Earth All Along - Television Tropes & Idioms

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You finally, really did it. You MANIACS! You BLEW IT UP! Aw, damn you! GOD DAMN YOU ALL TO HELL!

"The only danger is if they send us to that terrible Planet of the Apes. Wait a minute... Statue of Liberty... that was our planet!!"

— Homer Simpson on the potential dangers of space travel, The Simpsons.

A variety of the Tomato Surprise, in which at the very end of a Speculative Fiction story, the apparently alien setting turns out to be the Earth, warped and twisted by disaster, disease, the passage of time, or some other instrument of drastic change.

Almost invariably this involves a character who was sure he was anywhere but Earth discovering the Awful Truth.

This trope used to be called the Planet Of The Apes Ending, for the famous concluding scene of the original 1968 version of Planet of the Apes, where the revelation that the hero is back home comes when he comes across the ruins of the Statue of Liberty, which acts as The Constant. (The 2001 remake, while treading the same ground, uses a quite different ending based on that of the original French SF novel.)

At some point, this actually was very shocking (partially because humanity was very close to blowing itself up in the 1960s) and is one of the most famous kinds of Twist Ending. Through over-use, these days, it's become The Untwist; it would usually be more surprising if the apocalyptic planet turned out to be anywhere but Earth.

Variations:

A classic Twilight Zone twist: the characters in the story turn out to be Human Aliens. They're stranded on a primitive planet and now have to colonize. On resigning themselves to their fate, the leader says, "And I shall call this planet 'Earth'." Double points if his name is Adam. (The original Twilight Zone actually used this plot in "Probe 7—Over and Out".)
The preferred Outer Limits version: the peaceful folks living in fear of alien invasion are really humanoid aliens. The aggressors? Humans. - this variation also a classic Twilight Zone episode- "The Invaders".
Instead of believing it to be a different place, believe it to be a different time. The two variants: You believe you're in caveman days, but later realize you're in the future After The End, or you believe you're in the future, but later realize you're in the past during an enlightened period that will later get destroyed (with all record of it also wiped out). Since the actual Planet of the Apes Ending generally includes a level of time travel, this variant only counts if you were never confused about which planet you were on.

As you might expect, this is an Ending Trope, so there are many spoilers below. However, once you've read the description above, most Planet of the Apes Endings are self-spoiling anyhow.

Related to Humans Through Alien Eyes.

And of course...

You finally, really did it. You MANIACS! You BLEW IT UP! Aw, damn you! GOD DAMN YOU ALL TO HELL!
— Taylor, Planet Of The Apes

Examples:

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It Was Earth All Along

Parodied in the mockumentary The Independent starring Jerry Stiller: one of the films Morty Fineman creates is entitled What Planet is This (Oh My God it's Earth).

Anime and Manga

In Combat Mecha Xabungle, the low-tech worker-caste "Civilians" scrape out a hard-scrabble existence on a desert world, believing themselves to be descended from Terran colonists; over the course of the series, the planet is revealed to be (of course) Earth, stretched to the very end of its ecological rope. The 'colony' story was spread by the high-tech ruling-caste "Innocents" to cover up their plans to escape off-world and leave the Civilians to die.
In Eureka Seven, it turns out that the planet everyone escaped to to get away from the aliens invading Earth is actually Earth itself, transformed by the scub coral into a mostly-unrecognizable shape.
There are sufficient hints at the end of Mai-Otome to make the viewer at least wonder if the apparent colony world is in fact a far-future and much-changed Earth.
Super Dimension Fortress Macross: Love, Do You Remember? has a Planet of the Apes middle, when Hikaru and Misa find out that the planet they were transported to is Earth after a Zentradi attack.
Clow Country in Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle is the Tokyo from the Tokyo/X arc, just at a different point in time. This also counts as Nice Job Breaking It Hero since the protagonists were at least partially responsible for what happened to it.
Parodied in Keroro Gunso: Giroro and Natsuki get warped into a Desert of the Real by accident, and while searching for signs of civilisation, find it in the form of a familiar landmark in the series, the NPG Radio Tower - in ruins. The untwist: they're NOT in the distant future, the tower was merely declared obsolete after the NPG company built a better one. And there's several other previously obsoleted towers in the immediate area, just to hammer the point home.
Yasuhiro Yoshiura's Pale Cocoon inverts this. It was Moon all along. People thought they were living under destroyed Earth, and lost most of their historical records, but actually they were living in a Moon-colony with artifical gravity where people escaped environmental destruction. And when the protagonist looks at the sky for the first time, he sees blue Earth shining in the sky, as a sign that the planet has healed long ago, but no-one had thought to look.

Comic Books

In a bizarre case of this trope (it was not the end of the series, but Cliff Hanger revelation for the issue), the Archie Comics Sonic The Hedgehog series had Mobius revealed to be Earth far into the future, after an attempt by Cthulhu-like aliens to wipe out humanity for crimes against them. This was done to make the comic fall in line with its video game brethren, which had Sonic and company on Earth from the get-go. Some fans were not amused.
In Supreme, during the Alan Moore run, Supreme's buddies visit an alien planet and help the humanoid aliens fight the savage cannibals that live on underground caves. The twist, of course, is that the savage cannibals are humans, modified by exposure to nuclear radiation after World War Three. Then, they realize that superheroes are powerless in the face of nuclear threat.

Film

In The Film Of The Book Logan's Run, Logan and Jessica make it to the surface only to find the ruins of Washington, D.C.
- In the book, it was made very clear where they were to begin with—Washington was not in ruins; it was not After The End, but just in a Brave New World-like pleasure culture. This is why they wind up safe not on Earth but on a space station orbiting Mars.
Shua spends much of Sky Blue talking about how great Gibraltar will be, and how he'll go there after the fall of Ecoban. Guess where Ecoban is.
Star Trek The Motion Picture has a variation. At the heart of "V'Ger", the crew finds the fictional NASA probe Voyager 6 (there were only two Voyagers in Real Life, both launched shortly before the film's release) with its nameplate scuzzied up so it reads "V'GER". Apparently, the living machines which "improved" it knew English phonetics, but never invented Windex.
The Czech science fiction film Ikarie XB-1 (released in the US as Voyage to the End of the Universe) actually gained one of these through Cut And Paste Translation; in the original film, the characters were human astronauts seeking "The Green Planet"; the Americanized version of the film added stock footage of New York City to the scene where they finally discover the planet, changing the ending from The End Of The Beginning to Earth All Along.

Literature

The short story The Hunters has an invasion by ferocious aliens who destroy the civilization of the planet. At the end it is revealed that the invaders are humans.
One of the numerous Goosebumps books focused on Camp Nightmoon, a seemingly harmless summer camp where kids are taught military-style lessons to invade another planet... that planet, of course, being Earth.
- The TV Show episode portrays them more as alien explorers, and the end result may be a non-Vulcan version of the First Contact.
The Nitrogen Fix by Hal Clement kicks this up a notch by making Earth actively uninhabitable to human beings (as in, survival domes and oxygen masks), and introducing an alien race that thrives in the new environment.
In Grant Naylor's Red Dwarf novels (not the TV series), Lister is trapped on Garbage World, where humanity has dumped centuries' worth of its waste, for 30+ years. Early on, he finds the oil- and acid-rain-soaked, but still recognisable, shape of Mount Rushmore with its five presidents' heads (don't ask).
In Andre Norton's Star Rangers, a decrepit patrol ship from a decaying human-dominated galactic empire finally breaks down for good far from the galactic core and its civilizations. The faraway fringe world on which our heroes are stranded seems almost too perfect to the human crew members, though...
Gary Paulsen's SF novel The Transall Saga.
In Michael Marshall Smith's typically Mind Screwy debut novel, Only Forward, The City was mistaken by the protagonist for a parallel dimension but turns out to be a future Earth. The Constant here is Nelson's Column.
Ea of David Zindell's EaCycle turns out to be Earth millions of years into the future.
A variation: Larry Niven's A World Out Of Time has a relativistic spaceship pilot trying to return to Earth millions of years after he set out, and since the solar system has undergone extensive remodeling since he left and his computer has gone crazy, he can't tell whether it's Earth or not. And since the launching system he needs to get back up to ramscoop speed is long gone, he has to figure out which is true before he stops— because once he does, he can't go anywhere ever again.

Live Action TV

It wasn't the ending, per se, but the Doctor Who story "The Mysterious Planet" did feature the discovery (due to a Tube sign) that the planet the Doctor and Peri were on was actually Earth and it had been shoved half way across the galaxy.
- Similarly, the audio drama "Terror Firma" has the reveal that the setting of the story is a Dalek-conquered Earth.
- Also, in the comic "The Glorious Dead", the Doctor discovers that the planet Dhakan is in fact Earth with an altered history, after the discovery of St Paul's Cathedral.
Stargate SG-1, "Solitudes": Two members of the team seem to have been shunted to the wrong planet due to an overloaded Stargate. Turns out it's a second Earth gate, buried under the ice in Antarctica. This also serves as a great big lampshade for the whole Single Biome Planet thing.
- How, exactly? Since every planet they visit is Earthlike and presumably has an Arctic and Antarctic?
- Carter assumed it was an ice planet simply because that was all she could see.
The Twilight Zone episode I Shot an Arrow Into the Air features 3 astronauts crash landing on what they think is an unknown desert planet. At the end, it is revealed that the "desert planet" is actually a stretch of Nevadan desert about 97 miles from Reno. Only one astronaut survives the infighting over water and supplies to discover this.

Music

Appears in the Music Video for "Sing For Absolution" by Muse. After flying a spaceship across the galaxy, Matt Bellamy and his crew collide with an asteroid and plunge onto a desolate desert planet. They step out... and find themselves on the ruins of Westminster Bridge, London, with the smoking remains of the Houses of Parliament behind them.

Radio

A hybridization of Earth All Along, the Adam And Eve Plot, and an anti-Earth All Along occurs in the '70s BBC Radio Drama Earthsearch: The crew of the colony-ship Challenger tries to return to their home planet, Earth, to find it missing, and finally decides to settle on the new planet Paradise. Paradise is a lot like Earth, but it has saltwater oceans, and a heavily cratered moon. They eventually start referring to the planet as "their" Earth. There are a number of clues and red herrings — the other planets in Earth's solar system have different names, but we're told that the planets were renamed centuries earlier, for example. Just in case you didn't work out the original "Earth" wasn't Earth at all, the sequel begins with a global flood.
- The prequel, Earthsearch: Mindwarp has as sort of a Planet Of The Apes First Act, in that it takes place in an underground complex thought to be surrounded by rock infinitely in all directions, but when the main characters escape they find themselves on the original "Earth", but this happens early on.
The ending of the first season of Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy radio series, as well as The Restaurant at the End of the Universe in its novelization adaptation, features the main characters unexpectedly once more on Earth, with a rather unflattering secret about mankind unveiled in the process. We're apparently descended from a race of aliens who're all Too Dumb To Live.

Tabletop Games

The Roleplaying Game Earthdawn has a metagame aspect of this trope: the setting takes place A Long Time Ago on Earth, but there is no time travel, and the inhabitants naturally aren't affected by this. However, the clues were few (with only very small maps available), so most players actually never figured it out.
- Note, by the way, that the RPG Shadowrun is in contrast one of the most successful RPGs on the market, while being the same universe as Earthdawn, just Twenty Minutes Into The Future rather than A Long Time Ago.

Video Games

City Of Heroes has a weird version of this: much of the game's plot revolves around an alien invasion from a world in a parallel dimension. Which turns out to be an alternate version of Earth, where humans have been heavily modified into killing machines.

Web Comics

This is reversed in Dawn of Time. At first it appears to take place in the past, with the addition of the cavegirl-alongside-dinosaurs Flintstones device. However, as more of the world is shown through the story it's revealed that there are large cities, more advanced technology, and trading routes, showing that the world is more of an alternate universe. It's just Dawn who's incredibly primitive and possibly not even human.

Western Animation

Lampshaded in Futurama: "The next day, Billy's planet was destroyed by aliens. Have you guessed the name of Billy's planet? It was Earth! Don't date robots!"
In the Justice League episode "Hereafter" Superman wakes on a planet with a red sun after being blasted by Toyman and presumed dead. He makes his way across the wasteland to a jungle area, dealing with strange local creatures along the way. Considering the page I'm writing this on, you can guess what he learns when he meets up with his old 'friend' Vandal Savage.
In addition to the Homer quote above, The Simpsons episode "A Fish Called Selma" includes a musical stage version of Planet Of The Apes called "Stop the Planet of the Apes, I Want to Get Off". The song that Troy McClure, as Taylor, performs during the final scene literally names the trope in its lyrics:
I hate every chimp I see
From chimpan-A to chimpanzee
No you'll never make a monkey out of me!
...oh, my God! I was wrong!
It was Earth All Along!
You've finally made a monkey
(Oh yes we've finally made a monkey!)
Yes, you've finally made a monkey
Out of me!
The punch-line of the first season of Transformers: Beast Wars was that it doubles as both a sequel and prequel to Transformers Generation 1: the primitive planet on which they found themselves was, indeed, Earth all along, millions of years in the past, and the entire series was set during the period of dormancy while the Autobots and Decepticons were unconscious in their crashed ships halfway through the first episode. However, all the characters were from long after the original series, winding up on prehistoric Earth due to time travel. There are some dead giveaways Stonehenge was made by aliens!, but enough red herrings to make them look like they aren't dead giveaways. Speaking of red herrings, the second moon turns out to not be a moon at all. The Reveal is handled nicely, bringing the plot together for second and third seasons with episodes far more connected than those of the first.
- Particularly well handled considering that Megatron believes it is Earth from the first episode, though Dinobot does not, given the two moons and lack of civilization. Audiences were given conflicting evidence to support either a primitive Earth or an Earth-look-alike until discs came into play.

Close It Was Earth All Along

It Was Our Homeworld All Along

It wasn't actually Earth, but the twist ending to the fifth season premiere of Andromeda was that the dystopian Seefra-1 was really Tarn Vedra, the captain's home planet and former seat of the Commonwealth.
Dragon Quest III (Dragon Warrior III in America) had the protagonist fall into the Dark World, where he must defeat the demonlord Zoma. After defeating him, the locals celebrate by giving him the title of Loto (or Erdrick, in American NES versions). This reveals that the "Dark World" is actually Alefgard, the kingdom the first game takes place in (which also appears in the second), and that III was a prequel.
- Mind you, if you had played the first two games, the map of the Dark World and identical town names were a pretty big clue. By the way, the overworld of the first world of Dragon Quest III is a distorted Earth. I always thought it looked a bit like those Continental Drift drawings of earth not-too-many millions of years ago.
  - And all the kingdoms are named after real-life ones: Romaly (Rome), Portoga (Portugal), Zipangu (Japan), and so on.
The Elseworld mini-series/graphic novel Red Son ends with a twist: Krypton is actually a far future Earth, a utopia created by Jor-L's famous ancestor Lex Luthor, who founded it after defeating the Comrade of Steel (see Temporal Paradox).
In The Pendragon Adventure's eighth book, The Pilgrims of Rayne, Ibara is revealed to be an island on Veelox a few miles off the shore of Rubic City. 300 years in the future. Upon visiting Rubic City, Bobby finds the place a ghost town, with the Lifelight Pyramids now being tombs, and the only humans around are crazed pirate-like scavengers. It's rather terrifying.
Urinetown: The Musical: "For when the water dried up, they recognized their town for what it really was, what it was always waiting to be..."
Asimov's The Stars Like Dust is a veritable cornucopia of Planet Of The Apes Endings. About half the chapters end with the reader's sudden discovery that the story's location is not what it seemed. Contains examples of "It Was Earth All Along", "It Was The Homeworld All Along", and "After The End".
Zork Zero, prequel to the seminal Zork text adventures, makes its setting in the timeline fairly clear from the start. The twist comes at the end of the game, when you inadvertently transform the castle in the story into the little white house from the opening of the original game.
An award-winning Star Trek short story called "Our Million-Year Mission" had an Uber-Enterprise (comprised completely of holograms from the galaxy's best minds, including the crews of all the Enterprises...and a very real Data; no one but him knows any of that until The Reveal, however) that finds a replica of the Milky Way galaxy devoid of life billions of light-years from where it should be. Only it's not a replica...it is the Milky Way, and all of its life-forms have ascended to a higher plane of existence, making it a sentient galaxy.
The 2000AD short story The Last Hurrah of the Platinum Horde, by Alan Moore, has a gang of space age barbarian warriors deciding to leave their home planet and set off in a straight line across the universe raping, pillaging and killing everything in their path. It turns out that the universe is curved, and they end up coming back to their homeworld from the opposite direction and inadvertantly sacking it.
The early Arthur C. Clarke short story "Encounter in the Dawn" depicts First Contact between a technologically advanced galaxy-spanning empire and a primitive caveman tribe on a backwater planet. The description of the explorers is pretty much humans in the Standard Sci Fi Setting, however when the survey team is recalled, it is revealed that the cavemen they interacted with would eventually found the city of Babylon.
- This story was first collected in a 1950s edition named "Expedition to Earth", and the story was also given that title. It's a catchier name than "Encounter in the Dawn", I guess, but it did kind of give away the ending.
Pandorum: The audience is led to believe ( the spaceship has been drifting in space, but it is revealed at the very end that they had crash landed on the destination planet hundreds of years ago. If they had ejected themselves and the rest of the passengers at the beginning, they would have been saved.)

Close It Was Our Homeworld All Along

Starting Earth from Scratch

Before The Beginning or After The End

Anime and Manga

An interesting manga variant with an Anvilicious Aesop, delivered by mangaka Rumiko Takahashi in the early 1970's. A time vortex opens up in a classroom and starving primitive peasants spill out. Clues lead the class to assume that these are time-travelers from a historical famine centuries in the past. Since the class had been discussing the world's declining resources, they give huge amounts of food to the starving peasants before sending them home. "Home" turns out to be thirty years in the future - evidentally the people in the past would end up sending so much food through the time portal to help "the past" that they would end up collapsing civilization.
Scrapped Princess does this to the viewer, with a small hint that something might not be as it seems being at the beginning of the very first episode, and nothing more said about it until partway through the series. Everyone in the show is seen to be living in a catchall generic Middle Ages fantasy setting, and to the viewer, it looks like just another Slayersesque/Record of Lodoss War type anime based in some nondescript magic world that is kind of like our world, but not. However, the truth is that they're in the far future in "our" world, and their conquerers have regressed everyone back to the Middle Ages in order to prevent them from even wanting to mount a resistance. Then again, truth be told, if you catch the very beginning of this show and you've seen enough anime, this probably isn't a spoiler for you at all..
Sorcerer Hunters does the same thing Scrapped Princess did much less effectively (or more, considering that the above twist was an important part of the story in SP, but in SH, even if you suspected it somehow, it doesn't really matter until the end, and isn't even mentioned until the end). Long story short, in the final battle between Zaha and the Sorcerer Hunters, Zaha prepares a spell to unleash Carrot's power as the God of Destruction. Doing this requires them to be in the world that came before the world that the characters are now in, a world of death and destruction. The characters are transported to what looks to be present day New York City, destroyed by some kind of apocalypse or war. Also, flashbacks of the characters are shown living their present day lives as the actions of the present and future converge. While this sounds kind of cool, trust me it's stupider than it sounds.
Utawarerumono is set at a time where the descendants of genetic experiments made during an apocalyptic period have repopulated Earth. This is a variation where you are led to believe that it is an alternate fantasy world.

Comic Books

In the alternate-reality Superman comic Red Son, it is revealed that Superman is the distant descendant of Lex Luthor sent back in time, and Krypton is actually Earth, destroyed by the death of the Sun.
A comic based on Star Wars has the Millennium Falcon crash on a distant planet; Han is killed by the natives. Years later, the Falcon's wreck and Han's corpse are discovered by the famous archeologist... Indiana Jones. Who was trying to discover the Sasquatch, previously known as Chewbacca.

Film

In the MST3K-ified film Teenage Caveman, directed by the immortal Roger Corman, the Twist Ending is that it's After The End, and not One Million BC.
M. Night Shyamalan's The Village is actually set in the present day instead of the past. This is a variation in that it is the time period that the viewer is being deceived about, not the location.
Women of the Prehistoric Planet, which you may remember from Mystery Science Theatre 3000, features the accidental colonisation of Earth as a result from one of the few fictional vehicles ever to take relativity into account.
This is the main twist of Yor The Hunter From The Future, and the film's excuse to include Space Clothes, laser guns, and Mecha Mooks in the last act.
- Although the film's American title title kind of gives it away. The original Italian version is titled Il mondo di Yor (The World of Yor), which makes the final act much more of a twist.

Literature

Stephen Vincent Benét's short story By the Waters of Babylon (1937) is this trope: the narrator, the son of a priest who is "immune" to a certain kind of metal that can kill everyone else in his tribe, narrates in such a way that you think he is a member of a primitive tribe that may or may not possess magic of some kind. By the end it is clear that while there may be magic involved (specifically the flashback sequence), they most definitely are in the future, close to New York. The holy metal spoken of is most likely radioactive, and the narrator, like his father, has inherited his radioactive immunity. The "Babylon" in the title is a Shout Out to the town of that name on Long Island.
The World of The Runestaff by Michael Moorcock, is Earth in a distant future, where all technology is lost.
In Alfred Bester's short story Adam and No Eve, an experimental space flight sets off a chain reaction that devastates and sterilized the world, leaving the pilot of the spaceship as the last survivor. The story ends with the reveal that the planet will be reoccupied by life evolved from the pilot's gut microbes, and that present-day Earth is the result.
A Time Team story from 3-2-1 Contact appears to be set in the distant past, but at the end bulldozers show up the Time Team realizes that they are actually in the present, in the middle of the Brazilian rain forest.
The Shannara series is seemingly a Medieval Fantasy Setting with the usual Five Races, but it's revealed pretty early on to be an After The End future.

Live Action TV

In the 2000s Battlestar Galactica... Well, it's complicated, but manages to touch pretty much all the versions of this trope:
- The ending of the first episode had a bit of a Planet of the Apes ending when they revealed that the lost 13th colony that they were going to search for was called "Earth."
- After The End: When they finally reach Earth, it's a desolate wasteland, devastated thousands of years earlier by a war between human-form Cylons and the Centurions they'd built
- It Was Our Homeworld All Along: The "final five" Cylons turn out to be the last survivors of Earth, which makes the long-sought thirteenth colony their homeworld
- It (Wasn't) Earth All Along: The thirteenth colony was called Earth, but wasn't our home planet: our Earth is named after the earlier planet
- Before The Beginning: The human and Cylon survivors decide to go native on a primitive but hospitable planet, which they decide to name "Earth" because after four years looking for a planet called Earth, they'll be damned if they're gonna settle. When we revisit the fate of this Earth 150,000 years later, we see New York City and a man reading National geographic — as it turns out, the story is before our modern age, and we are all human-cylon hybrids. BSG gets those double points mentioned at the top of the page, because of the Adama family name.
Land Of The Lost: Not Earth, but a similar situation; an advanced, civilized Sleestak arrives in the Land of the Lost by Time Travel, only to discover that the primitive Sleestaks aren't from his past, they're from his future, After The End.
The planet Omega-IV in the Star Trek The Original Series episode "The Omega Glory" is a bizarre case. The "Yang" and the "Kohm" tribes are all that's left of their civilization after a Cold War turned nuclear, and the resemblance to Earth comes to a head when the tattered, ancient American flag and Declaration of Independence put in appearances that leave the heroes stunned. But it's all the setup for a massive unreveal. While a deleted scene would have suggested that the inhabitants are the human descendants of a Lost Colony, the mysteries are never resolved onscreen and Omega-IV is apparently just an alien planet that coincidentally reinvented America, the Soviet Union, China and the Cold War. (There were at least two other worlds in Original Trek that had cultures identical to Earth —five, if you count the Space Nazis who were explicitly given that information by an Earthman, the Space Gangsters who got it from an Earth book, and the Indians whose ancestors were actually from Earth.)

Video Games

Etrian Odyssey has a fairly typical medieval fantasy swords-and-sorcery setting, with some cryptic intro on the title screen about some disaster long ago that ended the previous age. This is shattered when you reach the fifth stratum in the first game, Lost Shinjuku (as in, this Shinjuku, with the backgrounds looking almost exactly like those pictures and everything.) It turns out that recklessly advancing science and technology brought about global warming and miscellaneous environmental calamities to the point that Earth was an uninhabitable wasteland, killing off almost everyone. The few survivors started something called the Yggdrasil Project to try to restore the environment, eventually leading to the low-population, completely lush greenery-everywhere medieval fantasy-looking world you're used to.
Quintet's Heaven And Earth series, which involves Soul Blazer, Illusion Of Gaia, and Terranigma. Although the first of those games doesn't explicitly claim to occur on Earth, it's a direct prequel to Illusion Of Gaia, which does (the ending reveals that Will's world eventually gave rise to modern civilization.) Terranigma is set long After The End, but the player isn't clued into this until after the end of the first act.
- Of course, this all depends on you interpretation of the series. Fan theories give rise to every possible scenario from alternate dimensions, Time Travel, to some sort of bizarre "New Game Plus"-inspired theory that claims that the efforts of all three games lead to "our Earth".
Most of the plot in Sigma Star Saga revolves around searching for a series of six planets which will ultimately lead to a Doomsday Device. Earth is the "seventh" planet, which had already been destroyed by said device.
Squaresoft loved to hint at this trope during their later SNES to early Playstation years. Secret Of Mana has a scene late in the game when the heroes find recordings of their world from its And Man Grew Proud days, before the Mana Beast destroyed civilization and brought about the return of magic. The recordings include country music, an episode of Jeopardy, news channel debates on the dangers of mana energy, and then a final broadcast of the Mana Beast attacking a city and then turning on the news crew that's filming the destruction. The implication is that the world of Secret of Mana is really Earth's distant future.
- Then in Final Fantasy VII, we have an archeological dig that's uncovered what appears the ancient remains of a recognizable, real-world fighter jet. Fans debated the implications of that scene for years, though after the release of Final Fantasy X-2, Word Of God has half-jokingly said that, rather than our world, the game actually takes place in Spira's far future.
- And in Xenogears, the heroes find an underground city near the end of the game that looks like a modern metropolis and, within it, they find ancient newspapers making references to everything from Elvis Presley to the Wimbledon Cup (not to mention that the origins of the Ancient Conspiracy fueling the game's story bears a What Do You Mean Its Not Symbolic resemblance to the book of Genesis). Word Of God later stepped in again to say that it's not Earth, but another planet far in Earth's future (though Earth does play an important, if unseen, role in that planet's backstory).

Western Animation

Parodied in a Futurama episode, where Fry thinks that he is in After The End New New York, but it turns out to be Los Angeles. Fry protests: "But there was this gang of 10-year olds with guns! But everyone is driving around in cars shooting at each other! But the air's green and there's no sign of civilisation whatsoever!" and his friends reply: "That's L. A. for you!"
- It then descends into satirical social commentary, where Fry cites, as proof that he's in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, the facts that nobody reads, everyone's a phony, and all the food has cilantro in it.

Close Before The Beginning or After The End

Dysfunction Junction

« Narrative Devices »

Earth Shattering Kaboom

Dying Dream

« Twist Ending »

Everybody Did It

Earth Shattering Kaboom

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The End Of The World As We Know It