So you have a comic or a novel that you just published and you reached the third sequel but now you hate everything about the second book. What do you do? Well a Story-Reset of course! This trope is used often to do a Soft Reboot of current events in order to do them over or change the outcome of the 'current' time line.
This trope allows you to go back a few pages or even a novel or two and rewrite the story after it has already been seen or published and either replace it with a brand new story or to change the original outcome while not being forced into doing a full Continuity Reboot. Basically keeping the previous stories and merely changing/rewriting the most current.
Some Tabletop gamers also have soft-resets like this which erase only one or two stories of play and go back to a previous point allowing different actions to be taken or different paths to be accepted in story telling. Similar to using a video game's Soft Reset or Save Scumming but in book or story format. Sometimes it's even present in such media.
Sometimes can overlap with Continuity Reboot in some ways, although a Continuity Reboot will often wipe out all of the current story and goes back to square 1; a Story Reset only wipes it back so far to a particular point saying previous stories are still canon and can sometimes cause Ret-Gone when characters introduced after a certain point are no longer present.
Examples:
- DC Comics has done it once in the Parallax storyline, basically null and voiding 15 issues of the Green Lantern by performing some Stable Time Loop plot line.
- Milestone Comics did this as well when joining the DC Universe by erasing most of the final story.
- When Sherlock Holmes was first killed off, hundreds of early Fan Fiction stories appeared in newspapers and book stores as freebees re-writing the last book.
- In Misery, Paul Sheldon tries to kill off the main character of a novel series that he's come to hate. When his number-one fan Annie Wilkes finds out, she loses it and forces him to write a sequel bringing Misery Chastain back to life in a way that she finds satisfactory. She is adamant that he not completely retcon the ending, but make it fit with the existing material.
- Brian's Saga: After Brian is rescued at the end of the first book, the third goes into Alternate Continuity territory in order to have him survive not two months but an entire winter.
- Back to the Future trilogy has a form of this when the time lines are constantly altered, two of which erases a few characters from existence and does a story reset of sorts to the original 1985 time line.
- The Godzilla series has done this no less than five times. The first time was in The Return of Godzilla which was set after the original film but disregarded all the others to establish a new continuity. Starting with Godzilla 2000, they released four movies in a row as direct sequels to the originals before making a direct sequel to the last one. Godzilla: Final Wars would finally move away from the original film and Shin Godzilla is an updated origin story for the character
- Terminator: Dark Fate ignores everything but the first two movies.
- Halloween: Happened twice, not counting Rob Zombie's full-on reboot.
- Halloween H20: Twenty Years Later (1998) and its direct sequel Halloween: Resurrection (2002) ignored everything after movie 2.
- Halloween (2018) ignored everything after movie 1.
- In Persona 2 we have Innocent Sin & Eternal Punishment with Innocent Sin taking place first with a Bad Ending then following the story with Eternal Punishment allowing you to restart the story with a different protagonist and get the Good Ending.
- Chrono Trigger kills Crono partway through. To resurrect him the party has to go through a journey, which in a sense, resets the story and undoes the death.
- Trinton Chronicles has done this more then once in it's long running history; whole story arcs have been eradicated and replaced or the current story has been erased to a point and picked back up.
