Clock Roaches

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"Writing a time travel plot ain't easy, do it wrong and all-devouring death maws come after you."

"2. Infest the timestream with time-beavers."
Justin B. Rye, Twenty Fun Things To Do With A Time Machine

Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana; Clock Roaches like causality.

Time, like Death, hates being tampered with. It uses things like Hitler's Time Travel Exemption Act to stop changes to itself, and the Butterfly of Doom to exact roundabout retribution, but sometimes the determined chrono-criminal can find ways around these defenses.

In cases like these, time likes to get its hands dirty and ensure a less ironic and more graphic end to these revisionist historians with the help of Clock Roaches.

Clock Roaches are time's clean-up service. They eat and destroy people and things that directly threaten time with a Temporal Paradox. Like roaches, they "eat up" the crumbs and mistakes of time travelers, and if they directly make nuisances of themselves, eat them as well. Also like roaches, you can never kill them all, nor hope to survive against their mindless fury for long. At best, you can delay them, and hope to fix whatever it is you've messed up and marked you as Roach-Chow.

The concepts of Clock Roaches probably stems from the difficulty in representing the threat of creating a time paradox. It's hard to show that the whole of existence is about to slip down the timey-wimey chaotic vortex of fate, and that it's definitely bad. It's much easier to write when anybody who dares to transverse the spacetime continuum gets eaten by an Eldritch Abomination. You could call them Chronos' Vengeance.

One of the possible results of a Time Crash. When it's a civilization doing it, not some kind of natural force, it's Time Police. Compare to the Necro Non Sequitur, a gratuitous and Rube Goldberg-y way for time to deal with interlopers. Not to be confused with the Butterfly of Doom, in which the insect punishing the time traveler for interfering with the natural progression of events does so by dying, when it's not just a metaphor to begin with.

Time Police is similar, but is where creatures like this are part of a formal organization. Not related to the insectoid Dungeons & Dragons construct of the same name; they, and any other roaches made of clockwork, are a kind of Clockwork Creature. Also not to be confused with the disturbing internet meme, Clock Spider, which is Exactly What It Says on the Tin.

Similar are creatures out for those who mess with space. You may look for examples in Hyperspace Is a Scary Place. Has absolutely nothing to do with the Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities.


Examples:

    open/close all folders 

    Anime & Manga 
  • Rave Master: This is the origin and purpose of the Endless; to destroy the world created by someone's tampering with time. It could only be killed by Etherion, specifically stated to be the power to create something from nothing, and even then, only under very specific conditions.
  • Humanity Has Declined offers an inversion: collapsed temporal paradoxes turn into time paradogs.

    Comic Books 
  • Ultimate Fantastic Four: The spider-shaped Argiopes, who would eat any time travel-created doubles to avoid paradoxes.
  • Time Beavers, a graphic novel by Timothy Truman, postulates that a race of time-sensitive beavers monitor the Dam of Time, which separates the relative order of the universe we know from utter chaos. The Dam is composed of items of considerable historical importance, such as "Fat Man" and "Little Boy". Several such items are stolen by the Beavers' mortal enemies, a shape-changing species of sentient rats who want chaos to run rampant.
    • The setup is similar to the one used in the Blinx video game franchise.
  • Aztec Ace includes "Doxie-Glitches", which are giant monsters that show up when a paradox threatens time and fix it by killing everyone in the vicinity.

    Fan Works 
  • The Pony POV Series has the Wolf in Shining Armor's Arc which erases things that aren't supposed to exist, such as anachronisms brought into being by a non-God Reality Warper. The good news? It's after the Big Bad, Makarov/the Shadow of Chernobull and is implied to be one of the ways Shining can stop him. The bad news? Shining is Immune to Fate due to being a temporal distortion, meaning it's after him. However, it obeys the Gods, so having Cadence nearby gives him protection.
    • Also from the Pony POV Series, the Cosmic Concepts themselves play this role — in extreme emergencies (when paradox threatens the whole continuum), the Alicorns and Draconequii will combine forces to erase the offending timeline. This is what happened to the G3 universe.
  • The "agent-in-place" from Harry Potter and the Nightmares of Futures Past is a somewhat less omnivorous version of this trope. We don't know a lot about him, but he is apparently at Hogwarts, knows of the original timeline, and is working behind the scenes to ensure that certain events (such as Ginny getting possessed by the Diary Horcrux) come to pass in spite of Harry's manipulations. Notable in that Harry has no idea the agent-in-place exists, and therefore doesn't know why certain things seem determined to happen.

    Films — Live-Action 
  • In the Final Destination movies, Death itself manages to act as a Clock Roach. The protagonists have a vision of their own gruesome demise and save themselves along with a group of their friends, and the remainder of the movie consists of Death finding increasingly gruesome, sadistic, and physically impossible ways of correcting the error. This is eventually subverted, when it's revealed in one of the later films that showing the protagonists a vision of their death is part of Death's plan, and the "corrections" to the error are actually their proper fated deaths to begin with. It turns out Death is just a dick who likes to play with his food.

    Literature 
  • The Langoliers in the book and movie of that title by Stephen King. In the story, several airline passengers find themselves trapped in a moment in the past, which is slowly fading and winding down as the present time moves further and further away, until the moment is completely eaten by the titular Langoliers.
  • Cthulhu Mythos: The Hounds of Tindalos chase down time travellers; the only way to hold them off is to eliminate all angles in the immediate area, since they can only travel through these. Note that they're not portrayed as necessary or helpful; they just are.
  • Singularity Sky by Charles Stross: the invention of faster-than-light travel brings with it the ability to travel through time. This in turn leads to the potential for whole new strategies of warfare and unpleasant weapons taking advantage of the ability to meddle with the past... but it is all prevented by a particularly powerful AI which uses its own (particularly effective) causality violation devices to smite any would-be temporal saboteurs with godlike amounts of overkill.
  • The Sisters Grimm: The pink eraser things in book ten, since the book they are in was magically linked to the time of fairy tales, and any changes change history, so Mr. Editor guy has his pink erasers eat everything and he resets the story.
  • In the Buffyverse collection of short stories, Tales of the Slayer, Volume 2, the short story Again by Jane Espenson has these after Buffy, Willow, and Xander are returned to their high-school selves. The roaches in this case manifest as mobile shadows that attach themselves to things they find in the wrong time, causing excruciating pain as they (presumably) eat them. They appear to be somewhat physical, as Buffy manages to cut one off of her arm, cutting her arm in the process.

    Live-Action TV 
  • Doctor Who:
    • The Reapers, Flying Killer Time Gargoyles from "Father's Day". The Ninth Doctor describes them in terms similar to white blood cells — when a paradox is triggered, they clean up the "wound" by erasing everything inside it. "Before" the Time War, the Gallifreyans kept paradoxes in order in a much less destructive way, but now they're gone.
    • The original series serial "The Time Monster" has the Chronovores, which are similar enough to the Reapers (giant winged things that eat people's timelines) that they may as well be considered a related critter. It's worth mentioning that the Chronovores were fleshed out in a novel by Paul Cornell, who later wrote "Father's Day". Some fans speculate that he wanted to feature Chronovores in "Father's Day" but was prevented by some sort of legal issue. Given we know The Doctor just makes things up sometimes, they could even be the same creatures and he just made up a different name for them this time.
  • Eerie Indiana: The garbage men in "The Lost Hour".
  • Sapphire and Steel: You're never quite sure what the agents of time look like, but you definitely don't want to hang around and find out.
  • In The Flash (2014), careless meddling with the past risks summoning a Time Wraith to seek out and destroy the meddler. When Barry asks Thawne why he has never encountered them before, he is told that he's been incredibly lucky. Besides, at most, he's affected one day before (when stopping Mardon and Savage).
    • Presumably, the Time Masters are careful enough to avoid the Time Wraiths in the Legends of Tomorrow spin-off. So is Chronos, probably.

    Radio 
  • In the Big Finish Doctor Who audio plays, they have Vortisaurs, creatures who live in the time vortex and are attracted to temporal anomalies. They're usually vicious, but the Doctor manages to tame one.

    Tabletop Games 
  • Dungeons & Dragons:
    • The 3rd edition of the game have the Inevitables, constructs born in Mechanus (the plane of absolute law) to enforce certain laws, both natural and invented. One kind of Inevitable, known as the Quaruts, maintain the sanctity of time and space itself.
    • The Clockroach itself, on the other hand, does not embody this trope.
  • In Continuum, the players themselves are Time Police. However, if the players fail, Clock Roaches known as Inheritors show up to clean things up, and the game makes it clear that you do not want to get in their way.
  • Mage: The Ascension: Wrinkle is the Paradox Spirit that shows up to deal with people who have pushed their luck one too many times in tampering with how things should be, especially temporally. If the mage apologizes for what they did and agrees that they shouldn't have done it, then Wrinkle does the actual work of rewinding events to the point where the offending Reality Warper can try something else. If not, then he traps the mage in a time pocket until they give in... or in some cases, rumor has it, he rewrites time so that the offender was never born. He is the most powerful Paradox spirit in Mage by an order of magnitude.
  • Exalted has the pattern spiders, the gods that maintain the Loom of Fate, and are basically responsible for the laws of physics. Bend the aforementioned laws too much, and you'll incur their displeasure in the form of a Pattern Bite, which is basically a spider bite, except that the spider is a giant mechanical god-spider responsible for maintaining natural law, and what it bites is not you, but your thread in the Loom of Fate, causing all kinds of unpleasant effects. So not much like a spider bite at all, really.
  • In Time Watch (for the GUMSHOE system), there are literal Clock Roaches, in that there are human-sized roaches from the distant (possible) future who come to the past to ensure their own timeline comes to pass.

    Video Games 
  • Prince of Persia: Warrior Within has the Dahaka, a guardian of time that hunts the Prince in order to restore time to its original flow. It's implied that whenever someone changes the past, a Dahaka shows up to deal with it — the first one was created when the Prince tampered with time, and a second comes up to deal with his second attempt to fix his own mistake in the game. If you get the Golden Ending, you kill the Dahaka, and the Empress of Time sails away with you. Thus the Sands of Time are not created in the past. (They get created when the Empress is killed.)
  • Singularity has mutants, creatures, and strange plants that were spawned from time travel shenanigans.
  • In Super Robot Wars, Ingram Pliskin and his clone Cobray are secretly these. According to Ingram in an exposition, every universe is given only one (hence why Cobray's powers didn't manifest until after Ingram was dead), and that their job is to protect causality by deleting from existence any force that threatens it.
  • As a result of Magus' actions, Lavos absorbs Schala and becomes the Time Devourer, the ultimate Clock Roach, who, rather than going after Crono and his friends, unmakes all existence. That is the entire plot of Chrono Cross. You can stop it, but not by simply defeating the Time Devourer; it'll just reproduce from another reality and the new one will replace the old one. You have to play a song that unites all reality, leaving the Time Devourer no copies of itself to regenerate from.
  • In Raidou Kuzunoha vs. The Soulless Army, Rasputin The Mad Monk (actually a Ridiculously Human Robot built in his image) was originally employed by some kind of future entity as part of an attempt to erase the timeline Raidou lives in (for example, the year is Taisho 20, but the Real Life Taisho era only lasted 15 years). He blows off the mission once he realizes it's a pretty sweet time to live in. It is implied allowing Raidou to change stuff stamped out the Crapsack World that is the timeline of Shin Megami Tensei I and Shin Megami Tensei II.
  • World of Warcraft:
    • The Bronze Dragonflight are this; their hired help (the players) are their Time Police.
    • The Infinite Dragonflight that attempts to change the timeline is universally villainous - only two out of four of their attempts even try to have a weak Hitler's Time Travel Exemption Act excuse (which is explained to make the current situation worse anyway), the rest being outright villainy.
    • Their goals have been muddied even further with confirmation in Wrath and Cataclysm that the Infinites are a corrupted future version of the Bronzes. While still Clock Dragons, they're useing their ability to modify time instead, hence the greater danger they pose than most people tampering with time.
  • In the Final Fantasy XI expansion "Wings of the Goddess", The avatar Atomos is a mindless being that eats 'dispensable' time, including the memories anybody might have of alternative timelines that have become endangered due to the intervention of time travelers. All of this ends up dumped in the Walk of Echoes, a graveyard for everything that might have been.
  • Time Shift: The protagonist fits this role, as there is apparently a danger of the Alternate Timeline "colliding" with our own if the Big Bad isn't stopped. What exactly this would mean is not explored, suffice it to say that would be bad.
  • Blinx the Time Sweeper: All the monsters except the main antagonists are a result of a colossal Time Crash. The plot revolves around eradicating them.
  • In Life Is Strange, the tornado that destroys Arcadia Bay on Friday is actually the universe's attempt to undo Max's use of time travel to tamper with destiny.

    Web Comics 
  • Timeclones and altered timelines are not welcome in Homestuck. Any given Hero has an alpha timeline; mostly this only matters to the Hero whose purview is Time. Either way, any deviation from the alpha timeline, or extraneous instance of a given hero, caused by time travel shenanigans is doomed to die eventually, in some unfortunate and contrived manner if the universe can't scrounge up a good one. Although in the pre-scratch kids' case, any session that does not deal with it is destroyed by The Tumor, a giant bomb buried in the center of the Battlefield.
  • The Adventures of Dr. McNinja has some sort of... bear-octopus-unicorn creatures that attack wayward time travelers.
  • Girl Genius has these things. Clock Eldritch Abominations might be more accurate.

    Web Original 

    Western Animation 
  • Vector Prime of Transformers Cybertron is shown in the Expanded Universe to have this sort of job, though he's far more personable than most examples and not nearly as unstoppable. The giant, all-consuming rift that shows up in the Time Wars arc of the UK comic fufills the trope more.
  • Similar to the Final Destination movies is the rule that chronal doubles in the Futurama universe always meet with some sort of fatal accident in order to keep them from cluttering up the time-stream... So of course, the sudden appearance of an army of time-duplicated Benders at the end of Bender's Big Score results in a huge rip in space-time leading to another dimension, handily setting up the plot of Beast with a Billion Backs.
  • In the Generator Rex episode "A Brief History of Time," Van Kleiss thinks he's being hunted by one of these. As it turns out, it's actually Breach, who has transformed into a Negative Space Wedgie that's attracted to him like a magnet - and destroys everything in its wake.

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