Line #29 SerialEscalation/Literature


1	* ''Literature/{{Baccano}}!'': How [[{{Gorn}} bloody]] can the violence get? How badass can the characters be? How [[CloudCuckoolander weird]]/[[TheDitz dumb]]/''awesome'' can [[OutlawCouple Isaac and Miria]] get? How badly can karma fuck up [[ButtMonkey Dallas]] this time? How much can we screw over [[BreakTheCutie Czeslaw]] now? Just how [[CrazyIsCool batshit yet supremely awesome]] are [[PsychoForHire Ladd]] and [[SociopathicHero Claire]] going to be in this episode? Will there ''ever'' be [[MoreDakka enough machine guns?]]
2	* ''Literature/TheBadGuys'': The titular group try to establish themselves as good guys by starting with minor good deeds like helping cats stuck in trees but find themselves embroiled in increasignly higher stakes over time, such as [[spoiler:travelling through time, battling an alien invasion, and dealing with a multiversal monster]].
3	* ''Literature/CodexAlera'': How outnumbered can the heroes be? What ridiculously over-the-top awesome plan is Tavi going to pull off next?
4	-->'''Doroga:''' [[LampshadeHanging You may have noticed that he does things...big]].
5	-->'''Bernard:''' Big?
6	-->'''Doroga:''' He saw that the creatures tracked him by heat. So he set the forest on fire.
7	** Part of Tavi's modus operandi is to get the enemy somewhere he can light a whole bunch of them on fire- hell, one time he not only did it once, but twice, and then followed it up in the climax of the action by- after his foes have used their magic to block out the sun- bringing the sun to them. Magical multiple refraction laser, activate!
8	* ''Literature/ACertainMagicalIndex'': Just how '''[[StoryBreakerPower ridiculously powerful]]''' can the villains be? No matter how powerful, Touma WILL beat him/her...just with his AntiMagic punch. On that note, how much more ridiculous insane/awesome can Accelerator's application of his power be? How about throwing an entire freaking [[spoiler:building]] and slowing down [[spoiler:the Earth]] for five minutes? How huge can Touma's UnwantedHarem get?
9	* The poem titled ''A Cut for You'' [[http://akaichounokoe.deviantart.com/art/A-Cut-for-You-627159644]] has a rather gory case of this as its about two friends (presumably female, according to one of the lines) playing a game where the goal seems to be who can cause themselves the most injury. The game ends when one of them hacks off a limb and they declare it a tie.
10	* ''Literature/TheDresdenFiles'': What [[CrazyIsCool mind-blowingly awesome]] trick will Harry pull this time? How many new scars can he get? How much more badass can Murphy become? How bizarre and gory can the villains' tactics get? How much can we scale up the GambitPileup? How pretty can Thomas be? How's Harry going to top The Dinosaur Incident? How much ass can be kicked? How many more mind-blowingly evil and powerful people can Harry piss off? Lampshaded in one of the later books, when Harry reminisces about how much Bianca scared him when he was up against her, even though by that point he recognises that she was little more than a StarterVillain. Admittedly, she had a SmallRoleBigImpact, but the impact was largely accidental, and she was neither particularly powerful nor clever compared to the Faerie Queens, Fallen Angels and {{Eldritch Abomination}}s who are Harry's main enemies as the books continue.
11	* In terms of going figuring out who the BigBad is supposed to be, ''Literature/TheEnchantmentEmporium'' starts with Allie trying to find out what happened to her grandmother. Then she finds out there's a sorcerer in town. Except, he's waiting on the appearance of a Dragon Lord, [[spoiler: that turns out to be Jack, his son]]. Then several other Dragon Lords- [[spoiler: Jack's uncles]]- show up, split between helping and hindering the first one.[[note]]And wanting to kill the sorcerer either way, for what he did to [[spoiler:their sister]][[/note]]. Then [[spoiler:Jack's mother]], a Dragon queen, makes an appearance....
12	* How many potential murderers will reveal to [[Literature/TheFatherLukeWolfeTrilogy Father Wolfe]] their motives and opportunity to commit the crime in ''Father, Forgive Them''?
13	* [[Literature/FearAndLoathingInLasVegas How much drugs can Duke and Dr. Gonzo put in their systems?]] Answer: a lot.
14	* In the first ''Literature/HarryPotter'' book, [[spoiler:three people die]], all of them offstage. In the last book, several are seen dying on-page.
15	* ''Literature/FoxAndOHare'': The danger ramps up slowly but surely as the series progresses, to the point where ''The Pursuit'' starts with [[spoiler:Nick]] getting kidnapped.
16	* In Creator/DaveBarry's [[https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1988/10/16/the-tune-in-turnoff-singing-those-rush-hour-radio-blues/41af6e50-5622-43cc-806c-99aafd49b5a6/ "Garbage Scan"]], the driver keeps tuning into classic hits stations just when they've finished playing a number of classic hits in a row, and that number keeps going up. First it's 14, then 19, then 54, then 317, and finally "3,814 consecutive classic hits with no commercial interruptions dating back to 1978".
17	* ''Literature/HeavyObject'':
18	** In terms of conflict, the initial volumes are relatively low stakes, dealing with regional conflicts which will at most result in the destruction of a city or two. Starting in Volume 6, the schemes started becoming a risk to global stability, risking all-out war between the supernations. Volume 10 saw the first introduction of characters who ''wanted'' a global war, something which the protagonists have barely averted several times. Volume 18 nearly resulted in the end of the world due to a ColonyDrop while revealing that the world's climate may soon collapse unless a solution is found.
19	** In terms of Objects, the technology and brutality seen has only increased over time. Early on Objects were largely variants of tanks and artillery, but their designs and uses have become increasingly sophisticated, up to an orbital version.
20	* ''Literature/HighSchoolDxD'': How insane and unpredictable can Issei get with his powers!? What kind of a new powers is he able to develop next '''''with Rias' breasts acting as a conduit'''''!? How awesome and intense are the battles going to be like next!?
21	* How [[MacrossMissileMassacre many missiles]] can be fired off at once in an ''Literature/HonorHarrington'' battle? In the whole first book, covering months of time and multiple battle scenes, we saw perhaps dozens of missiles fired. By the last book, in the climactic battle, half a million are fired ''in the opening salvo''.
22	* Creator/ChinaMieville's ''Literature/IronCouncil'' - What sort of golem is Judah Low going to whip up this time?
23	* ''Pandora's Star'' features a battle in which a wormhole-jumping spaceship instantaneously warps around a planet fending off an enemy barrage. The adversary's response? [[spoiler:Open enough wormholes around the ship to blast it with ninety-six nuclear missiles from every conceivable angle. ]]
24	* The ''Literature/{{Lensman}}'' series is made of this with its LensmanArmsRace. Gee, where to even ''start?'' Lets take the destruction of planets:
25	** ''Galactic Patrol'' doesn't destroy any planets.
26	** ''Gray Lensman'' starts with Helmuth's planet being cracked open and ruined by the self-destruct mechanism of his base. It ends with two enemy planets being obliterated, one by a planet-sized sphere of antimatter and the other by being smashed between two other planets.
27	** ''Second Stage Lensmen'' has flotillas of armed planets and planet-sized masses of antimatter. Several of them annihilate each other after being rendered ''hors de combat'' by the "Sunbeam" -- a WaveMotionGun that focuses the entire output of the system's sun on its targets.
28	** Finally, in ''Children of the Lens'', planets and antimatter planets are thrown around as anti-missile missiles. And anti-anti-missile missiles.
29	* A RunningGag in ''Literature/LoyalEnemies'' is that the various races the heroes meet bestow progressively bigger armies upon them as gifts for favors the heroes have done (and to stick it to the previous race in the chain). The dryad queen gives them a unit of dryad soldiers. When the elven king learns about it, he gives them two units of elven soldiers to help them. And when the heroes help a local dwarven clan, the entire clan decides to aid them in their fight. Funnily enough, when the armies actually show up for the battle, there are even more members of the alliance.
30	* ''Literature/MassEffectAnnihilation'': After the original trilogy of games had the fourteen ''hour'' all-elcor production of ''Hamlet'' ("An unforgettable experience!"), this book has a particularly loony fan of Shakespeare reveal he's written an all-elcor version of ''Macbeth'', which is ''sixteen'' hours long.
31	* ''Literature/MariaWatchesOverUs'': How much more romantic [[{{Subtext}} subtext]] can they put in the relationships between the girls [[BaitAndSwitchLesbians without them actually going anywhere]]? How much more will Yumi berate herself for being insignificant, despite several of the school's most popular girls fawning over her? How long can they postpone Sachiko's inevitable graduation? There has to be a massive black hole in the vicinity of the Lillian high school to explain the immense slowing down of time between New Year's and April, since that period gets covered by least a ''dozen'' [[LightNovels light novels]].
32	* Creator/MatthewReilly books. Where to begin? Oh, let's go with flying a stealth plane out of a collapsing ice cave, killing ''twenty men'' with ''one grenade'', pinning a man trying to kill you while missing a leg, crushing Humvees with a plane in an underground hangar, driving said plane into an elevator shaft large enough to ''hold'' planes with the elevator over fifty feet down, hijacking a ''space shuttle'', chasing down a ''ballistic missile'' with a ''plane'', getting on the other side of a car pinning you to a tunnel wall by ''driving up the wall and flipping the car over the other's roof'', getting a boat dragged by Boeing 747, flipping a double-decker bus over a wall so that it lands on its roof and rolls the right way up, killing a helicopter with an ''enemy-driven'' jet ski, having a convoy chase down a jumbo jet on an Egyptian highway, climbing from one plane to another while both are flying, a one-winged 747 sliding down a slope of spikes, a tsunami throwing a supertanker up a mountain, one man holding off a platoon from a citadel by using trebuchets, killing your enemy by decapitating them ''with a subway'', having an fight scene beneath a descending elevator, running thirty feet on the backs of caimans, and disarming a planet-destroying bomb from inside a tank that fell from a plane 30,000 feet up.
33	* ''Literature/McAuslan'': How many people can you rope into a Highland reel? Apparently, after trying (and succeeding) for the Black Watch's record of ''sixtyfour'', the General insists that they try for three figures. Said and done, after roping in a bunch of prisoners of war, the sentries from the neighbouring garrison and a bunch of people who have come up from a nearby town to see what the hell is going on, the Regiment dances a Onehundredandtwentyeightsome Reel, a grueling process which takes over two and a half hours.
34	** Creator/TerryPratchett, a known Creator/GeorgeMacdonaldFraser fan, would later have a Five-hundred-and-twelvesome Reel in ''Literature/TheWeeFreeMen''. Thankfully, Feegles move an order of magnitude faster than humans.
35	* The ''Literature/NewJediOrder'' series: how many planets and how many billion people are we going to obliterate/kill/sacrifice today while the heroes care little?
36	* For Myth/PaulBunyan and other TallTale characters this is pretty much the reason they exist, to make each subsequent story even bigger, more outlandish, and more absurdly implausible than the last. For example, after all the story's explaining how inhumanly large Paul is, there then come along story's like "Paul Bunyan's Cornstalk," where the eponymous stalk of corn grows so fast that, when Paul tries to chop it down, he's never able to hit it twice in the same place; by the time he makes a second swing of his axe, the stalk's grown so high that the first chop mark is over his head and out of sight!
37	* From the ''first chapter'' of ''Literature/ThePrincessBride'' comes this gem. By the end of the book, Buttercup's all but describing her love as "over nine thousand."
38	-->''"I have loved you for several hours now, and every second, more. I thought an hour ago that I loved you more than any woman has ever loved a man, but a half hour after that I knew that what I felt before was nothing compared to what I felt then. But ten minutes after that, I understood that my previous love was a puddle compared to the high seas before a storm. Your eyes are like that, did you know? Well they are. How many minutes ago was I? Twenty? Had I brought my feelings up to then? It doesn't matter. I love you so much more now than twenty minutes ago that there cannot be comparison. I love you so much more now than when you opened your hovel door, there cannot be comparison."''
39	** Westley then tops that by explaining how much greater his love is compared to hers.
40	** Referenced (and parodied) in ''Jack of Fables'', when Jack copies this speech practically word for word and tells it to the Snow Queen. Unlike Buttercup, though, Jack doesn't really love her and just wants to mooch off her and live in her palace as long as he can.
41	* ''Literature/QualiaThePurple'' just keeps going further down the rabbit hole with nearly every successive chapter, mostly starting from the already pretty insane chapters 5 and 6.
42	* ''Literature/ASongOfIceAndFire'':
43	** Red Wedding. Because [[spoiler:[[HonorBeforeReason Robb]]]] broke off an arranged marriage one of his daughters, [[spoiler: Walder Frey has many of Robb's Bannerman and army massacred. [[AnyoneCanDie Then he kills Robb.]] Then he kills Robb's mother Catelyn Stark. Then Arya Stark is nearly killed.]]
44	** Regarding Shagga, son of Dolf, who has a thing for axes:
45	---> '''Kevan Lannister:''' The big hairy one wanted two axes, black steel, double-sided.
46	---> '''Tyrion Lannister:''' Shagga likes axes.
47	---> '''Lord Lefford:''' He still had that woodaxe strapped to his back.
48	---> '''Tyrion Lannister:''' Shagga is of the opinion that three axes are better than two.
49	* ''Literature/TauZero'' concerns time dilation in a slower-than-light colony ship, the ''Leonora Christine''. To begin, it flies close enough to lightspeed that a 30-something-light-year journey will only take about a decade, from the point of view of the ship...but the main reason for this is the need to decelerate. When the ship's deceleration system is damaged and [[SpaceFriction the crew need to find a safe place to turn off the engines without being shredded by interstellar hydrogen]], they need to accelerate closer and closer to lightspeed, to increase the time dilation on-ship enough to be able to survive the journey... but the faster they go, the emptier space has to be to count as a vacuum...and the faster they have to go to be able to survive the longer and longer journey to the emptier stretches of space. By the time they find a region of space that's empty enough for them to repair the ship, [[spoiler:the [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Crunch Big Crunch]] has started, so they have to wait for it to finish, along with the ensuing next [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Bang Big Bang]], calculating their deceleration to end up in a star system where they'll most likely find an inhabitable planet.]] It's made even crazier by the fact that the ship's objective speed only changes by the tiniest fraction of a percentage of the speed of light.
50	* In ''Literature/UndefeatedBahamutChronicle'', Lux is first asked by Krulcifer to [[TheBeard pretend to be her boyfriend]], to stop her family badgering her into getting married. Later on, she brings him to her homeland with the pretence that they're engaged and are regularly having sex (by this point she's actually attracted to him). And then Lux and Philuffy have to infiltrate a hostile country with the cover story of being ''newlyweds''.
51	* In ''Literature/{{Worm}}'', the antagonists that Taylor, our protagonist, faces go from bullies at her school to local gang leaders to city-killing monstrosities and worse until by the end [[spoiler:she manages to MindControl almost every superpowered individual on every alternate earth in order to bully a PhysicalGod to death.]]

Context SerialEscalation / Literature