''The entropy of a fictional system whose writer is not in emotional equilibrium will tend to increase over time, approaching a maximum value at the writer's emotional equilibrium.''

->I do not understand why everything in this script must inevitably explode.
--->'''Teal'c''', ''[[StargateSG1 Stargate SG-1]]'', while reading the script of ''[[ShowWithinAShow Wormhole X-Treme: The movie]].''

There's no other way to say it: writers like killing and destroying. Nothing makes them happier than having people die or StuffBlowingUp. (In their writing, not in their real-world behavior. We're sure about this. Mostly.) It's the quickest way to get drama, too.

Unfortunately, writers cannot destroy all their fictional creations without ruining the story. Some of those creations have ContractualImmortality. Even when they don't, killing characters off or nuking cities can change the flow of a story in rather unfortunate ways. And [[KillEmAll destroying everything]] means there's no more story, and thus no more paychecks for the writer.

As a result, when there ''is'' anything expendable, writers will expend it. If the writer can bring people back to life by pushing the ResetButton, then people will die as long as the button is there. If a city has been evacuated, that city will go down in flames. Atomic flames, preferably. [[ThrowAwayCountry If it hasn't been evacuated, the writers can blow it up anyway if no named characters are there.]] It's not like readers will be upset, right?

The less often the writers get to do this, the more pyrotechnics they pack in. When everything is expendable (like in a show with NegativeContinuity), the writers will increase their system's entropy at a leisurely pace. [[OnceAnEpisode One death an episode or so]] will do. If almost everything has ContractualImmortality, then killable characters and inflammable places are rare treats, and the writers will spring on them like the proverbial hungry wolves on a sheep.

At times, some writers seem to be working out their stress by destroying fictional people and places. The carnage is always greatest at the moment the writer gets better, since they will increase the entropy until their self-therapy finally works. Needless to say, CreatorBreakdown almost inevitably leads to higher entropy.

This is the reason for the following tropes:

* AllTheMyriadWays
* AnyoneCanDie
* BattleRoyaleWithCheese
* CListFodder
* CloningBlues
* ConvenientlyEmptyBuilding
* ResetButton
* StuffedIntoTheFridge
* TonightSomeoneDies
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!!Examples:

[[foldercontrol]]

[[folder: Comic Books ]]

* DarkAge comics seemed to go through a period when blowing up or wrecking cities, or killing off characters, was the flavor of the decade. Especially [[TheDCU DC]] with its Coast City debacle, Gotham City's "No Man's Land", and three-quarters of Metropolis being wrecked. And Montevideo (wonder how the real city took the news?). The capitol of Nebraska gets nuked by an alien thingie, with the after effects blowing over half of Smallville. They seem to be reverting to this again with several [[ThrowAwayCountry Throw Away Countries]] being violently depopulated and Bludhaven drowning in toxic chemicals/going boom.
** Random worldwide massacres. Maggedon comes along, thousands croak in the affects of his defeat. Cyborg comes back to life, eats the moon, the world shakes and shimmies and buildings collapse. 'Infinite Crisis' had hurricanes chowing down all over the world, entire cities flood and nearly every volcano ''ever'' blowing its top.
** Gotham City in the comics. Every time Joker slips loose from Arkham Asylum or the Scarecrow gets his crazy on or heck, there's just a party, something shows up and turns hundreds of people into crispy fried corpses. And the police officers...does anyone train them? They go down dead when looked at hard.
** Given that society failed to collapse it seems that DC Earth has the greatest therapists the multiverse has ever known.
* [[MarvelUniverse Marvel]] also had its bloodbaths, with Manhattan being badly damaged by Onslaught (and later, mostly leveled by Magneto), Carnage and his troops turning the streets into killing fields and the island of Genosha and its sixteen million mutants being killed.
** UltimateMarvel has had ''millions'' killed by the various {{Alien Invasion}}s (especially the worldwide mass suicides during Ultimate Galactus), Magneto's Brotherhood attacks, Proteus' RealityWarper rampage, and the Liberators' brief conquest of the United States.
** Let's not forget the Civil War arc, where The Hulk caused a ludicrous amount of damage to New York. Admittedly, it was (somewhat) justified. Well, kinda.
**It gets bad whenever Marvel has the heavier cosmic characters go at it. In one story simply waking the ruling celestial destroyed two galaxies. Even planet eater Galactus [[BringMyBrownPants was having trouble holding it in]].
**Infinity Gauntlet was an example of the reset button. Ironman loses his head, Spider-man's head is crushed, Thor is turned to stone, half the universe suddenly dies etc.
* ''JudgeDredd'' also followed this trend; from the early comics, where a Judge would risk his life to save a single child, to later when it was acceptable behavior to gun down one innocent if it meant hitting the two perps next to them, to some storylines where wholesale carnage was status quo. This troper was particularly offended by ''Graveyard Shift'', which was about the riots and carnage in Mega-City that cost thousands of lives and was assumed to happen ''nightly''. After a while you stopped caring.

[[/folder]]

[[folder: Film ]]

* ''ResidentEvil'' Apocalypse: Alice and company are safely escaping in the helicopter. 99.44% of the rest of the city is zombies anyway. [[spoiler: So Umbrella Corp nukes it.]]
** Under the circumstances, is that an unreasonable response?
* ''Return of the Living Dead'' The army has no idea how to get rid of the zombies. They bomb the whole town. This proves to be ill-advised.
* Subverted in ''{{Outbreak}}''. The viewers were given plenty of information about the residents of the town about to be bombed. So naturally the day is saved.
* In ''Film/{{Alien}} vs {{Predator}}: Requiem'', [[spoiler:the {{MIB}} deal with the Alien infestation by blowing up the entire town, leaving only the heroes who were smart enough to ignore the government advice to escape.]]
* In relation to the comics above, ''TheDarkKnight'' is an exception. In the comics, it's a rare, rare person who escapes the attentions of the Joker alive, much less un-maimed. In the movie, many do so, even cops who are usually the first to go.
** ''TheDarkKnight'' and ''BatmanBegins'' seem to be working very hard to present Batman and his world in a '[[LowLowFantasy realistic]]' setting. In a superheroic setting where the main characters are far more powerful and capable than normal humans, the Joker can go omnicidal easily enough. But when you present Joker as a 'realistic' psycho, he's more limited.

[[/folder]]

[[folder: Literature ]]

* E M Dutch does this in ''AnotherDayAnotherNightmare''. Every time she reached a plot hole, or suffered from writers' block, she killed someone off. In increasingly imaginative ways, including a flock of exploding pink [[strike:budgies]] parakeets. I really wish I was kidding. Apparently, the (as yet unpublished) sequel(s) contains more of the same, to the extent that the author has stated she can't write another in the series because everyone with unresolved plot has already been killed off...

[[/folder]]

[[folder: Live Action TV ]]

* ''[[TwentyFour 24]]'' without a doubt. The writers seem to create characters, buildings, and whole cities for the express purpose of killing or destroying them later.
* It becomes clear that there are so many people with abilities in ''Series/{{Heroes}}'' so that the writers have lots of cool people to kill off in shocking ways. They take it one step further with their alternate futures where something is always about to be blown-up, a virus will kill everyone, or some other cataclysm will take place, but thanks the ResetButton, it never comes to pass. This of course allows for more alternate timelines to be created and averted. Very trop-ish to say the least, but it is quite entertaining.
* Beginning as a strange but mostly plausible story about what happens to retired secret agents, ''ThePrisoner'' gets more bizarre over time until the last episode leaves viewers utterly dumbfounded.
* The intro sequence of ''SevenDays'' uses a shot of missiles striking the White House. That was in the pilot episode, and things only get more dangerous from there.
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