I am struggling a bit to word the question so I’ll explain my thought process a bit.
I was thinking about Back to the Future style time travel where someone goes back in time, makes alterations to the past, and returns to a different life around the time they left but without actually acquiring the memories of their new life. Most of the time this happens at the end of the movie or series and they’re depicted only slightly confused but the viewer is given the impression they’ll integrate just fine. I’m wondering what’s out there for media where the conclusion of the protagonist’s adventures with time travel is just the beginning and the protagonist now has to struggle to make sense of everything.
Even with the short time loop/do-over premise that’s in movies like Palm Springs, Groundhog Day, and Omni Loop I feel like it could be difficult to interact with people afterwards. I imagine knowing everything about someone and having them regard you as a stranger would be frustrating and overwhelming.
From what I’ve seen the premise seems a bit under explored.
So the premise is: they travel back in time, change their future, travel back to the present, forget everything they did while time traveling, and now have to just experience their new future without knowing anything changed? Do I have a that right?
I mean, how do you know this isn’t the backstory for every character in every story ever? How do you know you didn’t JUST do this yourself?
I think you have it backwards. They remember their timeline, which doesn’t match the knowledge that everyone else around them has. A quick example is
big spoiler
the short story The Sound of Thunder.
Ahh, yeah, I think I didn’t quite follow OP’s request. The part they don’t remember is the time between where they traveled to in the past and their “present”, and the story is about them intuiting what happened in there.
From the title it sounded like the protagonist was suffering amnesia-like symptoms about how the world used to be along with everyone else.
Your idea of it is a hilarious (sort of) possible backstory to all of the thriller/horror movies where one person is ‘the only one who remembers X!’