Paradox Person

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

There are certain people who have been brought into the world that seem to defy it by their existence alone. They don't exist within the natural order and often weren't planned by any of the Powers That Be that keep cosmic order. This might be because they weren't meant to be here in the first place or aren't truly here. Their otherness is a characteristic trait, but not holding a right to this world doesn't necessarily make them harmful.

For the more dangerous variants that are of the grotesque and harmful kind, see Eldritch Abomination or Eldritch Location. Compare Ret-Gone, which might be the state these characters enter. They're almost guaranteed to be Immune to Fate.

Examples of Paradox Person include:


Anime and Manga

  • At the end of the 1st Bleach movie Rukia tells Ichigo about Senna their friend who was really just a person called Memory Rosary holding different memories of "Blanks" and was only created because so many blanks lost their memories.

Rukia: One can't remember something that shouldn't have existed in the first place.

  • Jack Rakan in Mahou Sensei Negima is a character of this type, (thought it's explained he just did ridiculous amounts of hard work)even coming back from the "dead" with WILLPOWER ALONE.

Chisame: Weren't you meant to be a freaking broken character with infinite cheats...? this being said after Rakan disappears completely to Cosmo Entelecheia.

  • Homura Akemi in the end of Puella Magi Madoka Magica. By the nature of her success, everything that motivated her or developed her character never happened, which changes the nature of her magic.
  • By definition, Servants in Fate/Zero and Fate/stay night. They are the souls of heroes of mythical past given body to exist in this world. Since dead people are supposed to stay dead, the world will try to crush this contradiction, which means that Servants disappear if they aren't channeled with Mana. Except Gilgamesh.

Comic Books

  • Adam Warlock has become something akin to this, a being who stands outside and is not affected by otherwise universal forces of chaos and order or life and death. His sometime enemy the In-Betweener was similarly described in his first appearance, but has since been treated as a creation and servant of the Anthropomorphic Personifications of chaos and order. Adam's ally Gamora was plucked from the timeline to make her into such a being, but it didn't take.
    • Another Marvel Comics cosmic being, the Anomaly, is essentially the embodiment of Things That Should Not Be.
  • The Anti-Hero version of the DC Comics character Chronos, Gabriel Walker, erased his own history to protect his mother from time-traveling enemies. Technically, he should not exist and has no "real" history to alter.
  • In Flashpoint, it had been established that Professor Zoom cannot kill Barry Allen, because due to their relationship to the Speed Force, Zoom would cease to exist if Barry died. So what does Zoom do? Make Barry save his mother back when Zoom tried to kill her. The resulting Alternate Timeline would make Barry into a living paradox, thus allowing Zoom to kill him.
  • X-Man from the X-Men franchise is one of the few survivors from the Age of Apocalypse timeline which no longer exits.
  • The Samaritan from Astro City. Came back through time from the future in order to prevent an Apocalypse, and in successfully doing so managed to erase the timeline from which he came... meaning technically he's never going to be born.

Film

  • Zed tells Edwards (J) this in Men in Black, because their job requires the agents to have never existed and that no ordinary person knows they exist.

Zed: You don't exist; you were never even born. Anonymity is your name, silence your native tongue. You're no longer part of the System. You are above the System. Over it. Beyond it. We're "them." We're "they." We are the Men in Black.

Literature

  • Becoming a Paradox Person by abusing Time Travel is the basic membership qualification in the Doctor Who spinoff group Faction Paradox.
  • The protagonist of Robert Heinlein's short story "All You Zombies" who is his/her own mother, his/her own father, and the person who recruited him/her into the Time Police.
  • In Tolkien's mythology: dwarves were not created with the world and therefore should not exist . They were created when Aule, the smith god, grew impatient for the first of Ilvatar's children (the elves) to awaken; he decided to create creatures for himself. However, because he didn't have the power of true creation, they were originally little more automatons, with no free will. Iluvatar was initially angry at Aule for stepping outside the plans for the universe as well as for creating such a mockery of real life. Aule repented and was sorrowfully preparing to destroy the first dwarves when Iluvatar, seeing Aule's grief, relented and gave the dwarves free will. As a result, the dwarves exist in Tolkien's world, but they occupy a strange place in it: they are like the Children of Iluvatar (elves and humans), and yet separate from them.
  • In David Gerrold's The Man Who Folded Himself, the eponymous time traveler also manages to erase his own birth at least once...but by then he's created so many alternate timelines that there's thousands of him lurking around, all of whom are outside of the timeline and thus should not exist.
  • Cassie is described as something like this in one of the Megamorphs books.
  • Young Wizards has the Transcendent Pig, an immortal being whose existence transcends space and time. He counts as a Paradox Person because none of the Powers That Be, who collectively created Reality itself, can remember creating him (a fact about which the Powers are rather embarrassed).

Live Action TV

  • This seems to be the current state of Peter Bishop on the series Fringe, if the dialog of the Observers is any indication.

Tabletop Games

  • This is the whole point of Promethean: The Created. Reality itself rejects your existence and staying in one place for too long causes the location to decay.
  • In the Tabletop RPG Continuum, the players (as well as enemy time travelers) can become Paradox People through the accumulation of Frag, representing how out-of-sync their recollections are with history. It's not a pretty sight: the symptoms start with nausea and disorientation, leading up to gradual physical disintegration, after which the unfortunate time traveler becomes a barely sentient ghost. Doing this on purpose is called "Time Combat".

Video Games

Web Comics

  • In Blip, the protagonist K is someone whose existence Heaven never predicted, so there's no place for her in the divine plan.

Web Original

  • In the multiverse of Global Guardians PBEM Universe, one being in each universe is unique to that dimension. These beings are indestructible, immortal, and "stand apart" from the world they were born in.
  • Every human(ish) SCP of the SCP Foundation, by dint of not complying to how reality (as we know it) works.

Western Animation

  • Ben 10 Alien Force A monster from 50 years in the past that accelerates time is destroying a town and Ben and the gang is told the creature does not hold order in the time stream .
  • Futurama: Fry became his own grandfather, thanks to some mixups sending the crew to 1947. Because he is a paradox himself, he lacks a delta brainwave, which becomes a plot point later on.
Retrieved from "https://allthetropes.org/wiki/Paradox_Person?oldid=1487515"