a tearful rant about the remorselessness in the havoc she's caused and the pain he's been though. Cinder responds by bluntly asking who Jaune is. This is enough to launch Jaune into a furious rage and fight here.
  • A heroic case in "The Final Word". Neopolitan has spent several volumes on a one-woman quest to avenge her partner, who she believes was murdered by Ruby Rose, and finally gets to fight her. However, Ruby has been fighting much bigger and badder villains for so long (and in fact did not actually kill Roman), that she neither knows or cares about Neo's motive at this point. Her casually telling Neo that "Whatever you wanted, I hope it was worth it." prompts her to snap and charge, which Ruby uses as an opportunity to knock her off a bridge.
• A flashback in season 15 of Red vs. Blue shows that in the midst of one of their many fights with each other, Freelancer Agents Carolina and Tex accidentally killed an orange sim trooper in front of a blue sim trooper trying to save the former, before continuing their fight without giving one single fuck to the tragedy that occurred for the others that beheld such a horrific event. The blue sim trooper was Temple, Church's Evil Counterpart, who would go on to brutally murder over half-a-dozen Freelancers and attempt to destroy the UNSC... with chilling success in fact. It turns out the orange sim trooper was Biff, Temple's best friend, who's death sparked his Start of Darkness.
• In Super Mario Bros. Z, Mario stomped Captain Basilisx's best friend into a lava pit and used his shell to slaughter the rest, but Mario doesn't remember it. Although Fridge Brilliance sets in when you realize that there are no lava pits in the room that Basilisx mentions. Mario may not remember it because it may have never happened in the first place, to say nothing of the fact that the way he describes the death is literally impossible to pull off in-context. The only true fact about his story is that there was indeed a third Koopa Troopa behind Door #2 of Bowser's Castle in Dinosaur Land.
• Sana Tsukumo of hololive honestly can't remember any specific Pokemon matches she's had because she's destroyed so many people that it's all blurred together. This is with Ina bringing up the crushing defeat the space girl rendered unto her when they first met.
  "No, I don't remember. How could I remember the dirt underneath my feet? There were so many of you."

Web Original

• In Bonews: The Fall of Gurts, Xiphias suffers horribly after being microaggressed by Railgun regarding Italian firearms. This is an especially interesting example, because there was a reciprocal incident much earlier in the series wherein Railgun innocently inquired after an improvement to Bulb Infrastructure, and Xiphias casually dismissed him, harming his feelings and eventually resulting in his heroic quest. All in all, the 2013 season was tough on everybody. The 2014 season is off with a bang as these two titans have again slighted one another, this time regarding ancestry, and are now returning to muster their respective regional armies. How this will end is anybody's guess.
• In Diamanda Hagan's review of Sextette:
  Minion: You Monster!!! Two months ago you made me eat my own children!
  Diamanda Hagan: Oh. An important day for you, but for me it was Tuesday.
  Minion: And you steal dialogue!
• Doc Sigma after a day well-spent with the neighborhood squirrels: "For you, the day I crammed you up my ass was the worst day of your life...But for me, it was Tuesday."
• In Dragon Ball Z Abridged, Frieza keeps a mental count of heroic speeches he's heard. By the time he arrives on Namek, the (mostly futile) resistance made so many, many heroic speeches, that many of the Namekians' badass boasts made it into the hundreds. 'We're here to stop the senseless slaughter of our people'? Ninety-two. 'You insane bastard!'? 190. 'We will be the ones who will stop you!'? 419. The point being that Frieza has devastated so many species and planets that the only way he remembers them is how cliche their dialogue is. Except Bardock, of course.
  • They try to be a little more creative by saying "We're going to f*ck your face!", but Frieza had actually heard that one 11 times.
  • Finally broken by none other than Son Goku. The heroic speech he's never heard before?
    Goku: Imma deck ya in the schnozz!
    Frieza: [beat] I'm sorry, that's a new one.
  • And a more, fierce one delivered by Goku during the battle also counts.
    Goku: I am gonna break you.
    Frieza: What? Aah!!
    Goku Like a Kitkat Bar.
    Frieza: ...What? What!?
  • This comes back to bite Android 17 in the ass in Future Trunk's timeline, when a more powerful Trunks comes back for round two and instantly kills 18 before turning to 17.
    17: Any chance I could... talk you outta this?
    Trunks: What was my master's name?
    17: Huh?
    Trunks: The man who taught me. The man who's arm you took. The man you killed. What was his name?
    17: ...Goku...Jr.?
    Trunks: Wrong answer.
• In Epic Rap Battles of History, Vlad the Impaler starts his verse by establishing himself as a Card-Carrying Villain for whom death and destruction are just a routine.
  Imagine forests of corpses dripping on a buffet
  You call that a nightmare? I call that a Tuesday
• A heroic version shows up in one of 4chan's "Humanity, Fuck Yeah!" stories. In the story, a random, everyday human piloting the space equivalent of a tugboat gave his life to stop an alien warship from crashing into one of their own colonies, which would have killed millions of their citizens or more. Years later, humanity is on the losing side of a war with a different alien species when the first aliens show up and mop the floor with humanity's enemies. The aliens then demand to know if their life debt is paid, and are increasingly bewildered that the humans have no idea what they're talking about. In their culture, such a deed is rare and treasured, and is cause to owe an enormous debt that may continue for generations. For humanity, which has been in war going on over a decade filled with soldiers Jumping on a Grenade, random people doing a You Shall Not Pass! or performing a Heroic Sacrifice for the sake of strangers, such a thing is just another day. Link◊
• Salon's "Interview With My Bully" series has a recurring theme in which the bullies, years later as adults, said they had little or no memory of the things they did that left the authors scarred for life.
• In Noob, killing Sparadrap's pets made Roxana one of the two people hated by the series' All-Loving Hero. When Sparadrap confronts her about it in Season 4, her reply comes down to "I'm leader of the Player Killer guild, I don't remember every single bullying act I perform," despite the fact that Sparadrap is also in a Mistaken for Badass situation with one of her subordinates. In Season 5, Sparadrap starts attacking her each time he gets the opportunity, which has the side effect of getting a better place in her memory."
• SFDebris's Alternate Character Interpretation of Captain Janeway, scourge of the galaxy ("Year of Hell"):
  [going down the list] "Did I help the Borg assimilate your people, uh, did Vidians I let escape murder your loved ones...or should I just mark this one down as miscellaneous?"
  • Describing the crew's dilemma in "The Killing Game:"
  "So we've got ourselves a good old fashioned free-for-all with the Hirogen wanting to take the Voyager crew alive, the Nazi soldiers ready to shoot the Voyager crew dead, the freed Voyager crew trying to avoid both, and the controlled Voyager crew possibly ready to shoot anybody; thus turning the ship into a massive Death Trap. Or, as it's known to the Voyager crew, Wednesday.
• In the Unshaved Mouse blog, which reviews Disney films and features an immortal, black-magic Walt Disney as a recurring character, Uncle Walt has this response upon seeing the latest villain in the Food Fight review.
  Walt Disney: Who are you?
  Shadowy Figure: Someone who owes you a lifetime of torment. Someone who has suffered at your hands like no other. Someone whose desire for revenge burns like the fire of a thousand white hot suns.
  Walt Disney: That could be literally anyone. Care to narrow it down for me?
  Unshaved Mouse: P. L. Travers maybe?
  Walt Disney: Ooh, good guess! Pamela, is that you?
• Worm:
  • When confronted by one of her (many) victims, Doctor Mother admits that she can't remember the codename Cauldron gave her (Garotte), the number they assigned her after they wiped her memories (1616), or the name that she picked for herself after being incarcerated in an asylum after uncontrollably acquiring a three-digit body count (Sveta).
  • When Skitter gets help from the other high school students to get away from Dragon and Armsmaster, knowing they wouldn't want to harm bystanders. Afterwards, one of the students who helped Skitter mentions they did it because she saved their father's life, and Skitter's only thought is 'I did? When?'.
• Played for laughs in The Cosmic Adventures of Doctor Fabulous. Zorg claims that he's battled Doctor Fabulous over the fate of the universe a dozen times. The Doctor retorts that he fights a thousand scumbags like Zorg every week.
• A rare heartwarming variation comes courtesy of Not Always Hopeless. This couple will forever be grateful to a paramedic who saved their lives after a bad car accident, but he has to admit that he doesn't remember the specific incident because those are the situations he deals with on a regular basis. (For his part, while the paramedic doesn't remember the incident, he says he'll never forget them seeking him out to thank him, because that doesn't happen often.)

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