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This is based on opinion. Please don't list it on a work's trope example list.

11/22/63

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  • Harry's essay is this and a Tear Jerker. After his mother kicked his father out, he came home on Halloween night in a drunken rage with a sledgehammer and proceeded to violently attack his family, killing Harry's mother and siblings and leaving Harry himself with permanent brain damage. Not only does this incident leave Jake an emotional mess, it's what sets off his whole time traveling adventure in the first place.
  • Despite being shot in the arm and face, Harry's father keeps on moving. The man in general is just... chilling.
    • Immediately afterward, Harry's father kills his brother Arthur. With one swing of the sledgehammer, the kid's face is obliterated in a shower of blood, bone chunks, and hair.
  • The brutal beating Jake is subjected to. Not only reading about it from his first-person perspective but the long-term effects it has, including memory loss and chronic pain.
  • The Bad Future Jake ends up creating by saving Kennedy. Without LBJ, the Civil Rights Act was never passed and the movement degenerated into violence after MLK's assassination. After Kennedy's second term, George Wallace and Curtis LeMay were elected and resolved the Vietnam War with a nuclear strike on Hanoi. The changes to the timeline have also caused near-constant earthquakes, some strong enough to sink whole islands like Hokkaido. As a result, the world suicide rate skyrocketed and fundamentalism of all types took hold, with twice as many dying at Jonestown as in our timeline. India and Pakistan underwent a limited nuclear exchange, the Iranian Hostages were all slaughtered, Russia collapsed and began selling nuclear weapons to Al-Qaeda, the Middle East went up in flames, Vermont Yankee suffered a meltdown and spewed radiation across New England and Southern Quebec, another terrorist set off a suitcase nuke in Miami, a suicide bomber at a Beatles peace concert killed 300 spectators and blinded Paul McCartney. All the while the continuing quakes are slowly tearing the planet Earth apart, with scientists predicting it will become the Solar System's "second asteroid belt" sometime around 2080.
    • For reference, Harry almost casually mentions that, thanks to the quakes, some of Japan's islands - including all of Hokkaido - sank into the ocean.
    • Worse still, arguably, are the "watery ripping noises" coming from the sky — the laws of physics themselves are apparently breaking down. It's already hinted that Jake's time travelling antics can damage reality itself, which means that alternate timeline he created is probably spiraling into a Class Z-3 Apocalypse How. Of course he fixes the timeline long before anything really bad starts happening, but still...
  • Jake Epping can perceive something is really, really wrong with Derry. And any fan of King's work knows exactly what that "something" is.
    (...) there was something inside that fallen chimney at the Kitchener Ironworks. I don't know what and I don't want to know, but at the mouth of the thing I saw a heap of gnawed bones and a tiny chewed collar with a bell on it (...) And from inside the pipe-deep in that oversized bore — something moved and shuffled.
    Come in and see, that something seemed to whisper in my head. Never mind all the rest of it, Jake — come in and see. Come in and visit. Time doesn't matter in here; in here, time floats away. You know you want to, you're curious. Maybe it's even another rabbit-hole. Another portal.
    Maybe it was, but I don't think so. I think it was Derry in there — Everything that was wrong with it, everything that was askew, hiding in that pipe. Hibernating. Letting people believe the bad times were over, waiting for them to relax and forget there had ever been bad times at all.
  • A moment in the show has Oswald sitting on a park bench, when he sees a newspaper article on President Kennedy's upcoming trip to Dallas as part of his re-election campaign. Oswald, already unhinged and paranoid that the FBI are watching him, decides then and there that he's going to assassinate the president. You can practically see the gears turning in his head as he reads the newspaper and gets the idea to do it. In the end, it really helps hammer in the fact that the simplest explanation was more than likely the correct one: that despite all the conspiracy theories, Kennedy's death really was because of a deranged nut who got it in his head one day that he wanted to kill the president, and it's all the more disturbing because of it.

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