Fake Better Alternate Timeline

A storyline where our protagonist finds themself in an Alternate Timeline that seems much better than their original timeline. Maybe the difference is that the protagonist themself was never born or otherwise didn't come to exist the way they did in the original timeline. Maybe some other specific event happened differently in the alternate timeline's past, and the effects of that ripple into the present. Or maybe the "alternate timeline" is more like a full-fledged Alternate Universe that resembles the original world in some ways, but has been different from it in other ways for as long as the story cares to show.

Whatever the case, while this new world seems better at first, cracks begin to appear in its facade as the protagonist explores it. The new timeline could turn out to be a Crapsaccharine World whose happiness depends on some terrible secret. Or maybe the new timeline has been genuinely better so far but is heading straight into some terrible, unexpected outcome that was prevented by elements in the main timeline. As a result, the protagonist will sooner or later find themself wanting to go back to their original world - which they usually do, especially if this is a series where Status Quo Is God.

If the change in the timeline is the removal of the protagonist, this trope functions as a subversion of the "Better if Not Born" Plot trope, and by extension a Double Subversion of the It's a Wonderful Plot trope. Related to Butterfly of Doom (if the new timeline is worse) or In Spite of a Nail (if the new timeline is merely not better). Subtrope of Grass is Greener, and has significant overlap with Too Good to Be True.

---

Examples:

Anime and Manga

• In episode 67 of Yo-kai Watch, Whisper dreams of a reality where Katie got the Yo-Kai Watch instead of Nare. At first glance, she seems to be better at it than him since she's friendlier to Whisper and helps him memorize Yo-Kai Wiki pages and her Yo-Kai are all rarer than his, but they all have personality quirks that make them less reliable (for example, Jibanyan may be lazy, but he's not a delinquent like Baddinyan and doesn't consider tasks below him like Goldenyan) and the fact that she resorts to using Whisper as a weapon after Goldenyan refuses to fight Noway implies that she either didn't befriend as many Yo-Kai as he did or her other options were even more unreliable.

Comic Books

• The Exiles tie-in to House of M has the Exiles team pop into the House of M's version of New York and are initially amazed by how it's an apparent paradise where mutants walk around openly without persecution, safe and secure in a clean, futuristic city. However, the illusion is shattered when they watch a Sentinel brutally gun down some non-mutant humans simply for being in its way and the team realizes that this reality is just as awful as any other they've seen, it's just a Persecution Flip.
• The classic Superman storyline For the Man Who Has Everything by Alan Moore shows Superman living a new life in which he is living, happily married with children, on Krypton, whose destruction never occurred. While this turns out to be an illusion created by the alien plant Black Mercy, the dream world turns out to be a darker place than it seemed at first glance. His father Jor-El, mocked for his failed doomsday prediction, has turned to reactionary politics, and Kal's cousin Kara (Supergirl) is attacked by people protesting Jor-El's use of the Phantom Zone.
• The Superman Adventures issues #30-31, written by Mark Millar, featured the storyline "Family Reunion", in which Superman, after disposing of an exploding antimatter engine in space, returns to Earth and discovers that a whole year has passed since he was last seen. In this new world, Ma and Pa Kent, sadly, have died in a house fire, and Lois is in a new relationship. Also, Lex Luthor, in the absence of Superman, has figured out new, effective ways to psychologically reprogram supervillains and is hailed as a hero; while this makes Clark question whether or not he was of any real help when he was around, it at least has a bright side in that his supervillains have been rendered harmless. Returning to the Fortress of Solitude, Superman discovers that his Kryptonian mother, Lara, is alive, as is his father, Jor-El, who managed to save one of Krypton's cities, Kryptonopolis, from the destruction of the planet. When this seems to be a silver lining to the new circumstances, this turns out to be another dimension, into which Superman was knocked by the antimatter explosion. Unfortunately, the destruction of Krypton turns out to have made Lara hellbent on conquering Earth, having already brainwashed this dimension's equivalents of Kal-El and Kara Zor-El into fighting for this plan. She also reveals that she had them kill Ma and Pa Kent, masking it with the house fire.
• The Tom Strong 3-part story in issues #20-22 presents an alternate timeline where the boat trip that brought Tom's parents, Sinclair and Susan Strong, to Attabar Teru, which resulted in the death of their hired sailor, Tomas, instead causes the death of Sinclair. With him gone, Susan and Tomas grow closer and get taken in by the Ozu tribe. Unlike Tom Strong, who lived in a special pressurized chamber and didn't touch his parents until they died, the child produced by Susan and Tomas' relationship, Tom Stone, had a normal childhood and ran around freely. Because of this, Susan and Tomas aren't on the volcano when it erupts, saving their lives instead of killing them like Sinclair and Susan were in the main timeline. When Tom Stone goes to Millenium City, he meets Paul Saveen, Tom Strong's archenemy in the main timeline, and convinces him to use his scientific genius for legitimate purposes instead of crime. With Tom's physical prowess and Saveen's genius, they form a crimefighting duo that not only keeps the world safe and forms alliances with other superhero teams from the ABC line, but helps Tom Strong's villains either reform or never turn villainous in the first place. However, this falls apart when Saveen becomes the one of them to marry Tom Strong's wife Dhalua after meeting her on Attabar Teru. She and Tom (who is also married), unable to resist each other, begin a romantic affair, and Saveen is rattled when he learns that his counterpart on the cartoon alternate Earth is a villain to that world's Tom equivalent. When the affair between Tom and Dhalua is exposed, the heroes of the timeline turn on them fast, resulting in deaths and this other timeline collapsing in a civil war between Tom and Dhalua and their former allies.

Fan Works

• An Anomaly In The Underground: In Null Driver, Iji, Asriel and Chara wind up in an Alternate Timeline wherein Iji successfully pulled off an Actual Pacifist run, ensuring the survival of Dan and the Tasen race. However, they eventually discover another, much less pleasant change: Mount Ebott was vaporized by the Tasen Alpha Strike, completely wiping out monsterkind.

Films — Animated

• Shrek Forever After: When Shrek wants to be feared again, Rumpelstiltskin puts him into another timeline. He gets to be feared again, which he likes, but then it turns out that in this timeline, he was never born. This means that his kids (naturally) don't exist, Rumpelstiltskin became king after killing Fiona's parents, Puss has become a pampered Fat Slob, and Fiona becomes a warlike leader of a rebel group of ogres.

Films — Live-Action

• Mr. Destiny, an '80s comedy starring Jim Belushi, Linda Hamilton, and Michael Caine in the role of a Clarence-like figure, subverts the It's a Wonderful Plot trope in a way that fits this trope; Jim Belushi's character always bemoaned the fact that he blew a game-saving play in high-school baseball, and Caine changed history so that he made the game-saver instead. Belushi then sees his life changing; he's now the Vice-President of the sporting goods company he's working for and married to the boss's daughter, but it turns out he's having an affair with a psychotic temptress, and his real wife from his old life (Hamilton), the one woman he truly loved, is married to someone else.

Literature

• Animorphs did this in one book, with Jake making a Deal with the Devil with Crayak to Cosmic Retcon the timeline so that the Animorphs never received their powers in the first place. The kids end up winning the war with the Yeerks FASTER without their powers, but it's largely due to Cassie being "sub-temporally grounded", which seems to give her some degree of reality-warping powers when she isn't in her "right" universe. Even with that, most of them die in the process.
  • Also from Animorphs: Very briefly toyed with in one of the Megamorphs books, where a Visser goes through time changing history to make the world easier to conquer for the Yeerks. As a result, slavery still exists (though apparently not related to race as Cassie owns one), Jake is a loathsome wannabe dictator considering selling Cassie out to the government for opposing their genocide in South America, Rachel is in a reeducation camp for independently-minded females, and the U.S. doesn't exist. On the other hand, neither Hiroshima nor the Holocaust happened, as the D-Day landing is fought against a French-German alliance and Hitler is just a jeep driver. Marco looks very briefly reluctant as his mother is still with him in this timeline (and not Visser One's host), but claims he's joining in because the timeline has only two TV channels.
• Careful What You Wish For: This happens several times, as the title would suggest:
  • In the first alternate reality, Ruth loves it initially — she has her own computer, the house and yard are in better shape, and they have a pool and a library. However, the parents in that universe have Uncanny Valley eyes, and what tips it over the edge is that her brothers don't exist.
  • In the second alternate reality, Ruth is in a Catholic boarding school in The '50s. She has fun singing in mass and she makes friends with a girl named Bridie, but then it turns out to be a Boarding School of Horrors run by a Stern Nun who punishes Bridie due to thinking being left-handed is sinful.
• Coraline: When the eponymous girl first finds the other dimension in her closet, she enjoys it — she wears the clothes she wants and there is a circus nearby. However, it then turns out to be a trap laid by the alternate parents, who want to sew buttons in her eyes and then kill her.
• Subverted in the Goosebumps story The Cuckoo Clock of Doom, where Michael's time-travel makes his little sister Tara Ret-Gone. The book ends with him thinking he'll go back for her one of these days, but as the book presents Tara as a genuinely chilling sociopath the timeline really is better off without her.
• The Midnight Library follows a woman who, after being Driven to Suicide minutes before midnight, finds herself in the titular library which is filled with possible lives she could have led. The librarian tells her she must use the books to find a new life to live in. She explores many alternate choices (if she'd gone through with her wedding, if she hadn't left her band, if she'd become an Olympic swimmer, a glaciologist, etc.), leaving each one "when the disappointment becomes total." Ultimately, after experiencing a huge number of alternate lives and trying sincerely to settle down in one of them, she sees the possibilities and the value she'd overlooked in the life she wanted to leave and fights her way back to that, managing to save herself in the nick of time.

Live-Action TV

• In Buffyverse:
  • In the Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode "The Wish", after losing her popularity for being a Scooby, dating Xander and subsequently getting cheated on, Cordelia wishes that Buffy had never come to Sunnydale. Her wish is granted, and at first seems to be as she wanted; she's still popular and never dated Xander. However, because Buffy never came to Sunnydale, Willow and Xander were turned into vampires, Angel is Vamp-Willow's torture slave and Sunnydale is ruled by vampires—The Big Bad of season 1, the Master, having fully taken over with Buffy not there to stop him. Partway through the episode, Cordelia herself is killed, and the wish is ultimately reversed by the alternate-timeline-Giles, who reasons that whatever the original timeline was like, it had to have been better than theirs.
  • Angel features an alternate reality in the third-season episode "Birthday". A demon gives Cordelia the chance to enter a world in which she does not have the prophetic visions, which after three years are near the point of killing her. In this parallel world, Cordy has become the rich and successful actress she always wanted to be — but the sight of a one-armed Wesley and an Angel driven insane from getting the visions in Cordy's stead quickly convince her to go back to the real world (though changed to become part demon so she can survive the visions).
• Community: Discussed following the events of the episode "Remedial Chaos Theory" where, at Troy and Abed's game night housewarming party, the timeline is split depending on the roll of a die. The "Prime" timeline continues when Abed catches the die and reveals Jeff's trickery, which seems to be the best of the options. Later in the season, when the study group is kicked out of Greendale after Chang takes over, they speculate that what they thought was the best timeline was really the worst given their current situation. After they rally to overthrow Chang at the end of the season, restoring the "Prime" timeline, it's revealed that their counterparts in the actual "Darkest" Timeline, jealous that there is another timeline where they could possibly be happy, are planning to invade...
• On the fourth season premiere of The Good Fight, Diane dreams she's in a world where Hillary Clinton won the 2016 election and she must have "dreamed" the world where Trump won. At first, it's a true dream for a liberal like Diane: cancer is cured, climate change is fixed, Elizabeth Warren is on the Supreme Court, and Trump's TV network is flopping. But Diane is jarred to learn that the firm's new client is Presidential Medal of Freedom winner Harvey Weinstein. Diane realizes that in this world, Clinton's victory was seen as the ultimate win by women so there was never a "Me Too" movement, and abusers like Weinstein remain in power. She also realizes that Adrian and Liz never discovered Liz's father regularly abused his secretaries, the firm is in trouble because Clinton's taxes on the wealthy are hurting business, and Clinton herself may not be re-elected because of her various scandals.
• Kamen Rider Zi-O: White Woz comes from an alternate timeline to the future of Oma Zi-O, where Geiz Revive defeated Zi-O before he could become Oma and apparently changed the world for the better. However, it's eventually heavily implied that life ceased to exist altogether in that timeline, making it much worse than the already Bad Future of Oma Zi-O's rule.
• Legend of the Seeker: Changing the past so that Cara never became a Mord-Sith (and thus wasn't there to lead the charge for Darken Rahl) leads to a timeline where Richard succeeded in using the Boxes of Orden without being corrupted by them, the Veil was never torn, and he and Kahlan are now married and ruling D'Hara together. Zedd, who is the only one to remember the original timeline, initially sees no reason to restore it since this one seems preferable to a world where the dead walk among the living and the end of all life seems imminent. However, the Keeper turns out to also know that time has changed, and to be able to make use of the situation to get even closer to victory than he was in the original timeline, forcing Zedd to restore it after all.
• In the Mr. Robot series finale "eXit", Elliot ends up in a parallel universe where his parents are still alive and happy and he's engaged to a still-living Angela. It all seems perfect... up until he finds out that there's already an Elliot in that universe and they cannot co-exist peacefully with one another or reality will break down.
• My Hero (2000): In "Time and Time Again", George changes the past to make Janet's life happier. The eventual timeline created as a result seems to be perfect — Janet and Piers are happily married with ten children, Janet's parents and Mrs. Raven are happy, and Tyler is in a relationship with a beautiful blonde called Miranda who is living where George and Janet usually live. George is tempted to let this new timeline be because everyone seems so much happier... until he learns that Mrs. Raven is having an affair with Piers, at which point he resets the timeline.
• Psych explored this trope twice:
  • The episode "The Polarizing Express" had Shawn being shown visions of what the world would be like if he'd never returned to Santa Barbara. The visions all contradict each other (one of them sees Lassie installed as a tyrant at the SBPD, another shows Gus with a family, and a third shows Jules as a successful cop in Miami), but Shawn's guide says that this is unimportant, and the real important thing is that Shawn himself would have been squandering his potential. The real lesson he was supposed to take away from the visions is that asking What If? is pointless.
  • In "Right Turn or Left for Dead", Shawn imagines how things might have turned out if he'd managed to continue hiding his lack of psychic abilities from Jules. At first, the alternate timeline seems better, as he and Jules remain together, but he fails to prevent a crime that occurred in the real timeline, and in the altered timeline, his attempts to keep his secret from Jules have unexpected consequences for everyone around them.
• Red Dwarf: The episode "Skipper" features two in Rimmer's search for a universe where he isn't a loser:
  • Rimmer comes across a universe where Lister is more cultured and Rimmer-esque. Rimmer is about to accept this universe until he finds that this Lister was put into stasis for bringing a pet rat on board, leading to the ship being swarmed by Rat Men.
  • The final one he comes across seems to be perfect for Rimmer — he's married with children, back on Earth, alive rather than a Virtual Ghost, and he's an astronavigation officer. Then, he finds out that Lister outranks him in this universe and is captain of Red Dwarf, which is enough of a dealbreaker for Rimmer to return to his original universe.
• Star Trek:
  • Star Trek: The Next Generation:
    • In "Tapestry", Captain Picard has a dream or vision in which he is told by Q that he died due to his artificial heart being damaged by a compressed teryon beam. He is given a chance — which he accepts — to avoid the fight which caused him to need the artificial heart. He is then shown that the attitude that he needed to avoid that fight would have meant that he would take fewer risks in the future and — as a result — never become captain.
    • In "Parallels", Worf finds himself shifting between various quantum realities. In the last one, he's the first officer of the Enterprise to Captain Riker since the events of "The Best of Both Worlds" (in this timeline, they were unable to save Picard from the Borg), and married to Troi with two children. But Alexander, Worf's son from the Primeverse, doesn't exist, which saddens him, and Geordi is also dead from an engineering accident.
  • Star Trek: Voyager: Episode "Year of Hell" has a double example. A Krenim named Annorax had previously tried to win the Krenim war against the Rilnar by removing the latter from history. This caused a plague that would have been averted by the presence of Rilnar DNA in the Krenim genome. Annorax attempted to fix that with another temporal incursion, causing the disappearance of his home colony and his wife.
• The Supergirl (2015) episode "It's a Super Life" has Kara, with the help of Mr. Mxyzptlk, go over various possible alternate timelines of her past related to her friendship with Lena Luthor, which by now has turned to Lena seeing her as the enemy after learning that she had been hiding her secret identity from her. In one such timeline, Kara tries revealing it to her when they first meet. At first, this one seems downright utopic, with the two of them working closely together and stopping several threats. Unfortunately, Lena ends up kidnapped by this timeline's version of Agent Liberty, who blackmails Kara into revealing her identity to the public and proceeds to lead his organization in killing all of Kara's friends and loved ones.
• Xena: Warrior Princess: In an episode of Season 2, Xena accidentally wishes to the fates that she had never become a warrior and done all the horrible things that haunt her with guilt now. For most of the episode, this alternate world seems better, even after the fact that she never stood for her village gave a chance for three notorious warlords to join forces and Gabrielle was enslaved by them (she still intends to find a way to stop them, to her it's just like any other problem she's run into). The only thing that finally convinces Xena not to stay in this universe is Gabrielle accidentally stabbing a man, thus getting blood on her hands.

Puppet Shows

• In Sesame Street special Elmo Saves Christmas, Elmo wishes for Christmas Every Day. At first, this is fun, but then the carollers lose their voices, Maria forgets how to work due to being off-work for a year, Big Bird is sad that he hasn't seen Snuffy in a year (since Snuffy was away for Christmas), the Count grows weary of counting the days, people get sick of there being nothing on TV but It's a Wonderful Life, and pine trees become endangered.

Video Games

• The third semester of Persona 5 Royal, which is only accessible by completing a certain Confidant before the finale of the original game. At the start of the new year, Joker finds himself in a warped reality where everyone's wishes have miraculously come true: Morgana has turned into a human, Ryuji's leg has healed and Ryuji is now a successful track team star, Shiho Suzui has returned to Shujin, Madarame has become an ideal and benevolent mentor to Yusuke, Wakaba Isshiki, Kunikazu Okumura, and Makoto and Sae's father are alive, and Sumire Yoshizawa has become her dead twin sister Kasumi. Only Joker and Akechi are unaffected, and they soon discover that this new world is the work of school counselor Takuto Maruki's Persona, who has the power to turn cognition into reality. The player has the choice to defeat Maruki and go back to the real world, or allow Maruki to erase the original reality forever and replace it with the new one where he plays god rewriting people's histories and personalities as he sees fit for maximum happiness. Should the player take him up on the offer, Maruki erases the parts of Joker and Akechi's personalities that allowed them to be immune; Joker's rebellious spirit and Akechi's personal tragedies. Should the player be indecisive, Maruki apologizes for allowing Joker the burden of free will and puts him to sleep forever, while the rest of the happy reality goes on around him.

Western Animation

• Animaniacs (2020): In "The Cutening", Dot changes the world so that it's cuter — all dogs are puppies, some mouldy bread smiles, etc. However, the Warner siblings then decide that it's too cute and set it back to normal.
• Arthur:
  • In "D.W.'s Time Trouble", D.W. feels that her big brother Arthur gets all the fun because he's the oldest, and wishes she was the oldest. That night, she has an Opinion-Changing Dream in which she's the oldest, and at first she likes it because she gets to have the pets she wants (a pony and a cat), and she teaches the younger Arthur to like unicorns and dislike spiders like she does. However, she changes her mind when the little Arthur becomes an Annoying Younger Sibling and she doesn't have an older sibling to look up to.
  • In "Buster's Second Chance", Buster believes he could have been just as smart as The Brain if he didn't fail an interview for an advanced preschool. Later he dreams about changing his past and actually gets into the advanced preschool. In the new altered timeline, he is a genius who takes advanced courses and moved up a grade level. While at first he is happy, he learns that he isn't friends with Arthur because he never met him in the new timeline. Not only that but Arthur is the leader of the Tough Customers who never stopped their bullying and have taken over the Sugar Bowl.
• In Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice is shown a universe in which he wasn't around anymore. While his ghostly neighbors are shown to have a much better life without him, he sees that without him, Lydia ended up a loner with zero friends.
• Coraline: Just like in the book, Coraline finds an alternate version of her life, and at first she likes it — the food is delicious, the neighbours have a circus, there is a beautiful garden, and the mother lets her play in the rain. However, it turns out that the alternate parents want to sew buttons in Coraline's eyes and then kill her.
• Family Guy:
  • The episode "Meet the Quagmire's" has Peter and Brian being thrust into an alternate timeline after Peter accidentally makes it so that he and Lois never married, with Lois instead being married to Quagmire while Peter is married to Molly Ringwald. Said alternate timeline turns out to be a lot better than the old one: Al Gore became President in 2000 instead of George Bush in addition to killing Osama Bin Laden with his bare hands, there are flying cars that run on vegetable oil, people now live longer due to them being more health-conscious and President Gore having implemented Universal Healthcare, there is Zero Tolerance Gun Control and a much stronger/more well-funded educational system, which are at least two of the factors to the country now having hardly any street crime, and Dick Cheney (who didn't become Vice President in this timeline) simultaneously killed Justice Antonin Scalia, Karl Rove, and Tucker Carlson in a hunting accident. The only mentioned downside is that Chevy Chase is the host of The Tonight Show, which Peter and Brian both agree is terrible. Peter however doesn't care about any of it and only wants Lois back in his life, going back in time again to fix things despite Brian's protests.
  • In "Road to the Multiverse", one alternate world Brian and Stewie dimension-hop to is a Disney universe, where pretty much everyone is happy and everything is great... except for the murderous antisemitism.
  • The episode "Chap Stewie" has Stewie altering the past so he is never conceived by Peter and Lois and is instead born into a family of British intellectuals. He enjoys it at first until his new family starts treating him like crap and makes him miss his old one, deciding to go back in time again to stop Peter and Lois from splitting up.
• A The Flintstones comic had The Great Gazoo take Fred to an alternate timeline where Fred was never born. Fred's first impression is that things are better off without him — Bedrock is now a much larger town named "Slaterock" (named after Mr Slate (Fred's boss)), Barney is now the Vice Chairman of Mr Slate's business, and Wilma is married to Mr Slate and lives in a larger home and is better off financially. Gazoo then shows Fred the downsides — Slaterock has a crime problem, Betty is homeless because she never met Barney (Fred introduced Barney to her), Barney spends nights alone in the office since he isn't married to Betty, Pebbles is a Spoiled Brat (this is shown when she throws her dinner into a servant's face), and Wilma is not happy in her marriage to Mr Slate and wants a divorce.
• The Garfield Show: In the episode "World Without Me", Garfield visits an alternate timeline where he never existed. At first glance, it seems like everyone got a better deal — Jon and Odie are rich because they don't have to deal with Garfield's Big Eater tendencies, Arlene is in a happy relationship with Bruno, and Jim Davis is the president of the United States. However, this world's problems soon become apparent: Vito's restaurant went out of business because Garfield wasn't able to save it, Jon, Odie, and Arlene are all lonely without someone like Garfield around, and the lasagna aliens are nearly able to take over the Earth because they had no one to fear.
• Season 2 of Inside Job (2021) has an arc "Project Reboot" dealing with alternate realities caused by Rand Ridley, and at first it seems like many of these alternate timelines shake out far better for our main cast; Andre ends up becoming insanely rich and gets surgery giving him a horse penis, Glenn never has the dolphin surgery and stays married to his wife and even receives a medal of honor, Gigi ends up head of the Illuminati, Myc appears to be pregnant and overjoyed to be a parent, and Brett becomes the world's top puppeteer. Of course, each of these timelines presents their own issues; turns out when you have a horse dick, your options for sexual partners become quite limited. Glenn winds up in a timeline where the Soviets won the Cold War, Gigi is in charge of the Illuminati's Disney division and hates it, and the puppet world turns out to be quite catty. Oh, also Myc isn't pregnant, it's just gas.
• In The Loud House:
  • In the episode "One of the Boys", Lincoln wishes he had ten brothers instead of ten sisters due to the sisters hogging the bathroom, judging him for eating peanut butter with his hands, and not wanting to go to the places he wants to go. Initially, he loves living with ten brothers because they agree to go to the amusement park and pizzeria, and they don't mind him picking his nose, but then they turn out to be slobby and mean, so he changes his mind.
  • In "Time Trap!", the Loud children go back in time and accidentally cause their parents to not want kids and thus cause their own nonexistence. At first, the alternate timeline seems better — the parents are rich, Flip's store is cleaner, and their neighbour Mr. Grouse is healthier as a result of getting more sleep. However, as time goes on, the kids also find out that Chandler has befriended Lincoln's friends and made them bullies like him, and that Chunk (the roadie of the punk sister Luna) had to abandon his band and run a junkyard.
• In the Miraculous Ladybug episode "Chat Blanc", Adrien happens to discover that Ladybug is Marinette, a secret he promptly exploits to get the Relationship Upgrade he wants from her. This actually works out for a while, with the two of them dating and being blissfully happy, but they still haven't neutralized the Big Bad, so he uses their relationship to manipulate them, and the timeline goes septic from there. End result? All of Paris is destroyed, nobody left alive except one akumatized boy crazed with grief, and the only way to fix it is to completely rewrite events so its catalyst never happened. The new timeline has a lot of room for improvement, but at least it's stable enough to prevent any apocalypses. (Bonus: it ended a lot of fanbase griping.)
• Rugrats (2021): In "Tooth or Share", Lil wishes that she were an only child so that she wouldn't have to share anything with her twin brother Phil, so Susie shows her what that life would be like if Phil was never born. At first, Lil likes getting more things to herself, she gets to play on the slide first, and Angelica is nice to her. However, without Phil to eat the raisins that she doesn't like, she has to eat them herself, she is unable to play on the seesaw because she doesn't have anybody to push her up and down, and Angelica becomes too attached to her. Lil also meets a boy named Will who looks like Phil, but doesn't share her fondness for anything gross.
• Seven Little Monsters: The episode "It's a Wonder-Four Life" has Four being thrown into an alternate reality after a bad day leads to him wishing that he was an only child and that the world revolved around the number four. While great at first, he comes across his former siblings who have turned into complete jerks with most of them leading rather miserable lives. It's enough for Four to take back his wish and want his old life again, coming out of the whole experience with a new level of appreciation for his siblings.
• In The Simpsons:
  • Episode "Treehouse of Horror V" segment "Time and Punishment" subverts this trope. The story has Homer accidentally traveling back in time to the prehistoric era and stepping on a butterfly. When this severely changes the timeline, Homer goes back again to avoid doing this and does different damage, repeating this process again and again and again. In one memorable new timeline, the family is rich and has a luxury car, Marge, Lisa, and Bart are all nice and well-mannered, and Homer's sisters-in-law are dead. Then Homer asks Marge for a doughnut and screams in terror when he discovers that they apparently don't exist in this timeline, prompting him to run off and go back in time again. Then, after he's left the room, it literally starts raining doughnuts outside, with Marge's unconcerned reaction indicating that this is completely normal in this world.
  • The episode "Bartless" has Homer and Marge imagining a world where Bart wasn't their son, with almost everything and everyone in Springfield apparently being a lot better. However, the Simpson family is in even more shambles despite them now living a more upper-class life. Marge has a job at the St. Shondaland Animal Hospital but is constantly stressed out due to her being the Only Sane Woman, Lisa suffers from OCD, and Homer works as a jumbotron operator for the Springfield Isotopes' home games but is dissatisfied with his job because he can never get the crowd loud enough to read 100 on the jumbotron loudness meter.
• Sonic Prime: Inverted. Nine is a cynical loner due to having grown up in a world without Sonic to save him from bullies, and uses a Paradox Prism shard to locate and travel to an alternate reality he dubs The Grim — a barren world where people don't exist. However, rather than be depressed by the empty wasteland, Nine is ecstatic by the prospect of a blank slate to start over and tries convincing Sonic to stay with him there.
• SpongeBob SquarePants: The episode "The Algae's Always Greener" has Plankton using a machine to put himself into an alternate reality where he owns the Krusty Krab instead of Mr. Krabs. While he enjoys it at first, especially since he's now around Krabby Patties all the time without having to steal them, he gets overwhelmed by the new responsibilities he has as both a boss and a father, not to mention having to deal with Krabs trying to steal the formula on a daily basis (and in the nude no less), eventually deciding that all of it isn't worth it and returns to his original reality.
  Plankton: Goodbye, everyone! I'll remember you all in therapy!
• Subverted in What If…? (2021). Two episodes focus on timelines that appear to be better overall than the MCU's central "Sacred Timeline" but have a Sudden Downer Ending to make them appear worse. In the second episode, a timeline where T'Challa became Star-Lord has him bring peace to the galaxy, turn the Ravager pirates into heroes, and the Mad Titan Thanos into a good guy, but it's negated by the reveal that with Peter Quill helpless on Earth, his evil father Ego can consume the galaxy without a fight. In the seventh episode, Thor being an only child creates a galaxy-wide dance party that turns villains into party animals, brings peace between the Asgardians and Frost Giants, and at worst causes some easily cleaned-up mischief. It's seemingly all for nothing at the end when Infinity Ultron invades this timeline. However, after the Guardians of the Multiverse assemble to defeat Infinity Ultron, these timelines are seemingly allowed to go to an ideal future for good, with Party Thor returning to a jubilant galaxy and Star-Lord T'Challa returning just in time to blow up Ego.

---