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

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A character seems to vanish off the face of the earth. Sometimes people just disappear, but this is something more. People who should know about it aren't even sure who the person was. Photos look the same, but without them in it. Their Love Interests either don't exist at all, or are in love with someone else. They never existed. They're not just gone, they're Ret Gone.

Of course, it's hard to write stories about people who don't exist, so there is normally at least one person who remembers the disappeared character's life. Mostly, this will be someone close to the character, such as a friend or family member (and it's often just one person) who will do their best to find evidence, while convincing themselves and others that they're not crazy.

Sometimes, without this character, the world is a notably different place, but sometimes, hardly anything has changed at all.

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Occasionally, it'll be the character themselves, whose continued existence is the only evidence they've ever been alive. They may be Invisible to Normals, seeing what the world is like without them. Or they may be alive and well, just really, really annoyed. Cases like this can sometimes cause a Loss of Identity if the character fears that they will start to forget themselves.

Common methods of a Ret Gone include killing them off at youth or somehow preventing their birth, shunting them into an Alternate History, and removing them from a metaphysical book of history, or rewriting the book itself in-story, although there are plenty of other Applied Phlebotinum tricks. If we actually see the character vanish and become Ret Gone, then that character doubles as a Ripple Effect Indicator.

Named, of course, after the Retcon.

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When some shadowy but non-supernatural force erases the evidence of someone's existence in a more mundane manner, they've been Un-Personed. When the writers decide to simply "forget" a character's existence, that's Chuck Cunningham Syndrome, when a Delayed Ripple Effect is used as a story device this will often be used to perform a sort of half-hearted Story Reset which may inadvertently 'remove' some characters from creation. When a character actively does this on a large scale, it may be to retcon the universe into being more In Their Own Image.

Keep in mind that doing this to Hitler never works.

As this is a Death Trope, expect spoilers.

Examples:

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An ad for DirecTV features a couple of parents watching TV while their kid draws on the walls. The husband bemoans the fact he forgot to record a show, whereupon Bon Jovi appears and sings to them the benefits of DirecTV's 72 Hour Rewind feature, and then starts making suggestions for other stuff they can do with the power to turn back time... beginning with changing their salsa from spicy to mild and somewhat distressingly culminating in him eliminating the nearby kid from existence with a lyric about choosing not to have a second child. Another commercial (from the "Get Rid of Cable" series) concerns a man who, bored after waiting forever for the cable guy, becomes addicted to cheddar after volunteering for lab experiments. In one of his bungled robbery attempts, he falls into a time machine and is teleported back to the time of his conception. He meets his would-be father, who chases him out of the house and into the path of an oncoming ice cream truck...only for him to fade out of existence anyways because his parents never ended up doing it that night.



Anime & Manga

Audio Plays

Big Finish Doctor Who: In Neverland, the Time Lords are revealed to have a device called "The Oubliette of Eternity", which is a dispersal chamber combined with an erase-from-history device. The really horrifying thing that is that there is no Ripple Effect-Proof Memory in effect: even a person who has authorized its use many times over is under the impression that it has never been used. Nazi scientist Dr Elizabeth Klein has this happen to her after she continues altering history to ensure Nazi power. However, a new Elizabeth Klein is created who has no memory of the actions of her previous self. The Light at the End has this happen to the Doctors when the Master uses a conceptual bomb to remove the TARDIS from existence.



Card Games

In Magic: The Gathering: Some cards, such as Door to Nothingness and Æther Snap do this, according to their flavor texts. You can actually do this to yourself with the Pact Cycle, flavor-wise. These involve borrowing mana from the future. When it's time to send mana into the past, if you can't, you erase yourself from existence. Apparently it happened to Zhalfir. Teferi "phased it out" (transported it to the future) to prepare for the Phyrexian invasion, and when it was time for it to "phase in", it couldn't.

In Chrononauts, this is done with the aptly-named card "Your Parents Never Met". The chosen player's Secret Identity is revealed, and they must trade it in for a new one.

Munchkin features a card that when used lets you take any item/steed in play, put it in the appropriate Box of Holding and carry on as if the card you just put in the box never existed.

Comic Books

Fanfiction

Film  Animation

Happens in Meet the Robinsons when Lewis wipes Doris from existence by vowing to never invent her.

In Shrek Forever After, Shrek is tricked by Rumpelstiltskin to give up the day he was born. As a result, Shrek finds himself Ret Gone. His children don't exist, and neither Donkey nor Fiona remember him.

Film  Live-Action

Literature

Live-Action TV

Music

"Hands of Doom" by Manowar: Nothing shall remain.

Not your memory, your name.

It will be as though you never, ever lived.

Tabletop Games

Video Games

Visual Novels

Web Animation

Red vs. Blue: Reconstruction hangs a lampshade on this concept: after the Reds delete the Blues from the Command database, Caboose disappears. Simmons panics, thinking he may have deleted Caboose from existence. Turns out Caboose was just using the bathroom. Grif: Come on dude, tell us more about the reality-bending computer. I'm hanging on your every word.

Simmons: I don't wanna talk about it.

According to Yatzhee of Zero Punctuation, Duke Nukem Forever, DNF was such a massively transcendental work of awesomeness that reality itself couldn't handle it and the timeline it was in collapsed. Sadly, the DNF of our reality was far worse.

In Bonus Stage, Phil travels back in time to episode 1 and kills his past self with an axe, in doing so causing himself to be "McFlyed" and erasing him from existence. With nothing else to do now that his foil is gone, Joel hangs himself, causing every episode of the series to be erased from existence (including the previous episode, which, as a result of Joel's death, was erased in mid-episode).

Dreamscape: Keedran, in her true form, can just straight-up wipe you from existence by imploding you in light.

Webcomics

Web Original

Web Videos

Happens to everyone in Demo Reel, as it turns out none of them are real and their tragic backstories, whether it's rape, sending your father to jail, maternal suicide, war crimes and so on, were just ways of teaching The Nostalgia Critic an Aesop Amnesia lesson. As one might imagine, it was a Downer Ending.

Western Animation