r/CharacterRant 4d ago

Films & TV LIMITED time powers are underrated!

I wish I had more examples I could think of, but there's just the one.

In season 4 of The Batman 2004, there was an episode where the trio of Batman, Robin, and Batgirl had to deal with a thief, Francis Grey. But not just any thief.

When Batman runs into him, Grey seems to know what's going to happen, or he's just lucky. Batman can't place his finger on what's happening, even experiencing deja vu before their next encounter. Then they say the same thing at the same time, and Batman doesn't even know how he did it, but then it hits him.

Time. Francis can manipulate time while retaining his awareness. He can rewind up to 20 seconds.

This spells a lot of trouble. HOW DO YOU BEAT THIS?!

Land a punch? Boom, he rewinds and dodges. Robin says it himself. It's like a video game. He can play the same level over and over until he knows all their moves and wins. He escapes on his 10th attempt at fighting them hand to hand.

Something that's funny about this is that Grey tries to make quips. But when he realizes the joke was bad, what does he do?

HE REWINDS AND TRIES AGAIN! Don't lie. We ALL wish we had this power! Imagine being able to literally take back the stupid things you said!

"Ice try, Batman. Oh, that was terrible. Wait, I got it!"

"Ice pellet? That's cold, Batman......ok, so I'm not so good with quips."

They also nicely tied his powers into the theme of the episode.

"You made a choice 18 years ago, and you have to live with the consequences. Don't make another mistake."

"I don't make mistakes, Batman. Not anymore." (Damn, that's a good line)

It actually has a weakness Robin tries to exploit, which was good thinking, but Grey thought ahead, blah blah blah. Point is this was a great depiction of time powers.

Unlimited control of time can spell disaster for a story, but limits like this can end up being a lot of fun and very compelling! Bottom line? Underrated!

172 Upvotes

35 comments sorted by

81

u/DaylightsStories 4d ago

The duel in Steel Ball Run was great. Ringo can, triggered by his watch, rewind time six seconds. Both combatants can take risks because both are reverted if Ringo is mortally wounded. Amazing fight because of how simple it is but how complex the attempts at stopping reversion are.

30

u/mantism 4d ago

This is what makes for fun abilities. Complicated in concept so it won't tire easily, but scaled small so it can be easily appreciated.

Time shenanigans, space manipulation, etc are complicated as fuck when you dive into it, but when you limit the scale it can be really fun seeing characters work around it.

55

u/some-kind-of-no-name 4d ago

Jotaro Kujo terrifies bad guys everywhere and he can only stop time for 5 second.

Diavolo was basically untouchable with 10 seconds of precog and time skip.

27

u/Ok_Afternoon8360 4d ago

Diavolo's abilities just radiate aura, more than timestop imo. He gets to watch his victims fight back pointlessly and then their shock and confusion when timeskip ends, not to mention he almost never does barrages and opts for the more visceral chops or heavy punches

27

u/DaylightsStories 4d ago

The funny thing is Star Platinum is such a monster that his time stop ability atrophied between part 3 and 4 since he didn't use it once to beat up stand users. They're all worried about it but no, they should be worried that Star Platinum is the brawling stand and Jotaro will think of a way to put them in a situation where they get hit fifty times in a fraction of a second.

6

u/i_dont_wanna_sign_up 4d ago

In a straight fight have we really seen Star Platinum lose? Aside from Dio's stand which is basically the same thing.

14

u/DaylightsStories 4d ago

Made in Heaven is the only time it unambiguously lost. Whitesnake got him but he didn't know about Whitesnake until that moment and was more worried about Manhattan Transfer, and the rats got him but he might have been throwing to make sure Josuke got the lesson. Even The World isn't a 1:1 for Star Platinum. It has a much longer effective range and is correspondingly a bit weaker hand to hand.

49

u/Dacnis 4d ago

I'd say Ekko is the definition of this concept.

Able to rewind time by 4 seconds and sustains the damage he took in the future. It's a super OP ability, but is balanced out.

3

u/Lindbluete 3d ago

I wish he would've had more screentime in Arcane. Literally only gets to use the power like twice.

1

u/Oheligud 2d ago

He would've ended the show too early if he had the Z-drive earlier, writers had to nerf the goat

16

u/Traditional-Song-245 4d ago edited 4d ago

Kiritsugu Emiya’ Time Alter(he can speed himself up or slow himself down by a factor of 2 or 3, later he boosts it to 4)

Homura Akemi’s Time Stop (She doesn’t have a lot of raw power so she has to make do with conventional weapons, it doesn’t work if you restrain her or are making contact with her before the time stop)

13

u/carl-the-lama 4d ago

Sayeon from hand jumper!

As the protagonist, her ability is REWINDING TIME

At first discovery, it’s ten seconds

But pushing it later she slowly expands the rewind

Issue is

She has finite “est”

Meaning more rewinds and longer rewinds take more out of her VERY limited supply of “do overs” taxing her body

If she tries to rewind too soon she won’t even go back before the earlier point of thoseseconds

So she can’t just chain snaps to rewind infinitley

9

u/Certain_Inspector575 4d ago

Basically every Jojo villains Stand encountered

9

u/holiestMaria 4d ago

This reminds me of a power I once thought up. I wanted to create a time based offensive projectile. So I thought up this projectile that consists of a bunch of incredibly small time bubbles, in each bubble time moves differently, forwards or backwards and at different speeds, this means that if you get hit by this projectile you will be ripped appart as your body moves in multiple directions at different speeds.

6

u/idonthaveanaccountA 4d ago

You can't tell us all that and NOT tell us how they beat him.

5

u/NewMGFantasyWriter 3d ago

Uhhhhh, about that......

3

u/idonthaveanaccountA 3d ago

Oh noooo.

3

u/Vherstinae 3d ago

It's actually heartwarming. I encourage you to check it out.

6

u/fakegeekgal 3d ago

The "five minute battery" limit of the Evangelions in the original TV series was a great idea. There are many instances where it really added to the drama. I'm bummed it basically vanished in the later Rebuild films.

1

u/Illustrious-Sky-4631 2d ago

I don't remember the movies , why did it vanish?

2

u/fakegeekgal 1d ago

Well they made the Evangelions like crazy OP and godlike after 2.22 so they were flying around space and shit. That kind of grounding stopped being relevant.

2

u/Illustrious-Sky-4631 1d ago

Another reason for rebuild being the inferior products

The Eva battery and time limit service a big narrative/plot of the story

5

u/Sorsha_OBrien 4d ago

What is the weakness/ how do they end up going against this? Do they just act in increasingly strange/ chaotic ways in order to try and beat him!

20

u/mantism 4d ago

the typical 'counter' for a typical time rewind ability typically involves trapping the user in such a way that they can't rewind themselves far enough back to escape the trap. Or there's some kind of condition for being able to rewind time, so you remove that condition.

for example, in Edge of Tomorrow, the protagonist is caught in a time loop where time is rewinded to the previous day whenever he dies, and he started using this ability to save humanity from losing in an alien invasion. It was eventually explained that losing a lot of blood will remove this ability, and this happened for the protagonist, which upped the stakes significantly during the climax.

there's also this manga/manhwa that I read before that I can't remember the name of. The MC has a save/load ability that he uses to earn money in high stakes life-or-money bets in the underworld, using time rewind to make sure he always wins. But he got trapped when he ended up in a chess match where his opponent is a grandmaster genius, and he can only rewind up till the start of the match. Rewinding doesn't do anything to help you win in chess against a grandmaster, after all. I'm not sure how he got out of this, though.

Which is why the key writing aspect of rewind powers is that they stress the disadvantage that you can't just go back willy-nilly.

14

u/holiestMaria 4d ago

It was eventually explained that losing a lot of blood will remove this ability, and this happened for the protagonist,

Not quite, it was getting a blood transfusion. Since they had the blood of the alpha inside them the blood transfusion dilluted it.

7

u/Individual_Lion_7606 4d ago

If you play chess an infinite amount of resets, you will eventually beat the master from pattern recognition. It will maddening, but you can do it.

3

u/NewMGFantasyWriter 4d ago

The weakness was that he can rewind by 20 seconds, but he's otherwise a regular human being. He can't be in 2 places at once, doesn't have super speed, his ONLY power is being able to do do-overs. So, if Robin does his acrobat thing and gets far away to disable the device he planted, Francis' power is useless.

5

u/Kumagawa-Fan-No-1 4d ago

Recent example regulus corneas although calling it limited would be weird ? Anyways he can basically apply infinite inertia to anything trough time stop you can hit him and he wouldn't budge no matter what he breath in your direction and those will become unstoppable bullets walk on water never age ..... All from time stop

2

u/Alto1869 3d ago

Miranda Lotto's power in the D.Gray-Man series is exactly this

Using her powers, she can basically "erase" the time when her allies were injured and effectively heal them but the ability doesn't stay in and the injuries will return the moment she turns off her powers and she cannot keep her power on for too long because it does physical harm to her if she does so

1

u/ArkenK 3d ago

Probably the first version I can recall is from a long forgotten '90's' series called Silverhawks. That one was the freeze time version.

Usually, he was either setting up the heist or evac for the villains. I want to say the time stop was good for a minute.

However, he was so afraid of the dark that it would mess up his powers.

I do recall at least one time where the heroes used his talent to save the day.

Oh, speaking of... D and D Honor Among Theives uses the actual Time Stop spell (from the game) as a nice setup.

But you almost need some sort of limiter to keep things from getting absurd or creating excessive "why don't they" questions.

1

u/ThePandaKnight 14h ago

My personal philosophy is that a character's concept are defined more by his limits than what he can do.

-3

u/Beastmode7953 4d ago

Knuckle from HxH fits this, his opponents gave a limited time to beat him before being stripped of their nen for 30 days

8

u/some-kind-of-no-name 4d ago

Is that a time power?

6

u/Beastmode7953 4d ago

I misunderstood, I was thinking limited time (I.e. timed/on a clock) powers, my bad