Basic Trope: Time stops moving for everyone, but one character (or a few characters).
- Straight: Alice snaps her fingers, and when she does so, she makes it so that time halts around her for a few hours.
- Exaggerated:
- Time stays stopped for months or years.
- Multiple characters can do this.
- Downplayed: Alice can slow down time to a degree for a short while, but she can't stop it per se.
- Justified:
- Alice is some form of god. Her powers can defy the laws of physics or reality.
- Alice is a Time Master; it would be weirder if she couldn't do this.
- Alice has some technological means of creating time dilation via warping space-time.
- Inverted: Alice snaps her fingers, and time begins moving at blinding speed.
- Subverted: After Alice snaps her fingers, everyone freezes, but it quickly becomes apparent that she only paralyzed them.
- Double Subverted: The time stop turned out to have a delayed effect.
- Parodied: Alice gets this power from her coffee.
- Zig Zagged: Alice can stop time for varying lengths of 'real' time.
- Averted: Alice possesses no time-stopping abilities whatsoever.
- Enforced: The author, thinking the ability to stop time is cool, decided to give the ability to one of the characters, in this case Alice.
- Lampshaded: "Huuuuh... How'd ya move in an instant, exactly?"
- Invoked: Alice does massive amounts of research to determine how time-stopping is possible.
- Exploited:
- Alice uses her time-stopping abilities to finish her homework in class before she has to submit it to avoid detention as punishment.
- Alice using her time-stopping abilities to run naked through the streets, turn everyone's clothes backwards as they wear them, have Bob feel-up Charlie's ass and strip the Alpha Bitch naked in front of the school.
- Alice uses her time-stopping abilities to work as an assassin.
- Defied: Bob keeps Alice from using the Applied Phlebotinum that lets her stop time, or contaminates it.
- Discussed: Alice and Bob ask and tell each other what they would do if they could stop time.
- Conversed: Alice and Bob watch a movie whose protagonist has this capability and debate whether s/he acted responsibly and/or whether it would be possible in life.
- Implied: Alice and Bob are in a messy room. Bob leaves to quickly take a bathroom break, and when he comes back, the room is spotless. This does point to Alice having time stopping powers... or maybe Alice is just really, really fast.
- Deconstructed:
- Turns out Alice doesn't have the Required Secondary Powers, and is rendered blind, deaf, anosmic, and entirely unable to move until Time Continues.
- Repeated use of time-stopping results in Rapid Aging, as Alice is effectively a year older in relative time due to all the time-stopping she's done.
- Alice's ability to stop time suddenly stops working in the middle of one instance of Alice using it. Instead of time resuming, however, it stays frozen no matter how long Alice waits, possibly leaving everything frozen forever... except for Alice.
- Alternatively, while time isn't frozen forever, Alice is trapped within a single frame of time, causing her to permanently disappear from the "regular" flow of time, which leaves everyone to wonder just where the hell Alice went.
- It turns out that everyone else is still conscious while time is stopped... and Alice doesn't discover this until she stops time for several years, and starts it again to find that everyone else in the world has gone completely insane.
- Reconstructed: It's mental time stopping. It gives Alice infinite amounts of time to think through a plan, observe an area, and/or Contemplate Our Navels, but she can't act until she's finished.
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