|
|
"Every atom in existence is bound by an electrical field. The Reality Bomb cancels it out, structure falls apart... Full transmission will dissolve every form of matter... Across the entire universe, never stopping, never faltering, never fading. People and planets and stars will become dust . And the dust will become atoms and the atoms will become... nothing . And the wavelength will continue, breaking through the rift at the heart of the Medusa Cascade into every dimension, every parallel, every single corner of CREATION! This is my ultimate victory, Doctor! THE DESTRUCTION! OF REALITY! ITSELF!!!"
Omniversal-scale Annihilation. Can take on three forms:
The Ultimate End Of All Things: The Physical Annihilation of everything, everywhere. Period. Only counts for fictional universes that have alternate dimensions or some such that would prevent Universal Physical Annihilation from working.
Cosmic Do-Over: The Metaphysical Annihilation of everything. It is not "the end of all things", because "after" this happens, nothing ever existed, even in the "past" (for lack of a better way to put it). There never was anything to annihilate; you can't have an end to something if you wipe out its beginning. This is the retroactive destruction of all of everything, everywhere.
Ultimate Destruction: Not only has all of reality been erased, and never existed, but all realities, all versions of alternate realities, don't exist. All of creation, ever, is "gone" and does not exist in all time periods and timelines, ok well, was there any such thing called time (to be retconned) at all, ever? Everything, everywhere, everywhen, with every exception, if there is one, being shown at some point.
Depending on whether the work treats metafiction as a type of alternate universe, this may not be a credible threat since the destruction of all things would have to include our own reality. There may also be Fridge Logic if it's likely that an alternate universe exists where the heroes failed to prevent the apocalypse. Both of these issues can be justified or lampshaded.
Examples:
open/close all folders
Anime and Manga
- In Soul Eater Death The Kid goes mad and decides at one point that the only way to create ultimate symmetry is to destroy all of existence. Luckily for everyone, Black Star manages to pretty much (literally) beat some sense into him. He's back to normal now.
- Near the end of Futari wa Pretty Cure, the Dark King is purportedly destroying multiple planets in his spare time. His goal, as stated throughout the series, is the total destruction of all existence.
- El Hazard 2: This is the reason Kalia exists. According Yuba Yurias, once she assembles the Trigger of Destruction, she begins to wipe out all life, in all words until nothing remains. She then crosses over into the next nearest dimension and begins this process anew, and was to repeat this until all that remained was a void. Upon which, her final act would be to turn the "Trigger" on it/herself and perish.
Comicbooks
- In Grant Morrison's Doom Patrol, this is what will happen if the Anti-God, let free by the Cult of the Unwritten Book, is able to proceed with unmaking the universe. "Nothing. Forever and ever."
- In Lucifer, the spin-off from The Sandman, all of Creation was nearly unmade when God left creation. Since His name is on everything in Heaven, Earth and everywhere else, and it holds it all together, everything started to slowly break down. It was averted when God left His job as supreme deity to his half-angel granddaughter. Chances are her universe — the third at the time — would have survived anyway, not being entangled with God's crappy handiwork.
Films
- In Dogma, if the Word Of God is ever proven wrong, all of creation will cease to exist.
- This is the goal of the Warlock, and he comes Damned close.
Literature
- All of Spider Robinson's time-travel stories are fueled by the premise that a genuine temporal paradox will result in the complete annihilation of space-time from beginning to end, not only destroying everything, but causing it never to have existed at all.
- In The Keys To The Kingdom series by Garth Nix, if the House is destroyed by Nothing, reality will cease to exist (including all the Secondary Realms). This does end up happening, but it gets better, since Arthur is able to recreate the Realms from the Atlas.
- The Dark Tower — this is what happens if the Tower falls - the utter chaotic destruction of every single universe, dimension, plane, time, space etc etc. The Big Bad want to this because he claims he will be able to rule the chaos that will exist forever afterwards.(Could be a Class X5 depending whether said chaos counts as a universe.) The worrying part is that this is starting to happen already at the beginning of the series. Even more scary is that protagonist has to succeed every single time. The antagonist just has to win once.
- It's hinted that Suzumiya Haruhi has the power to do this (but not the mental sickness required to, at least not yet).
- In the Belgariad series by David Eddings features a the End of All things scenario: If the Child of Dark were to win the battle with the Child of Light, the universe would cease to exist. However, in the Mallorean, it changed to the Cosmic Do-Over.
Live-Action TV
- Unsurprisingly, Doctor Who has a few examples of this extreme:
- In "Journey's End", Davros, who gives the page quote, comes within a hair's breadth of destroying all matter in the entire multiverse save for himself and his group of Daleks.
- The TARDIS explosion from series 5 is listed under Class X-5, but comes damn close. It comes within a single planet and a few minutes of being Class Z.
- It should be noted that Doctor Who has an example in every category for this trope. If there's one thing these people know, it is how to kill a lot of people/planets/etc.
- In "The Big Bang" it reaches Class Z-3 - all realities never existed. Creation never existed. Nothing ever existed. The above statements ignore Earth and the moon and sun.
- The sun was destroyed too, since the big ball of fire that rises and sets every day was the TARDIS exploding.
- Note it's easy to miss that it's a Z-3 and not a Z-2, since its status is only confirmed in a single, blink and you miss it line of dialogue from a Cyberman in the previous episode. "All universes will be deleted."
- It should be noted that only Doctor Who ever produced examples which can even remotely qualify for above vanilla Class Z.
- Even better, Series 6 makes it clear that the Silence want the Doctor gone because, whatever happens when the Question gets answered, must be even worse than the Z-3's that they have caused. Think about that for a moment.
- Famous episode writer Steven Moffatt plans to reveal said name in the season 7 finale (which airs tomorrow, so I expect this to be edited)
- The denial of a fixed point in history at the end of Series 6 creates a temporal explosion threatening to collapse and kill all of reality, spreading outward from the point that was broken.
- Glory's portal on Buffy the Vampire Slayer would have merged our dimension and all others. Considering the differences in physical laws between dimensions, this probably would have killed almost all beings in almost all of them.
- Actually the portal will only join the dimensions briefly whilst Glory passes through it, whilst presenting a real problem for Sunnydale whilst it's still open its pretty much explicitly stated that they would let her do if it didn't involve murdering Dawn.
Music
- Actually happens in Food for the Gods. Satan leads an army of the damned into Heaven, and starts utterly laying waste to everything in sight. God responds by going completely insane with rage and obliterating all of creation.
Tabletop Games
- This is the fate of Creation if the Nobilis lose their Valde Bellum. Retroactively, no less.
- The Abyssal Exalted were created by the Neverborn with the express intent of throwing Creation into Oblivion, freeing the Neverborn from their fetters to existence by getting rid of existence.
- This is the presumed goal of the Wyrm in Werewolf The Apocalypse, although some speculate that Its goal is actually to make things as horrible as possible and keep it that way forever.
Videogames
- The Qualia in Chaos Rings does this if the heroes fail in the final battle.
- The fourth or fifth endings of Drakengard if not for the intervention of the heroes.
- The second Tasty Planet game has the Goo devour progressively bigger things, eventually getting to planets, stars, entire galaxies, and eventually the fabric of space-time itself.
- Sonic the Hedgehog (2006) comes dangerously close to Solaris (the joining of Mephiles and Iblis) devouring all of time, past, present, and future and all of existence if Sonic, Shadow and Silver hadn't stopped him.
- In Sonic Generations, the Time Eater ( controlled by current and past versions of Dr. Eggman/Robotnik) has the ability to erase time and space. The game starts during this process of time erasure, but because of the two Sonics, it never gets very far.
- Live A Live. You are the one who can end everything by simply choosing the Armageddon option. It disintegrates everything, in every place, in every time period, all at once (even though just destroying the Prehisoric chapter should have been enough), so you know it's horrible.
- In Final Fantasy IX, Kuja comes within a hairs breadth of pulling one of these off. He almost manages to destroy the crystal that holds the fabric of reality together. Luckily after he manages to beat the party to death, forcing them to fight and defeat a big blue thing who got trapped in that crystal all along and decided that since Kuja wanted to destroy everything, it was time to end the universe, he has a last minute Heel Face Turn, resurrects the party, and dies offscreen after Zidane has found him inside the now death-throeing Iifa Tree.
- In Final Fantasy VI, Kefka manages to succeed in a severe Class 1 destruction of the world, and when he learns to his disgust about people's hopes, love, and dreams, he decides that he'll "Destroy everything and create a monument to Non-existence."
- In Dissidia the Cloud of Darkness and Exdeath had a talk about the differences in their plans to destroy existence. Exdeath himself may have rather ruled over everything but the Void has other plans.
- The bad ending of the Demon path in Soul Nomad has Revya doing this after devouring Gig. Why? Cause it was fun.
- In Super Paper Mario, this is Count Bleck's true plan. He's later backstabbed and replaced by Dimentio, who settles for a Class X-5 with the intent of reconstructing it in his own image. However, after Dimentio is defeated by the heroes, he resets it back to Class Z, since if he can't remake the world with his death, he might as well destroy all of existence with him.
- In Ratchet & Clank: A Crack in Time, this is implied to happen if someone tries to use The Great Clock for time travel. Nearly happens, too, thanks to Azimuth.
- Shin Megami Tensei III Nocturne. True Demon Path. All universes in the entire omniverse are obliterated with no chance of recreation by the death of God's avatar at the hands of the demonically-powered Hito-Shura. Demons and fiends are all that's left. The Final Battle between Lucifer and God is now unavoidable...
- In Chrono Cross, the Time Devourer intends to consume every timeline, destroying everything in existence. It can only be stopped by the titular Chrono Cross, which temporarily merges the timelines and allows Serge to Ret Gone Lavos.
- In I Miss The Sunrise, according to the Black One, the Big Bad's plan (compressing the universe into a single point of energy — essentially an artificial big crunch) will cause "the end of all things". It's not entirely clear how or why, though.
Webcomics
- In Homestuck, messing around with the fourth wall is supposed to be even worse than Class Z, according to Karkat:
CG: BUT SUFFICE TO SAY THERE ARE JUST SOME THINGS YOU DON'T WANT TO SCREW WITH.
CG: THERE ARE OUTCOMES THAT ARE EVEN WORSE THAN THE COMPLETE ANNIHILATION OF EXISTENCE ITSELF
CG: FORCES MORE DAMAGING TO THE INTEGRITY OF REALITY THAN THOSE CAPABLE OF TURNING IMAGINATION INTO PURE VOID
GC: THEY ARE FORCES WHICH IF HANDLED RECKLESSLY WILL NULLIFY THE BASIC ABILITY OF INTELLIGENT BEINGS IN ALL REAL AND HYPOTHETICAL PLANES OF EXISTENCE TO GIVE A SHIT.
- The threat of such an event is a major plot point in The Order of the Stick, in that breaking all of the gates would presumably bring about the unraveling of the world, eventually.
Web Originals
Western Animation
- In Transformers, this is Unicron's ultimate goal. Given that his overall method is to eat the entire multiverse one planet at a time, its taking him quite a while, but, impressively, he's already devoured about 22.5% of known universes that way.
- This is the goal of Owlman in Justice League Crisis On Two Earths, once he learns of the existence of the multiverse. It is quite awesome, but ultimately foiled by Batman.
- Attempted by Spider-Carnage in Spider-Man: The Animated Series. After losing Uncle Ben and Aunt May, then experiencing his world's version of the Clone Saga and having to face a 50/50 chance that he's not the real Peter Parker, he's possessed by the Carnage symbiote, this alternate universe Spider-Man sets a new standard for Ax Crazy. He attempts to, in his own words, "Destroy all reality." His plan is basic: trigger a bomb similar to the Davros example, unraveling the bonds that keep atoms together. It won't stop at destroying the Earth, or even the universe: With the help of a portal courtesy of the technology that created The Spot, the blast will be replicated across the entirety of the multiverse, ensuring that when Spider-Carnage dies all of creation dies with him.
- Done as a joke for an intro to The Simpsons, where aliens create a wormhole that's powerful enough to even suck God into it, leaving nothing but a blank slate.
- Similarly, Professor Farnsworth of Futurama makes doomsday devices as a hobby, including one that "destroys everything everywhere"
Other
- According to Solipsism, your mind is the only sure thing to exist. In Metaphysical solipsism, everything else is just a part of your reality. When you die, all of reality is destroyed with you.
|
|
