I love time travel stories, I’ll admit. I love them in all their clichéd, ridiculous glory. But when you love time travel stories, you tend to see tropes that get used again and again…and again. So without further ado, let’s look at some of the biggest time travel clichés out there. Can you think of any that aren’t on the list? Say so in the comments!
Naked Time Traveling
You can blame Terminator for this one- often times, time travelers will arrive naked. It explains why they couldn’t bring any advanced technology with them from the future and so one. A less intense version of the cliché lets the time traveler keep their clothes, but they for whatever reason can’t take any objects with them.
Time to Kill Hitler
Once a hero have time travel, there will be inevitably be the question of whether they should kill Hitler and prevent the Holocaust from every happening. Spoiler alert: it never works. Even if the heroes succeed, it will lead to another person taking up Hitler’s cause or someone even worse rising….and so on. This plot is used so much that people tend to parody it these days- there’s an issue of Deadpool where Hitler reveals he is used to time travelers trying to assassinate him.
A Message from the Future
Sometimes time travel isn’t powerful enough for someone to physically travel back. Or sometimes it is, but they can’t stay around long enough to really explain themselves for whatever reason. The result of this is our main character getting a warning from the future not to do something because it will lead to something bad. But odds are that this warning will be misinterpreted or even not believed. The plot point happens a lot in Star Trek and can also be seen in the anime Orange.
It’s also happened in real life too, but that almost certainly was a hoax. A guy calling himself John Titor posted on message boards in 2000, claiming to be a soldier from 2036. He claimed that civil war would break out in 2004. Obviously, it didn’t, which would mean his warnings worked. But research of the inconsistencies in his story shows he was almost certainly just a guy making stuff up. Titor’s posts did inspire the anime Stein’s Gate though.
The Bad Guy Goes to the Past to Conquer
It’s inevitable that if time travel is invented, someone’s going to go back in time and try to use that future knowledge to take over the world. A bad guy from the future has all the knowledge needed to stay one step ahead of their opponents and probably some rad future technology to boot. Probably the ultimate example of this is Marvel’s Kang the Conqueror, who has done this so many times he’s created a bajillion different timelines and a bajillion alternate versions of himself.
Time Has Already Been Changed
With time travel, there’s always the paradox- when a time traveler successfully changes the past, they make it so they would never need to travel back in the first place. Yet the time travel still happened.
This is either explained by multiverse theory- the time traveler simply creates an alternate timeline while their own future remains unchanged- or a stable time loop, where the change has already happened unnoticed. An example of this is can be found in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. Harry and Hermione have to travel back in time, free Buckbeak the hippogriff and help Sirius Black escape without being seen by anyone. We find out that all the weird unexplained stuff that happened during the sequence of events of previous chapters- strange noises, the Dementors being chased off, Harry catching a glimpse of a spell cast by someone that was, in fact, his future self…all those were a result of time travel and past Harry didn’t even realize it.
In the worst cases of these scenerios, the time traveler actually ends up causing the event they’re trying to prevent in the first place. In a certain movie, a time traveler is haunted by memories of seeing someone killed as a child. At the end of the movie, he dies in front of his past self- it was his future self he saw get killed.
The Grizzled Future Hero
A common cliché for a dystopian future scenario is there will be a buff, grizzled older version of the hero. They’ll likely have some gnarly scars or an eyepatch or a super-advanced prosthetic limb. This serves to show that this is a future where only the “strong” survive and our hero had to become a major badass to continue resisting the evil regime. Also, they need to be somewhat maimed in a way that demonstrates the danger, but it can’t be in a way that seriously impedes them from their gruff-and-gritty gun-toting activities.
The Future Where the Bad Guys Wins
Another extremely common time travel trope is the “bad future”. This is the future where the antagonist has won and the world’s turned into some dystopian horrorfest and the protagonists must prevent this.
Harry Potter and the Cursed Child is a good example of how the trope can get laughably ludicrous- in the future where Voldemort wins, Hogwarts now has “Blood Ball” they celebrate instead of the “Yule Ball”, they have a secret evil handshake, you can hear screams from the dungeons and so on. It seems less like “bad future” and more like “future populated by edgy Hot Topic Children”.
Save the Girl...Again and Again and Again
A really weirdly popular time travel trope is looping back in time over and over to save a girl from her inevitable, impending death. A girl the protagonist is close to dies. The protagonist travels back in time to prevent her death. She then immediately dies some other way. The protagonist loops back in time again…and it continues. Basically, the universe really wants to kill this girl and it’s up to the protagonist to stop it.
It’s understandable it’s a popular trope, since that’s compelling drama and all. The weird thing is it’s always a girl being killed, while the time-looper in question is usually a guy, though there are a couple examples of girls time-looping to save other girls (Life is Strange and a certain magical girl anime).
I guess it’s good for slickly combining several damsel in distress tropes at once, you get “man heroically saves woman in peril” and “fridged girlfriend/female relative” at the same time, so like, two for the price of one there. The trope is especially popular in anime and video games. Recent anime alone that have used that basic formula are Re Zero, Erased, Stein’s Gate, etc. There’s also a Vocaloid song about it, though it at least pulls a twist on the formula down the line. I’m not saying these series are bad (I like all of them to a degree except for Re Zero), but I gotta point out that it wouldn’t kill us to at least gender-flip it once in a while.
The Kid from the Future
This is definitely one of the most ubiquitous time travel tropes of them all. A kid falls out of the sky onto the main character's head and wouldn’t you know it, it's their kid from the future here to prevent something horrible from happening (this is the literal description of how it went down in Sailor Moon). A lot of times, these kids will be coming from one of those futures where the bad guy wins.
There’s probably a lot of reasons this is popular: it’s an easy way to introduce a new character AND a new conflict, it allows you to set the Official Couple in stone because see they're going to get married, it's destiny (and in some case, writers use it as a shortcut to avoid having to build a relationship), it allows the writer to establish what the protagonist's future will be like even if the story itself doesn't got that far, etc. How the audience reacts to it varies.
I tend to kinda love time traveling kids myself. We’ve got Chibiusa from Sailor Moon, Future Trunks from Dragonball Z, all the kids from Fire Emblem Awakening...it just kind of fun when kids travel back in time with a huge mission and find out what total losers their parents were when they were younger. It’s good shenanigans.
Don't Try to Change Fate
Often, the moral of a time travel story is basically: “don’t time travel”. Even the smallest change will lead to horrible, unforeseen consequences. Want to change it so you ace that math test? Congratulations, getting the top score led to the school blowing up somehow. I bet now you’ve learned your lesson.
Of course in some stories the protagonist can subvert this and find the right combination of actions that will allow them to change what they want to change while not messing things up too badly after looping back several times.
However, in some cases this trope can go to ludicrous, illogical extremes. One example of this is Life is Strange. Don’t read ahead if you don’t want spoilers for the ending.
In Life is Strange, we learn that the protagonist’s time traveling has caused a giant tornado. Why? This is never explained. But the ultimate solution to solving this problem caused by too much time travel is…more time travel. The protagonist has to travel back to before all the other time traveling happened. Somehow, additional time travel stops the Time Travel Tornado. Yeah, sorry, but that doesn't make sense.