rdfs:comment
| - You Time Travel into the past; something happens as a result of your time travel, and somebody dies. Somebody important and probably even famous, who you know stayed alive until after this date. What can you do to close the Stable Time Loop, Set Right What Once Went Wrong, or at least trick out time so you can end up back in a "Close Enough" Timeline to your own? Why, impersonate them, of course! Examples of You Will Be Beethoven include:
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| - You Time Travel into the past; something happens as a result of your time travel, and somebody dies. Somebody important and probably even famous, who you know stayed alive until after this date. What can you do to close the Stable Time Loop, Set Right What Once Went Wrong, or at least trick out time so you can end up back in a "Close Enough" Timeline to your own? Why, impersonate them, of course! Usually, for added drama, the person you're replacing is supposed to die in some other way in order to trigger a significant event, meaning that you expect replacing them to lead to a Heroic Sacrifice. This is not to say that it actually does, though; you can often find a third option besides dying nobly in the past and screwing up the timeline. There is also a variation in which the time traveller doesn't cause the historical figure's death, but instead discovers that the historical figure never actually existed; the time traveller then has to impersonate the historical figure in order to create the history he remembers. Compare and contrast Time Travel Escape; in particular, the third option in the more-dramatic version often involves pulling something like a Time Travel Escape. Also compare Beethoven Was an Alien Spy, which is a supertrope to at least the Stable Time Loop version of this, and Emergency Impersonation, a very similar plot that doesn't require time travel. Examples of You Will Be Beethoven include:
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