It Is Beyond Saving

"Gotham's time has come. Like Constantinople or Rome before it, the city has become a breeding ground for suffering and injustice. It is beyond saving and must be allowed to die. This is the most important function of the League of Shadows. It is one we've performed for centuries. Gotham must be destroyed."

— Ra's al Ghul, Batman Begins

Perhaps society A is a Crapsack World, and the idea is to either destroy it or to get people out of it. Perhaps society A is actively falling apart, and the idea is to simply let it fall apart. Whatever the case, some would claim that society A is beyond saving.

This could be said by a Well-Intentioned Extremist who genuinely feels this way, it could alternatively be used by some other variety of villain as a mere rationalization, or even a form of The Plan in which perhaps the intention isn't to destroy it/let it collapse/get people out of it after all, but to simply convince people that this is the idea. Also, it could be a heroic character using this justification, though that would probably tend to evoke moral ambiguity by its very nature. Occasionally used heroically to admit that their efforts will only win a little time — a stretched out Last Stand.

In any case, the expressed idea is that the society is beyond saving, whatever the real idea may be.

This may extend to Restart the World if they think that the beyond-saving world can only — and has to — be remade from scratch.

Needless to say, this is a fairly popular attitude in Real Life, no matter the facts. noreallife Compare Put Them All Out of My Misery, Inherent in the System, and Soiled City on a Hill. Compare also Mercy Kill for a more personal version. If this is applied to a villain, this is Beyond Redemption. Depending on the circumstance, it might also end up being a Hard Truth Aesop.

---

Examples:

Anime and Manga

• This is how Eren feels about the rest of the world in Attack on Titan. Since the entire world sees the Eldians living on Paradis Island as nothing but devils and will stop at nothing to destroy them all, he feels that there is no other option but to unleash the Rumbling on it. That said, he's also deeply conflicted over going that far and waits until the last moment before putting that plan into motion, in hopes that maybe he won't have to, although he's also clearly not that convinced of such an optimistic outcome. In the end, he decides to go through with his genocidal plan, but deliberately holds back just enough to allow his friends a fighting chance to stop him if they so choose.
• In Code Geass, Lelouch practically runs on this: his mother was killed, his sister was crippled, his father sent him and Nunnally to Japan, which was subsequently invaded as part of a global conquest campaign. Most of the people of Britannia are racist and treat the natives, otherwise known as Numbers, as second-class citizens, even the ones who become Honorary Britannians, and some of the leaders think little of razing a ghetto upon the flimsiest pretext. Whether it's to rid the world of the oppression, or just revenge (it's kind of both), he has little reason to show them any mercy.
• At the beginning of Cross Ange, Ange marvels at the World of Mana, calling it peaceful and perfect.
  • By episode 10, having been turned on by everyone in her nation and exiled as Cannon Fodder against dragons on a Penal Colony for being a Norma, she, after almost being executed, decides that the Mana world, which oppressed her and the other Normas, needs to be destroyed. It does not help that mana is actually a drug / mind control and the puppet master has a few screws loose. By episode 23, when Embryo severs the Mana network and starts the fusion of the two worlds, a few of the people who turned on her encounter her and demand her help. She tells them she could care less, and scares them off with a gunshot. In the end, she and the other Normas (and a few formerly-Mana-using sympathizers) go to the DRAGON world, while everyone else deals with the collapse of civilization and the loss of Mana; surprisingly, a world of trigger-happy barbaric raiders survive without mana fairly well.
  • Likewise, the state of the Mana world made its creator, the aforementioned Embryo, think that this particular creation of his was a failure beyond saving, growing so utterly decadent beyond hope and he really had to restart it to make it better. This is actually one of the legit things he had in mind, although he screwed it up by concentrating more on his own desires and ego, as opposed to Ange who eventually decided to fight not just for herself, but also for people dear to her.
• Near the end of the Devilman manga and its anime adaptation, the death of Miki at the hands of an angry mob pushes Akira/Devilman over the edge. He believes there is nothing left in the world worth fighting for and instead dedicates himself to the task of killing his former best friend Ryo/Satan, even as the world around him burns and humanity goes extinct.
• Land of the Lustrous reveals that Kongou Sensei's creator, Ayumu, believes this about humanity and its remaining culture. She has firsthand experienced the cruelty of the last humans that supposedly led to an awful future, and created Sensei not to give humanity peace but to help lead the next dominant species into a more logical, peaceful era devoid of humanity's failings.
• Mobile Suit Gundam: Char's Counterattack: The events of Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam (in particular, Kamille getting Mind Raped in the finale), have led Char Azenable to adopt his father, Zeon Deikun's belief that humanity would remain corrupt so long as it stayed attached to Earth. So he plans on using Colony Drops to force people to emigrate to space and give a depopulated Earth a chance to heal.

Comic Books

• Batman: No Man's Land: After two biological terrorist attacks and an earthquake hit Gotham City, the US government decides to wall it off and declare it no longer part of the US, instead of trying to save those in Gotham who couldn't get out in time.
• The Question: Hub City, according to Charlie, who leaves at the end of the '80s series. Myra stays on as mayor, primarily to do what she can to protect the children of the city.
• X-Men: The Sentinels were designed to hunt down and destroy mutants. They frequently develop self-awareness and decide that the best way to destroy mutants is to eliminate anything that may potentially become a mutant — in other words, anything with a genetic structure.

Fan Works

• Code Prime: This was Marianne’s rationale for why she chose to join the Ragnorök Connection. During her time as Charles’ personal knight in his expeditions and conquests, she came to see that it was in humanity’s nature to destroy itself. When she gave birth to Lelouch and Nunnally, she joined the Ragnorök Connection, because she hopes to create a world where they would safe, and feared that the current world would destroy them.

Film

• In The Batman (2022), both Selina and the Riddler believe that Gotham is too corrupt to be saved, and anyone who says different is a liar or a fool destined to fail. Bruce himself worries early in the film that he may not be able to help the city, but he has to try anyway.
• The Dark Knight Trilogy:
  • Batman Begins: Ra's al Ghul, leader of the League of Shadows, believes that Gotham has become too corrupt to save, and therefore the League must destroy it before it spreads its cancer. Batman's disagreement with their perspective drives much of the movie's story.
    Bruce: Gotham isn't beyond saving. Give me more time; there are good people here.
    Ducard: You're defending a city so corrupt we have infiltrated every level of its infrastructure.
  • The Dark Knight Rises: Ra's' daughter Talia agrees with her father's assessment of Gotham and proceeds to enact his plans to destroy it to avenge his death.
    Bruce: [Ra's] was trying to kill millions of innocent people!
    Talia: Innocent is a strong word to throw around Gotham, Bruce.
• By the end of Escape from L.A., Snake Plissken decides that the Day of the Jackboot Crapsack World that society has become deserves to be sent back to the iron age via the global EMP satellite control which he helped to retrieve.
• Ghostbusters (1984): Egon Spengler is explaining the Backstory.
  Egon: Something terrible is about to enter our world and this building is obviously the door. The architect's name was Ivo Shandor. In 1920, he started a secret society [of Gozer worshippers]... After the First World War, Shandor decided society was too sick to survive. And he wasn't alone; he had close to a thousand followers when he died. They conducted rituals on the roof. Bizarre rituals intended to bring about the end of the world, and now it looks like it may actually happen.
• Marvel Cinematic Universe:
  • In Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Steve declares SHIELD as this, when he assesses that HYDRA infiltrated the organization at its very inception, so it ends up destroyed and is eventually rebuilt by loyal members.
  • In Avengers: Endgame, an alternate Thanos realizes that his plan would never work. The spared people would always remember those lost, preventing them from enjoying Thanos's balance. Seeing that the Avengers have undone all of his work, Thanos declares the only solution is to erase the universe and rebuild it according to his own ideals.
• In Melancholia, this is Justine's take on Earth getting obliterated by the titular rogue planet.
  Justine: The Earth is evil. We don't need to grieve for it.
• In Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, this is Totenkopf's motive in creating his World of Tomorrow (and destroying the old one in the process).
• In Sodom and Gomorrah, Jehovah sends two angelic messengers to Lot to tell him that the title cities have become so evil and corrupt that He can see no alternative to wiping them from the face of the Earth. Lot pleads for the innocent to be spared, and the angels tell him Jehovah agrees to his plea that if he can find ten righteous men to lead out of Sodom, the cities will be saved. But Lot cannot find even one righteous Sodomite, and the cities' doom is sealed.
• Star Wars:
  • The separatists from Attack of the Clones use this rationalization in a deleted scene. Arguably a subversion, as Dooku was secretly working for Chancellor Palpatine to create a conflict that would give Palpatine more power. No matter how accurate Dooku's statement about the Republic was, his goal was to replace it with something even worse... and he and his master had exploited and exacerbated the Republic's corruption rather than trying to thwart it.
    Dooku: We don't recognize the Republic here, senator, but if Naboo were to join our alliance, I could easily hear your plea.
    Padme: And if I don't join your rebellion?
    Dooku: The Republic cannot be fixed, m'lady. It is time to start over.
  • This is also Luke's view at his lowest moments in The Last Jedi:
    Luke: I know only one truth: it is time for the Jedi... to end.

Literature

• In Atlas Shrugged, John Galt and his followers feel this way about America. He is headhunting as many talented and intelligent people as possible with the intention of convincing them not to join an enterprise, but rather a "strike" where skilled workers withdraw their skills from the market and engage only in unskilled labour. The intent is to destabilize the economy and government and for Galt and his followers to eventually fill the power vacuum and remake society in line with their ideals.
• In H. Beam Piper's The Cosmic Computer, the existence of the titular supercomputer was covered up because it had predicted that the Terran Federation was inexorably declining, and that the decline would accelerate into a rapid collapse if the prediction became generally known.
• Foundation Series: By the time Hari Seldon created the science of psychohistory, it was too late to save the Galactic Empire — at that point, it was so stagnant that its fall was inevitable. The policies that could actually save it would never be implemented because no one saw the need, so all he could do was to try to arrange conditions so a new galaxy-wide Empire would reign in 1,000 years instead of taking 30,000 years.
• New Jedi Order: Part way through Star by Star Leia comes to the realization that the New Republic, which she helped create, is too hopelessly blinkered, corrupt, and in some cases just outright stupid to be worth bothering with any further, and quits being a senator.
• In Julien Gracq's Le Rivage Des Syrtes, the highest-ranked government officials, depressed by the decadent and apathetic country of Orsenna they live in, decide not to prevent the on-going war with the military highly superior country of Farghestan (a war that would certainly lead to utter defeat and destruction), just so they can put an end to Orsenna as they know it.
• Summer Knight: The Summer Lady plans to use powerful magic to end the cycle of life and death, thus ending the pain that comes with death. Of course, in the short term, this plan will kill off most everything currently living. From what little we've seen of his motivations, Cowl seems to feel this way about the White Council. He might have a point there.
• Technic History: In the Dominic Flandry series, set in the 31st century, during the waning days of the Terran Empire, Dominic Flandry of the Imperial Naval Intelligence Corps has noted that he's just doing his best to stave off the inevitable collapse of the Empire.
• Thousand Sons: In Ahriman: Exile, Amon feels this way about his own Legion, the Thousand Sons. He believes that the Legion is hopelessly corrupted and that there is no way to reverse the Rubric of Ahriman which condemned most of the Thousand Sons to a state of living death, and so he believes that the only way to save the Legion is to destroy it utterly. Ahriman, whose dark deeds were motivated by a desire to save and preserve the Legion, is horrified when he learns this.
• Victoria: This is the general opinion of the author on the United States.

Live-Action TV

• Arrow:
  • Part of the reason why Malcolm Merlyn wants to level the Glades and kill everyone in it was that his organization, Tempest, had tried and failed many times to gentrify the area, which came to a head when Merlyn's wife was murdered in the Glades. As a result, Merlyn is opposed to every current effort to improve the Glades in favor of just destroying the place with earthquake machines.
  • The Season Four Big Bad Damien Darhk believes that Star City itself is beyond saving, and he's actually amused that people are still trying to save it. It ultimately turns out that Darhk and his allies in HIVE feel this way about the whole planet, and plan on nuking it so that they and the select survivors they've gathered can rebuild a better world afterwards; when Merlyn finds out about this, he's quick to hop aboard.
• In Bar Rescue, Jon Taffer has had to deal with several bars that were not very receptive to his advice. O'Face, however, has the dubious honor of being the only bar he flat out refused to rescue. While the staff's incompetence was a big factor, the dealbreaker came when Taffer looked into the bar's history and found not only multiple police reports about incidents at the bar, but a video of owner Matt trying to bribe bouncer Syck into throwing another employee through a window. Taffer delivers an epic "The Reason You Suck" Speech to the staff before leaving them to their fate.
• Gotham, especially at the end of season 4 and throughout most of the final season when the writers were essentially adapting No Man's Land (see the Comic Books folder above).
• From Kitchen Nightmares, there's Amy's Baking Company. Amy and her husband prove themselves to be truly horrible both as restaurant managers and as people. Not only do they make several absurd decisions that cost them customers (their servers are people who went to culinary school, and Amy only cooks one item at a time, leading to a massive backup in orders), they also perform actions that range from cruel (firing a worker for asking a single question that is not intended as an insult) to outright illegal (attempting to poison a customer for being rude, and in Samy's case pocketing a server's tips). Ramsay also learns that the store has gone through over fifty employees in a single year. He finally hits the breaking point, though, when he brings this up to Amy and Samy. Not only does Samy reveal that they've actually gone through over 100 employees in a single year, but their mannerisms cause Ramsay to realize that they didn't hire him to help save their restaurant, but because they wanted him to be a Yes-Man to silence their critics. Finally realizing that these two cannot be helped, he delivers an unusually calm "The Reason You Suck" Speech to the couple, and for the first and only time in the show, leaves a restaurant without trying to save it.
• Restaurant Stakeout: The Red Room's workplace environment was one of total freedom due to an owner who assumed a restaurant would run itself. What resulted was everybody treating the place like a second home, serving patrons only if they felt like it, and a chef who openly told his customers he wanted to quit. The staff got so comfortable at work that, unlike all other staffs Willie Degel intervened with before, they verbally attacked Willie every time he tried to propose something or call attention to something — the more Willie yelled at them, the harder they yelled back. Willie eventually walked out, for the first (and so far only) time in the series, when he realized the crew would never accept any workplace changes and that they displayed not an ounce of fear of him or anybody else. The owner soon felt the same way too and fired the entire staff.
• Star Trek: Deep Space Nine:
  • In "Our Man Bashir", Dr. Julian Bashir plays a James Bond expy in a holo-deck program, which becomes unpleasantly real when the DS9 crew are caught in a Teleporter Accident and become characters in his program. Captain Sisko takes on the role of the main villain, Hippocrates Noah, who plans to wipe out most of humanity except for a small enclave in his secret base on the summit of Mount Everest, claiming that humanity has grown too corrupt to continue existing. Bashir goes Off the Rails when he carries out the villain's plan rather than foil it, which surprises even the Diabolical Mastermind.
  • By the seventh season, the Klingon Empire has had more than its share of corrupt and insane leaders, in spite of the stated Klingon beliefs regarding honor and courage. In "Tacking into the Wind", Ezri Dax's solution is to let the Klingon Empire, as it is then, die off instead of trying to fix things from within, reasoning that the Empire's governing system would just create more corruption in time anyway. This is a strong contrast to the previous Dax, Jadzia, who had a very romantic view of Klingon culture.
• The Twilight Zone (1985): In "Shelter Skelter", the Crazy Survivalist Harry Dobbs believes that the world has been destroyed by pimps, bureaucrats, hairdressers, rock stars, and pornographers. He tells Nick Gatlin that he almost wishes that World War III will happen so that the "scum of the Earth" will be destroyed and people like him can build a better world.
• Warehouse 13: This is H.G. Wells's opinion on humanity and her motive for trying to bring about a new ice age using an artifact known as "the world's first weapon of mass destruction". H.G. was brought out of a hundred-year stasis encased in bronze, which she had asked to be placed in due to her becoming mad with grief and hate following her daughter's murder. H.G. had hoped to wake up in a better world, but soon comes to the conclusion that things have only gotten worse and declares the only way to save the world is by "destroying the parasites eating it alive".

Music

• In The Protomen, after killing Protoman and realizing that humanity will not stand for itself, Megaman decides to just give up and leave the City to Wily's robots, with a parting shot of "you are the dead" at humanity. In some performances, he even says to the robots, "Fuck it! Kill 'em all!"

Religion

• The Bible:
  • Noah's flood occurs because God wants to eliminate the sinful humans, and selected only a few to survive the destruction.
  • God wants to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah because "their sin is very grievous", but Abraham tries to talk Him down, bartering down to sparing the city if at least ten righteous people lived within. The criterion is not met.

Tabletop Games

• Princess: The Hopeful: Some among the Court of Storms take this position, arguing that the Darkness has so thoroughly corrupted the world that the only course is to burn it all down and hope that the Light can create something better in its place. Considering the world in which they live, they've got a point.
• Warhammer 40,000:
  • This is the position the Craftworld Eldar held about the collapsing Eldar empire right before the fall of the Eldar. They promptly decided to leave their home planets, leaving the debauched majority of their kind behind. Soon after leaving, the fall occurred, which literally squicked Slaanesh into existence, claiming the majority of the Eldar empire with it. The few Eldar who remained who survived did so only by taking shelter in the Webway, where they became the Dark Eldar (who now feed on souls to ward off Slaanesh), while the ones who escaped on the craftworlds barely managed to escape in time to survive the whole ordeal.
  • The Imperium has had this attitude towards many, many cultures. The typical response involves killing them. To the last man, if possible. With orbital strikes. When the Imperium thinks a culture is too corrupt to save, it does not mess around. There are also plenty of humans who abandoned the Imperium to the Tau or Chaos (or at least the ones who haven't been reduced to gibbering insanity or megalomaniacal evil) that bear this view of the Imperium, seeing it as a broken, decaying empire that's gonna take all of humanity into a hellhole with it when it finally collapses on itself. Honestly, they're not wrong.
  • Some sources claim that Nurgle is a firm believer in this principle, and his ultimate goal is to wipe the entire slate clean.
  • Roboute Guilliman seems to be teetering on the edge of this with respect to the Imperium and how it compared to the ideal he strove to build in the 31st millennium.
    Guilliman: Why do I still live? What more do you want from me? I gave everything I had to you, to them. Look what they have made of our dream. This bloated, rotten carcass of an empire is driven not by reason and hope, but by fear, hate and ignorance. Better that we had all burned in the fire of Horus' ambition than lived to see this.
  • Despite the fandom attitude that Inquisitors declare Exterminatus on a planet every other day for reasons like "someone tripped and said "Emperor-damn it!" ", it is actually the choice of absolute last resort, when a world is deemed unrecoverable (not "unrecoverable without enormous cost in lives, materiel and time", unrecoverable, period) and destroyed to prevent it falling to the enemy of the week.

TV Tropes

• By its very definition, the Cut List is a tool to doom articles beyond saving.
• When Real Life sections get especially problematic (like the one on this page had), unless someone feels like cleaning it up, they are often cut, with the page being tagged No Real Life Examples, Please!.

Video Games

• BioShock: The Central Theme of the series is that any attempts to create a utopia will inevitably have their "perfect" societies end up this way.
  • In the backstory of the first BioShock, Andrew Ryan (and a lot of other disillusioned rich sociopaths) grew increasingly disgusted with the United States' corruption of The American Dream, from social security to nationalizing private property. It was Ryan's belief that the idealistic dream of "one man born with nothing but a body to work with, rising as high as he desired, and killing anyone who stood in his way" had died in America, so Ryan decided to leave and build his own city-state called Rapture in a place that couldn't be found or targeted by anyone, and wait out the inevitable nuclear apocalypse. Ironically, he doesn't realize "It Is Beyond Saving" now applies to his own city. By the time the Player Character arrives in Rapture, the whole place is close to falling apart, everyone inside has gone insane, and they're fighting a civil war over the precious few resources that are left.
  • By BioShock 2, the city is ruined yet still alive, but any trace of capitalism has been replaced with a suicidal cult that worships the birth of a new Hive Mind, and little girls are kidnapped by the cartload from outside the city to create a Messiah out of the very resource that drove everyone insane. Tenenbaum rails at a Big Daddy who is busy repairing hull fractures, asking why they can't just let the city die.
  • In BioShock Infinite, Columbia is depicted as the 1900's ideal of a heavenly utopia, with all the racism and robber barons that the era had dialed up to eleven. Rebel leader Daisy Fitzroy has this opinion of Columbia, deciding a horrifying massacre is worth ending the dystopian nightmare she and her fellow non-whites find themselves in. Booker and Elizabeth deal so much damage to Columbia that the whole city literally veers into a maelstrom, and then they decide to use multiverse-based time-travel to ret-gone the city.
  • Also in Infinite, America at large is also beyond saving in the mind of the self-proclaimed prophet Zachary Comstock, who refers to it as "the Sodom Below". Comstock is also grooming his daughter Elizabeth to carry out his "prophecy" that "the seed of the Prophet shall sit the throne and drown in flame the mountains of man", since he's Secretly Dying of cancer. In a future timeline that Booker DeWitt enters into to save Elizabeth when she is taken to Comstock House, he sees an elderly version of Elizabeth already fulfilling this "prophecy" in 1984 with an attack upon New York City.
  • And in the backstory of Judas, the space station the game takes place on is Bread and Circuses taken to its logical extreme, with legions of brain-dead fanatics worshipping every word that comes out of the three CEOs mouths. The player character is so disgusted that she causes a station-wide apocalypse, justifying her actions by claiming the people who completely bought into the ultra-capitalist hype have nothing left to fight for.
• In Elden Ring, this belief is associated with the Outer God of Frenzied Flame. Its adherents, namely the wandering merchants, believe that the Lands Between is so fundamentally rotten that only burning it all down to nothing can save it. Melina, your companion, opposes this view, though nothing stops you from embracing it.
• Lucian, the villain of Fable II, plans to use the Spire to wipe most of the world out and start fresh, creating a world where death and despair won't exist.
• Fallout 4:
  • The Institute, a clandestine organization of scientists living in an isolated subterranean city beneath Boston, believe that the surface world is beyond redemption, crawling with super mutants and raiders and being an overall violent hellhole. Their goal is not to wipe out the surface world, however, but instead to create a nuclear reactor that would allow them to exist autonomously without ever having to procure resources from the surface world.
  • Deconstructed in most endings.
    • In any ending where you don't side with the Institute, every other faction deems that the Institute is beyond redemption and must be destroyed, but that doesn't stop them from seizing its most precious resource — their science department (that is to say, pretty much 90% of the Institute) — and using it the same way the Institute has been misusing it, but for their own politically charged ideologies: learning how to better scan for signs of technology so they can seize hoard it even more effectively, creating even more Synths and assigning them jobs and identities with no concern of the consequences to humans, or using their technology to guard the Commonwealth but screw the safety standards.
    • If you decide the scientists themselves are beyond redemption and let them die in the raid, the Railroad will immediately turn hostile; you just ensured the total genocide of the Synths because their only source of reproduction died with the Institute scientists. Even in the ending where you side with the 'bad guys', you were put in charge specifically to reform the Institute. You're not expected to do a good job, but your efforts did slightly change the mindset of at least one person — your son, who decides in his last will and testament that his latest synth experiment deserves the chance to Become a Real Boy.
• This is the Flame Emperor's view of Fódlan and the Church of Seiros in Fire Emblem: Three Houses; they believe the only solution to the corruptions of the Crest system and the nobility is to completely destroy the current order through war and rebuild the continent from the ashes. The other factions during the war phase disagree, aiming to either remove the corrupt elements of the system and reform it from the inside or to make the land's hidden history public and open its borders to the outside world. As there is no true Golden Ending but all paths lead to a brighter future, it's left up to the player to determine who's right.
• Half-Life: After 2 days of fighting, the US Military, after heavy losses, decide to pull back and commence air strikes. Before they've even finished retreating, they send special forces to detonate a thermonuclear warhead at the center of the base.
• At the beginning of Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII, Hope explains that the chaos has devoured too much for there to be any possibility of saving the world. The only thing Lightning can do is try to save as many souls as she can to be brought to the next world.
• The Big Bad of Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance sees the United States of America as diseased by corrupt politics, bureaucracy, and media "bullshit" to the point that it can't be saved in its current state. He aims to tear apart the very foundation of the country and build a new society in its place where Might Makes Right.
• This is mentioned early and often in One Shot, with several characters believing even Niko restoring the sun wouldn't save the world, merely prolong the inevitable. It turns out that is because the world is produced by a Three Laws-Compliant AI, who is forced to violate the first law as part of its core programming. It wants to die so it can stop putting a real person in danger to produce a fake world.
• Pokémon:
  • This is the mantra of the primary antagonists, Munna and her gang, in Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Gates to Infinity. To them, having the Bittercold completely destroy the world is a better alternative than trying to fight for a better future.
  • This is Lysandre's motivation in Pokémon X and Y — he's convinced that the world will only become more and more corrupt due to terrible people and soon there will be not enough resources to go around, so the only way to save at least some people is to torch the earth and most of the population with it.
• There's a definite possibility to write off all of Creation, the entire Multiverse, as this, in the Shin Megami Tensei series.
  • Lucifer attempts to convince you to destroy the entire process of creation and reconstruction in Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne, and the White in Shin Megami Tensei IV try to invoke this to convince you to reduce all that exists to Nothing. Most often, though, any faction will invoke this against their enemies to convince you the world as-is is broken, and that by joining up with them, you can get it back on its feet again. Think about the price of doing so for any given allegiance, though.
  • Strange Journey gives us the Schwarzwald itself, which is reality declaring this of human civilization.
• The reason that Neku was brought into the Reaper's Game in The World Ends with You was that the Composer considered Shibuya beyond saving, but agreed to one last game against his Conductor to decide whether he would destroy it or not. He ultimately wins the game, but watching Neku's Character Development causes him to decide it's worth keeping around after all.
• Xenoblade Chronicles 3 offers an interesting variation in that the heroes coming to this conclusion regarding Aionios is unambiguously a good thing. While Noah initially hopes that he can make people's lives better by destroying the Flame Clocks, he gradually realizes that Aionios's cycle and the meddling done by Z and his minions affects everyone in ways he cannot fix just by freeing Colonies and beating up Moebius mooks, and that the only correct choice is to let the world end and hope for the best. This ultimately proves to be the correct choice, as destroying the forces maintaining Aionios in its present state allows the world to revert back to its previous form.

Webcomics

• In Drowtales, the Big Bad, Snadhya'rune, enacts a series of schemes to ravage her city and make it collapse so that she can takeover uncontested. Her schemes work all too well and go beyond her control. Her demons and her flower plague infest the city so deeply that they can no longer be suppressed or removed, only contained at an increasingly high price, leaving her with nothing left to rule. By the final chapter of Moonless Age, the city is nearly dead and everyone has given up on saving it, deciding to preserve who they can and return to the surface.
• Unsounded:
  • Captain Hetr thinks Ethelmik is beyond saving and relishes in slaughtering the people there and razing it to the ground, even though the criminal conspiracy he's painted the entire town with as an excuse to kill every man, woman and child is one he's a vital part of.
  • Several characters have expressed such thoughts about humanity itself in Kasslyne, and they are unfortunately very powerful characters working on crafting superweapons to carry out the genocide they've decided is the answer.

Web Original

• The Onion has a video in which an FDA commissioner gives up on Americans as a whole. His final conference is ranting at all present to just stuff as much trash as they want into their gullets and even throws junk food at them before departing, telling them to "go get cancer".
  FDA Commissioner Steve Hoyer: America is on its own. I'm not going to hold its hand like a goddamn child anymore.
• RWBY Season 6, Episode 3 reveals that the reason why the world suffered an apocalypse is because the gods saw the leaders of the world unite as one under a bickering, backstabbing, warmongering witch against their own gods as the pinnacle of sin. Then they turned the entire world into a wasteland and killed everyone but said witch and the Grimm. Humanity came back slowly and mysteriously, but forever changed in the hopes that their natures would also change. The gods have given humanity one final chance: if they are still bickering, backstabbing, warmongering bastards after thousands of years of fighting a common evil together, they will be destroyed completely. Said witch's Evil Plan by the present is to summon the gods early after having set up multiple plans in different regions to destabilise humanity and keep them from uniting, in hopes that them fulfilling their intent to destroy the world would also enable her eternal life to come to an end.

Western Animation

• By the time of the Justice League episode "Twilight", Superman seems to have this idea about Apokolips. Darkseid kidnapping him and brainwashing him into a leader of Darkseid's armies at the end of Superman: The Animated Series has a lot to do with it, but seeing Darkseid's subjects rally to help their God-Emperor after Superman defeated him and declared the Apokoliptians free probably didn't help.
  • By the fourth season, the Justice League's official policy with anything related to Apokolips is to leave it alone unless it's threatening something outside its borders or on the insanely improbable chance that someone wants to defect.
• In the season finale for season 3 of ReBoot, the city of Mainframe has been trashed so heavily by MegaByte's rule that even Bob finds it hopeless to actually save the city. His solution is to intentionally lose a Game, corrupting the system past the brink and causing a total systems failure, gambling that the User reboots the system from backup, restoring things to the way they were, instead of reformatting, which would annihilate everything completely. It works.
• TRON: Uprising: Cyrus concluded this about The Grid under Clu's rule and set out to detonate an electromagnetic bomb that would wipe the hard drive and everyone on it. This is why Tron had to lock his crazy former apprentice away. The horrible part? Real-world computer troubleshooting actually would consider that an option for a hard drive or computer system too corrupt to save.^note It's even used in the Alternate Continuity of TRON 2.0 to try and slow down a virus causing a Zombie Apocalypse across Encom's servers. Depending on your opinion of TRON: Legacy, Cyrus might have been right.

---