Follow TV Tropes

Following

Playing With / Cosmic Retcon

Go To

Basic Trope: A force or entity within the work alters the timeline, past or future, of the show.

  • Straight: Bob excised Alice from the spacetime continuum using a DeMat Gun.note 
  • Exaggerated: Bob erases Alice and anyone whom she ever interacted with out of the spacetime continuum, including himself.
  • Downplayed: Bob erases Alice from everyone's memory.
  • Justified: The being that was excised would eventually have caused mass deaths, therefore the local Time Police had him or her removed. The revised timeline is not much different.
  • Inverted: Bob modifies the spacetime continuum by creating Alice.
  • Subverted: It doesn't work, and Alice is still there.
  • Double Subverted: Alice just took a little while to disappear.
  • Parodied: ???
  • Zig Zagged: ???
  • Averted: Alice is just retconned out of the work with no in-universe explanation.
  • Enforced: The creator wants to erase Alice from the show's history, but feels a normal retcon is too arbitrary.
  • Lampshaded: "Remember Alice?" "Nope." "Me neither."
  • Invoked: ???
  • Exploited: Bob does this in order to create his ideal world.
  • Defied: ???
  • Discussed: ???
  • Conversed: ???
  • Deconstructed: Characters in-universe begin angsting about how easily everything and everyone could be erased from history altogether, and wonders whether it was themselves who came back wrong due to remembering it or if it was everyone else.
  • Reconstructed: The characters in-universe don't have Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory, thus don't experience such angsting. They live and act as they would in their original world, because they are there.

Back to Cosmic Retcon

Top