http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TimeTravelTenseTrouble

Lister: We don't exist here anymore!

Kryten: Actually sir, we don't ever have existed here anymore, but this is hardly the time to be conjugating temporal verbs in the past impossible never tense! Red Dwarf We don't exist here anymore!Actually sir, we don't ever have existed here anymore, but this is hardly the time to be conjugating temporal verbs in the past impossible never tense!

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(Try saying that ten times fast.)

Most Indo-European languages have multiple tenses, to differentiate things that have happened from things that are happening right now from things that will happen, plus some to define what had happened before that, not to mention some that are a bit less identifiable in their everyday uses (we doubt that most people have understood the Pluperfect Subjunctive). It mostly works fine when your timeline is a strict progression from cause to effect.

Unfortunately, when you are watching the San Dimas Time, winding through the threads of the Timey-Wimey Ball, chasing another time traveler who is always one step ahead of you, it can become awkward. As a result, time travelers will often stumble over their wording, leading to use of tenses that can be torturous to understand.

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Usually this is an experienced traveler explaining in eloquent yet incomprehensible terms that they didn't "just succeed", when you return from an adventure in the future. Alternatively, a less experienced character will attempt to explain what's going on, and struggle with their terms.

If your Future Me shows up, there may be pronoun trouble on a similar style, especially if there's several versions of future characters knocking around.

This is related to Meanwhile, in the Future , Anachronic Order, Non-Linear Character.

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Examples:

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Anime & Manga

Mikuru from Haruhi Suzumiya is aware of the tense trouble, but she keeps flubbing it anyway. Considering that Mikuru is spacey and Moe, this leads to Adult Mikuru showing Kyon a mole on her breasts while saying something like "But you were the one who told me about it... wait, has that not happened yet? oops...". Later in that episode Kyon casually asks Mikuru if she has a mole "right about here" and points to the location on his own chest. She turns around, checks, and starts trying to beat the information out of him. That would be where Kyon "told her about it" — it's a bootstrap paradox.

Comic Books

In Watchmen, Dr. Manhattan, who is able to perceive the past, present and future, says "Yes, yes, he killed Blake and half of New York . Excuse me, Rorschach, I'm informing Laurie 90 seconds ago," to Laurie "Silk Spectre" Juspeczyk, being confused by tachyon interference, before saying the same thing to Rorschach 90 seconds later. He's even in the exact same pose and position (relative to the walls of the panel) both times he says it. Also, the whole flashback (flashnow?) scene on Mars.

. Excuse me, Rorschach, I'm informing Laurie 90 seconds ago," to Laurie "Silk Spectre" Juspeczyk, being confused by tachyon interference, before saying the same thing to Rorschach 90 seconds later. He's even in the exact same pose and position (relative to the walls of the panel) both times he says it. Also, the whole flashback (flashnow?) scene on Mars. Disney Ducks Comic Universe: In an Uncle Scrooge story, the evil witch, Magica has this problem Magica: This is like all the times in the past that Scrooge himself has chased me in the future. I mean... what am I talking about?

A frequent out-of-universe problem when trying to describe events crossing Crisis on Infinite Earths, due to the major differences in how the retcon affected different characters and different past events. A few characters were rebooted as completely new characters (Wonder Woman), some were made so that they had been around before the Crisis, but their personalities and histories suddenly had always been very different from what all previous comics portrayed (Superman), some were erased from history (Supergirl), and some had basically the same history and memory that they had had before the Crisis (The Flash, Green Lantern). Therefore, there's both the reader's perception of what "Pre-Crisis" and "Post-Crisis" means (Pre-Crisis: Silver- and the Bronze Age, Post-Crisis: Dark- and Modern Age), and there's the characters' perception of what "Pre Crisis" and "Post Crisis" means (basically: Pre Crisis: Before Barry and Kara died, Post Crisis: after Barry and Kara died). This leads to descriptions like "After the Crisis, Batman changed so that he had been dark and brooding both before and after Barry died."



Also, Barry's life, career and friendship with other characters, as well as the vague event note from the characters' point of view: that Really Big Deal that no one really remembers but no one ever wonders about that caused his death, are all perfectly compatible (as far as their memories are concerned) with their personal histories and timelines that had been established after the Crisis was written. So basically, the characters can all recall and talk about events that as far as they are concerned, occurred when Barry Allen was still alive, but most of those events are significantly different from how they were reported by comic books written before the Crisis was published.

Also, Barry's life, career and friendship with other characters, as well as the vague event that caused his death, are all perfectly compatible (as far as their memories are concerned) with their personal histories and timelines that had been established after the Crisis was written. So basically, the characters can all recall and talk about events that as far as they are concerned, occurred when Barry Allen was still alive, but most of those events are significantly different from how they were reported by comic books written before the Crisis was published. Supergirl: In Supergirl vol. #5 issue #22, Supergirl runs into this trouble when she remembers that she travelled to the far future and fought/will fight alongside the Legion of Super-Heroes. Supergirl: Well, um, thank you for unblocking my memory. You were... will be... very good friends to me. Well, um, thank you for unblocking my memory. You were... will be... very good friends to me. In Supergirl: Cosmic Adventures in the 8th Grade issue #5, Supergirl tries to have a talk with her time-travelling alternate self. Supragirl: Anyway, when the asteroid destroyed the school and gave everyone super powers, and Lena and Belinda were making everything crazy, I had to use the asteroid fragments to get time travel powers!

Supergirl: None of that ever happened!

Supragirl: That's because I'm on my way back in time to stop it from ever happening!

Supergirl: But... Why are you here?

Supragirl: I don't really know. All I know is what you told me...

Supergirl: What? I didn't...

Supragirl: Oh... You don't tell me about it until we meet in the 30th century. That's when I got this cool belt!

Supergirl: Right. And is that where you got the horse?

Supragirl: Comet? Oh yeah, he belongs to you in the future. You loaned him to me.

Cable is this trope personified, as there's often no telling from which point in his life the Cable you're dealing with is actually from. It would be completely possible for him to be Killed Off for Real, and still continue to appear in comics simply because he hasn't died yet. The best you have is a few markers, like whether or not he's currently infected with the T-O virus, or if he has Belle. note A sentient A.I. who helps manage his time travel abilities. However even that isn't a given.

However even that isn't a given. Justice League Odyssey reintroduces the time traveler Epoch who uses entirely new tenses of words to communicate niche timeframes relative to his current one. Everyone else is confused when he uses them, to which he just responds they aren't familiar with "fourth dimensional grammar".

Fan Works

Films  Animation

Light Years: The tagliney prophecy which drives the action of this animated Science-Fiction film makes use of it: "In a thousand years, Gandahar was destroyed. A thousand years ago, Gandahar will be saved." The telepathic mutants who recall this prophecy are acutely aware of the past and the future, to the point where their language has no present-tense verbs, and instead use past- and future-tense verbs simultaneously. Example; instead of telling the hero "I am your friend," a mutant says "I was/will be your friend."



Films  Live-Action

Literature

Live-Action TV

Podcasts

The Gemini arc of Sequinox sees the girls sent to a Gothic Horror world which is also based on Victorian England. The group has trouble figuring out how things worked "back in the now".

Radio

As with the panel games examples in LiveAction Television. The News Quiz lampshades the folly of having a Topical Panel Show being recorded on a Thursday for broadcast on a Friday as one the most anticipatable news events frequently occurs on a Thursday, an election in the UK. Leading to having to predict (Read:bluff) the result to perform gags accordingly.

Tabletop Games

Continuum invents a time-travellers' jargon with terms regarding your personal 'spanner' timeline being separate from terms used in the general 'leveller' timeline. Things in your subjective past are in your "age", while things in your subjective future are in your "yet". When talking about objective time, things are either "Up" or "Down"; the year 2000, for example, is Up from the year 1990. All events except those in your personal past require the present tense, since in a second, they may be your "now" too.

Averted in one place in Gurps Time-Travel by saying that there are two timelines for the adventurer, the time he came from "hometime" and the time he is adventuring in; and Hometime keeps going while the adventurer was adventuring. Thus all that is necessary is to distinguish between home past and away past.

Genius: The Transgression runs into this once it starts talking about time travel; when discussing the consequences of changing the past it says that "what used to happen (and here the past tense gets into a bit of trouble), is that you got your ass kicked by the transsapient gods who live at the end of time."

In Time Agent the objective is to have always been winning by using time travel to have changed the past, while never having had time travel invented. The flow of causality operates according to the Schrödinger's Gun trope, which means that technologies often work until you discover that even before you had been making changes to the timeline, they had never been working. In one instance the player commander of the Zytal had to leave and be replaced by another player, but from the board's perspective, the new player had always been the commander of the Zytal, for the previous commander had never been playing.

Video Games

BioShock Infinite: The Luteces casually lampshade and debate this in front of the player. Their discussion is very confusing. Robert: I told you they'd come.

Rosalind: No, you didn't.

Robert: Right. I was going to tell you they'd come.

Rosalind: But you didn't.

Robert: But I don't.

Rosalind: You sure that's right?

Robert: I was going to have told you they'd come?

Rosalind: No.

Robert: The subjunctive?

Rosalind: That's not the subjunctive.

Robert: I don't think the syntax has been invented yet.

Rosalind: It would have had to have had been.

Robert: "Had to have...had...been?" That can't be right. Also, in the game's intro, Robert notes that the player "doesn't row". He means that (looking from a future perspective) the player never rows, in any of the timelines. Rosalind misinterprets this as "The player doesn't know how to row, isn't a rower". Rosalind: Why?

Robert: Because he doesn't row.

Rosalind: He doesn't ROW?!

Robert: No. He doesn't row.

Rosalind: Ah. I see what you mean.

City of Heroes: Mender Lazarus has trouble with tenses. This doesn't make any sense to me. My readings tell me that your Temporal Scaling isn't strong enough yet to support the mission I had planned for you. But you've already done the mission. I know. I was there. Made even worse because he's also in contact with a nearly infinite number of alternate selves, some of whom passed the local universe's Do Not Pass Go, Do Not Exist time travel brick wall. Diviner Maros of the Circle of Thorns exists at all points over a 14,000 year period simultaneously. Your conversations with him can be very confusing, even to him.

At the end of Final Fantasy I: Garland/Chaos: "Two thousand years from now, you killed me."

Lampshaded, like everything else, in Kingdom of Loathing. At the beginning of time, all messages are prefaced by "you remember" followed by a past participle or past perfect; the Distant Past switches off between first-person present and third-person past (because you're inhabiting the memories of your ancestor) seemingly at random, and the exposition upon arriving in the future for the first time starts out in future tense before saying "You will then start getting your narrative in present tense, because it's the future, we get it, no need to run that joke into the ground."

Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time naturally falls victim to this trope during the final boss fight. Among the banter we find this: "It happened! ... Well, it will happen!" referring to the events of the game being experienced, rewound, and then about to happen (again?) if the Prince doesn't do something about it .

. The Achron fandom made a little of their own grammar to explain stuff in the game. They talk about game-time and real-time (also referred to as "time" and "metatime"), and refer to units and events as early or late. When they specify when something happened, they use an ordered pair for the time.

A boss in Avernum 5 summons two future versions of himself to assist him, and he does his best to keep his grammar consistent when shouting orders to them. He loses track and starts rambling when you kill both future selves and screw up the timeline.

Discworld lets players go back and forth between the past and the present. If you try to use an item that needs to be used at that place but in a different time, Rincewind will say "Try again later. Or earlier."

In The Longest Journey, one of the species April encounters in Arcadia perceives the timeline all at once, and so has a horrible time keeping tenses straight when speaking to more temporally limited creatures.

The opening cutscene to Spider-Man: Edge of Time. "Earlier... in the future." This is also lampshaded in a funny moment: Amazing Spider-Man: [after the time rift shifts and creates a deadlier path] O'Hara, can you do something to help me in the present?

Spider-Man 2099: Which present? You're in my present. You mean your past present or my present future?

Amazing Spider-Man: ...I hate you. [after the time rift shifts and creates a deadlier path] O'Hara, can you do something to help me in the present?Which present? You're in my present. You mean your past present or my present future?...I hate you.

In Legacy Of Heroes, Shimmerstorm speaks exclusively in this. Shimmerstorm: Like I'll tell you yesterday, I was ready.

In World of Warcraft expansion Burning Crusade, a quest mob you can fight is a large creature called Banthar. In Warlords of Draenor, which takes place in the past of this same area, a person who sends you after Banthar on a quest has this to say: They have Banthar here! Or rather, she's still alive back now. Did what I just said make any sense?

Sunless Sea: Irem is... strange. It borders on some sort of Behind-the-mirror Dream Land, enough so that it manages to exist without actually having been founded yet. It's going to exist, but right now doesn't, and yet you can still visit it. Practically every sentence referring to it has verb trouble, and if you turn in a Port Report to the admiral he practically gets a headache just thinking about the right tenses.

Anachronist implies that every mage who tries to investigate the mysteries of time is inevitably driven mad by the mixing of verb tenses. The ranger teams have done the hard work and the rogue chronomage is now in custody. Hurray! the world is saved and all that. Except taking down the wizard just means he isn't going to destroy the universe in a giant temporal paradox, there's no guarantee he hasn't already destroyed the universe. That's the problem with time travel, you never know if the past has already happened. At least you can always count on the future having not happened since otherwise you'd remember it happening (unless of course it happened in a past that hasn't happened yet, but that hardly ever happens).

Tasokare Hotel: In Chapter 8, this exchange takes place when Neko opens Kiriko's box to send Osoto to hell. Masaki Osoto: I remember now! In the future, I went to hell because of you!

Neko Tsukahara: Your English grammar is wrong!

Web Animation

Parsley Boobs has this exchange between the future counterparts of Carl and Steve; The joke being that he's using incorrect number and person, not tense. Steve: Close the door! Don't you know he suffers from amblyopia?

Future Carl: Yes I do... for I are he! Only, I'm from the future.

Future Steve: You know, I really do think it's "I AM he".

Future Carl: It's all this time traveling! It really confuses me as to what tense we should be using!

Web Comics

Web Original

Examined and refuted by Things Of Interest in detail here .

. Chris Sims of Comics Alliance describes one Plot Thread in the X-Men: "Beyond Good and Evil" storyline thusly: [Cable and Tyler] are, of course, trying to kill Apocalypse before/after/during his plot to kidnap all the psychics, which may or may not have already succeeded/failed in the future that happened last week. So they need to steal a time machine.

From The Other Wiki's article on the MIT Time Traveler Convention: "The spacetime coordinates continue to be publicized prominently and indefinitely, so that future time travelers will be aware and have the opportunity to have attended."

Western Animation

Real Life