The Story That Never Was

"I remember this famous episode of the original Star Trek, where Kirk has to go back in time and let the person he loves die, so the Nazis won't win the war... What kind of fucked up choice is that?"

— Life Is Strange, Episode 4: Dark Room, Max's Journal

Sometimes the protagonist will wake up and find out that it was All Just a Dream. This is a slightly darker take that shows up in speculative fiction that deals with Time Travel, Reality Warping and alternate realities; the events really took place, but some key Inciting Incident near the beginning must be undone to resolve the plot's key conflict. It could be the solution to ending a "Groundhog Day" Loop (as opposed to getting the loop perfect), a matter of realizing that a single trip was a case of Make Wrong What Once Went Right, or it could just be a case of the option to Ret-Gone everything coming up in the finale. Reasons can include Balancing Death's Books, preventing a Time Paradox, or simply discovering that the unintended consequences of the event in question outweigh the good it does. More often than not, the event in question is the same one that brought about said conflict, making this an odd sort of Cutting the Knot solution.

This can be treated as utterly tragic, since it undoes Character Development, and may even be a sadistic choice (the "inciting incident" in question is often some sort of tragedy, such as the protagonist's death, or an innocent party they now have to personally harm). Other times it has a slightly more optimistic spin, with it being implied that some of the nicer events that transpired will take place In Spite of a Nail (a slightly awkward scene of the main character befriending a character, especially a Love Interest, who they no longer know is a popular one). In worse cases, it might even be All for Nothing, with it implied that the catastrophe that was averted could easily happen again (and the next people to experience it might be more selfish).

The thing that it turns out must be reversed to retcon away the events is typically an Inciting Incident.

Writers must be quite careful with this trope, since as with All Just A Dream, it runs the risk of making it seem like the entire plot was pointless. This is avoidable if a Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory allows them to retain Character Development (although, this invokes a bit of Fridge Logic if the issue was that time travel inherently damaged the timeline; something's changed either way) or otherwise benefit in some metaphysical way which prevents the audience from feeling cheated, or if the entire plot involved multiple loops anyway (so the audience is used to large chunks of plot not being canon in the main timeline).

Compare Set Right What Once Went Wrong, where undoing a specific event is the overall goal (which might lead to this trope), The Greatest Story Never Told (which happened, but was simply kept secret), Victory-Guided Amnesia (the events happened, but memories of them were erased), Reset Button Ending, which returns the work to its Status Quo without resolving the conflict on its own (and doesn't always include altering history), and "Better if Not Born" Plot (where the protagonist being Ret-Gone is portrayed as a net positive).

Contrast All Just a Dream, where the events are revealed to simply never have happened, "Leave Your Quest" Test where undoing everything would be seen as a copout on the heroes' part, May It Never Happen Again where the story ends with characters making sure it doesn't repeat, and Stable Time Loop, where changes to the timeline are either inevitable or meshed in perfectly (although it's still possible to run into the "bad outweighs the good" problem).

Not to be confused with What Could Have Been. The Time Traveller's Dilemma is a subtrope.

Note: This is a Spoilered Rotten trope, which means that EVERY SINGLE EXAMPLE on this list is a spoiler by default and most of them will be unmarked. This is your last warning, only proceed if you really believe you can handle this list.

---

Examples:

Comic Books

• In Adventure Time, the "Dungeon Master" arc ends up with its entire timeline being erased from history as a side-effect of destroying the Eldritch Abominations that were its villains.
• In The Infinity Gauntlet saga, Thanos managed to get the Infinity Gauntlet, a powerful Applied Phlebotinum that can modify everything, so he erased the half of sentient life of the universe to please Ms. Death, among other things like defeating the Cosmic Entities of the Marvel Universe. After the battle against the Mad God, finally Adam Warlock got the infinity Gauntlet from Thanos and used to Set Right What Once Went Wrong by restoring all the lives lost in the event (not just the ones erased by Thanos, also the deaths of heroes battling Thanos) and also managed to convince everyone in the universe that it was All Just a Dream.
• Played out bleakly in Marauders (2022). Back when Tempo and Jun Tenta (aka 'Sumo') were in the villainous MLF, a Eugenix hit squad killed both the MLF and their adversaries in X-Force. At Jun's insistence, Tempo used her powers to rewrite history, the two of them travelling through time. Shortly afterwards, X-Force's leader Cable, who knew nothing about what they'd done to save him, shot Jun in the head. Years later, Tempo feels she's the only one who remembers Jun as a hero, not just dumb muscle for the MLF.

Fan Works

• Dæmorphing's take on the below-mentioned Elfangor's Secret plays with this interestingly. While only the epilogue actually happened in the real timeline, the retained memories of the alternate timeline and the time travel trip substantially change the course of the overall series by revealing that the Andalite rescue the team is trying to stall for is not a good thing and Earth has to win on its own.
• Quantum Starlight (a My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic fanfic and Whole-Plot Reference to Quantum Break): an accident during the first test of a Time Machine causes time itself to fracture, leading to a whole mess of unchangeable Stable Time Loops and the looming threat of a Time Crash. And then the protagonists find a method of time travel that does allow them to change the past, so they go back and stop the original accident. The majority of the plot is erased from the timeline, but the time travelers retain their memories of events retconned away.
• Stars, Eyes of Heaven: Not only was the original timeline completely destroyed, so was the whole universe. All that remains is what Jotaro remembers of it; beyond that, it functionally never existed at all.

Film — Animated

• Lewis Robinson of Meet the Robinsons discovers the far future is an ugly dystopia where humanity is a Slave Race to mechanized overlords. Learning that it's one of his inventions that went rogue and begat this dystopia, Lewis gives a Death Glare to the Cyber Cyclops Big Bad and delivers the scathing Pre-Mortem One-Liner "I am NEVER going to invent you.". Whereupon the device dissolves from existence, just before Lewis exploits the Timey-Wimey Ball to Set Right What Once Went Wrong.

Film — Live-Action

• In the Director's Cut version of The Butterfly Effect, at the end the protagonist decides that the only way he can stop screwing things up with his Mental Time Travel is to jump back to before he was born, and strangle himself in his mother's womb; deleted scenes imply he wasn't even the first of his mother's children to go through this.
• The Devil's Advocate: The movie ends with Kevin Lomax deciding to screw fate and killing himself to destroy the Devil's plans for world conquest. Then he suddenly finds himself back at the courthouse at the start of the movie before he made the decision that would lead to him meeting and ultimately working for the Devil. He chooses differently this time, thus undoing all the film's events, but it turns out that the Devil is still watching him anyway...
• In the finale of Donnie Darko, the titular protagonist goes back in time (somehow) and allows himself to be hit by the falling airplane engine that had missed him in the beginning, in order to change the sequence of events that led to his girlfriend being run over by a car.
• In Edge of Tomorrow, Major William Cage is stuck in a "Groundhog Day" Loop, where every time he dies fighting the alien Mimics, he wakes up the morning before the battle. Turns out this Mental Time Travel is a power he accidentally stole from an Alpha Mimic by contacting its blood. In the climax, Cage kills the Omega, the supreme leader of the Mimic Hive Mind, though he dies in the process. But the Omega has a souped-up version of the Alphas' power, and Cage gets its blood on him before he dies. Cage wakes up back in the very first scene of the movie—but this time, the Omega is dead, and all the other Mimics with it. And Cage is the only one who remembers the erased timelines; to everyone else, it looks like the alien invaders just died spontaneously.
• Not in an "Old Testament kind of mood" at the time, God in Jesus, Bro! decides to undo the rapture and the various deaths caused by Rick, Santa Christ and the Devil's actions in the film by resetting everything to before Elizabeth breaks up with Rick. Subverted, in that Santa Christ returns Rick's memories of everything that happened shortly after.
• Primer: when the power of Time Travel proves too dangerous and too confusing for anyone to use, Abe Terger travels back as far as he can and interferes with his past self's experiments, hoping to stop the past versions of himself and Aaron from pursuing time travel any further. The future versions of Abe and Aaron, who went through all that character development, continue existing—since time travel in Primer results in the travelers cloning themselves unless they're careful to maintain a Stable Time Loop.
• Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time: Most of the film's events are undone by the ending, as the timeline resets back to right after the conquest of Alamut. The only person who remembers them is Dastan, who manages to rat out Nizam as the real traitor and kill him before he can screw things over, therefore saving his family, Tamina, and the world.
• During the highly ambiguous ending of Too Many Cooks, the realities of the various TV shows seen so far seem to break down and crash together, creating incomprehensible pain and chaos for the characters trapped within. With the last of his strength, a dying Smarf reaches out for a large red button which he finds in the kitchen. Everything then fades to white and he awakens in what appears to be the sitcom from the first part of the film, restored but with pieces of the various other shows mixed into it. This suggests that he succeeded in (imperfectly) resetting reality somehow, which is backed up by the heavy implication that Bill, who Smarf killed earlier, is now also alive again.
• X-Men: Days of Future Past does this for the events of every movie in the series up to that point with the exception of First Class. To prevent a Bad Future where the Sentinels have almost completely wiped out mutantkind, Wolverine travels back in time to 1973 to prevent the events that lead to their creation in the first place, drastically altering the timeline of the entire franchise in the process. This also had the unexpected consequence of bringing Jean Grey and Scott Summers, who were killed in X-Men: The Last Stand, Back from the Dead.

Literature

• Animorphs:
  • In the Megamorphs novel "Elfangor's Secret", Visser Four has used the Time Matrix to alter key events in human history to make the Yeerk invasion much easier. In order to undo the changes to the timeline (and Jake's death), the Animorphs ensure that Visser Four's host, John Berryman, was never born by preventing his parents from meeting, thus ensuring that Visser Four was never able to alter the timeline to begin with.
  • In "The Forgotten", the Animorphs decide to steal a Yeerk Bug fighter in order to fly it to the White House and expose the Yeerk invasion, but an accident results in an anomaly known as a Sario Rip being created, where two alternate versions of each person involved exists at the same time and will be eliminated at a specific time, and also results in the Animorphs getting trapped in the Amazon rainforest along with Visser Three and his underlings. However, Jake gets killed by Visser Three before that time, thus returning him to the exact moment when he made the decision to steal the Bug fighter (as he is apparently the only real person there, as he's the only one to have vivid flashbacks to before his decision throughout the novel). This time, he decides not to go through with it.
• In Artemis Fowl: The Lost Colony, Artemis and Holly, along with N°1 and Qwan (demon warlocks) are trapped in Limbo (a place outside of time) that Hybras (the Demon Island) is suspended in. But the spell holding Limbo there is unraveling causing time in the realm to warp all over the place, with constant past and future moments in the realm intersecting with the present. Artemis manages to figure out the pattern of the time jumps by observing the timer on a bomb that they had managed to drag along with them and they plan to use the energy of the kinetic bomb to power the spell. Leon Abbot however does not allow this, and draws his blade, slaughtering Holly and the warlocks. When he reaches Artemis he considers sparing the human, keeping him around as his pet and teach him tricks. But Artemis has a trick for Abbot, still keeping the count of the time jumps in his mind, he takes Holly's neutrino pistol and fires a laser bolt at the place where Abbot was about to stab Holly, just as the past intersects with the present, causing the laser bolt to get whipped into the past and hit Abbot before he stabs her. The present Abbot disappears while Holly and the warlocks get back up as if nothing had happened, because nothing had since Artemis had used the time jumping to prevent their murders from happening in the first place.
• Subverted in the ninth and tenth Captain Underpants books. An evil time traveler named Tippy Tinkletrousers escapes from Captain Underpants by travelling back in time. When he returns to the present, he discovers that he caused something while in the past that caused other villains to defeat Captain Underpants and is seemingly trampled to death by a giant zombie. The narrator then says that "the epic novels that we have come to know and love never actually happened." It's not until the prologue of the next book that we learn that the zombie moved so slowly that Tippy was able to put a jumbo ketchup packet under the zombie's foot and escaped back to the past to Set Right What Once Went Wrong.
• In David Eddings' Dreamers tetralogy, the fourth book describes a Deus ex Machina that one-ups the Physical Gods already present as viewpoint characters: the two amnesiac Old Gods remember their powers, effortlessly neutralize the Big Bad, and make their victory retroactive so the plot of the series never happened. Lampshaded, even, when they make a passing comment on all the Character Development that they unmade.
• Goosebumps: Be Careful What You Wish For: Samantha Byrd gets a gift of three wishes from the witch Clarissa. But, as expected, all these wishes come with terrible side effects. At the end, Samantha uses her final request to wish that she had never met Clarissa.
• One Star Trek Expanded Universe novel recounts what happened to McCoy in the alternate timeline alluded to in "The City On The Edge Of Forever", in which he unwittingly changed history and was subsequently trapped in the past for the rest of his life. At the end of the novel, these events never happened due to Kirk and Spock's intervention (as shown in the episode), but McCoy finds that he remembers them anyway.
• The Spooksville book Time Terror has the gang screwing up the timeline enough that Watch decides to go back and prevent them from finding the time machine to begin with, which takes the story back to the start with the others not remembering anything. In this example, Watch still exists alongside the past version so he has to go into hiding so the two Watch's don't cross paths. This actually becomes important in a later entry, where the other Watch dies and the original one steps in to replace him.

Live-Action TV

• In the Angel episode "I Will Remember You", Angel is turned human by the blood of a demon. Although this would remove the only obstacle to having a happy relationship with Buffy, Angel quickly realizes that he is completely unable to help innocent people without his vampire strength, and convinces The Powers That Be to reverse time and undo the events of the day, with only Angel himself remembering them to ensure that things don't play out the exact same way.
• Doctor Who, being a time travel show, does this a fair bit:
  • In "Father's Day", the Doctor takes Rose Tyler back to the day where her father, Pete, was killed so she could share one last moment with him just before he dies. However Rose disobeys the Doctor and saves her father's life by pushing him out of the way of the car that would kill him. As this was a fixed point in time, changing it causes catastrophic events on the world with the Reapers of Time being released to deal with the paradox. Ultimately, the one way to fix the anomaly is to have Pete relive the event that was changed and get hit by the car that would have killed him. Accepting his fate as the only way to restore time, Pete walks in front of the car and gets killed, erasing all of the alternate timeline that occurred due to the paradox.
  • The Trope Namer is the two-part finale of Series 3 of the revival: The Master has succeeded in taking over the entire world, trapping the Doctor in a Rapid Aging state, and Martha Jones on the run on the ground. He accomplishes this by using a psychic Mind-Control Device to gradually work his way into being elected Prime Minister of Britain, before using an army of Toclafane (cyborg future humans he transports to the present) to seize control of the whole world. The Master spends a year having his army gradually killing off the population of Earth, which is a Temporal Paradox since they're killing their ancestors. This is only made possible due to the Master turning the Doctor's TARDIS into a Paradox Machine. The Doctor ultimately manages to defeat the Master by having Martha travel the Earth to every human survivor (linked with the Master's psychic device) and have them all think his name in unison, allowing the psychic energies to be granted to him. Once the Master is out of the way, the Paradox Machine is destroyed, causing the entire year of the Master's reign to reset back to before the paradox machine was activated. Only the select few people present near the machine retained memories of the year, while the rest of the population of the Earth were unaware of it occurring. This year came to be known as "The Year That Never Was".
  • In "Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS", the TARDIS takes damage from a salvaging ship's magno-grab. This causes all sorts of problems, including Clara being trapped inside, moments from time seeping out, and zombie creatures roaming about the ship. Then, to top it all off, the TARDIS core is revealed to have hit critical and will eventually explode, with the zombie creatures revealed to be future versions of the TARDIS crew who had their flesh burned up and melted by the TARDIS. The Doctor eventually figures out the only way to repair the damage is to prevent the entire day from happening to begin with, which he does so by reaching through one of the tears in time to the point where the TARDIS got caught in the field and passes his past self the button to turn off the magnetic field, effectively erasing the entire day.
• At the climax of the Farscape episode "The Locket", the central characters are forced to use the strange properties of the Negative Space Wedgie that they are trapped in to reverse time and change history so that they never entered it. One of the two characters with a Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory who remember this feels guilt that they might have erased a number of people who were conceived and born thanks to one of the crew having children on a planet on the other side of the anomaly, but the other speculates that they might have split the timeline instead of erasing it.
• Three Kamen Rider shows have gone with this type of ending so far:
  • Kamen Rider Ryuki ends with the hero dying, but his actions convincing the final boss to give up and reset time one last time, this time with the Rider War never happening.
  • Kamen Rider Build ultimately resorts the rather drastic measure of getting rid of an alien planet-eating monster by merging his reality with another one where Evolt doesn't exist, which effectively undoes the entire show and about a decade of its history before that. At first only Sento and Banjou have Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory, but the sequel films have most of the core cast regain theirs as well.
  • Kamen Rider Zi-O ends with the protagonist having gained godlike power over time and space, and on the brink of fulfilling a Stable Time Loop where he uses those powers to conquer the world. Having learned from his adventures, though, he willingly discards the power in order to restore time to its proper state, while also changing some things so that the people he knew from the future are now his friends in the present. Like with Build, the main characters eventually get their memories and superpowers back.
• In Legends of Tomorrow, the Legends spend most of season 2 trying to keep The Spear of Destiny out of the hands of the Legion of Doom, but ultimately they fail and the Legion uses the Spear to rewrite reality. Even trapped within the Legion's Doomworld reality, the Legends make a final attempt to steal back the spear and undo the damage, only for Eobard Thawne to destroy the spear itself. The Legends then reason that the only way to repair reality is to stop the Legion from getting the Spear to begin with, so they travel back in time across their own personal history (a Dangerous Forbidden Technique) to World War I where the Legion had first acquired the completed Spear. In a Final Battle of the Legends teaming up with their past selves to face the Legion, all of the future Legends end up being killed with the exception of Sara. Sara then uses the Spear's reality powers to disable its own reality warping before the Legion would use it, thus preventing the Legion from ever creating the Doomworld to begin with and restoring reality to its correct nature, but also breaking time in the process.
• Legion (2017) ends with David's life dramatically altered via time-travel, starting with himself as a baby and onward from there. All the events of the show, including the characters, cease to exist as a result.
• The Star Trek: The Original Series episode "City on the Edge of Forever" ends with this trope implied. When McCoy gets drugged and falls through a mysterious portal through time, his changes to the timeline cause the Enterprise to disappear from the present. Kirk and Spock follow McCoy into the portal, arriving in New York City in The '30s. They meet the peace activist Edith Keeler, and soon realize that she's the change in the timeline. McCoy saved her (or will soon save her) from an early death, and her activism will delay the USA's entry into World War II just long enough to lead to a Bad Future where Nazi Germany wins. So Kirk prevents McCoy from rescuing Keeler—erasing McCoy's involvement in the past and restoring the timeline to normal.
• Star Trek: Voyager
  • In a season-one episode, there's a time paradox centered on a polaron-based power grid on a pre-warp civilization's planet in the Delta Quadrant. Tom Paris and Captain Janeway end up falling through a hole in time that was caused by the power grid's accidental detonation. The twist is that the future-Voyager-crew's own attempt to rescue Paris and Janeway is what caused the detonation, and Janeway realizing this and using a phaser to stop the rescue attempt resets the timeline, preventing the detonation and in turn preventing them from going back in time in the first place.
  • The two-parter "Year of Hell". Voyager ventures into a region of space controlled by an enemy, the Krenim, that has the power to change the past by erasing objects or people from history, and after a messy first contact, they find themselves at war with the Krenim. At the climax of the episode, Janeway destroys the mechanism they use to change time, causing it to blow up and erase itself from history. The final scene of the episode shows them back at the beginning, with the events of the episode never having happened. With the correct balance of power now restored, their first contact with this version of the Krenim is much more civil, and the conflict (and subsequent Year of Hell) is avoided.
• Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: In "The Visitor", an aging Jake Sisko explains that when he was a teenager, an accident caused his father to be pulled into subspace, and he's spent decades trying to figure out how to rescue him. He eventually discovers that the only way to prevent his father being lost in subspace forever is to return his father to the moment of the accident so he can avoid it. At the end of the episode, he carries out his plan, the accident is averted, and everything that happened after is RetConned out of existence.
• The Umbrella Academy (2019): At the end of the appropriately titled episode "The Day that Wasn't", Five steals a briefcase from the Commission and travels back to the meeting at the Umbrella Academy shown at the start of the episode, thus undoing everything that happened that episode.

Video Games

• Bastion has two endings. One is to leave the broken land and the other is to reset to before the calamity, without knowing if it will repeat or not. It's heavily hinted that it does indeed repeat (serving as an In-Universe explanation for a New Game Plus).
• The plot of BioShock Infinite is driven by the conflict of the Player Character Booker DeWitt and the Big Bad Zachary Comstock over Comstock's daughter Elizabeth and her Dimensional Traveler powers. Towards the end of the game, it is revealed that Comstock is actually Booker himself who, in an alternate timeline, has had a religious conversion and changed his name, while Elizabeth was originally the player-controlled Booker's daughter Anna, who was taken to another dimension as a baby. After Elizabeth's power manifests fully, she realizes that the number of timelines is infinite and Booker becomes Comstock in about a half of them, so the only way to put an end to this conflict is by killing him just before the Comstock-Booker bifurcation occurs, effectively preventing the entire plot of the game from ever occurring, which she does with Booker's consent.
• Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair is all a computer simulation to retrain everyone to be better people. Well, at least that was the plan before Monokuma showed up and hijacked everything. A large part of the finale is about how to proceed with the situation, either undoing it all or letting the villain win. Despite all intents and plans, the reset turns out to somehow allow everyone to retain their memories and character developments, despite the timeline being thrown out.
• The end goal for Day of the Tentacle is to prevent Purple Tentacle from drinking toxic waste and mutating into a supervillain. The heroes need to travel back in time and shut off the machine that produces the toxic waste before Purple Tentacle can drink it. However, a mishap puts this on the back burner for the entire second act.
• Digimon Story: Cyber Sleuth and its interquel Digimon Story: Cyber Sleuth - Hacker's Memory end with a Cosmic Retcon in which humans and Digimon never met, fixing many aspects of the world but erasing everyone's memories of the bonds they formed with their partners and people they met in their Digimon adventures. In the end, the Player Characters are the only ones who remember everything.
• Deponia Doomsday has a tangled story with time travel, time resetting and time loops that ultimately ends with Rufus convincing everybody that the tragic end of the previous game is the best option.
• The original Final Fantasy saw this happen upon the Light Warriors destroying Chaos and ending the cycle of Garland going back in time to become him^note The time loop is effectively: 1) Garland is defeated by the Light Warriors and sent back in time by the present day Fiends, 2) Garland in the past becomes Chaos and sends the past Fiends to the future, 3) the Light Warriors travel back in time and are killed by Chaos. The time loop can only be broken if Garland at step 1 defeats the Light Warriors, or the Light Warriors at step 3 defeat Chaos, which is what happened in the game. The ending text makes it clear that no one will remember the events of the game, since they never happened (the Fiends were defeated in the past before Garland could send them to the present), and that it's incumbent on the player to remember the events as the true arbiter of the legend.
• Ghost Trick ends with going back to When It All Began and undoing the initial death, erasing the entire timeline from that point forwards.
• At the end of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Zelda sends Link back to the past after apologizing for his quest preventing him from having a normal childhood. In doing so she actually failed to fully erase everything and created two timelines; one where Link simply vanished from existence after defeating Ganon as an adult, and one where he exposed the conspiracy as a child^note And that's not taking into account the third timeline in which Ganon killed Link in battle and another incarnation eventually had to deal with him. Word of God is that despite being able to live out his childhood, Link retained memories of the events of the plot and lived an unfulfilled life because he never got to be the Hero of Time. However he managed to ease his regrets by passing on his knowledge to his successor as the Hero's Shade in The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess.
• As well as referencing the Star Trek example (as seen in the page quote), Life Is Strange has this twice itself; at the beginning of chapter 4, and for the entire game.
  • Max realises she can jump back in time via photos (as well as just reversing it briefly as is done in normal gameplay) and tries to fix the death of Chloe's near angelic father. In the new timeline Chloe suffered a car accident instead and is dying a slow, painful death while confined to a wheelchair, suffering many of the bad things that were previously caused by her father's death^note kicked out of school because they can't accommodate her rather than delinquency, the family are on the verge of poverty because of medical bills despite her father's job, Max still moved away (and seems socially isolated at school as an Alpha Bitch instead of a wallflower) and all the mysterious events they were investigating — including the random death of animals, freak weather events and the disappearance of Rachel (who Chloe never met) — are still happening, culminating in a choice of whether you kill her with an overdose at her own request, or not. This is finally enough to make Max restore the original timeline, where Chloe is miserable and went through hell for the last 5 years, but is still alive. The entire scene is effectively foreshadowing for the endings...
  • You first see Chloe when she's shot by Nathan, causing Max to manifest her Time Master powers and undo it in a Justified Tutorial. At the end of episode 5/Season 1 you have a Sadistic Choice of endings; "Sacrifice Chloe" or "Sacrifice Arcadia Bay". The former follows this trope, Max goes back in time (via a photo you took just before it happened) to let her get shot and Dying Alone (as far as she knows), never to be reunited with the former best friend crying her eyes out just feet away. A montage reveals that this also solves most of the story's other conflicts.^note Nathan sells out Jefferson after being arrested for her murder (and presumably gets the care he needs), the Prescotts are being investigated for their involvement, Rachel's body is discovered shortly after as a result and Kate never attempts suicide, as the much larger scandal prevents the video of her going viral (and/or the arrest of Nathan making it clear she was a victim).
  • The other ending subverts this trope. Max tears the photo up (echoing an earlier moment when she destroys her prize winning photo to retcon herself back to the town and be able to save Chloe), having decided to Screw Destiny and let the storm that this damage to the timeline summoned destroy the town (with a Shrug of God as to how many survivors there are). After it subsides an unspecified amount of time later, Max and Chloe leave the ruined town together, moving on with their lives.
• Mary Skelter 2 is erased twice over:
  • The premise of the sequel is that the setting and much of the cast is identical to the first, except with the addition of new Blood Maiden Tsuu and the formerly-Death by Origin Story Little Mermaid. For a variety of reasons, not the least of which being that Little Mermaid's death was how the Dawn discovered that Blood Maidens can fall into Blood Skelter under stress, things go very badly. In the True Ending, Tsuu remembers that she was originally a Nightmare who used a Jail core to reset time and rescue Little Mermaid, and so the couple decide to use the Jail core to undo Tsuu's actions and re-rail the timeline...leading to Mermaid's death as described in the first game's prequel novel.
  • The Embedded Precursor version of the original Mary Skelter: Nightmares, normally unlocked after finishing the sequel, eliminates the potential Stable Time Loop that could arise from the above. Right around the point where Nightmare Tsuu learns of Little Mermaid's death and would run off to reset time, Jack comes across a microphone that belonged to Little Mermaid and just so happens to have recorded a scene from the sequel. This causes Jack's Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory to kick in, who in turn restores Nightmare Tsuu's memory during an "I Know You're in There Somewhere" Fight, and together they find a way to revive Little Mermaid in the original timeline. Tsuu and Little Mermaid ultimately join the first game's heroes in whatever ambiguous fate awaits them outside of the Jail.
• Mortal Kombat does this twice with its mainline games:
  • The first is Mortal Kombat 9, which begins with Shao Kahn emerging as the canonical winner of Mortal Kombat: Armageddon and thus ruling over all of existence. The last being on foot is Raiden, who proceeds to send a message to his past self from the events of Mortal Kombat (1992). The rest of the game is figuring out what the Arc Words ("He must win") actually mean. This being Mortal Kombat, it involves the deaths of many named characters until Raiden figures out the meaning of the answer and prevents Shao Kahn from becoming the ruler. It also turns the original Midway timeline into a Bad Future that has to be avoided.
  • The second is Mortal Kombat 11, and it goes even further than that: due to the events of 9, Kronika, the keeper of time, plans to restart time with the intention of removing Raiden from her designs, buying time and collecting the required MacGuffins so she can reverse the hourglass. By the time the heroes reach her keep, time indeed begins going backwards, with the newly-crowned Fire God Liu Kang being unaffected by these events and fighting Kronika To the Pain. Kronika is defeated in two of the endings, but Liu Kang lost almost all of his friends and allies (with the exception of Kitana in one of the endings). In the DLC Aftermath Kronika's role on the story is reduced as it progresses until Shang Tsung takes over the crown and begins rewinding time so his future is told, thus rendering the new timeline non-existant. By the time the DLC ends, one of two endings take place: either Shang Tsung consumes Liu Kang's power and turns everyone into his slaves, or Liu Kang erases Shang Tsung from history and begins reshaping the timeline anew. By the time of all the possible endings of 11, not only the events of 9, X and 11 never took place, but neither did everything before them.
• At the end of Persona 2: Innocent Sin, Nyarlathotep successfully destroys the world, and Philemon tells the heroes that the only way they can undo it is by undoing them becoming friends when they were children, the "innocent sin" responsible for the entire plot. They accept, but main character Tatsuya ends up retaining his memories, kicking off the plot of the sequel Persona 2: Eternal Punishment.
• The "Freedom" ending of Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne has the Demi-fiend, allowed to create a world as he sees fit, use his power to restore the old world and everyone who lived in it. It's implied that a handful of people do remember what went off, but most will be unaware of their death and rebirth.
• Sonic the Hedgehog (2006) involved lots of time travel, and Dr. Eggman trying to harness the power of the god Solaris to conquer everything. Predictably, Solaris gets out of control and destroys almost all of time and space before Sonic and friends can stop him. The final cutscene involves one last bit of time travel, in which where Sonic and Elise extinguish the flame of Solaris, thereby preventing the lab accident that set the entire plot in motion. As the rest of the game wasn't very good, Sonic fans didn't particularly mind that it ended by erasing itself from the series timeline- although, for some reason, a level from it still showed up in Sonic Generations despite this.
• The last twist in Tales of Destiny 2 reveals that the Big Bad lacks onotological inertia, and destroying her will cause her to have never existed in the first place. The Big Bad created both the The Dragon and the heroine, and jointly these two characters motivated all the party members to join the quest. Naturally, if their creator never existed, they will never exist either and the main characters will never cross paths. Worse, the hero and heroine have probably the most demonstrative romance arc in the Tales series, and the hero can barely stand the thought of erasing his girlfriend to save the world, but they choose to believe that the Power of Love transcends the laws of time and space and complete their quest regardless. It's not so bad in the end though - wiping out the Dragon eliminates several traumatic backstories, and it turns out the were right about love overcoming all.

Web Original

• At the end of Funny Business, when Jeanette learns that her Reality Warper powers are a result of her being the only real entity in the universe, and everybody else is but a figment of her imagination, and hence there is no reason for her depression and self-hatred, and everything she will ever do is completely pointless because nobody else exists to be affected by it, she eventually decides that the only way to deal with this is to Depower herself permanently and erase all of her memory of ever having had her powers to begin with. Because of how this universe’s cosmology works, this causes the world to spontaneously be recreated into one where other people indeed exist, Jeanette is a normal kid, and nothing in the story ever happened.
• Strange Bedfellows: Kronos decides to retcon the entire story by using god-powered time travel (which can only affect a few electrical impulses if you aim for twenty years ago) to prevent himself from inadvertently starting war between the Varkians and Sakkilians. Of course, a few outsiders were watching and decided to give a copy of the epic to Kronos after he and the others "woke up" from that strange dream... but anyone who ceased to exist is permanently unwritten from history.

Western Animation

• In The Batman, an episode set on New Years eve revolves around Francis Grey, a clock-repair man who, because of his family's dire financial straits, stole an expensive watch, leading to a cavalcade of Disaster Dominoes which landed him 17 years in prison. After developing Time Master powers during his prison stay, allowing him to rewind time 20 seconds with only himself retaining the knowledge of what happened in those 20 seconds, he uses them to set in motion an Evil Plan which eventually succeeds, killing the bat family, a large group of New Years Eve celebrators, and... his now-adult son who he was reunited with seconds before his plan succeeded and thus got caught in the blast. When he realizes that twenty seconds is not enough to save his son, the resultant Big "NO!" Despair Event Horizon-fueled Skyward Scream supercharges his powers, rewinding time 17 years to the moment before he stole the watch - and to before he even got his powers. With the knowledge of the future in hand, he decides to leave the watch alone and just work overtime instead. Fast forward to the New Years eve from the start, and the Bat-Family is discussing New Years resolutions just as they did in the opening of the episode, but a clock that Alfred had trouble repairing in the opening has been fixed by none other than Francis himself. The episode ends less than a few minutes after it chronologically started with Francis returning to his van labelled "Grey and Son, Clock Repair" before heading home to spend New Year's with his family, with absolutely none of the Bat-family having a clue that Francis has Set Right What Once Went Wrong.
• In the Family Guy episode "Back to the Pilot", Brian asks for Stewie's help in finding a lost tennis ball. Stewie agrees to take Brian back in time so he can see the location, but Brian failing to listen to Stewie's warnings ends up telling his past self about the 9/11 attacks. This results in an apocalyptic Bad Future from the result of nuclear attacks. After multiple trips result in dozens of Stewies and Brians from the future arguing it out on whether or not to prevent 9/11, one of the Stewies decides to hold a vote. Upon the majority agreeing to allow 9/11 to happen, this Stewie and Brian then travel one minute back in time to the very first point they arrived via time travel, before they made any changes. Stewie then draws a gun on the past Stewie and Brian and forces them to go back to the present. By doing so, Stewie managed to erase the entire alternate timeline created by the constant time travel along with this version of Brian and Stewie.
• Futurama:
  • In "Anthology of Interest I", Fry asks the "What If?" Machine what would have happened if he hadn't been cryogenically frozen in 1999—that is, if the entire premise of the show were undone. Turns out this would cause a Time Paradox — because the future needs Fry for an unexplained reason — and this damage to the timeline attracts the attention of Al Gore and the Vice Presidential Action Squad. When they figure out that Fry needs to get frozen to save the timeline, Fry disbelieves them and breaks the freezer. The temporal paradox then implodes the entire universe—stranding Fry and the rest in a white void, with nothing to do but play play Dungeons & Dragons for the rest of eternity. Examples of the trope which tend to be a Shoot the Dog are also briefly parodied when Al Gore et al assume Fry was supposed to die, and get confused when trying to murder him doesn't fix anything.
  • "The Why of Fry" teases at this. The brain spawn's last-ditch effort to destroy the universe is to send Fry (the only person capable of stopping them) back to 1999 to prevent himself from getting frozen. But Nibbler gives future-Fry a pep talk that convinces him that getting frozen and sent to the year 3000 is necessary. Fry instead makes a minor change that ensures he isn't in a position to be tempted by the brain spawn in the first place.
• In the Justice League episode "Time, Warped", Batman tampers with the villain's time travel belt so that instead of going on his time traveling crime spree, as he did at the beginning of the previous episode, it locks him in a time loop at the point where he would have started. Ultimately, though, the events weren't completely negated: Green Lantern is left with a Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory of a Kid from the Future who is not from the woman he was dating at the time.
• Kim Possible - A Sitch in Time had Kim and Ron being separated due to his mother getting a new job in Norway, leaving them unable to stop their archenemies from stealing the Tempus Simia (Time Monkey) idol and traveling back in time to try to stop them from being the heroes they are today. This fails, whereas Shego goes on to create a Bad Future where she is the supreme overlord, forcing the duo to team up with their now-grown-up friends to defeat their enemies' future selves. It would also be revealed Shego was responsible for Ron's mother's new job in Norway. The mission eventually ends with Ron destroying the Time Monkey, preventing the bad future, let alone the whole story, from happening.
• The Loud House: At the end of the episode "The Mad Scientist", Lisa uses her newly discovered time travel to undo everything that has happened in the episode and ensures it won’t happen again, with only her remembering the original timeline.
• The sixth season of Ninjago, Skybound, ends with Jay using his final wish from Nadakhan to make it so that no one ever released Nadakhan in the first place. Nadakhan, who is forced to oblige and is unable to twist Jay's words due to being weakened from Tiger Widow venom, grants this wish, and everything reverts to the way it was at the beginning of the season (with the exception that Jay and Nya retain their memories of the experience).

---