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Marge: [reading the poster] "Hang in there, baby!" You said it, kitty. [looking more closely] "Copyright 1968." Hmm, determined or not, that cat must be long dead. That's kind of a downer.
— "The Twisted World of Marge Simpson"
doesn't just find plot holes; it can make your typical happy ending into a Downer Ending, and render even the most flawless moral victory into Black And Gray Morality. How? By helping the viewer realize that the "survivors" at the end of the movie don't have a future, even though they can't help but celebrate as the Evil Tower Of Ominousness explodes with its master's demise. When authors use large and amazing technologies and world or even galaxy spanning threats, they run the risk of letting the excitement of Stuff Blowing Up get the better of them and not think through how the survivors will make a living afterward.
Y'see, Happily Ever After implies there's arable land to farm, electricity and running water, and a semblance of civilization to go back to; as well as more than two people surviving by the end. A Zombie Apocalypse, nuclear holocaust, Colony Drop, or anything that can cause The End Of The World As We Know It will have subtle and far reaching effects even if it's stopped. And even if humanity does manage to survive (Humans are clingy bastards) there's bound to be massive casualties.
Even if the movie runs with the above scenarios and makes it about characters surviving After The End, the author may end up seriously overestimating their and civilizations' chances of survival.
Cue the Moral Dissonance if the heroes are primarily responsible for this near genocide. The subversion of this trope is if the heroes fully realize the effects of their actions... and choose to follow through anyway. Maybe they are amoral sociopaths who do not care, or maybe the Omniscient Morality License makes it such that the ultimate consequences will be preferable to the status quo.
Note that, despite the name, the "holocaust" doesn't have to involve massive death; it could be as simple as a criminal getting away because the writers didn't give the good guys enough evidence to convict.
Understandably, this can get depressing and completely overshadow the intended ending, prompting fans (and authors) to say there was No Endor Holocaust. Contrast Inferred Survival.
Ending Trope, so spoilers be ahead.
Examples:
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- Blue Gender. A few humans have survived Gaias Revenge, and they can all live in harmony with mother nature, free at last of technology! Then the Fridge Logic sets in - the only survivors will be physically strong people. If you're a cripple, blind, deaf, have a curable terminal disease, etc. then you're hosed. Mother Nature hates you and you have no right to live.
- Inverted in End of Evangelion. The world is supposed to have ended, with everyone but two people (see Rule of 50/500
 ) converted to protoplasmic Tang. However, it is explicitly stated that nobody died, they all just lost their individuality to the point that they ended up in one big group hug on the metaphysical level, and (probably accidentally) implied that even normal humans can regain their humanoid individuality with a decent show of willpower. Sort of an Inferred Survival for everyone on earth.
- Yeah, but what will they eat?
- The crops and contents of the food storages already there? Not everything got destroyed. And if animals were affected, which is left unclear, then they should have the same chance of returning.
- Ergo Proxy, though already post-apocalyptic, just made it worse when the last known bastion of humanity fell since its patron Proxy abandoned it, as well as almost every Proxy burns to death. The only survivors are a Proxy, two cogito-infected autoreivs, and a person who is either another Proxy or sterile. However, this is considered good because the small populations of humanity who retreated from the planet a thousand years before begin to return due to the Earth finally recovering from the nuclear winter. Every character we knew that even survived will likely be slaughtered because none of them were meant to survive — Proxies were genetically altered to have a deathly reaction to UV rays and autoreivs were meant to destroy all the sterile humans and then themselves by way of the cogito virus.
- The manga version of Nausicaa Of The Valley Of The Wind does this at the end. Nausicaa destroys the computer that has been manipulating events from behind the scenes since the Seven Days Of Fire so that life on Earth can once again begin to grow and evolve at its own pace. The problem? Since humans had been genetically engineered to be able to survive in a polluted, radioactive world they could no longer survive in places that had been purified by the Sea Of Corruption. The computer contained the knowledge to modify humans back to their original form, but without it humanity is likely doomed to extinction.
- Erm, no. Adapting to such polluted world and back is actually within normal mutation power, provided you have time (as in a couple of hundreds of years). And the Sea is a local phenomena. By the time the whole Earth purifies, humans will likely be adapted to it, too.
- The manga kind of leaves this up to the reader. There's considerable evidence that either viewpoint could be right. At the very least, lots of people are still going to die.
- The movie Spriggan ends with the destruction of the Big Bad's super weapon, the 'ARK" (yes, THAT ARK. It has Dinosaurs). We are shown the heroes emerging triumphant from underground, to be cheered and applauded by the team members on the surface of the mountain. All seems well. And then we zoom out to show the earth which looks not a little battered, as well as completely reshaped, by the earlier destruction. Clearly the world will never be the same now.
- Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann has an inferred extinction: After humans retake the surface, they live (largely) at peace with the Beastmen. However, Beastmen can't reproduce and all of the existing ones were made in People Jars by Lordgenome. Since the they're apparently not making any more Beastmen, they'll eventually all die out (except Viral, because he's immortal).
- Of course, it is only an inferred extinction; there's nothing saying that they CAN'T recover from it, since we do see apparently youthful Beastmen serving on the bridge of the Chouginga Dai-Gurren in the after-credits of the final episode. Presumably Beastmen still have access to the cloning technology Lordgenome used to create them; it's quite unlikely he created every single individual Beastman himself, and probably had the process automated at some point.
- Let's remember that in the final battle, entire galaxies were used as shuriken. If there was any life there before, there sure isn't now.
- And the Anti-Spiral's Big Bang Attack-thing. That last episode was basically the story of two cosmic horrors kicking the snot out of each other, casually extinguishing who knows how many billions of lives in the process.
- Really, the champions at this are the Dirty Pair. Anything they get involved with has a 50% chance of causing mass collateral damage, and it's probably not healthy to dwell on the numbers of deaths that can (indirectly) be laid at Kei and Yuri's feet.
- Though they don't actually fit the Trope so well because the destruction they cause is directly stated, and not inferred.
- In Ponyo On A Cliff By The Sea, Ponyo's actions flood the world. While every one we see gets saved, what about larger cities, or people who couldn't otherwise get on a boat?
- This troper wonders if he was the only one in the world to feel more depressed than gleeful after watching that movie, considering Earth's gravitational pull was messed with, temporarily bringing the moon obnoxiously close to the earth and sending many, if not all, of Earth's satellites and space stations, including the MANNED International Space Station which orbits closer to the surface than many geostationary satellites, careening back to the surface — thus rendering much of the world's GPS systems, satellite communication systems, weather monitoring systems, etc. useless, not to mention the astronomical amount of money it would take to replace them all and the collateral damage that falling satellites would cause. Also, when the world was flooded, as well as Ponyo's little run to meet with Sosuke, it made this troper recall the devastation of the 2004 tsunami in the Indian Ocean. The structural damage from all that seawater that many buildings will suffer will be significant. Property damage in the trillions. It doesn't matter if there were poor saps out on the street when the giant rush of water slams out against the town, or that Tanaka Everyman just had his house and all his possessions swept away. Nope! All this is perfectly forgivable because our main character is an innocent little child infatuated with another child and doesn't know better. I'm in despair.
- This Troper thought that the implication was that only that little corner of the world was flooded- basically, the whole thing was a metaphor for a tsunami or regional flood, and one that was surprisingly slow as opposed to being just a giant crashing wave of water. There was no evidence of flooding or devastation elsewhere, and considering the fact that even if the Moon's orbit was being tampered with (who knows, it was not-highly-literal magic), flooding the entire world would logically take more water than is currently ON the world (think about it- floods only work because a high water line in one place means a low tide somewhere else, or just negligibly lower everywhere else), so it seems highly unlikely. It still means that this bit of Japanese town and countryside were flooded out, but considering the massive flotilla of pretty calm people at the end, it looks like the little fishing village made good use of its resources before the water got too high.
Comic Books
- Astro City has a beauty of a discussion of this trope— an aging superhero, who spent his youth as some hybrid of Golden Age Superman and Golden Age Batman, is called back into service again against a generic giant robot. Instead of Mac Gyvering — and he actually tells the audience the kinds of things he'd have thought of back in the day— he simply beats it to death, ploughing through six residential city blocks in the process. Afterward, he shouts at the policeman who thanks him for his help, telling him to look at the destruction and claim that he (The Hero) actually helped anything.
- Lampshaded and parodied in Scott McCloud's one-shot, over-sized, comic Destroy!: Two super-powerful heroes fight in New York City (and the surface of the Moon), destroying a good many buildings in the process. Until the very end, the only dialogue is Destroy! quickly met with Shut up!!; at the end, a bystander (police?) opines, 'Good thing no-one was hurt.'
- Subverted in Fables, where the collapse of the "Evil Empire" leads to massive catastrophe on all sides due to the power vacuum and radical change in status quo.
- Although The Incredible Hulk is ostensibly a hero, many of his Unstoppable Rage rampages have caused enormous and widespread destruction, which begs the question of exactly how many innocents have lost their lives as collateral damage. This was partially addressed in the recent World War Hulk (in which Hulk sent prior warning to the citizens of Manhattan to clear out before utterly trashing the place), and again in the Civil War arc, where one of his rampages is explicitly stated to have killed 26 people and a dog, making this particular holocaust not-so-implied. To be fair, this could be applied to almost any superhero whose battles involve large-scale trashing of urban environments.
- Lampshaded in a Damage Control miniseries after World War Hulk:
John: We've never found a casualty at a Hulk site before, so I guess we shouldn't be too surprised. Robin: No deaths? Incredible. John: I've always felt it's best not to dwell on these things.
- Lampshaded, subverted, and parodied by Plastic Man in JLA.
Good thing for this crummy economy, or we wouldn't have all these abandoned buildings to crash into!
- However, also played straight in the same story arc, when The Flash saves an entire city from destruction without anyone thinking of the after-effects and homelessness of the inhabitants. Of course, this a universe that already saw the destruction of Montevideo...
- Done deliberately in V For Vendetta; it's pointed out early on that the price of freedom in the comic's post-apocalyptic world could very well be starvation.
- It was a non-issue in the movie because there never was a nuclear war, just a breakdown of several major world governments. Alan Moore admitted that was a significant plot-hole as humanity would have never been able to survive a nuclear war such as the one in the graphic novel.
- It was written before nuclear winter was a widely known possibility.
- In Y: The Last Man, every male mammal dies, all at once. Humanity may or may not survive, but really, what's the point? It seems to have utterly escaped the author that the ecosystem is totally and irrevocably fucked to hell.
- This very fact was remarked midway through the series, when geneticist Dr. Mann remarks that with no males, all mammal species would eventually become extinct. Later on, he implies that this may not be the case, when a couple of women see rats long after they were supposed to have all died.
- At the very least, the entire food chain has just had an enormous chunk ripped out of it. It would take thousands of years (or more) to achieve a new equilibrium that would would still have lots of missing environmental niches. Plus, think of all the rampant disease from that many rotting corpses. This is a catastrophe on par with the end of the dinosaurs pretty much, especially since it happened a lot faster.
- Corpses do not spontaneously generate new diseases. The sorts of diseases you'd find rampant lingering about a bunch of corpses would be the sort that would be lethal pretty much to the exact species that are already doomed to extinction anyway.
- In Watchmen, even without the Awful Truth about Veidt being responsible coming to light (or even believed, considering that Rorschach is certifiably Ax Crazy), Dr. Manhattan tells Veidt that the world coming together and averting war due to New York being destroyed by what's believed to be an alien (or Dr. Manhattan himself in the movie) is a stopgap solution, at best.
Veidt: I did the right thing, didn't I? It all worked out in the end.
Dr. Manhattan: "In the end?" Nothing ends, Adrian. Nothing ever ends.
Fan Fic
- Averted in the Daria Expanded Universe, as the Ringbearers (a Green Lantern Corps-inspired organization) are specifically stated as acting on post-Zombie Apocalypse worlds to help restore the damaged ecosystems and provide the sustenance, building materials and medical care needed for the survivors to have a fighting chance to restart their civilization.
- All cartoons that have humans interact with animals, short of tortoises, leave out that that creature will most likely be dead inside of 20 years. Ratatouille? Remy won't last more than 5, so Alfredo better start learning hot to cook himself. A Bugs Life? Yeah, they'll all be dead by that time next year most likely. Also every movie with a dog or cat.
- Lampshaded on Family Guy: "Wow, Brian, it's moments like this that make me sad that you're gonna die fifty years before I do."
- Also lampshaded in Roald Dahl's book The Witches: The protagonist not only accepts that he will remain a mouse forever, he is extremely optimistic about his short life span. He is glad that he won't outlive his grandmother.
- In the Steven Spielberg film A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, David is finally reunited with his adopted mother in a simulation of their home. However, humanity has been extinct for hundreds or thousands of years, David was only given one day with his mother before she died, and David's batteries probably ran down for good in the closing shot
- Presumably we were supposed to acknowledge all that and simply consider it a happy ending for his finally achieving his dearest desire before the end.
- In the remake of the Andromeda Strain, humanity in the future sends a sample of a Nanobot virus dead set on killing with humanity with (very roundabout) instructions on how to beat it and (presumably) to keep some o' that cure around for when it comes in the future. They stop the virus, but continue with the deep sea excavation that will cause the extinction of the only thing capable of stopping it; so the future is completely screwed because of us. This is not helped by the fact that a shadowy government organization kept a small sample of the Andromeda Strain, and it's even implied to have gotten loose since the message sent from the future referred to its storage code.
- If the future knew we'd still destroy the strain-destroying bacteria and keep some of the virus around... why did they bother at all and not just send a plain message saying "Keep some of this bacteria around for the future. Thanks!"
- The ending of Be Kind Rewind. Yaaaaaay, they showed their movie. But the store is still &@$#ed. I think that this comic sums it up best.
- Although not a "Holocaust" exactly, in Con Air, Garland Greene manages to survive the events of the film, and is last seen happily engaged in casino gaming. As we all know, demented, crazed serial killers, don't just "get better". Had the movie run just a bit longer, we might have gotten to see him convert Casino patrons into headgear...
- It is heavily implied (completely unrealistic, much everything else in Con Air), that Garland Greene's encounter with the tea party girl made him rethink his life and made him sane, somehow...
- Dawn Of The Dead and Land of the Dead have the remnants of humanity holed up and later get eaten, save for a handful of survivors. At least in the case of Land of the Dead the zombies were growing smarter, so maybe they'll evolve back to a human intelligence and live happy but smelly lives themselves.
- The Day After Tomorrow. The super-storm may be over, but the world's problems are just beginning. An entire hemisphere now buried under uninhabitable ice, major cities destroyed, some serious overcrowding and resources issues imminent for the refugees who fled south... The astronaut's hopeful line that "the air never looked so clear" demonstrates that the writers did not quite think this through.
- Which also makes this a case of Hilarity Ensues, given how the end of the movie was treated
- At the end of the remake of The Day The Earth Stood Still Klaatu sacrifices his physical form to stop the Gort nanobot cloud...by unleashing a massive EMP like pulse that covers the entire Earth. The last few minutes of the movie show entire cities shutting down...and the movie ends. Now, there are two ways to interpret this: the pulse shut down all electronics on Earth temporarily, which would cause the death of hundreds of thousands of people (such as airplane passengers, people dependent on life support, people with pacemakers...) or it shut down all electronics on Earth permanently which would not only cause the aforementioned deaths but eventually lead to the further deaths of millions due to lack of heating, food spoilage and the inevitable global chaos. The implications and the actual effect of such an event are simply ignored due to the movie's abrupt end.
- Like the alternative was in ANY way better? I'll take my chance against potential starvation/primitive economy world than the other... fate.
- The problem being that if the EMP was permanent, the lack of global communications would prevent those who knew what happened and why from warning the rest of the human race why they needed to change. Thus creating the very likely possiblity that Klaatu will come back and think we 'squandered' our second chance (when the warning was actually lost) and kill us all.
- Averted in the original, which specifically stated that during the titular event (which happened in the middle of the film and lasted only an hour), airplanes and hospitals and such still had power, which had the neat bonus of making the power Klaatu had at his disposal even more impressive.
- In Escape From LA, Snake Plissken stops all electricity, all over the Earth. Actually, I don't think anyone could be be considered to have "won" in that movie.
- That's Snake for ya. Piss him off, he'll send the entire world back to the stone age. It's made pretty clear that he doesn't care how many people die, provided they get the message that he is not to be fucked with.
- Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer ends with Galactus (who in the film appears as a huge sentient cloud several times the size of Earth) exploding in a suitably impressive fashion, all while he was about halfway through munching on the Earth's core. Basically, it's the Independence Day mothership times a hundred, plus whatever damage you would expect from having huge, miles deep holes buried in the planet's crust.
- At the end of The Fifth Element, the Earth now has a new moon which rests more than 1000 times closer than our normal moon. Good surfing ensues.
- Said moon-like object didn't obey the laws of physics in the first place (because it was an incarnation of pure evil and not something from the physical world), so maybe it doesn't even have observable mass.
- Does that make the situation better or worse?
- They have space-faring technology AND friendly relations with an infinitely superior alien species (Mondoshewans). They can't politely ask them to move that thing away, or go out themselves and nudge it into the sun?
- The Cult Classic Flash Gordon movie has Gordon stopping Ming from sending the moon crashing into earth. Gordon tracks how long this will take, using a Magic Countdown, device, stopping the collision Just In Time. Even if that's enough to save the world, the moon's orbit is now royally screwed, and the Earth should have already been subject to catastrophic tidal effects. Still, Flash Gordon is hardly a movie full of gritty realism.
- It could be argued that the moon had not actually been moved out of orbit yet, and at the countdown ending, it would launch forward. The opening sequence of the movie indicated Ming was playing with Earth's geological and meteorological events for fun, so that wouldn't be much of an improvement.
-
Flash:"You'd call off the attack?"
Ming:"I could."
Flash:"Everyone would be saved?"
Ming:"Just those left alive. After the earthquakes and tidal waves and the inevitable breakdown of civilization, they won't be quite the human beings you remember. They'll be more tractable, easier for you to rule in the name of Ming."
Flash:"You mean slaves."
Ming:"Let's say they'll be satisfied with less."
Looks like the Earth was saved from total destruction, but the other disasters have led to a breakdown of civilization anyway.
- Hellboy 2 has the fairies forced underground by humanity's expansion into their rightful territory. With the entire royal family dead and the Golden Army unusable, their civilisation will most likely be split by rival claimants to the throne, and the BPRD has lost its heroic members, so there's nothing standing in humanity's way to continue expanding, driving the fairies to extinction. And this is without taking into account that in the films, Humans Are Bastards, to the point that when the forest god dies it creates a forest compared in the novelisation to Eden - which humans then pollute and destroy.
- Averted in the comics, the whole world is slowly decaying, not because Humans Are Bastards (in fact they're one of the nicest groups), but because it's the End Of An Age
- In I Am Legend, a cure is found and delivered to a walled city housing some survivors. But considering the infectees' physical capabilities, how is that city wall going to stop them? And what good will the cure be if it requires that the infectees be captured alive, restrained, and packed in ice while it's administered?
- If only the original ending, with the creator of the cure still alive was kept, less questions would be raised.
- One more reason why the remake never should have happened.
- Plus the infected were sentient in the original ending, which led to a peaceful resolution. According to the director's cut advertising, this was controversial idea.
- Even worse because there are hints at it in the finished movie. You can tell the makers were going back and forth as they were filming it. This article addresses it pretty clearly.
- In Independence Day, the unmitigated and total victory over the aliens is wonderfully uplifting, until you realize that the aliens blew up all the major nations' capitals and several dozen of its primary cities in the days they went unopposed. Did we mention that, thanks to industrialization, around 90% of the developed world's population now live in cities? Also, the effects of a ship 1/4 the size of the moon blowing up in low earth orbit (due to a nuclear explosion, no less) cannot be good.
- Especially not if the theory that the alien weapons were powered by antimatter is correct. They also point out that a ship one quarter of the moon's size in geostationary orbit would cause massive tidal waves and earthquakes just by being there.
- It's stated in the novelization that the mothership was behind the moon not in Low Earth Orbit.
- Novelization nothing—it's clearly stated in the movie itself that the mothership is sitting behind the moon. That's why it takes them so long to spot it. Where people are getting the low-orbit idea, I have no clue.
- ...the scene where the city destroyers are being sent on their way by the mother ship is set pretty damn close to Earth.
- Ip Man concludes the final fight with the speculators overpowering the Japanese guards to get to the wounded hero, then cuts to him being taken to safety and later to his real-life success. What happens to the Foshan townsfolk as a result of the most probable Japanese response is left unknown.
- For some reason, kids' movies about dinosaurs tend to have the plot of an extinction scare with a happy ending. Does this mean that extinction will come, but not in the lifetime of the major characters, and so the ending is happy? Somehow makes it harder to enjoy The Land Before Time movies when the viewer remembers Fantasia and what happened to them in that.
- In the movie version of Logans Run, all the people are forced to evacuate their city of Crystal Spires And Togas, when the Evil AI that ran it is defeated. Despite the evil, it was a beautiful and decadent Utopia where no one had wants or needed to know a valuable skill or trade. The downside was it killed them at 30. To put it plainly, these humans are entirely dependent on machines to provide and don't even know what the Sun is. The Sun! Saying 90% of the thousands of refugees died in the winter would be optimistic, as they knew nothing about wilderness survival and had only one senile elder human to teach them how to survive.
- In The Matrix Revolutions, as pointed out in this Cracked article. Neo wins! All people can be free from the Matrix if they want to leave! Yay!...Oh wait that means billions of people finding out their life is a total lie and they can choose to keep living knowing it's a lie. Or they can go die in a post apocalyptic wasteland.
- Without desiring to get too Fan Wanky, the implicit suggestion is that the Machines won't object to the pre-existing freeing process - people are still offered the choice of red pill (freedom) or blue pill (this is a dream, nothing's unreal about the life you lead). The uses and abuses of this new dynamic is explored in the follow-up MMORPG, the Matrix Online.
- Expanded on pretty blatantly for a series so engrossed in symbolism, actually; after the movies, there is simply no more war in the real world. Freed humans who would or previously would have lived in Zion before moving permanently to their hovercraft may choose to work for the Merovingian or the Machines themselves; the insinuation is that the real world is meaningless with the Machines' willingness to kill all the humans now gone, because the humans can't populate the surface, and the Machines still need live humans for
power the processing power of their brains. In the end, nobody can use the real world, but everyone needs the Matrix to keep running as usual.
- The fact that the workers and the capitalists reconcile at the end of Metropolis doesn't change the fact that the city is in ruins and all the machines it depended on were destroyed. Sure, Joh Fredersen knows how to build the city, but the man who took care of all the tech details just fell off the cathedral roof. Besides, where are all the workers supposed to live after their homes flooded out?
- In Plan Nine From Outer Space the alien Eros claims that the human race must be destroyed to prevent it developing the solaronite, a weapon that will explode the atoms of sunlight, thereby destroying the entire universe. Since the aliens are defeated at the end, we must assume that either a) more of the aliens will arrive to complete the destruction of the Earth, or b) humans will develop the solaronite and destroy the universe. Either way we're screwed.
- Your typical Zombie Apocalypse movie has this, albeit in some it's part of the underlying horror (or helps the ambiance at any rate). Resident Evil 3 has the last known remnants of humanity flee to Alaska in a four seater helicopter (don't worry, it managed to carry all two dozen of them. It was made out of a clown car, you see). It's worth mentioning that the T-Virus has completely killed all other plant and animal life. So really, humanity is boned with or without the zombies.
- At the climax of Small Soldiers, Chip Hazard hijacks the truck containing all the toys, and unleashes several hundred Commando Elite toys on our heroes. It's probably best that the movie didn't go into what most likely happened to all the Gorgonite toys (not to mention the other Chip Hazards) that were in that truck.
- Also, at the end of the film, Gil Mars plans to manufacture more of them, add a few zeroes to the price and sell them to the military. "I know some rebels in Central America who will find them quite entertaining."
- Although military injuries aren't much of a holocaust as civil ones.
- Another classic example is the destruction of the Death Star in Return of the Jedi. Fans claim the effects of a moon-sized ship being blown up in orbit around Endor would have almost annihilated all life on the planet, despite the fact that Star Wars has never particularly followed the laws of physics, and George Lucas stated that it didn't happen (it even names a trope). (See this rather infamous website for details.) One suspects that the fans are fond of this idea because it kills off the Ewoks.
- That's the forest moon, not Endor itself.
- There's no reason to assume that Endor's Moon wouldn't just develop rings like Saturn. They'd barely even be visible to the naked eye. That would have a minimal effect on the ecosystem. The Death Star was huge, but it wasn't nearly huge enough to blot out the sun on an earth-sized moon. ~~~~
- In the 2002 film version of The Time Machine, the leader of the Morlocks says that there are many more Morlock colonies other than the one the hero blows up in the climax. Add to this the fact that it's made clear that You Can't Fight Fate and that the hero sees a future in which the Morlocks have conquered the Eloi and the only logical conclusion is that the other Morlocks will eventually kill him and all his friends. Of course, there isn't logic anywhere else in the movie, so why start there?
- The future may not be so bleak: the major event he tried to change first, his girl friend's death, could not be changed because it was the impetus for him creating the time machine in the first place. If she didn't die, he wouldn't invent a time machine, and without a time machine, she would die, therefore she must die and he must invent a time machine.
- Except that if the horrible future he sees doesn't happen, it wouldn't have been there for him to see, and hence wouldn't have motivated him to go back in time to change things for the Eloi. It's the same problem. Unless, of course, the Eloi's descendants become incredibly technologically advanced and deliberately fake what he sees, somehow, in order to preserve the integrity of the causality loop. But even that doesn't work, because someone would have to have changed the future first in order for a technologically advanced Eloi society to exist.
- It could also be that, as a result of saving a group of Eloi, they leave Earth and let the surviving Morlocks have it, and Protagonist saw that. What he saw doesn't have to have been exactly what he inferred it to be. It just needs to have been there for him to see and take the wrong way.
- 28 Days Later closes with the revelation that the Rage virus didn't spread beyond Great Britain and the rest of the world is OK, but one is left wondering what effect the gruesome death of tens of millions of people, plus the full abandonment of one of the world's greatest economic and military powers (and a nuclear state to boot), would have on the global economy and political-military status quo. The picture gets grimmer in 28 Weeks Later which ends with the infection crossing the English Channel into France.
- In the film WALL-E the Earth becomes very polluted but it is found out that some humans left on a cruise ship called the Axiom, which is the only ship ever seen in the film. No one knows what happened to any of the other ships if there were any. What happened to the other couple billion people left on Earth is never mentioned.
- Averted; at the end of the film the Axiom and its few thousand inhabitants (who can hardly walk and don't know much about nature) land on the Earth. It might appear that humanity's kind of screwed, but the end credits make it clear that they learn how to rebuild, likely using the resources and information in the Axiom.
- Although it does seem like they're just repeating the same mistakes. Overfishing?
- Which, of course, begs the question, "Where did all the fish and animals and such come from?" Clearly, the planet has been uninhabitable for hundreds of years.
- Functional matter replicators (or whatever the heck they used to make Food Inna Cup) go a long way towards averting the Inferred Holocaust.
- The little Buy N Large film near the beginning implies the Axiom wasn't the only ship out there. Of course, since the Autopilot is under orders never to return to earth, they may remain out there until the ships break down irrepairably.
- In X2: X-Men United, the titular X-Men team with the Brotherhood of Mutants stop William Stryker from using a doomsday device from causing the death of every mutant in the world. Magneto, the only one outfitted with a protective helmet, stopped the device half way and turned it against humans. The film doesn't dwell on it much after the device is fully shut down, but think on this: Half of the people on earth suffered suffered seizures, then later the other half suffered them. Commuters, pilots, swimmers, skydivers, folks swimming, people with heart conditions...at least thousands of people must have died. The third movie not only ignores this events, they actually suggest that the relations between humans and mutants somehow got better!
- Even if no one died, every mutant in the world just had painful, highly visible seizures in front of their normal human neighbors (and in turn was perfectly fine when every human had them). If Mystique's small scale Superpower Meltdown is any indication, some of them will also have very noticeably blown their cover and taken all ambiguity out of existence, and made themselves even bigger targets for hate crimes.
- The Star Trek reboot may suffer from this. Sure the BBEG was stopped, but there's still a hole deep into the mantle in the middle of San Francisco bay.
- In a future where planets are regularly terraformed, an incomplete drill hole wouldn't be beyond fixing.
- Live Free Or Die Hard. Okay, folks, imagine you had basically shut down the country's entire infrastructure, including police and firefighter communications, not to mention programmed traffic lights to give contradictory instructions, and done your best to inspire a mass panic by transmitting nationwide a (faked) video of the White House blowing up. Merely shooting the bad guy is not going to clean all this up.
- Army of Darkness has this in both endings. In "I slept too long", his problem is pretty obvious, and in "Hail to the King", Deadites can still freely possess anyone, anywhere, and Ash is essentially doomed to live in a randomly zombifying world. The comics rolled with this.
- World War Z: although the book ends on a hopeful note, it's also set up in such a way that one person not being careful enough could start the whole thing over again. But it's also set up in such a way as to indicate humanity has learned much from the experiences chronicled in the book, so it might not be such a horrible fight the next time.
- If you ignore the catastrophic environmental damage, collapse of many state governments, tension between those that are still around... Humanity has learned to fight off the zombies and many people have overcome their differences to work towards rebuilding, but there's the implication that it may be too little too late.
- L Ron Hubbard's Typewriter In The Sky has the main character falling into a story. When the story ends, that universe collapses and everyone dies except our protagonist, who returns to the "real world." We, however, know that it's just a story, so once the book ends his universe must be destroyed too.
- The Rapture, as depicted by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins in Left Behind, means the sudden disappearance of every premillennial dispensationalist Christian and every child in the world (including unborn children), and causes thousands to die in plane crashes. The authors, however, seem to have no idea of how devastating a catastrophe like this would be, and life returns to normal a few days later. To quote Fred Clark from his series of blog posts:
It's one of the most awful and awesome panoramas of human suffering ever imagined in a work of fiction. But the audacity of the wholesale suffering that L&J imagine is dwarfed by the greater audacity of their wholly disregarding the very scenario they have presented. The authors and their protagonists seem wholly unperturbed by all of this death and destruction, save in how it presents a logistical inconvenience and cramps the travel plans of our heroes.
The Christ Clone trilogy is even worse. The Left Behind series has a kind of cartoonish logic to all the distasters and plagues due to the terrible writing of the twin authors. The author of the Christ Clone series can actually write, and all the disasters are lovingly detailed. You'll be having nightmares after reading it, trust me.
- The Gripping Hand, the long-awaited sequel to The Mote In Gods Eye by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, has the Moties' disastrous breeding cycle fixed by a parasite spread by air-borne cysts. "Only Moties carrying the parasite will be allowed to leave the Mote system." All it takes is one unscrupulous physician to find a way to kill the "Crazy Eddie Worm" without killing the Motie hosts and bingo, the disaster for the entire galaxy envisioned in the first book is now inevitable. Or something else happening to make the parasite no longer viable in Moties. That doesn't even count the Moties that reached the brown dwarf system.
- In The Road by Cormac McCarthy, the protagonists are a man and his son, headed south through the ash covered ruins of America. They reach the southern United States, only to find that it is just as dead as the rest of the country. On top of this, the boy's father dies. The boy is found by 'the good guys' in what feels like a forced happy ending, but then you realize that there is no biosphere. Everything is dead. Eventually, everyone is going to starve to death, be eaten by cannibals, or die of some horrific lung disease. And that will be it.
- By the end of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, virtually all industrial facilities have been destroyed or abandoned to ruin, and virtually all oil wells and mines in the world have been abandoned as worthless when they weren't blown up by the heroes themselves, but it's OK because the evil collectivists have been deposed (and most of them aren't actually killed). And even having one productive copper mine makes up for all the rest that were blown up, because those were subject to taxation and therefore worthless. Sure, the heroic capitalists may have their Lost World up and running fine, but are their egoistic powers really enough to save the country from spiraling into chaos and civil war? I doubt it.
- Subverted in the post-apocalyptic world of S. M. Stirling's Dies The Fire where it's mentioned just how backbreaking hard it is to grow your food the old fashioned way, and even those who survive and create functional communities (as opposed to starving, or becoming the slaves of power-hungry barons) do so only due to a string of very good luck.
- In Vernor Vinge's A Fire upon the Deep, the "happy ending" involves the destruction of whole civilizations and the deaths of trillions upon trillions of people. Which leads one to wonder, how bad was the Blight anyway ?
- Subverted in Oath of Swords by David Weber. It takes place After The End in a fantasy world, and it's revealed that the elves there act as aloof and quiet as they do because they have post-traumatic stress disorder. Elves live so long that most of them were there personally at the destruction of the previous world. To most of the characters it was a long time ago and things are okay now, but to the elves civilization is still a shadow of what it was.
- To help put in in perspective, many of the elves were Warlocks at the end of the first Wizard war when Ottovar changed the nature of blood magic, making the Warlocks into the Elves. 10,000 years later the Magitek empire fell and it's only been another thousand years since the fall. Human populations alone are still a mere fraction of what they were.
- Used deliberately in Tais Teng's short story Three Snapshots of Utopia. The main character finds a young man in a Hitler Youth uniform in the middle of the Sahara desert; he turns out to be a time traveller who has just changed history by preventing the pre-war assassination of Adolf Hitler. In his world, the Germans won WW2, but felt that this was ultimately meaningless without the guidance of Hitler himself. Thus, subverting the standards of alternative history, this youth caused history to unfold as it actually has. Ironically, the pictures he carries of the Nazi-dominated world he un-made seem unbelievably idyllic and utopian. The main character still ends up killing the youth in cold blood. Why? Because one of his pictures shows the beautiful playground of a school in the freshly irrigated Sahara glades, full of sunlight and flowers and laughter and playing kids... And none of the kids are black.
Live Action TV
- Original Battle Star Galactica was essentially a show about some 50000 people surviving after their home planets were wiped out. Despite this the show was positioned as funny.
- In the re-imagined series, the realisation that there's no one left is brought crashing down on the survivors in all subsequent seasons, the one glimmer of hope being when the battlestar Pegasus showed up. And that turned out to be commanded by a loony, power-mad admiral.
- And then there's the ending of the series, where the survivors (humans and friendly Cylons) end up on our Earth in the past and throw away all available technology and start over on a peaceful world free of war where man can live in harmony with nature. The idea that this means plowing fields by hand, building houses by chopping down trees with stone axes, dying in childbirth, being killed by starvation and disease and wild animals, and losing all of their culture, while being completely unable to warn anyone about the cycle of history seems not to occur to anyone.
- Given that the finale implies the Colonials will be introducing language (presumably with writing) and farming but such things didn't show up for another 100,000 years, it can be assumed things didn't go very well. The fossils found in the Distant Finale indicate that even Hera died young.
- Dead Set ends with every main character and the entire country of Britain dying or becoming undead. It is entirely possible it spread over the boarders, since the "riots" started in Liverpool, which is in England. France was broadcasting emergency radio signals, so it's heavily inferred that the zombies likely spread to other countries, and possibly the whole world. Also is the fact that nobody from any country ever attempts any sort of rescue or offers any kind of help in any form to Britain and the survivors.
- However, one may argue that because electricity and television continued to work properly city-wide for weeks in Britain, that there may be survivors in those buildings, keeping those resources running.
- One episode of Ghost Whisperer was about a girl who had been kidnapped and died while trying to escape. Then it turned out her sister and ex-boyfriend had been trying to stage an intervention and force her to go cold turkey on the drugs. The general attitude was that everything was just fine then. Nobody seemed to realize that grabbing a girl against her will while she was passed out, taking her to a deserted cabin in the woods, handcuffing her to a bed and her dying from their negligence is legally counted as kidnapping and accidental homicide whether the kidnappers call it an intervention or not. How many years hard time do you think they'll get?
- ...and that's before you factor in whether the state counts a death while committing a felony first-degree murder.
- Every episode of Power Rangers becomes disturbing to watch when you see how many buildings are toppled by megazords and giant monsters. To be fair, the writers sometimes Hand Wave this by putting in abandoned places or quarries. Also, one has to wonder what the casualties were in such episodes like Countdown to Destruction, where all of the big bads from the first six seasons decided to conquer Earth and some other planets. The whole city gets raided. Even a megazord gets toppled by a bunch of Mooks.
- And then comes Power Rangers RPM, which tap-dances delicately around the fact that 99% of humanity has been killed in a nuclear holocaust. Yes, in a children's show. They hint at it subtly enough that at least the nuking is a Parental Bonus, although not even the tykes are thick enough to miss the whole "near extinction" thing, for which the hinting is as subtle as a sledgehammer to the testicles.
- They don't really "tap dance" around it, if by that you mean "don't discuss the consequences". The origin story episodes very clearly show and state a metric fuckton of people died, and Ziggy's origin involved him getting medical supplies for an orphanage full of war orphans dying of radiation poisoning. So yeah...Darker And Edgier ineed.
- Space 1999 starts with the Moon being blasted out of Earth's orbit, and follows the inhabitants of the moonbase. How badly did Earth suffer from this? We find out via Negative Space Wedgie Subspace Ansible that humanity survives for several thousand years... but the planet did not. All that is left of Earth life are recordings. While there existed the possibility of transporting to Earth... no one complained much that the window was missed.
- In one second season episode the Alphans make contact with Earth and discover that everybody is now living in domed cities because the planet's natural environment has been totally destroyed. The funny thing is, nobody on Earth seems to bothered about that. "Who needs nature?" they laugh. Maybe they're all just in denial.
- In Urinetown, the main characters manage to wrest control of the world's diminished water supply from the corrupt businessman in charge. However, the liberal use of water that results from this reveals that Cladwell's strict rationing may have resulted in extreme poverty and near unlivable conditions for the lower classes, it had also kept the water supply at a manageable level. As a result, much of the world's population dies of dehydration and the leader of the revolution is killed by an angry mob. This is all explained by an unusually cheerful narrator who breaks the fourth wall on a regular basis, with the entire cast ending the play with a shout of "Hail, Malthus!".
Western Animation
Video Games
- The Mega Man and Mega Man X series play with this: the original glosses over all the implied death and destruction caused by Wily's attacks, with MM 7 being real bad as the robots that busted Wily out of prison must have killed a number of guards and inmates in the process. The X series averts this, by admitting the the heroes are killing sentient robots. X4 onward was specific about this, with the heroes telling certain bosses that their actions could cause significant destruction if they didn't stop. X4 is especially notable, as the prologue stage has you fighting in a city that your character knows was inhabited by millions.
- The Legend Of Zelda: Link's Awakening. The whole game is a dream, and you know this by the end, but you have to wake up, essentially killing all the lovable characters you've met along the way. Except possibly Marin. But that's only in the secret ending. And she ends up being a seagull rather than human anyway.
- Professor Layton Andthe Curious Village has the plot twist that 90% of the village's population is robots. Whenever they run out of power, the elderly Bruno fixes them up in the dead of night. If Flora lays a hand on her fortune, the robots will be deactivated for good; she decides to leave her fortune, as well as the village, happy ending for all - but what happens when Bruno dies?.
- Worse, she never even asked Bruno if he was okay with having to live the rest of his life in that village, despite his duty to the count being complete when she leaves. Bitch.
- In Metal Gear Solid 4, the main characters are actually concerned about this happening when they learn the worm that Sunny made won't just shut down GW, but all of the Patriot's AI's which, by this point, practically run the whole bloody planet. The double subversion comes when, in the epilogue, they learn the AI's weren't destroyed, but lobotomized, with the areas concerning power, water, and other essentials would still be functioning.
- It's notable that this was actually the original plan, with the rationalisation that humanity would pick themselves back up and may actually benefit from a world destroyed. Sunny, the nine year old girl decided that plan sucked and modified the code herself.
- There is a reason why the Evil Overlord list recommends running all plans past your trusty five year old adviser.
- Despite what Tails would have you believe, this happens in Sonic Adventure.
- Arguably Diablo II. Although you've defeated the three prime evils, the world is still basically overrun by possessed critters that have wiped out most of the world's population.
- Confirmed. Check out the information that's out about Diablo III. Necromancers running amuck, cursed forests, crazy cultists and the Kingdom and probably the entire world have been smashed down to rubble basically. Oh, and Tyrael is apparently now crazy and all the Prime Evils, plus Lilith, are back. There is some good news though! Now that the Worldstone is gone, all humans will apparently now become super strong half angel, half demons like they originally were. I'm sure that will go just swimmingly, don't you? Talk about a CrapsackWorld.
- Gears Of War seems perfectly happy allowing its hero to screw the world up in an attempt to save it. For one,fans speculated that the "Lightmass bomb" deployed in Gears 1 would cause massive collateral damage. Sure enough, the bomb evaporated tons of immulsion and gave birth to a disease called "rust lung" in the sequel.
- Fans have already speculated that flooding the hollow with sea water at the end of Gears 2 will drain a significant portion of the water supply on Sera, turning much of the planet into desert wasteland by the time Gears 3 rolls around.
- In Age of Empires 3: The Asian Dynasties expansion, The Indian campaign set ends on a triumphant note, as the sadistic British general in charge of one of the main branches of the East India Company has been killed, along with the branch itself......Until you realize how well the Indian mutiny went in real life....
- Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance ends on an optimistic note regardless of which side you play as the pivotal force in stopping the Seraphim and the epilogue is narrated, but it's clear that a significant percentage of the human race is dead and Earth itself may be uninhabitable due to radiation. The Aeon are still mopping up a civil war and have lost their true leader,, what's left of the UEF is struggling to find its feet after the Seraphim tore out its heart and soul (along with almost all of its military personnel), and the always-fractious Cybrans have lost one of the few commanders they could rally around, in addition to their own civil war. The Seraphim still have a great deal of military power and resources in the material world, and from the teaser at the end... it's not over by a long shot.
- the tesser of Supreme Commander 2 seems to show that in a few decades things are A OK
- Odin Sphere. Hoo boy, Odin Sphere. Don't get too attached to the beautiful land of Erion, because it's gone at the end of the game, along with nearly everyone in it. Only four people are left alive, with the faint glimmer of hope that Gwendolyn and Oswald can at least re-populate the world. Might be a subversion though. We do get confirmation that they succeeded and the world was repopulated, during a secret scene in which Cornelius and Velvet likewise finally become free of the Pooka Curse
- With the scale of the villains and powers involved, it might seem impossible, but Eternal Darkness averts this trope. None of the major villains really want the world destroyed, and nothing that happens really affects the world as a whole. Even the battles between ELDER GODS take place in some sub-realm where it doesn't harm humanity It's Cosmic Horror, but that doesn't mean it's not subtle.
- Although, it is implied that the ancients deliberately caused World War I, so I wouldn't say humanity is completely unaffected.
- Really, Eternal Darkness subverts the trope, in that beating the game once, or twice, ends with a not-so-implied vision of a properly apocalyptic future. Beat the game a third time, and you find out exactly why those futures are not going to happen.
- Final Fantasy VI. Yay that Kefka is dead and his Evil Tower Of Ominousness is destroyed! Whoo everyone celebrate! Except... the entire world is radically altered. Many of the major cities were destroyed by Kefka's actions. Magic is essentially dead and gone with all the Espers having been genocided by Kefka and the Goddesses being killed. The land itself is barren, and the animals are all poisoned or mutated. Remember the scene with Celes on the island? With all the rabbits dying of poison and the fish being poisoned too? Extra points because the heroes let Gestahl and Kefka go free when they and the Espers had them by the balls. At which point Kefka killed all the Espers and destroyed the world.
- The good people of South Figaro provide an example of hope in the face of great evil, as most of the NP Cs are bright, sunny, and optimistic that life will go on even in a Crapsack World. The entire World of Ruin plot seems to be an aversion of this trope. This troper likes to think they turn out just fine.
- Dragon Quest II lets you visit Alefgard from the first game. Only the first castle is on the map. The other towns are replaced with a patch of desert.
- Dragon Quest III's World of Darkness is covered in constant night, and happens to have another world directly above it. When the hero uses the Ball of Light, the source of the darkness is destroyed so it is always daytime. Either the ball is providing the source of light, or the world above was destroyed to let the light in.
- The Legend Of Zelda and Zelda II both fit chronologically last in the timeline depending on who you talk to. The diverse cities seen in other games, including their unique cultural development, history, lineage, and anything else they might have contributed is either lost or replaced by a barren wasteland filled with Moblins and Octorocks, hermits hiding away in caves, and a small number of remote towns with a handful of people. Don't be too fond of the friendly Zoras, because there aren't any.
- There's an interesting example in the novelization of the Lucas Arts game The Dig, albeit part of the Back Story rather than the main plot. The Cocytans, a race of Sufficiently Advanced Aliens, decided to share their technological wonders with the rest of the galaxy, so they sent off a bunch of probes disguised as asteroids. These probes were programmed to "show up" in close proximity to likely planets and (apparently) threaten to crash into them unless the inhabitants of said planet came to take a look, at which point they would be kidnapped and whisked off back to Cocytus to meet the friendly aliens. (Meanwhile, the Cocytans Ascended To A Higher Plane Of Existence and got stuck there, leaving rather a cold reception back at home.) The Fridge Logic comes in when you ask yourself the question: would the asteroid ships have crashed into the planets they targeted if they didn't happen to have a native society that was sufficiently developed to stop them? This is, perhaps mercifully, left unanswered.
- Played with in Fallout 2, when one of the semi-self-aware Wright children asks the player character if he or she will end his family's existence by deleting their save file. Regardless of whether or not the player says yes or no, the kid then asks if he will dream. Almost a Tear Jerker for this troper.
- Tales Of Vesperia goes to great lengths to address this. The party realise that they have to permenantly deactivate all of the world's Blastia in order to power the Wave Motion Gun that will save the world, including the Barrier Blastia that keeps the major centres of population safe. First, they go to the world's leaders and get permission. Then they discuss ways to prepare for the ensuing blackout, such as creating a new military force to guard the cities. The end result is that the world will be harder to live in, but it's not without hope.
- Homeworld (the first game) ends with the Hiigaran Exiles reconquering their ancient home planet from The Empire and settling down to populate it. So far so good, until you realize that if Hiigara was so important that the Emperor himself had to lead the battle to defend it from you, then it must have had a rather sizable imperial population when you conquered... erm, liberated it. What exactly happened to all those people?
Tabletop Games
- The Dungeons And Dragons supplement "Elder Evils" is basically designed around this concept. Yes, all of the Big Bads can be defeated (or at least can be temporarily driven off), but their appearance irrevocably changes the world. Take Atropus, the World Born Dead, as an example: even if you manage to repel him, his presence has unleashed hordes of undead upon your world and killed off most of the living inhabitants. The awakening of Leviathan, a serpent so large it encircles the planet, has caused earthquakes and tsunamis that have decimated civilization. Yeah, you defeated the Cosmic Horror ... but at what cost?
- Even the best endings in the "Time of Judgement" supplements for the original World Of Darkness are usually a little horrifying. Only Wormwood, the canonical ending of Vampire The Masquerade, is limited in its scope, and even then it would have a significant impact— with all those ancient, powerful, influential vampires ashes in the wind, what happens when, say, the creature that had turned the CEO of
Kellog Brown and Root Pentex into little more than a hand puppet abruptly vanishes?
- To be fair, Wormwood was clear that despite all the rationalizations, Vampires ARE A BAD THING. If nothing else, in the Crapsack World that is the Old World of Darkness, the loss of all Homo Nocturnis is only a benefit.
- In just about every other possible ending for the other gamelines humanity is almost wiped out, and much of the planet lies in ruins. These can be considered happy endings since the alternative is that all life on Earth is completely wiped out.
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