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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.
What happens when you detonate a spherical metal honeycomb over five hundred miles wide just above the atmosphere of a habitable world? Regardless of specifics, the world won't remain habitable for long.
Fridge Logic 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 at least 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. For more general plot points that are chilling when contemplated at length, see Fridge Horror.
Ending Trope, so spoilers be ahead.
Examples:
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Anime and Manga
- Blue Gender. A few humans have survived Gaias Vengeance, 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.
- ...Huh. So, it's a literal implied Holocaust?
- 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.
- 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.
- 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?
- Now And Then Here And There. For all the inspirational music and pictures of the pretty archipelago the desert had become, 1) Dying world or not, oppressive destructive Complete Monster of a dictator or not, there were inhabited villages in that desert, 2) there were also animals, 3) desert ecosystems are fragile in the best of times, The Great Flood just annihilated every living thing there, how do they expect an archipelago ecosystem to evolve from that? Even if the water seeps into the groundwater or evaporates, leaving the land water-rich but not a sea anymore, well, there's still that utter and complete destruction of everything to contend with.
- A possible explanation is that She only released the water to the south, since it's shown at the end of episode one (when the camera pans back while Shu's hanging from the fortress) that everything south of Hellywood is already gone. Another explanation would be that since Lala Ru is water itself, she mentally controlled the path of the water to avoid all the aforementioned from happening.
- You're forgetting that the reason why the Sun looks so big is because it's expanding and threatens to literally swallow the Earth. So Yeah...
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.'
- Averted 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:
- 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.
- There's another problem. As history shows us, when there's a massive revolution lead by the unruly masses, inevitable a strong personality will emerge as a leader, and it's very likely (but not inevitable) that this strong personality will turn themselves into a dictator, or there will be a brutal and blood struggle for power. In all likelihood whatever new order takes power, it will be more or less as oppressive as the former.
- Which is exactly what V was grooming Evey for - to become the leader who would build up the new world after everything was wiped clean.
- 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. This is a catastrophe on par with the end of the dinosaurs pretty much, especially since it happened a lot faster.
- Clearly there was No Endor Holocaust, as the Distant Finale shows us Paris sixty years later.
- 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.
Film
- In Tim Burton's Batman, Axis Chemical is blown up, destroying the source of Joker's smilex gas. While this is good, there must have been at least a hundred people, henchmen granted, inside the plant. Not to mention the resulting massive chemical fire spewing out fumes.
- 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 five, 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.
- Played for Black Comedy in a Citizen Dog strip where this is stated to be the reason why old people find pets comforting. "[The average life expectancy for a dog is] just 12 years? Heh heh... I feel better already!"
- This really sounds more like a colossal inversion of a different trope entirely...
- Soylent Green: Okay, so maybe for sake of argument, the secret does successfully get out, and the Soylent Corporation is shut down. But what are the common masses going to do? The Earth, for the most part is screwed ecologically, the only way to get a decent meal without paying for it is to steal or kill for it. The world is headed for anarchy, if it isn't already. Most likely though, the company's influence will keep the secret suppressed, only allowing it to survive in small rumors and urban legends amongst the people.
- 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!"
- 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 unrealistically, 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.
- Let the Food Wars begin!
- Europe, Japan and much of China and North America would have been almost destroyed. These being the places with the technology, resources and science base to solve the problems and save as many people as possible. Not to mention all the other climatic effects a new ice age would have.
- 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.
- The problem continues in 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 possibility that Klaatu will come back and think we 'squandered' our second chance (when the warning was actually lost) and kill us all.
- Actually it is far worse then this. Not only would billions die but we'd almost certainly destroy the ecosystem in the process. Over half of the worlds population now lives in urban environments, and the only way we produce enough food to feed everyone is because farming has become heavily industrialized. So suddenly 3.5 billion people would mb moving out into the country side in a world that can only produce enough food for a fraction of their number, eating anything they can and burning the rest to stay alive. I doubt there would be a forest left on Earth after the first year and something approaching a nuclear winter would set in from the soot and smog released as the survivors burned coal, wood, and anything else in the least efficient and most polluting way imaginable, campfires.
- There's also the fact that a pulse of Electromagnetic Radiation capable of permanently destroying all electronics on earth would probably just kill us too. We do, after all, run on bio-electric... stuff. Stuff which is effected by powerful magnetic fields.
- Averted in the original, which specifically stated that during the eponymous 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.
- There was a review that found a bright side: "at least there's no way to show this movie again."
- 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.
- 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.
- 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 (due to a nuclear explosion, no less) cannot be good.
- Given that the alternative was complete annihilation, I think this falls more under good villain buildup than a quasi-happy ending.
- 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.
- 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.
- Somewhere A Paleontologist Is Crying. Extinction is the death of a species, so by defintion it would only occur at or after the deaths of the main character/s. And then there's how the extinction of the Dinosaurs occured over hundreds of thousands of years. It would only be considered not a happy ending if their inevitable natural deaths had the same result as well.
- 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 bomb, 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.
- Alternatively, that's not so much a research and logic failure as it is Eros not actually having any better understanding of what he's talking about than the movie's writers.
- 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."
- 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's moon 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.
- 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?
- 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.
- Responsible for a few changes to the end of Wall-E. During the previews, audience members expressed depression at the end of the film; they'd left with the impression that humanity was screwed on returning to the polluted Earth. The animators added on a series of images to the credits that showed the human race repairing the ecological damage and regaining the skills they'd lost aboard the Axiom, ending with a beautiful landscape and a Crowning Moment Of Heartwarming (hundreds of years later, the plant that Wall-E found has become a gigantic tree).
- In X2: X-Men United, the eponymous 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.
- It gets worse. Vulcan was the voice of peace and reason in UFP, with it gone we should expect a much more violent history.
- 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.
- In Alien: Resurrection Ripley saves the day by crashing the xenomorph-filled ship into the Earth causing an impact blast hundreds of miles wide, most likely destroying the biosphere in the process. Nice Job Breaking It Hero.
- John Connor and the Human Resistance's future victory in the Terminator series leaves them with a ravaged planet, hardly a great prize for winning a war. I guess that's why Sarah and John are frantically motivated to try and prevent Skynet happening in the past.
- The Resistance had been surviving for quite some time while fighting Skynet. It's pretty clear humanity will survive and perhaps do a little better, post-war, without the threat of Robot death looming over them, but that doesn't mean it will be an easy or pleasant existence. The alternative of Earth not being nuked to all heck is, naturally, a preferred option.
- Spaceballs. Unless they somehow get decent leaders and some humanitarian aid, everyone on Planet Spaceball is apparently going to die of hypoxia.
- James Cameron's Avatar ends with the natives winning a military victory against the corporate goon squad who were treating them much the same way that the American Indians were treated. However, if the history of the real world is any guide, humans are going to return, with a real army and better equipment, and succeed in taking what they want. As a character from another James Cameron movie stated, "I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."
- Not to mention said humans will be coming back telling stories of the atrocities committed by these savage blue monsters. I walked out of the theatre after this one perplexed at how happy everyone else looked...
- On the other hand if you assume the Planetmind can sucessfull fend off the humans, then humanity's "dying planet" no longer has any outside sources of resources and we're doomed to slow, unpleasantly Mad-Max extinction instead.
- Given the technology necessary to travel to another star the Earth's biosphere is no longer necessary for humanity's survival. Also if the hard scifi space travel holds up there is absolutely no way that anyone can stop humanity from blasting the planet with a relativistic kill vehicle. The Navi may as well be extinct now if Cameron follows a logical story progression.
- Actually, in the backstory it's stated that the only thing allowing humanity to maintain space travel is the [[unobtainium]] from Pandora. It's also implied that the same mineral is floating the human economy at this point. Blowing up the planet doesn't seem like a great idea, all things considered.
- No, they had intersteller travel before they found the green rocks, they got to the planet after all. Also killing every living thing on the planet will not destroy the mineral deposits.
- Famously, The Sound Of Music ends with the von Trapps heading off on foot to Switzerland, which they claim is "just over the mountains" from Salzburg. The problem is, it's not. Germany is though. Specifically Berchtesgaden, the closest thing Hitler had to a "home". That is of course considering whether or not they make it over the Alps in the first place, with no protection or supplies. Also, the heroic Nurses who sabotaged the Nazi's vehicles...were probably treated to more than a slap on the wrist. Nazis, eh? Bastards.
Literature
- 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.
- Especially considering the Holy Russian Empire's freely admitted ambitions of outbreeding and conquering the west.
- Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows offhandedly mentioned that about 50 people died on the defenders' side in the Battle of Hogwarts. Now considering that there couldn't be much more than 30 of age students fighting, and they were heavily implied to be the main power, only supported by some order members, parents, and teachers, it probably means that EVERY SECONDARY CHARACTER DIED save for the mentioned survivors. Dean? Seamus? Lavender? Parvati? Alberforth? Cho? Yeah, they are probably lying around there somewhere...
- 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 disasters 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 spiralling into chaos and civil war? I doubt it.
- Averted 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?
- In Brigadoon, the eponymous Scottish village appears on earth for one day every hundred years. This seems fine until you realize that by the time one year has passed for the villagers, 36,500 years have passed on Earth! How many years will it be before the land the town inhabits is rolled over by an ice-age glacier, or flooded by the polar ice caps melting, or the Earth becomes uninhabitable in some other way? And this was supposed to keep the townspeople safe!
- The much-discussed appendix of 1984 is an inverted example: if no one can topple Ingsoc, why does an in-universe document talk about them in the past tense?
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.
- 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 indeed.
- Plus if you assume that RPM is set in the same continuity as the other seasons, then it means that every character from every season until now (with the exception of the Time Force team and possibly the SPD team) presumably died in Venjix's attacks and it renders all the previous sacrifices made by all of those rangers kind of pointless.
- 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 Burn Notice, Chaotic Good Michael Weston and his crew save people's lives from Drug Cartels, Street Gangs and many other kinds of nasty people, but he usually does this by scamming government employees, security guards and many innocent bystanders into giving him the information he needs, usually in the form of documents. Though never showed, one can assume that when their employers notice the documents missing this people will be fired and their lives possibly ruined. This was lampshaded in a season 3 episode where his own mother Calls him out on this after she witnessed first hand what her son has to do every day in order to save lives. It's heavily implied that Michael makes up for it in some way but it's impossible for him to make up for it all every time
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.
- For all the apocalyptic doom and gloom, one of the endings to Mage DID imply the end of life as we know it... but only because all of humanity had transcended mortality, awakened as mages, and combined once more into the One and recreated the universe from the beginning.
- 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!".
Video Games
- Halo really likes this trope. YAY!!!! The Covenant is gone, and so are the Flood. Oh, but there are about 270,000,000 humans left (Right now there are 7,000,000,000), there are rogue Covenant still, the Elites and Humans are at a Cold War style situation with neither really liking the other, but the Elites respect us because of people like John and our connection to the Forerunners, John and Cortana are MIA, the Prophets are destroyed, there are 5 More Halo Rings, Johnson is dead, Lord Hood is basically the highest ranked UNSC member now (well, that's ok since it's Ron Pearlman) the Arbiter is the Sole Survivor of the Ark, and since there are 5 more Halos, there are 5 more chances for the Flood to take over. Did I mention Cortana and John are MIA? Humanity is almost certifiably screwed.
- 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 MM7 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 on a floating city called Sky Lagoon in the first half, and when it falls onto the city below, part two picks up in that decimated 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.
- Not exactly an Inferred Holocaust though, since you are told that those lovable characters would still live on within your own dreams and every time you still talk about them. Cold comfort since your hero usually doesn't speak or sleep.
- 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?
- 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 AIs which, by this point, practically run the whole bloody planet. The double subversion comes when, in the epilogue, they learn the AIs 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.
- And in Sonic Adventure 2. Eggman blew up half the freaking moon!!
- And again in Sonic Unleashed, in which Eggman cracks open the planet, leaving entire continents in pieces. But no, putting them back together like a jigsaw puzzle fixes everything.
- 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 Crapsack World.
- 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 teaser 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- The first Homeworld ends with the Hiigaran Exiles defeating The Empire that saturation-bombed their adopted home planet with thermobaric weapons, killing three hundred million people, for violating a treaty signed by members of their species from four thousand years ago and killing its deranged tyrant, aided and abetted by rebel Imperial Navy units. A Genre Savvy player might well wonder what was going to happen to said empire now that its [[Warhammer 40K God-Emperor of Man]] expy was dead and buried. According to background material in ambiguously-canon midquel Cataclysm, the answer is "nothing good"; the resulting power vacuum kicked off a civil war that ended with the old Empire messily Balkanised and an awful lot of military hardware in the hands of Imperial loyalists, warlords or pirates. And then the flesh-eating technogenic Cosmic Horror turns up.
- In World Of Warcraft it's explained that the reason the Titans who created Azeroth didn't just kill the "old gods" who had infested and corrupted it was that the old gods were already so deeply rooted that doing so would have caused the planet more harm than good. So now after giving them a few more millennia to take root, the players are running around killing them anyway. So Yeah.
- Not to mention that a powerful being exists on the planet who's job is to wipe out everyone if it decides that the planet is "corrupted". It is convinced not to, but states that it has done its job countless times on other planets before.
- In Eve Online, the player character can not be killed even if the ship he is on is destroyed, but it is made explicit in the supplementary materials supplied by CCP that the ship has a largely-full conventional crew (the player character, a "capsuleer", replaces all command and control crew, but maintenance, etc. is still needed, and on large ships, that's a lot of people). A ship being destroyed is an inconvenience for the player, who in the worst case scenario is transferred to a clone and can start again in a new ship. The rest of his crew, it's better to just not think about.
- This is stated in the old chronicles to be ranging from 1-2 crewmembers on the smallest of the frigates, to around 1000 for a standard battleships. The city sized titans are crewed by tens of thousands of crewmembers.
- Then there are the NPC ships you can fight, most of which are not capsuleer-controlled, so even the smallest involve full crews being killed off for (virtual) real. See the Refuge In Audacity entry for Eve.
- When you think about it, all 4X games, from Civilization to Total War to Heroes Of Might And Magic end this way, win or lose. Yay! You've won! What's the death toll of your supreme greatness? Bummer, you lost. Not only did your plans suck and got your ass conquered, but you took most of your population down with you in that desperate last stand. Even games which, like Civilization, allow for peaceful victories, it's often necessary to butcher quite a lot of people on the way, especially when your victory is at hand and everyone freaks out and dogpiles you, crab bucket-style.
- The main plotline of The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion ends with Emperor Martin sacrificing himself in order to stop the daedric invasion. Great, everything's nice again... except the Septim bloodline was the only thing holding the daedra back, wasn't it? With the last of them gone, what's keeping the daedra from launching another invasion..?
- It is said that the freaking huge dragon statue still works, even if it's "dead". The more serious threat is the fact that there is no heir-apparent, being that the likely wars for the throne will kill tons of people.
- Half-Life 2 and its subsequent Episodes manage to avert this trope and play it straight simultaneously. On the one hand the horrors suffered by humans due to the years of Combine rule and the various alien species now populating Earth is heavily shown, not the least being the hundreds upon hundreds of corpses Freeman finds (and the less said about Ravenholm, the better), not to mention the devastation to City 17 and its populace during and after the destruction of the Citadel. On the other hand it seems to ignore how completely and utterly screwed the entire planet is, considering things like the Combine draining the oceans, the extinction of most of Earth species and how bloody numerous all those aliens are (seriously, a single Antlion hive contains hundreds of the damn things). Hopefully Episode Three will at least Hand Wave these things.
Western Animation
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