Follow TV Tropes

Following

Serial Escalation

Go To

https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/sword_escalation_6829.png
Wait 'til you see the centuple one.Fun fact: 

"Kara, when I started living this life it was just me and I was going up against human threats. That I can handle. Then it was the metahumans and I can handle that. And now I learned that there are multiple Earths and I was brainwashed aboard an alien spacecraft."

Some series push themselves up and over the top, surpassing the bar they just set themselves a few episodes ago. Then they do it again. And again. And again.

This isn't meant to be confused with the buildup to season finales or a plot climax, but rather a consistent escalation in events that always exceeds what a viewer would expect. When this is done well, a new Moment of Awesome is, at any given moment, just around the corner. When done poorly, what would constitute as a Moment of Awesome can feel ordinary, or even absurd.

For events that are impossible, go to Beyond the Impossible.

Related to Sequel Escalation, wherein the escalation progresses across consecutive works in a series or franchise.

Compare Troperiffic, Exaggerated Trope, Logical Extreme, Lensman Arms Race, Sorting Algorithm of Evil, Power Creep, Mid-Season Upgrade, and Next Tier Power-Up, although they can overlap.


Examples:

    open/close all folders 

    Comic Books 
  • Blue Beetle: How is Jaime Reyes gonna get screwed over this time? How awesome are Brenda and Paco gonna be next issue? Is that a giant naked guy? Is Paco going to use his stick? Is the Scarab going to figure out how to take down EVERYTHING?
  • The achievements of the Saint of Killers from Preacher get steadily more impressive until the end where he kills God.
  • Nextwave: Agents of Hate. Take a normal super team, give each one of them a triple espresso shot of snark, exaggerate their character flaws and set them against increasingly ridiculous enemies. Throw away any aspiration of being taken seriously, then hang lampshades on everything fans like in comics. Then make it more ridiculous in the next volume. Then it explodes!
  • So, just how insane and ridiculous can Deadpool get today?
    • More insane and more ridiculous. Obviously.
    • To elaborate: One of his issues begins with a panel of Deadpool garotting Santa Claus while the caption reads: "A routine assignment." And that is probably the least weird thing that happens in that issue.
    • By the way, no, you never find out why he's garroting Santa Claus. Did we mention it was with barbed wire?
    • And there's the old Cable & Deadpool storyline, "Deadpool vs. the Marvel Universe". It starts with a fairly typical (read: way over the top) story of Deadpool tracking down Wolverine to keep him from killing Weasel, and escalates until it's Deadpool, Bob, Weasel, and a handful of lesser Marvel heroes fighting off a horde of Carnage possessed dinosaurs.
  • Occurs to some extent in ElfQuest: How much more evil can we make Winnowill in this story arc? Also, the climactic fight between Cutter and Rayek in the Troll Caverns starts out as a simple fistfight, but by the end of it they're hitting each other with freaking great stalagmites. They both win - Cutter satisfies his lust for revenge, and Rayek wins the Wolfriders' respect.
  • War Machine, one of his latest suits allows him to repurpose any weapon whether it's damaged or practically broken and attach it to his suit to become one living WMD, this might just seem out a little out there but when you see him literally put pieces of a jet together to make a clawed gauntlet weapon and FLY at the same time or when he pulls pieces of a tank including treads and becomes a living breathing tank. To top that off implications that he can possibly interface with some of the deadliest weapons in the Marvel with no known limit mean he can always push his abilities up to eleven.
  • The Incredible Hulk: The Hulk often uses this trope to a lesser or greater extent depending upon the author. Just how mad/strong can he become?
    • The Red Hulk. How many popular characters can he effortlessly beat? How many ways can he violate the rules of the Marvel Universe just for something that looks cool?
  • How many millions of people can be killed in Mega-City One in the latest catastrophe/big bad plot in Judge Dredd?
  • Shakara: The comic opens with the Earth being destroyed by the Hierarchy and Shakara subsequently laying waste to their fleets. The comic gets increasingly batshit from there, culminating with a final battle against the Big Bad and his acolytes before he wipes out all of reality. Knowingly embraced by the writers, who noted that they tried to make every new issue bigger than than the previous.
  • Ultimate Marvel: The first half of the Ultimate universe introduces the characters, groups, locations, powers, context, etc. Everything slowly, taking the required time to explore the meaning and consequences of each one of those things. The team-ups also started small, just a couple of heroes at a time. But, by the second half, when everything has been set up, the real fun begins. Hickman's The Ultimates and Spencer's Ultimate X-Men are packed with non-stop action from beginning to end.
  • Each volume cover for The Simpsons: Colossal Compendium reuses the characters from the preceding volume (except the final volume, which reverts to just the starting roster of Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa, and Maggie). Volume 2 adds Abe Simpson, Patty and Selma Bouvier, Santa's Little Helper, Snowball II, and Plopper. Volume 3 adds Milhouse Van Houten, Ralph Wiggum, Montgomery Burns, Edna Krabappel, Ned Flanders, Comic Book Guy, Moe Szyslak, and Nelson Muntz. Volume 4 adds Baby Gerald, Bumblebee Man, Dr. Hibbert, Otto Mann, Krusty the Clown, Janey Powell, Sideshow Bob, Chief Wiggum, and Professor Frink. Volume 5 adds Uter Zorker, Hans Moleman, Principal Skinner, Jimbo Jones, Dolph Starbeam, Kearney Zzyzwicz, Apu Nahasapeemapetilon, Wendell Borton, and Sherri and Terri Mackleberry. Finally, Volume 6 adds Lewis Black, Database, the Squeaky-Voiced Teen, Waylon Smithers, Blinky the Three-Eyed Fish, Sideshow Mel, Groundskeeper Willie, Jessica Lovejoy, Mr. Teeny, Rod and Todd Flanders, Allison Taylor, Barney Gumble, the Blue-Haired Lawyer, Lenny Leonard and Carl Carlson, Jub-Jub the iguana, the Screamapillar, Superintendent Chalmers, Duffman, Snake Jailbird, Cletus Spuckler, Rainier Wolfcastle, and Stewart the duck from "The Last Temptation of Homer". That's 62 characters, for those of you keeping count.

    Comic Strips 
  • Calvin and Hobbes: Bill Watterson noted in the commentary of the 10th Anniversary Collection that every time there was another Babysitting Episode, it got harder to write for because the events of the story had to be bigger and more ridiculous than the last one. Eventually, he had Rosalyn face off against Calvin's not-so superhero persona Stupendous Man.
  • Played with in one strip from Piranha Club, where Bud Grace (the author/artist, who regularly appeared in the comics for behind-the-scenes tomfoolery) was told by a frustrated editor that his comics were getting weirder and weirder — which was around the time the martian Zerblatt had become a recurring character and had fathered dozens of froglike kids with a supermodel. In a later interview, Grace admitted that his comics were getting increasingly more and more bizarre, likening it to eating a lot of spicy food — after a while it doesn't seem as spicy anymore, and then you want something spicier.
  • Dilbert: Topper. Every story you tell, he did it better, even if it seems logically impossible.
    Coworker: When I first started programming, we didn't have any of these sissy windows! We only had ones and zeros, and sometimes we didn't even have ones! I once programmed an entire database using only zeros!
    Dilbert: You had zeros? We had to use the letter O!

    Fan Works 
  • Every Heroic BSoD in Ace Combat: The Equestrian War gets more and more tearjerking. Fluttershy simply blames herself for killing Razor and cries. Rainbow Dash suffers physically and mentally, thanks to Gilda's betrayal. Then there is Derpy's despair in chapter 15.
  • All Worlds Alliance gets more stakes as the series goes. At the start of the story the Apostles of the New World, the Big Bad of the fanfic series, have been introduced and are the main menace to the namesake organization across the multiverse. Then, there's the revelation of Nemeth and the Slave Fortress, where it is revealed that he's enslaving countless heroes across the multiverse and sells them to other people for profit. If the escalation isn't enough, All Worlds Alliance Missions - CROSSOVERDOSE ups the crazy further when large amounts of people from various worlds within the multiverse have gone missing, in the form of Caught Up in the Rapture, adding another set of headaches for the organization since now that they have to deal with a mass rescue of hero slaves from the Slave Fortress, as well as a significant multiversal crisis on their hands, beyond the level of what they dealt with. It also escalates to Lensman Arms Race levels, when the Apostles used the disappearance to their advantage in order to wreak havoc in this world.
  • There's this one Lemon Pokémon fanfic called "The Adventures of Ryan and Kirrie" which basically has an Excuse Plot covering the fact that the titular characters keep doing it every chapter. The reason it's listed here is because each time they do it, it gets more and more ridiculous, including but not limited to Shroomish spores causing them to get high (and have sex [of course] under its influence) instead of getting poisoned or an allergy, and having a three-way with Leaf, of all people. By the latest chapter, anything resembling actual plot and Character Development simply goes down the drain and is instead replaced by what can best be described as an orgy.
  • In Evangelion canon the Angels only showed up one at a time. Not in Avalon, each battle has more Angels attacking at once then the one before it. Not enough? Once the Angel War comes to an end, the team takes part in the Battle of New York against thousands of aliens, with the implication that there will be continued escalation until the Grand Finale against Gah Lak Tus.
  • If it weren't for the fact that the story's over, the Halo fanfic Enemy of My Enemy could be taken as this. The armies of the two sides are ridiculously huge (numbering several million), and the weapons get more and more advanced with each reveal. However, at the same time, as the action gets more hectic and the casualties pile on, there is actually a devolution of technology as both sides begin running out of ammunition. This does not stop the battle.
  • Dungeon Keeper Ami: How bad will Ami's undeserved reputation get? What clever idea will she come up with next? How bad a situation can she find herself in and pull herself ''out'' of? And just how much of an out-of-context problem can she become for the rest of the Keepers?
  • Beginning a New Path, written by stargatesg1fan1, is an epic tale of Harry Potter and the Endless Crossover with a somewhat promising opening chapter... Which quickly boils down into a seemingly endless series of bad smut and over-the-top solutions to every problem (real and imagined) of an equal number of fictional realities. Fourth Wall? What are you talking about? The author explicitly mentions himself as well as the cast of the movie, going so far as to have his main character merge with his dimensional counterpart and take over the production in order to make things right. Crossovers involved include the Stargate SG-1 and its spinoffs, several other Harry Potter realities, Justice League of America, AVATAR, Resident Evil, and more - and none of these would be complete without the main character adding one or more girls from the new reality to his Harem.
  • It's fortunate that Neon Genesis Evangelion and Warhammer 40,000 have already been mentioned, because Shinji and Warhammer40k combines both (obviously). What Rule Of Cool-laden method will be used to kill the Angel this time? What literally impossible thing can the AT-Field be used for next? How thoroughly can Tokyo 3 be destroyed? How much CAPSLOCK can be inserted into the next In the Name of the Moon speech? What new Batman Gambit can Shinji pull off? How much More Dakka will Kensuke need? How much carnage can apocalypse Rei inflict? Which meek, unassuming and/or pathetic character becomes completely awesome due to Shinji's mere presence?
  • How long could Yu-Gi-Oh! fanfic Skin possibly get? 500,000 words? 700? 1,000,000? The story isn't even half-way through according to the author, and while YMMV, a majority of the readers are in agreement with it only getting better as it goes on in its violent path of mind-screw dreams and over the top card-battles.
  • "Spengbab" is a form of Memetic Mutation in which the perpetrator draws a twisted version of SpongeBob SquarePants. It can range from humorous caricatures to slightly offputting to downright scary. HERE is a compilation of Spengbab pics in video form. About halfway through the video, the music gets very abrasive and the pictures start looking like increasingly grotesque Eldritch Abominations. Don't click the link if you are of weak constitution.
  • Thirty Hs: From space armor to groinsaws to killing the fuck out of planets using another planet's corpse and vampire cavemen on Mars, it might as well be called Harry Potter: Serial Escalation
  • The same as above can be said about Dragon Age: The Crown of Thorns. Counting almost 650,000 words, it has been a constant fount of epic gambits epic battle scenes, snarky humor, character developments and overall badassery on the part of the seven Grey Wardens, culminating in the most recent chapters with a Battle in the Center of the Mind between the Guile Hero / Magnificent Bastard dwarven noble protagonist and the Archdemon, a confrontation that ends with the latter gaining a higher degree of sentience. All in all, there is no telling what will happen next because a major plot point has been changed, and it was definitely not the only one.
  • Cornova and Jakayrta (writers of Poké Wars) have a habit of making each battle more epic and destructive than than the last.
  • Uninvited Guests: It starts from Yachiru burning entire 11th division brrack down while trying to bake a cake and currently at the point where the Gotei 13 using Komamura as the filler villain in order to re-claim the Plot Armor that Aizen hi-jacked from Ichigo. Yeah, it's that kind of fic.
  • Imperfect Metamorphosis: How much worse can Reimu's day get? How can the situation get any worse? Exactly how much can we push Reisen to the edge of despair?
  • The MLP fanfic The Immortal Game embodies this. The story starts out with the Mane 6 pitted against an evil spirit, and progresses to the point where ponykind is fighting for survival against an army of monsters, and later the creator of their universe.
  • And while we're on My Little Pony fanfics, Fallout: Equestria - Project Horizons does this all the time. How many times can the author make the backstory even more tragic? How much Nightmare Fuel can he cram into prewar projects? How many times can Rampage messily die in a chapter? What kind of balls-to-the-walls escape plan can Blackjack come up with next, and how drunk will she be while doing it?
  • The Swarm of War starts with a few hundred humans, a few hundred Orks, and the Overmind with a few dozen Zerglings… Ends up with human armies a million strong, hundreds of Chaos Space Marines, hundreds of Daemons. hundreds of thousands of Chaos Cultists, millions of Orks, and tens of millions of Zerg (with all kinds of advanced tech brought out). And all of that is before the expansion to other planets starts…
  • In Mega Man: Defender of the Human Race, it's noted in-story that Wily's plots keep getting bigger.
    • Project G-2, AKA The Mad Grinder, is even more dangerous than Gamma.
    • Episode 12 reveals the Conduit's plan of robot genocide, which is a threat to Dr. Light and Dr. Wily.
  • Drakonophobia starts off with the Dragonborn Thief Petra and her fear of Dragons. It deals with an escalated Thieves Guild storyline and towards the end fighting against Alduin. Seems like the normal storyline? Except that The Dragonborn becoming a God, or a god like figure to ensure time flows normally. The seemingly final battle takes place At the beginning of all time lines. Also, how screwed can Petra get?
  • The fan DEATH BATTLE! Hulk vs Asura consists of this most of the fight in Shout-Out to the Screw Attack's popular fight between Goku and Superman. Asura starts at his base Vajra form, but whenever he starts to gain the Advantage Ball, Hulk's ever increasing rage and strength cause him to eventually take it back, prompting Asura to switch to a stronger Super Mode, first his Six Armed Vajra Asura, then Mantra Asura, while his and Hulk's growing strength does more and more damage to to the land their fighting on. The fight concludes with Hulk's anger causing him to reach his WorldBreaker while Asura goes into his planet sized Asura the Destructor for a final clash that completely destroys the planet they're fighting on and only leaves one of them alive. It's Asura.
  • The Facing the Future Series manages to become more exciting and enjoyable with each story. Justified as the writer's technique improves with each story.
  • In the My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic fan fiction Princess Celestia Hates Tea, the eponymous ruler decides to finally declare her long running dislike of the beverage. Things spiral out of control in a frightfully quick fashion.
  • How many times can the YouTube account for Yu-Gi-Oh! The Abridged Series get cancelled and reinstated? It's happened seven times now.
  • Tomica Hero Rescue Pups is perhaps the most insane and over-the-top PAW Patrol fanfiction in existence, combining it with Tomica Hero Rescue Force characters and Star Wars and Bayonetta elements:
    • How badass can we make the pups? Let's start with them easily fighting off droids with pup fu, then have the pups unleash weapons they've been holding back to keep their own show rated TV-Y. Whoa, did Everest destroy an AT-AT the exact same way as in The Empire Strikes Back? Alex then hands Skye her own lightsaber, so she can be Luke Skye-Walker. They can perform Rescue Gattais too. Sure, that's to be expected, bu-Whoa, they have their own Force powers too? And now they're speaking Enochian, sending their clothes flying off, and summoning giant weapons? Chase has a stun baton? Standard for cops. Did he just shoot lightning from his? Oh no, he's lost his body! Don't worry, once his soul gets it back, he gains Swat mode! Whoa, did Skye just turn to the Dark Side for more raw power?
    • What kind of Super-Disaster will our heroes explosively suppress next? An artificial sun? A giant plant? Hallucination gas? A city-destroying bomb motorcycle? Super fire? A city-destroying shockwave maker? A tornado made by a Temperantia clone in its eye? A city-wide deep freeze? Giant balls of molten metal? An earthquake caused by a vibrating underground metal cluster?
    • In the place of disaster mecha that can't fight back, this fanfic has super-droids and their Zukkein counterparts causing the Super-Disasters. Sure, the Terra Resetters are back, but now say hello to a Star Destroyer, a Temperantia clone, an ice-and-fire Fortitudo clone, Skye's Sith form, a blackout-causing energy monster, the aforementioned earthquake-making cluster, and more!
    • What kind of Finishing Move will be used to save the day next? Sure, the standard Toku finishers used are to be expected, but the pups also use equivalents to Bayonetta's Infernal Demon summons. And two super-droids are killed without a finisher.
    • The Mooks themselves, too. They start with Axto, and as early as the first episode those pull out lightsabers. Episode 2, they've got blasters and AT-ATs. Then come buzz droids, TIE Fighters, Droidekas, Death Axto (an Expy of the Death Troopers), and Jakasts.
    • Juri Shiraki's use of Kajibano Super Power has also improved greatly since the events of Rescue Force. She takes out Droidekas by throwing taxis at them, suplexes a giant two-headed dragon Zukkein back and forth, rips one of its heads out of its socket (she also does the same with Axto arms later on), and finally catches its tail and throws it back into the air.
    • The author himself also stated that the current Neo Terror leader Darth Longinus is a Disc-One Final Boss. What could possibly be twice as worse as this super-powerful and short-tempered Darth Vader Expy?
  • Sonic X: Dark Chaos deconstructs the Sonic franchise's use of the trope by quickly introducing numerous Invincible Villains and demonstrating that the heroes are surviving not because of their power, but because the villains keep getting in each other's way or aren't really "villains". And the heroes are affected by the seeming hopelessness of their situation, even though they keep helping as many people as they can.
  • The Night Unfurls: Until the end of the Leaping Lizards Arc, the Good Hunter goes from fighting standard fantasy foes (e.g. orcs, goblins) and traitorous mercenaries to mutated Elite Mooks complete with Body Horror, complete with two eldritch abominations as a nod to the game this fanfic is based on.
  • In the Neon Genesis Evangelion fic "NonNeglecting Week" NERV is audited by social services, and the adults are told to actually spend time with the children. The escalation is what happens during each attempt to spend time.
    • Ritsuko just gives up and abandons the kids on her trip.
    • Fuyutsuki is hypnotized before the group even reaches their destination.
    • The "Bridge Bunnies" trio ends up being taken to jail.
  • The first book of A song of Metal and Marvels A Man of Iron is a crossover between Iron Man and A Song of Ice and Fire, in book Two Chracters from all over the Marvel universe are integrated into the story. Not to mention characters who are as yet unseen but have been referenced.
  • The story of Blood on the Hands of a Healer is this from the perspective of Kamen Rider Ex-Aid canon, where there the main characters had to deal with an In-Universe Massive Multiplayer Crossover of different video game genres. In this story? They have to contend with invading fictional characters from entirely different genres AND mediums.
  • Considering how The Weaver Option brings Taylor Hebert into the Warhammer 40,000 universe, it was unavoidable.
    • It begins with Taylor being transported to the middle of a battle between Imperial and Orkish troops, where she uses insects to turn the tide of battle.
    • The next arc has her and the Imperial troops fighting to stop a C'Tan shard from destroying an entire hive.
    • After a battle with an Eldar army, she ends up in a fight against an entire Ork Battle Moon that derives into another fight against Khornate daemons led by the biggest of the Bloodthirsters - which she defeats, becoming a Living Saint.
    • Then, after a few years of buildup (during which Taylor becomes a Sector Lady), comes Operation Caribbean, where Taylor leads a fleet and army against the Ultima Segmentum's largest and most dangerous pirate alliance - leading straight into an invasion of Commorragh, the Dark Eldars' main base, where nearly ninety percent of the Dark Eldars in the galaxy die and the Chaos God Slaanesh dies.
    • For the continuation, it's a pile up between a Necron fleet that held off the Aeldari during the height of the War in Heaven and annihilated the entire Second Legion, the biggest Ork WAAAGH! since the War of the Beast, the Fifth Black Crusade led by Lorgar and Magnus the Red and the Imperial Fleet intended to destroy the former!
  • Lampshaded in I'm Nobody after the Normandy crew in a span of a few days fights, in this order, Zombie/Heartless Saren, Person of Mass Destruction Laxaeus, and then Sephiroth. Shepard is fearful of what will follow after that.

    Film — Animation 
  • Each My Little Pony: Equestria Girls movie scales up and adds more action, magic, and main antagonists than the last. The first only had Sunset Shimmer and the Fall Formal. The second, Rainbow Rocks has the Sirens and a school-wide Battle of the Bands. The third, Friendship Games, has an entire rival school, motocross, archery, a Man-Eating Plant, portals to other worlds opening, and more anthro transformations than the previous two movies combined.
  • Felidae: How much Bloodier and Gorier can a movie about a cat solving a mystery be?
  • Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children.
    • The director and animators basically adoptedSerial Escalation as their entire philosophy when devising the fight scenes, starting with a swordfight on motorcycles and just escalating from there. This is what happens the important characters in a movie are all Charles Atlas superheroes in a Role-Playing Game 'Verse.
    • Even more so in Advent Children Complete. Just compare the original fight against Sephiroth to the updated version. One is clearly more than the other.
  • How to Train Your Dragon 2 starts with Hiccup as an experienced dragon-rider, which the first movie spent nearly two hours building up to. Naturally, the filmmakers had to up the ante to keep the audience interested. So how did they do it? For starters, the movie has Hiccup as a bona fide explorer, where he had spent the first movie as a humble blacksmith's apprentice. It also doesn't hurt that it climaxes with Hiccup and his pals facing an army of dragons led by a Bewilderbeast (effectively a dragon Kaiju), where the first movie ended with a showdown with just one king-sized dragon. The death of Stoick helps reinforce the raised stakes in particularly dramatic fashion.
  • Shrek: First movie, Shrek goes against a dragon, and the armed forces of a diminutive prince. Fair enough. In the sequel, the villain is a Fairy Godmother; those are powerful spellcasters, like genies. Third movie? The most famous fairy tale villains all get together to try and take down Shrek. Last movie? A freaking Reality Warper!
  • Parts of the climax of Tangled seem determined to outdo their predecessors at all costs. Look at yourself, Flynn. Now back to me. Knees apart. Now look around. Where are you? You're on a horse. Back to me. The horse is now doing Le Parkour. Old Spice jingle whistle
  • Yellow Submarine: How psychedelic can we make it? Very, very psychedelic. It's all in the mind, y'know.
  • In Minions, Scarlet's version of The Three Little Pigs that she recites to the minions, not-so-subtlely threatening them if they fail their mission, ends with her (as the Big Bad Wolf) crushing them with an anvil, a bathtub, a UFO with an alien inside, and a megaton bomb.

    Music 
  • KISS. How much pyrotechnics can they fit in this show? How much blood can Gene spit up this time? How high can the drums go now? How much more creepy are half their songs this year? How much body hair can fit on 1 human being? How much more awesome can their music get?
  • Tom Lehrer:
  • Stephen Lynch is also brilliant at this, although he may cross over into squick territory. Rumor has it he left one song unfinished because his father threatened to disown him if he didn't.
  • DragonForce. How many references to sunlight/moonlight/warriors/fire can we fit in? How much apocalyptic subtext can we fit in a single verse? How many ludicrously overblown solos can Herman Li and Sam Totman manage?
  • And as DragonForce is to metal, so is Meat Loaf to rock 'n' roll. Take the familiar lyrical themes of '70s hard rock, double the length of each song, add pounding pianos, soaring orchestra, layer upon layer of squealing guitars, bombastic backing choirs, and one of the largest hams in modern music history on lead vocal, and you've got a totally unique brand of "Wagnerian rock" that seems scientifically engineered to produce crowning moment after crowning moment.
  • Faith No More amps up the heaviness for each of the subsequent albums The Real Thing, Angel Dust and King For A Day (Fool For A Lifetime). The track "Surprise You're Dead" is by far the heaviest on The Real Thing, but the likes of "Caffeine" and "Malpractice" on Angel Dust, and then "Ugly In The Morning" and "Cuckoo For Caca" on "King For A Day" outdo it.
  • Neil Peart of the band Rush appears to be doing it with the number of pieces in his drum set. To be fair, he doesn't have the big-ass glockenspiel and Chinese gong any more. Now, digital samples of said instruments he can trigger via foot pedals on the other hand...
    Stephen Colbert: The band Rush is here! Either that or a drum factory exploded in my studio.
  • This rendition of the COOL&CREATE arrangement Flandre Scarlet's theme starts out fairly playable, and then it adds more and more notes until only a computer could play it. Seriously, here's a video of a player piano failing the song.
    • As an aside, the song is often referred to as "Death Waltz"; this stems from a misnamed video and refers to Faerie's Aire and Death Waltz, which has no relation to the actual video except for the fact that both pieces are practically unplayable normally (for completely different reasons).
    • And in true Serial Escalation style, someone has made an even more ridiculous arrangement.
  • The Lonely Island's entire musical output runs on this trope. For example, Like A Boss starts out as a fairly normal office day: remembering birthdays, directing workflow, ect. Then it gets a little odd, like crying down sex phonelines, getting sued for harrasment, and taking a shit on Debra's desk. Then he takes a load of drugs, eats some chicken strips, and then has sex with a massive fish in the sewers (note that this is after the protagonist has chopped off his balls) before turning into a missile and bombing Russia. All a normal day in the office.
  • P!nk in concert. How much more insane can this woman's stunts get? The "Try This" tour had her doing an aerial spin while singing. So the "I'm Not Dead" tour had her doing a Cirque de Soleil performance. While singing. And no net. And then a big aerial stunt at the end. So the "Funhouse" tour has her singing while doing a trapeze act that starts out with her blindfolded.
  • U2's 360º Tour. If you thought the Zoo TV tour was big, then the Pop Mart tour out Spinal Tap-ed Spinal Tap. Then, after a few comparatively low-key tours, the 360º tour was even more of a spectacle than Pop Mart was.
  • Two Steps from Hell, how much more epic can they honestly get? Just about everything they make is already a Crowning Music of Awesome.
  • Metal in general has "How METAL can we make the guitars?" It starts with making them pointy, then making them shaped like dragons, then adding double necks, then...well, look at the picture.
    • And if that wasn't enough, there's another quad guitar user named Michael Angelo Batio who can actually use the guitar to its full potential. Left-handed by birth, ambidextrous by training, able to play two guitar necks with one hand each at the same time or switch his hand over and under a guitar neck in rapid alternation for a distinct sound... He can do a lot more, but the general rule is that almost all of it is very technical and too fucking fast to believe. Even shown when he was in a Hair Metal band, of all things.
  • The Italian powermetal band Nanowar Of Steel manages to put the essence of symphonic epic Power Metal into five seconds of song, even beating most Grindcore songs in shortness. The song is called "Power of the power of the power (of the Great Sword)", which takes longer to say than the song goes.
  • Some examples in the Loudness War. Taken to its logical conclusion with The Stooges' Raw Power remaster and Hypocrisy's Virus.
  • The album openers and closers of each Marianas Trench album fit this trope: they become more intense and ambitious with each album.
  • tool's song "Schism". How many uncommon time signatures and switches between them can we pack into a single song? 47.
    • Topped by The Dance of Eternity by Dream Theater which manages a grand total of 104 time signatures changes in 6 minutes.
      • Not to mention that The Dance of Eternity is shorter than Schism.
  • The ever evasive twenty-seven minute long version of Helter Skelter.
  • Daniele Gottardo. How much more badass can waltz sound? How does it feel when Steve Vai himself subscribes to you? Now this is damn impressive.
  • Styrman Karlssons äventyr med porslinspjäsen (Chief Mate Karlsson's adventure with the porcelain pot). The entire song is sillyness getting sillier and sillier- and the main character getting more badass. The song starts out with him stepping in his chamber pot when he is going to the navy ball, and it gets stuck on his foot (it would seem the pot is incredibly durable for porcelain). Since he can't get it off his foot, he smears it with shoe polish so it shines black. Then he dances so well he gets promoted to Captain... and the next verse tells us how he is every pirate's worst nightmare- partly due to the powerful kicks he can do with the pot on his foot. Then he falls off the ship in the middle of the sea... and sails home using only the pot and his coat. And then he meets his wife... who has her foot stuck in a chiffonier. And she went all the way down to the port like that.
  • My Bloody Valentine circa Loveless. Beyond being simply one of the loudest live acts ever, the band (particularly Kevin Shields) took their obsession with the "wall of sound" several steps further than most by supplementing their songs with keyboards based around samples of their guitars feeding back at maximum volume in turn being run through those same amplifiers.
  • Garth Brooks has done this a few times. "The Thunder Rolls" became the second highest-debuting song on the country charts in 1991. "Good Ride Cowboy" tied the record (set by Eddie Rabbitt's "Every Which Way but Loose") in 2005. In 2006, Keith Urban debuted a song at #17, and in 2007, Kenny Chesney debuted one at #16… but only one week after the latter, Garth's "More Than a Memory" debuted at number one. Making this even more impressive is the fact that the country charts are tabulated entirely from airplay, so songs generally have to climb for several weeks before hitting #1. This means that all of the 120 or so stations on Billboard's survey had to play a brand new song 30-35 times in one week… from an independent label, no less.
    • Michael Jackson also did the same (twice) in 1995. Prior to that year, the highest-debuting song on the Billboard Hot 100 chart was the Beatles' "Let It Be", which debuted at #6 in 1970. In 1995, Michael and his sister Janet Jackson debuted at #5 with "Scream". Later that year, he topped that feat by being the first artist to debut at #1 with "You Are Not Alone".note 
  • Evillious Chronicles: One of the first songs, "Daughter of Evil", was Very Loosely Based on a True Story, but mostly straightforward and with a "happy" ending for almost everyone involved. Fast-forward to one of his later songs. It's about a girl with multiple personalities who murdered her father, who is implied to have molested her, and at the end, she is implied to have been killed via injection. It's that kind of series.
  • One might argue The Who were a case of this as far as gear was concerned, from Pete Townshend matching John Entwistle's quest for more volume and amplification to Keith Moon's ever-expanding drum kit setups. The band's penchant for ambitious concept albums, onstage "auto-destruction" techniques, road antics, and rock excess might also be a case, at least up until the beginning of The '80s. Much of the rock music world followed, musically and otherwise.
    • Much of their excess and road antics came to an end in the wake of Moon's death.
    • According to Neal Smith, he and Moon had an ongoing rivalry over who had the most drums in their kit.
  • Miley Cyrus's constant quest to distance herself from her child star past lead her to experimental music about her dead pets who could be used as ambience music for a alien cafe.
  • Pelagial by The Ocean starts with soft keys and strings, and generally gets progressively darker and heavier as the tracks continue, ending with a slow, obliterating doom track. This is to give the effect of diving deep into the crushing depths of the ocean.
  • The lyrics to Never Set The Cat On Fire, with each couplet giving you worse things which you shouldn't do, all the way from setting the cat on fire to starting interstellar wars.
  • Christmas With The Tabernacle Choir went from relatively straight forward concerts to full-on productions as time went on.

    Pro-Wrestling 
  • What ridiculously awesome move will somebody pull off next? What dastardly act will the Heel perpetrate to make the feud evem MORE personal? What kind of stacked odds will John Cena face and overcome?
  • Weight classes in pro wrestling. In the early days, 180 lbs would be considered small, but passable for a heavyweight. This increased to 200 lbs, then 215, then 220, to the point men weighing above 230 lbs were being considered "Crusierweights" in WCW's heyday. As steroids became less popular and the biggest acquisitions from the talent pool, already dried up due to the collapse of the territories, started to age, 220 was again almost universally considered an acceptable standard for heavyweights by 2003, with CMLL going back down to 214, then WWE Cruiserweight Classic stating none of the competitors would be over 205 lbs, as the process continued to go in reverse.
  • The Wrestling Championship belt has, over the hundred-plus years the sport has been around, changed dramatically with time. At first, the World's title was literally just a decorated weight-belt with an especially fancy "buckle". By the 50's, the NWA template of a belt (Big central face plate, smaller intricately designed side plates on a custom leather strap) was the norm, and by the 70's, designs were getting bigger and bigger until the WWF came out with "The Big Green Belt" in 1982, which dwarfed all but the AWA title and the NWA title. By the 80's, some belts were so big they looked like slabs of etched gold on top of leather. Now, even independent promotions have large, intricately detailed belts the likes of which can rival the big companies and in some cases, surpass them. It's so prevalent that it's actually noteworthy when a promotion's belt isn't very big...but because of changing times, it also tends to come with ridicule.
  • Professional Wrestling as a whole was the definition of this trope in the Monday Night Wars as the main promotions one-upped themselves while the indy promotions (namely ECW) did more and more outlandish things in order to just stay noticed. How violent can hardcore wrestling get? How high will a wrestler fall as part of a stunt? How contrived can the flippy moves get? It got so bad in the late 90s that the WWE now is purposely defying this to the point of inverting it.
    • On the contrary, most people loved hardcore matches and high flying wrestlers. It's only in recent years that people have started to complain about it, due to indy leagues doing it badly.
  • Ladies and gentlemen, the greatest counter ever.
  • Concerning Hulk Hogan's famous bodyslam on André the Giant at Wrestlemania III, Andre's weight gets bigger and the time between the event and his death gets shorter.
    • To elaborate, Andre is usually billed as slightly over/under 500 pounds. Hogan once said that due to Andre's declining mobility, he unintentionally dead-weighted Hogan, so it felt like 700 pounds. Eventually it turned into Andre simply weighing 700 pounds. Concerning his death, Andre died six years after that match; Hogan once said he died several weeks later. Eventually wrestling fans started joking that the bodyslam killed Andre.
  • WWE's Hell in a Cell match was looking to go in this direction after the legendary third Cell match in which Mankind flew off the top both into the announce table (which was planned) and then through the ceiling mesh (which was not), leading to concerns in the industry that attempts to meet or surpass the standards set by the match would cause very real dangers. Luckily Vince McMahon put his foot down following this and made sure no future Cell matches ever tried to top what they did in that match (although the Cell match with Triple H and Cactus Jack in 2000 attempted to homage many of the moments from this match, albeit in a less dangerous way).

    Roleplay 
  • Destroy the Godmodder:
    • The game started out as a silly Minecraft-themed forum game with little story beyond a Random Events Plot. Then, in DTG2, the series slowly evolved into the large-scale conflict with intricate plotlines, illustrations, and proper roleplaying that it is known for today.
    • In-universe, the Godmodder perpetuated this. In the first game, he was attacking a small Minecraft server. At the start of the second, he traps every Minecraft player on a server. Now, an inter-universal team of bigger villains overshadows him, and they may not even be the biggest bad of the game.
  • GET THAT PIZZA!: Played with. While tropers can steal the pizza in any way at any time, meaning less impressive ways can still be used as the thread goes on, it's only natural that the tropers would come up with more complex ways as the thread goes on. Lampshaded by Awe, after Bluethorn accidentally causes a Class X-4 apocalypse.
    "Awe921 looks back at the first page and reminisces about the days when the worst thing that happened to him was merely a bullet."

    Tabletop Games 
  • Warhammer 40,000 asks you a few simple questions: How much worse can we make this galaxy? How many atrocities can we get the Imperium to commit today? How many more Imperial Guardsman can we kill in this battle? How much more hopeless can the wars against the Tyranids and Necrons become? What further madness can spew from the Eye of Terror this week? And most importantly of all... how much Dakka can we fit into one vehicle?
    • Then there's Wazdakka Gutzmek, an Ork Big Mek whose lifelong ambition is to built the most awesomest bike in the 'ooniverse. How awesome? Well, he used it to ram into the cockpit of a Titan and kill the people inside. For his next trick he'll try fitting it with a fully functional warp-drive, so that he can ride from one side of the galaxy to the other (and shoot anything that gets in the way)!
    • His bike has so many flashy gubbinz that it's one looted antigrav system from being a jetbike, has no less than three large guns that can all be fired at once (going by the wording in his entry), and the man himself has been depicted in art with a chainsaw claw.
    • How much bigger of a threat can Ciaphas Cain, Hero Of The Imperium defeat by accident? How uncertain can his heroism/dirty cowardice be? How many times can Jurgen save the day without making it into the histories? How much more Subtext can we pile in?
    • Even on the mundane note, a boltgun (standard small arms) weighs about 7.5 kilograms and fires .75 caliber rounds. That's right, it weighs twice as much as a modern M16, has three times the barrel diameter, and fires armor piercing high-explosive rockets, and manages to have a 50% larger standard magazine to boot. It is amazing what players take in stride.
    • The swords in this universe run on combustion engines, the tanks (designed by superhuman werewolf space vikings) are powered by hydrocarbon-fission-fusion cells, and the space ships are powered by SLAVE LABOR.
  • When played right, Exalted is basically the Do It Yourself version of Serial Escalation.
  • Scion starts at 11 and the books actively encourage the players and Storyteller to see how far they can push the meter up.
    • The /tg/ board on 4chan has been seen discussing how to properly min-max Surtr. As in, the Norse fire giant destroying the world. That Surtr. Min-Maxing him.
    • The 3rd Edition Epic Level Handbook explicitly encouraged the Dungeonmaster to do this to the players with ridiculous and unfair challenges on the grounds that the players will have the resources to deal with them. How far can the Dwarven Defender swim through lava?
  • Paranoia does this for Black Comedy. The damage levels go up to "disintegrated," the fall chart goes up to "orbital," and the deaths go up to "six per player."
  • Spirit of the Century lets player characters pull off some ridiculous stunts to rise to the challenge, so long as you're willing to be creative and spend a fair number of Fate Points. Oh, and any game that is willing to include build-it-yourself gadgets and the potential to fight talking gorillas atop a Zeppelin is guaranteed to go up to eleven.
  • Don't Rest Your Head has the same mechanic that is slowly wearing you down and making you more powerful at the same time, pretty much guaranteeing you'll push a little further next time. By the late game (which can sneak up on you surprisingly quick) you're more powerful than the (possible) incarnation of Death. And, using the madness powers, by this point you have power that's so over the top you could call down the four Horsemen, or an army of ninjas, or make enough ants crawl out of your skin to consume the city. It gets pretty intense when you're creative.
  • F.A.T.A.L.. At any given point, you will be unable to believe it could possibly get any more complicated, poorly worded, and deeply broken in its attitude towards sexuality. And then you will turn the page and find a dildo that makes you give birth to another dildo. Brain Bleach may be necessary.
  • Mekton doesn't usually indulge in it (the system is somewhat inclined towards the Real Robot rather than Super Robot series), but it does have Excessive Scale. For when you need to build Unicron, Primus, the Death Star, or the Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann.
  • Magic: The Gathering did this with the "Mythic Rare" rarity level. It has also suffered a lot of Power Creep.
  • Cards Against Humanity applies this to Black Is Bigger in Bed. The base game has "A big, black dick." The Red Box Expansion Pack has "A bigger, blacker dick." The Bigger, Blacker Box has the holofoil "The biggest, blackest dick." hidden in the lid and "A dick so big and black that it is a problematic stereotype." similarly hidden under the middle row of the redesigned BBB. Finally, the note  "Please do not buy this product." box comes with "The even biggest, blackerest dick".
  • Werewolf: The Forsaken has an In-Universe version of this trope. Werewolves earn Renown dots by accomplishing major deeds in line with the Urathara virtues, and each such deed must be more impressive than whatever the werewolf did to earn his previous dot of Renown.

    Theatre 
  • A common Improv game is called "Yes, And" fits this trope. Someone says something mundane, and someone else adds "Yes, and...!" attempting to top the person who spoke before them. If it doesn't end with a ridiculous Evil Plan to Take Over the World, someone wasn't playing correctly.
    • Actually, that's an Improv technique. You confirm a person's plan and then add onto it. "Let's go to the park!" "Yes, and then we can feed the ducks!" And then it will get crazy.
    • Improv in general tends towards this by design; the cardinal rule of improv is to never say no to your partner (otherwise the scene loses momentum fast). "Yes, And" simply turns it up to eleven.

    Toys 
  • Transformers: Generation 1: Hasbro tried to top a number of their own gimmicks. For example, in 1985, Hasbro introduced the Triple Changers — toys that had three transformation modes (one robot mode, and two vehicle modes) instead of the usual two. In 1987, they introduced Sixshot — a toy that had SIX transformation modes! Then there came Ten!

    Web Animation 
  • DEATH BATTLE! sometimes puts this as one of the reason of the winner's victory. Such as:
    • Superman constantly gets stronger as the comic progresses compared to Goku's limiting powers.
    • Because a Digimon's evolution tends to put no regard in balancing, they overwhelm any Pokemon's evolution.
  • Monty Oum's videos, including Haloid and the Dead Fantasy series: How many different video game characters can we stick in this Crisis Crossover? How insanely over-the-top can the fights get? What gigantic building will the fighters destroy next? And most importantly, how much Fanservice can he stick in there? And now that he works on Red vs. Blue, how much more epic can the next fight scene be? How much crazier will Tex's methods of punching people in the face get? How many more times will Grif get hit in the balls? How many different ways can we screw up Church's life this week?
  • Barbie: Life in the Dreamhouse has a very outlandish second season compared to the first. The cartoon went from showing Barbie go to the beach, attend parties, and redecorate her house to showing Barbie get trapped in her giant closet, become even smaller than doll-sized, and pursue dolphins that escaped into the sewer.
  • RWBY: The first three volumes consists of a story arc that increasingly escalates the stakes for the heroes. The climax of the plot involves a war that sees the deaths of students, civilians and main characters, the separation of the titular team due to personal and family issues, and Beacon Academy's destruction. The story arc that begins in Volume 7 is lampshaded early on by one character as being "just like Beacon again", setting up Atlas Academy's destruction. This time, however, Volume 8 escalates certain things from the Beacon storyline beyond expectation: one hero becomes an Arc Villain, the titular team is separated by falling into the Void Between the Worlds, and the entire kingdom is destroyed rather than just the academy.
  • Originally, Fallout Lore: The Storyteller was just a in-universe documentary series about the Fallout series. Then it became a in-universe documentary series with a framing device. Then it became a in-universe documentary series where the framing device included a cross-continental chase, government conspiracies, and mad experiments, at times being much, much longer than the episode's actual documentary contents. The documentary portions of the series also have escalated, from coverage of a theme, person, location or event to now essentially covering entire games.

    Webcomics 
  • The Adventures of Dr. McNinja: How far can we stretch Rule of Cool and Rule of Funny? What crazy-awesome foe can we throw at Dr. McNinja this time, and what over-the-top, adrenaline-soaked method can he use to bring it to its knees? How epic can a moustache be? Can a moustache get more epic if we put it on a dinosaur?
  • Casey and Andy: What madcap new invention will they come up with next? How many different ways can they find to blow themselves up? Will Bob be there too?
  • In 8-Bit Theater you can notch three arrows to one bow and then notch three arrows to ''two'' bows and then you can add more bows than a two armed human could possibly carry.
    • On a different note: just how much time can the author put between setting up a Brick Joke and having it come back? At first, they happen within about 350 strips or so. Now we're seeing jokes come back after nine years.
      • Particularly notable since THAT brick joke was from the first battle Fighter and Black Mage faced (a giant) TO THE FINAL BATTLE before it came back. Yes, almost literally the entire comic!
  • Effectively the premise of MS Paint Adventures:
    • Jailbreak starts with a guy trying to escape from prison. It starts simple enough, but gets progressively more bizarre and ridiculous until by the end said escape ends up involving teleportation, harpoon guns, and Elves.
    • The fight against Demonhead Mobster Kingpin in Problem Sleuth. How will our heroes top their last utterly ridiculous, over-the-top and incredibly awesome attack? Answer: Sepulchritude.
      • Let's put this in perspective: Problem Sleuth started with a detective trying to escape his office. It ended with an aerial battle against an invincible demon whose attacks are powerful enough to split the the universe apart, with a Humongous Mecha made out of candy, a giant sniper rifle extruding from a clock tower, and Death's Scythe all being used as weapons. And that's not even getting into the Comb Raves...
    • Andrew Hussie has gone on to use Homestuck as a vehicle in which he can turn shit up to eleven, and then turn it up to eleven again without resetting it from the first time. Repeatedly. He's actually said that the entire ending of Problem Sleuth would be considered a regular Homestuck panel by now, and he's probably right.
      Andrew: There was only one sure thing I knew when starting HS. That was that this thing would go batshit insane in ways I couldn't begin to imagine. In fact, it was practically the mission statement.
    • In a more meta-example, there was the AlterniaBound Flash update on October 25, 2010. When it went live, the traffic crashed the site, which was expected given how heavily anticipated the update was. What wasn't expected, however, was it also crashing the mirror site Hussie uploaded it to.
      Andrew on Twitter: ok i quit putting stuff on the internet forever because THE INTERNET CAN'T HANDLE ME
    • The exact same thing happened exactly a year later with the End of Act 5 update on October 25, 2011. As much as Hussie and his team tried to be prepared for the inevitable, the Newgrounds mirror - not to mention the entire Newgrounds site itself - was torpedoed WITHIN MINUTES OF IT BEING POSTED.
    • This trope also applies to the the flashes. First they were nothing more than simple short animations with catchy but basic music. Then walkaround games were introduced, and the flashes just kept getting bigger and more impressive (helped by very hard-working music and art teams), culminating in Cascade, thirteen full minutes long and containing quite possibly as many Crowning Moments Of Awesome as all the other flashes combined.
    • When it started, Homestuck was just a bunch of kids getting up to silly antics that made fun of video games. Now, the heroes have become literal gods powerful enough to create a hurricane that can drill through the surface of a planet, and a omnicidal demon powerful enough to destroy planets with ease is one of the LESSER villains.
      • The aforementioned Cascade involves the destruction of two entire universes, and a character shrinking planets to the size of tennis balls and driving a spaceship through the fourth wall.
      • Act 6 started off at noticeably slower pace. Then came an alien invasion, the Earth being flooded, and the main villain killing gods and destroying a chunk of the afterlife.
      • Note that "destroying a chunk of the afterlife" refers to destroying that area of spacetime.
    • Six words: Chekhov's Literally Every Single Story Detail. How many incredibly minor items or jokes from thousands of pages ago will suddenly become plot relevant?
    • To make matters worse (or better), Hussie has stated that Homestuck is but a warm-up to something else. Speculation implies this might lead to the Singularity.note 
  • How many Shout Outs can Second Empire cram into this Comic? Into this chapter? into this page? Into this panel? Into This. Single. Sentence?
  • Schlock Mercenary did it here, which invokes this trope once you realize that the object they were intimating would be used to ram the Andromeda Galaxy was THE MILKY WAY GALAXY! That's not impressive at all, they're already on a collision course! In a few billion years or so, without intervention.
  • Irregular Webcomic! has just taken Wolverine's Badassness and Coolness up to eleven here (read the annotation just how crazy this is). A lot of the idea originates from xkcd.
  • The entire run of Sam & Fuzzy is one big long chain of how much weird stuff can fit in one story line. We start with an anthropomorphic teddy bear and a demon possessed freezer. Then add a secret agent taxi driver, a ninja mafia, an alien invasion of a major US record label (WTF?!?). Oh yeah, and The King is alive on a remote island somewhere. It starts getting into Mind Screw territory pretty quickly.
  • Warbot in Accounting: Just how hilariously depressing can Warbot's life get? Arguably, this early one.
  • Sluggy Freelance: What can we reference from our 10+ year history in this story arc? What character did we forget to give a month's worth of development?
  • Mob Ties: How drunk can Sidney Burns get? How strong can Sidney Burns' punches be? What insane, awesome, or funny antics will the cast be up to this issue? How many Shout Outs can the author fit into an issue? How big is this Issue's Wham Episode going to be?
  • Sonichu: How blatant mixed messages about minorities and women can Chris make? How much more will the schedule slip?
  • Bittersweet Candy Bowl, How much of a beating can Alejandro take and still be okay? Confrontation did not answer the question.
    • Daisy has 18 extracurricular activities while being an "A" student in a schedule full of Honors courses.
  • Looking for Group: How many lines can Richard cross?
    • How can we make Richard maim/kill/fwoosh his enemies this time?
  • VGCats: Leo and Aeris had an argument that resulted in Leo being aborted from time. However, this is immediately trumped in the next strip he comes back.
  • From Bug Martini: "Hey, check it out. 7 girls 5 cups."
  • Annual villains in Bob and George. How overcomplicated will their plans become? How long setups will they have? How much people will they kill, only to get rebuilt? How long will the fights get? How impossible-to-win will the battles become, only for the heroes to get saved by random plot devices, caused by the ultimate omnipotent force?
    • Also how little will the game parodies have to do with the games?
  • User Friendly: How hard will Stef fail at Quake this time?
  • Toward the end of Girl Genius's "Castle Heterodyne" arc each strip was grasping to outclimax the last. How many new weapons and/or traps does the Castle have, and how much bigger in scale and scope can they get? How many native Mechanicsburgers are suddenly ready to start stomping around, and how much more crazier and badass and crazier can they get than the last? This was a welcome break from Arc Fatigue until it became another source of it.
  • Dragon Ball Multiverse: Super Saiyan 2 Vegetto, followed quickly by Super Saiyan 3 Vegetto and his colossal "Final Dragon Shine" finishing move. He became so strong his mass increased to roughly that of a moon. And even that didn't kill Broly!
    • Something more interesting might be how the Vargas constructed a room that completely blocks out Ki signatures, allowing Cell to produce a second, stronger Cell Junior while murdering his previous one in cold blood. Although this may count as Crazy-Prepared.
      • They also constructed energy shields that can withstand energy blasts from Broly and Cooler.
    • The U19 fighters claim that, in their war armor, any one of them could kill Broly with one strike. While it's never revealed if this was quite accurate, it's clear they aren't bluffing: only 1% of Broly's murderous rampage penetrated the energy shield that's protecting the spectators. Xeniloum's Z-slash, however, went through 100%... and he didn't seem to be even trying. The Vargas are naturally freaked out.

    Web Videos 
  • This is the driving force of the "Prank War" between Streeter Seidell and Amir Blumenfeld of collegehumor.com. The "pranks" started out as relatively harmless - Streeter replaced the audio on a song Amir was listing to with audio from a sextape, and Amir set Streeter up on a fake date with a fake girl. But things changed with the third prank, where Amir submitted an embarrassing audition tape to a fake company for a network pilot that Streeter then played for the office, and it became an unwritten rule that the pranks had to be public. Amir pranked Streeter by convincing an audience at Upright Citizens Brigade not to laugh at any of his jokes, and Streeter responded by setting Amir up in a fake sketch with Human Giant, wherein they would insult his acting and eventually remove him from the sketch. Once he found out, Amir took it fairly well, but when he was informed that the sketch itself was not real and they had flown to LA for nothing, he was almost driven to tears, and things got personal. The next prank was the infamous Yankee Stadium prank, in which Amir arranged for a fake JumboTron proposal from Streeter to his girlfriend Sharon. She accepted, but when he told her he didn't set it up, she slapped him, and they apparently broke up. While the pranks, admittedly haven't been that severe since then, they're still pretty bad: Streeter convinced Amir that he won a half-million dollars with a rigged half-court basketball shot, and Amir convinced Streeter that he was going to die when he went skydiving and the parachute wouldn't open. It remains to be seen whether things will get worse from here, or if the War is over.
  • The Mystery Sphere: How apathetic can Ryney be? How intelligent can the magical bears riding velociraptors be? How long can this series keep having a coherent plot in spite of those things?
  • The Angry Video Game Nerd:
    • Many things, but mostly: how many times can he cram the word fuck into a 15-minute video? Also, how bad will the next game to be reviewed suck? How pissed off can he get? How many creative ways to destroy games can he come up with?
    • His analysis on why Lester the Unlikely never got a sequel:
      I can imagine what Lester the Unlikely 2 would've been like. The game starts... and you couldn't even move; all that happens, Lester pulls down his pants, sucks his thumb, and takes a shit. The third game, you couldn't even get past the title screen; all that happens, you push Start, and Lester falls down and farts. The fourth game doesn't even work at all; you just put it in your Super Nintendo... [the cartridge explodes] and it explodes. The fifth game isn't even a game; it's just a bag of shit that says Lester the Unlikely 5 on it. And there's a new one coming up on the PS4 using the latest state of the art technology of constructing the disc out of orangutan diarrhea. It just turned out that was the only way, and it really gives Blu-Ray a run for its money.
  • The goal of My Opinions On Every Pokemon Ever is to write opinions about every single Pokémon that stretch several paragraphs.
  • How long can two people on Livejournal stretch "some people find improper grammar sexy" and continue coming up with things like "No gerunds before marriage. I'm still a lady"?
  • This video of "Top 60 Ghetto Names". You may have to pause on "Watermelondrea" due to intensive laughter. The last one is... Courtney.
  • Pretty much the core engine of every Britanick sketch. Each sketch generally starts off somewhere normal and increases in absurdity until reality collapses. This sketch distills the concept into two people talking - Brian wants to know what a particular line from Twelfth Night is, and Nick's incorrect answers go from "wrong part of the play" to "wrong play" to "wrong author" to 'frying pan' all the way up to quoting a section of a suicide note penned by Brian's dead ex-girlfriend.
  • Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog: How much more of an offensive, jerkass-ish douchebag of an asshole can Captain Hammer be? Even worse. During the filming, Nathan Fillion was told for the first time in his life this line:
    "You are not cheesy enough."
  • Welcome to Atop the Fourth Wall... and yes, Virginia, there IS a "Santa Claus Conquers the Martians" comic.
  • How incredibly esoteric, obscure a character can Akinator guess next?
  • Epic Meal Time boils down to this trope applied to food. To wit: their early endeavour of putting five different kinds of bird meat in a pig, and a few episodes later they broke the 100,000-calorie barrier.
  • Warriors Of Genesis: Everyone in this whacked-out world is a fan of this trope, it actually makes the viewers remember something else.
  • The Channel Awesome anniversary specials have tried to top each other every year. The first was just a short 20 minute brawl in a random Chicago building and the draw was that most of the contributors (And AVGN and Kyle Justin) all flew to Chicago to be in the same room at the same time. The 2nd Kickassia, was about an hour or so, had a decent plot and was set in more than one location and had multiple costumes, but was still fairly cheaply done mostly focused on the Critic, and was a "Shaggy Dog" Story in that nothing really changed. The 3rd Suburban Knights was a longer slightly more epic tale, with a slightly bigger cast with 2 ongoing plots, and some drama and consequences that lasted in the following year and leading into the 4th film To Boldly Flee an over 3 hour long epic tale with multiple story arcs, even more site regulars appearing, it's own original musical number, impressive film level special effects, and ending with several characters killed off and the universe of TGWTG changing forever. Its been mentioned that following anniversary specials will NOT attempt to top To Boldly Flee (at least not anytime soon), and will be closer to the earlier specials in terms of complexity.
  • The Nostalgia Critic: How bad can the currently-reviewed movie get, and how badly will it break the titular Critic next?
  • The Impossible Man: First chapter we are introduced to The Impossible Man teleporting himself without understanding it, by the end of the book, we see how his power truly works without understanding it.
  • The SCP Foundation used to have three object class: Safe (can be safely contained), Euclid (possibly dangerous; most living beings are Euclid), and Keter (tries to bring The End of the World as We Know It). Then we were introduced to Thaumiel SCPs, which are completely beneficial and geared towards the preservation of the planet; for that reason, they are protected with a level of secrecy and security even beyond many Keter SCPs. After that, an SCP obtained the Apollyon class, which means that not only it's capable of Keter-level destruction, it will eventually escape containment and the Foundation is incapable to prevent or stop it.
  • Destroy the Godmodder:
    • This trope is one of the founding mechanics of how the game is played, despite attempts of the GMs to stop, or at least slow it. Look at the beginning of any thread, then look at the end of it, and it will have scaled way up.
    • Destroy the Godmodder went from being just a battle with the Godmodder in the first game, to a complex plot involving Homestuck and a lot of world building.
    • Every game also has internal Serial Escalation. In the beginning, the game mostly involves insta-summons and attacks against the Godmodder. By the end, the battlefield is swarming with entities and whittling down the Godmodder's last Hit Points takes as long as massively cutting them down during the start.
  • That's Offensive is a short video about three young men playing poker who keep accidentally offending one another. At first the offensive things are fairly reasonable and common things to be offended over (such as casual use of the derogatory word "retarded"), however their reactions and the things they get offended over quickly escalate, getting to the point where they yell at one another because someone said "feel" or "gramatically".
  • The LoadingReadyRun skit "Hot and Saucy" does this with a hot sauce salesman forced to offer increasingly ludicrous hot sauces, to the point that they're quickly lethal, and eventually sells the one that will kill everyone on the planet if consumed.
    Salesman: Alright. Here is Temporal Patricide. It's not as hot as Clyde's, but when you eat it, it goes back in time and kills your father.
  • The "[X work] theme but with every Y replaced with Z" trend works like this. The things the lyrics are replaced by become increasingly absurd until sometimes the resulting videos go on for several minutes or hours.
  • Rock, Paper, Anything zigzags this. Usually, there will be a stream of increasingly complicated objects...which is countered by an absolutely mundane object, and the cycle starts anew.
  • Jon Bois:
    • The Tim Tebow CFL Chronicles takes this approach to Canadian Football, as the Toronto Argonauts break through every boundary, constantly driving even further than anyone thought possible. First they leave the stadium, then they leave Toronto, then all of Ontario—then after driving across all of Quebec, they find a ship and leave Canada for Greenland. In the end, they try to "pass" the ball into space, so the game can last forever. Unfortunately, Tim Tebow's throw is off, so the ball gets destroyed, and the game abruptly ends.
    • 17776 gives the same treatment to American Football, partly as a result of human immortality. Playing fields can now encompass entire states, games can take decades or centuries to finish, and one player is depicted using an EF-5 tornado to gain competitive advantage. And then the sequel, 20020, is released; the story centers around a college football game with 111 teams that crosses the entire continental United States.
  • The Music Video Show went in this in season four with its Black Comedy slowly increasing as the season goes on. Several episodes contain instances of Domestic Abuse. How dark can it get? One episode has child abuse and child suicide. And then in another episode, there is not only a child death but also a puppy dying in a vehicle. How much black comedy will be inserted into each episode?
    • How will women and children be abused THIS time?
  • The Last Podcast on the Left has discussed this with both serial killers and cult leaders:
    • They observe multiple times during a heavy hitter series when a serial killer has to go further and further with their crimes. Often the first murder is accidental. From there, they begin killing on purpose to replicate the high they got off the first death, and have to do a little bit more each time to keep the feeling alive. This eventually culminates in a "berserker mode" for many if not caught in time, as was the case for Ted Bundy and his attack on a Florida sorority house.
    • Cult leaders have to escalate their claims to keep their followers. Whatever the cult starts with, as time goes on those claims become normalized and the cult becomes less focused. The leader, therefore, has to escalate his proclamations to keep everyone hooked on the cult and not thinking too much about anything else. Aum Shinrikyo went from a cult predicting the exact date of doomsday to actively taking steps to bring said apocalypse about themselves.
  • QuackityHQ's "Roblox Sucks" series begins with him poking fun at the game and its less-than-stellar community, and ends with the Roblox forums being shut down.
    • This video elaborates a bit more: the account he was using for the series, "quackityishot", was banned after a series of forum raids that he and his subscribers conducted, prompting another raid on the forums to get the account unbanned. The official Roblox Twitch account was watching the stream and banned all accounts that the chat gave him to use (one ban notice even says "Do not continue to stream forum raiding on Twitch"). After his IP is blocked from accessing their site, Quackity tries calling Roblox's customer service number, and is quickly hung up on. He then tries the Canadian number and gets a sex hotline. Quackity eventually gets back on the site via rabb.it, and checks the forums to find the raid still going strong. He tries logging back in as quackityishot and sees that the admins flat-out deleted the account, eventually culminating in Quackity's Twitch channel being temporarily suspended and the forums receiving an additional filter: you couldn't post unless your account was over two years old.
      Steel Penguin (in the comments): Wow. Even the admins of Roblox are toxic.
    • The next video ups the ante even more: not only was "Quackity" censored on the forums prior to the raid, his undercover account was deleted and his IP was blocked within minutes of the stream starting. Rabb.it was used again to bypass the IP ban, and more donor accounts were used (though these typically lasted under a minute before getting banned and deleted). People told Quackity that Roblox admin "InceptionTime" was watching the stream - he ends up blocking Quackity on Twitter after he attempts to reason with the unruly admin. The forum filter is upped from two years to thirteen years, and Roblox began taking down games and models that were in some way themed around the raids. Throughout the whole clusterfuck, Quackity keeps Corpsing and saying that this would all stop if quackityishot were unbanned.
  • Call Me Kevin actually lampshades this in his video of The origin of Jim Pickens, when it comes to showing how Jim Pickens basically took over his Sims 4 videos. The videos started out with Urp John, an oddly-proportioned Sim whose only goal was to sleep with as many women as possible and have just as many children. Then control switched over to Jim Pickens, who started locking people into basement dungeons to serve as money-makers by painting the very next episode. This escalated even further when Jim became a vampire, and his prisoners also served as a blood-bank, Jim starting multiple cults, becoming human again, and having a battle royale with multiple Sims that resulted in Shrek joining the family, and then the Strangerville pack, which is weird in itself. He says the series went from 'The Forearm God' (Urp John) to 'Shrek impregnating the entire neighborhood'!
  • Dream's Minecraft Manhunts get more and more over-the-top as the series grows more in number. For example, the Manhunts started off with only one hunter. As the series expanded, Dream added a second hunter, and eventually a third. As a result, his victories keep getting better and better. The strategies that Dream and the hunters use also evolve. In the Minecraft Manhunt grand finale explanation video, Dream said the hunters were at their best, and Dream only managed to kill one of the hunters once, whereas in the earlier videos, Dream killed the hunters many times while also managing to outsmart them. Dream did actually outsmart them in the grand finale, but he had to use new techniques as well as becoming better at the game.
  • Often used as a source of humor in Map Men:
    • Mark and Jay saying "Hala'ib Triangle", and then twisting it to make the "Hala'ib" part last as long as possible every time they say the place again.
    • Basically how the two describe enclaves. A first-order enclave is a country surrounded by another country, while a second-order enclave is when a country is surrounded by another country, which is inside the first country, and a third-order enclave is when a country is surrounded by a second country, which is inside the first country, which itself is surrounded by the second country. Or as Jay puts it:
      "A piece of India inside Bangladesh, which is in India, which is in Bangladesh, which is insane."
    • The episode on what the world would look like in 250 million years has Jay and Mark presenting the continental drift like a weather news broadcast, with both of their eyebrows getting increasingly larger every time the video cuts.
    • "Who Owns Antarctica?" has a short slideshow on famous explorers with mustaches. The mustaches are edited to be larger and larger with each next photo, eventually ending with a man whose mustache is edited to be 8 times larger than his head. Also in the same episode, the end-roll ad has Mark washing dishes on the sink before he ends up washing increasingly ridiculous objects, like a hand saw, a vinyl record, a book, a chair, and finally someone else's face.

    Western Animation 
  • In Dan Vs., who's Dan going to destroy this time? How far will he go? How much pain can Chris be put through? Is Dan's Imposter coming back? And how villainous can the things Dan's fighting actually be? Seriously, the first season alone has Dan swearing vengeance against New Mexico, Canada, George Washington, etc. At some point, even the most mundane titles have you on the edge of your seat. Like "Reality TV". Or "The Boss". Or "The Telemarketer" (especially the Telemarketer).
  • The Running Gag in Archer with Brett getting shot. The most recent case involved multiple ricochets and the bullet going down a flight of stairs before hitting him. It finally hits the peak at the start of season five when he gets accidentally shot during an FBI raid... in the head.
    • Or giving Ray severe injuries, enhancing him with bionic parts, then accidentally re-crippling him. At this point, having been rendered quadriplegic, he's about one step above being a head floating in a jar.
  • Megas XLR should be called "Serial Escalation: The Series." How strange will the buttons and weapons get? How badly will they backfire? How much can Coop eat? How badly will the world get screwed over as a result of the hero's actions?
  • Regular Show: How angry can Mordecai and Rigby make Benson? How bizarre can the adventures get? How will J.G. Quintel and company make the censors cry this time?
  • Steven Universe: How much more Homoerotic Subtext can Rebecca Sugar stuff into an 11-minute episode? (This is the butt of MANY fandom jokes.) What super-powered Gems and/or Fusions will we meet next? What Eldritch Abomination will be redeemed (or not) next by the Power of Friendship? What powers will Steven acquire next, and how far will they take him?
    After "Jailbreak": There's no way this show could get any gayer
    After "Keystone Motel": There's no way this show could get any gayer
    After "The Answer": There's no way this show could get any gayer
    After "Hit The Diamond": There's no way this show could get any gayer
    After "Last One out of Beach City": There's no way this show cou-
  • Batman: The Brave and the Bold. How much more awesome can The Bat get? What gadgets does he have this time? Did the Batmobile just turn into a Humongous Mecha?
  • Someone tell us that there is no challenge between the writers to make Quagmire from Family Guy progressively squickier in his sex mania.
    • The fights with the giant chicken; the one in "Internal Affairs" involves time travel, cloning and a space shuttle, among other things, and the fight between Peter and Homer in "The Simpsons Guy" involves the two getting radiation-induced superpowers.
  • In some episodes of The Simpsons, Homer's Amusing Injuries are rendered this very way.
    • One episode has Homer coming home with a truck and claiming that it Fell Off the Back of a Truck; A "truck-truck". Cue Bart driving up with a truck-truck, claiming it fell off of a truck-truck...truck. Cue Maggie driving up in a truck-truck-truck...
  • South Park is essentially fueled by this trope. Now you can ride like Mr. Garrison! [1]
    • Over the course of "The Mexican Staring Frog of Southern Sri Lanka", In-Universe Executive Meddling slowly turns the Show Within a Show Jesus & Pals from a down-to-earth, family-friendly public access show into a Jerry Springer-esque trainwreck.
    • Cartman's Self-Serving Memory in "Fishsticks" results in his flashbacks becoming more and more outrageous, from being calling "handsome and not at all fat" to slaying a dragon and even fighting a robot army as an Expy of the Human Torch.
    • And in the early seasons, Sheila's over-the-top protests, ranging from mass suicides outside of a network studio to throwing a parade for a lady with a conjoined fetus. They seemed to have stopped after the war with Canada.
    • In "Death" the boys ask various people about their thoughts on assisted suicide. When they ask Mr. Garrison, he says he's "not touching that one with a twenty-foot pole" and with each person they ask, the figurative pole grows another twenty feet.
    • How many more people can go to Hell? "Best Friends Forever" revealed that Hell has a million times more people than Heaven. With Kenny's help, Heaven somehow beats them offscreen.
  • How much more brutal can Metalocalypse get?
    • Blacker than the blackest black times infinity?
    • And what line will Doctor Rockzo cross next to get more cocaine?
    • Not to mention the size of the Tribunal's meeting room.
  • Similarly, Moral Orel went from being a dark comedy mocking religion to a flat-out depressing dramedy over the course of 3 seasons...and fans loved it, despite that [adult swim] regretted telling the show creator to amp up the dark humor.
  • Avatar:
    • Avatar: The Last Airbender does this with its titular bending. Katara, for instance, goes from requiring a water pouch at all times, to bending her sweat, to bending the water in her opponent's bodies. Justified in that the characters all spend massive amounts of time in training. Ability escalation is to be expected when you work hard and practice constantly. With each passing season, the series basically does this with the powers of every major character.
    • The sequel series, The Legend of Korra, has this with Lin Beifong. In just about every episode she is in, she continues to be more badass. From swinging on her metal cables in the Pro-bending stadium to save Korra in Episode 6, to outright tearing apart a Mini-Mecha on her own in Episode 7, and then being an outright One Woman Army and saving her men from an Equalist base in Episode 9.
  • Invader Zim loves this trope.
    • Some of the best examples? There's Zim flooding an entire city with a colossal balloon because Dib hit him with a water balloon, there's Dib hacking into advanced Irken machinery from his laptop, there's GIR knocking Dib through a brick wall with a projectile sandwich... It just goes on.
    • Not to mention all the catastrophes that Zim's caused: killing two previous Tallests, destroying several planets on his own, creating every kind of horrible, twisted monstrosity imaginable and starting a massive power failure when he was two minutes old. Also, most of that was unintentional.
  • Time Squad: The episode "Every Poe Has a Silver Lining" had Edgar Allen Poe is completely cheerful and oblivious to all things dark and gloomy and Time Squad makes the guy have a complete mental breakdown — until they criticize his cake.
    • The Ho Yay centered on Larry went from being barely noticeable in season 1 to being a character trait in season 2. The Ho Yay count kept on rolling into Refuge in Audacity territory, with Larry and his feelings for Tuddrussel being the prime target. The idea escalates to the season 2 episode "Ex Marks the Spot", where Larry acts like a jealous housewife and tries to sabotage Tuddrussel's and his ex-wife Sheila's dinner after seeing them act rather unusually cool towards each other. When found out, and Tuddrussel casually laughs it off, Larry bitterly tells him he's sleeping on the sofa.
  • My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic has Fluttershy who can stare down a cockatrice and then a dragon.
  • SpongeBob SquarePants invoked this when Mr. Krabs crossed the Moral Event Horizon. Eventually the writers stopped at "The Cent of Money".
  • Tex Avery makes this his modus operandi during his years at MGM. Just when you think the cartoon can't get any zanier, it does.
    • King Size Canary: How big can the cat and mouse get from one bottle of Jumbo-Gro? Bigger than the whole planet, apparently.
    • Northwest Hounded Police: How far will Wolfie go to shake off Droopy? And where will he find Droopy once he gets there?
    • Bad Luck Blackie: What crazy thing will fall on the bulldog's head next? And how will Blackie manage to cross his path?
  • Gravity Falls started off as a relatively innocent cartoon about twins exploring an apparently sleepy city while staying at the tourist trap of their mysterious Grunkle Stan. Cue Season 2, which opened with the monsters being zombies, and then continues to evolve possessed brothers, a videogame girl wanting to keep Soos forever, a missing family member who's been traveling 30 years through different dimensions, dark pasts, the Genki Girl losing hope and locking up in a Lotus-Eater Machine, and finally the end of the world. That escalated quickly.
  • In the Robot Chicken episode "The Rambling of Maurice", a Batman skit features Two-Face getting his face burnt again, turning him into Three-Face. He then gets burnt a third time and becomes Four-Face, and the skit ends before we see the aftermath of him getting burnt a fourth time.
  • Adventure Time:
    • In terms of creepiness. Name anything creepy about this show—the Mind Screw ending of "Tree Trunks" and "Evicted!", the Nightmare Faces Marceline, Peppermint Butler's desire for flesh—it doesn't matter. ALL of that was topped by this. Holy. Freaking. Crud. According to Adam Muto, this is just the beginning.
    • They outdid themselves again with those creepy freaking clown nurses in "Another Way", which legitimately freaked out most people who watched the episode and undoubtedly scarred many children for years to come. Prepare to lose sleep.
    • They did it again with those three freaking scary fruit witches in "Dad's Dungeon", two of whom ate the third voraciously.
    • A separate example from above from the Season 5 two-part opening: How much worse is it going to get for Alternate Universe Finn in Farmworld? First he is forced to sell his pet to pay back a gang, then tries to find a way around it, then comes across the Ice King's crown which an elderly and insane Marceline warns him to avoid, then gets it stolen by Big D, the gangster threatening his dad, then finds that while he was fighting Big D to get it back, the gang set his hometown on fire, then goes home to find that his house is burning with his family in it, then in desperation puts on the crown, which saves his house by freezing it but drives him insane, then he tries to stop the town from burning and sets off the atom bomb, then finds his family but has to send them away so he can't hurt them (even though they are probably going to die of radiation in the next few hours), then finds that he's killed Jake with the bomb as he's in a pool of radioactive goo, and then has to fight him as he is turned into the Lich via radiation. It would presumably get even worse had Jake not cut it off by wishing them back home. Nice Job Breaking It, Hero
  • Rick and Morty: The parallel dimensions in "Close Rick-Counters of the Rick Kind" become increasingly absurd variations on a theme, from a world where slices of pizza order human delivery, to a world where phones sit on pizza and order chair delivery on human phones, to - finally - a world where chairs sit on inanimate humans and order phone take-out on pizza. Rick and Morty even visit an Italian restaurant and purchase some edible phones for themselves.
    • Arguably the entire show, on a high concept sci-fi scale. The first episode starts with the most ridiculous thing being that Rick has created a flying car from garage junk, and introduces the concept of the multiverse. By episode six of the first season, the titular characters have replaced alternate universe versions of themselves who managed to solve a problem our Rick and Morty couldn't, and also coincidentally died around the same time. The Council of Ricks in Episode 10 escalates this even further, and by the beginning of Season 2 we're in full-blown mind-fuck territory, if we weren't there already. And it escalates further from there.
  • Star vs. the Forces of Evil: How much Ship Tease can this show have? Star and Marco's relationship escalates every season, finally resulting in a kiss in Season 3. That isn't even mentioning how every girl in the show has flirted with Marco in some way. First Jackie, then Star, then Janna, then Hekapoo, then Kelly...
  • When Star Wars Rebels first hit airwaves, it focused on just a small, rebel cell fighting against impossible odds on a backwater planet. We got to know a young boy who discovered his Jedi destiny as he and his unlikely Jedi master fended off Imperial Inquisitors and other foes the Galactic Empire have sent in hopes of stopping the rebellion before it could ever begin. After these well-knit rebels defeat the Grand Inquisitor, they are rescued by the nascent Rebel Alliance, which has only begun to unite many small rebel cells into a larger force. The next season focused on their efforts to help this rebellion grow and find a new base while drawing the attention of Darth Vader and more Inquisitors, as the Empire began turning up the heat after their losses in season one. Things get interesting in season 3 when the Empire calls in Grand Admiral Thrawn for military expertise in dismantling the rebellion, and as the rebellion gains more allies and the rebels we knew from the beginning develop more and more, they face his military might and face a devastating setback. Things go full circle in the final season as the rebels look to fight back and defeat Thrawn in an epic Grand Finale that leads them all the way back to where the whole series begun.
  • The Amazing World of Gumball: In "The Brain", the Wattersons must avoid doing stupid stuff or else the then-stupid Anais's brain would be damaged for doing too much facepalming at their antics. At the store, Nicole is fed up by a teenage grocery store clerk and asks him to go get his superior, which is revealed to be a young kid. Then she asks for the kid's superior, who turns out to be a baby. Then she asks for the baby's superior, which luckily is a grown woman...who was pregnant with a baby (the superior) talking inside of her. Then a fat man comes shortly after with multiple people talking inside of him, which by all accounts were his sperms.
  • The Futurama episode "The Late Philip J. Fry" is absolutely nothing but this when regarding Time Travel. Fry, Bender, and Professor Farnsworth accidentally travel to the year 10,000 and try to find backwards time travel. Then they go to the year 105,105, then 252,525, and later 50,000,000 then 1,000,000,000 where life in the Universe is wiped out. Then they go to the end of the Universe at a jaw-dropping year 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 and watch the Universe recreate itself. So they try to travel forward to the time after they first used the time machine. They go too far and then go through all those years again, seeing the Universe recreated again and finally going back to the right time.
  • "The Slumber Party" from the PBS animated series of The Berenstain Bears starts off with the eponymous sleepover only involving Sister, Lizzie, Anna, and Millie. However, they start inviting other friends to the party initially using the excuse "What's one more?" every time. It pretty quickly escalates to the likes of "What's a hundred more?" due to how many others get invited, which leads to the party getting overcrowded and out of hand.
  • Wander over Yonder started out as an innocent comedy of a naive and positive traveling alien nomad and an always-hating evil overlord. The second season dramatically shakes things up by shifting to a more sequential plotline where the galaxy is threatened by an Omnicidal Maniac.
  • In Codename: Kids Next Door, the episodes where Sector V plot to steal the Delightful Children from Down the Lane's birthday cake have the cake start off at a reasonable size and then get progressively bigger with each installment, coming to a head in the fifth one where the cake is a space station blatantly parodying the Death Star. Unable to top that, their cake in the Grand Finale is simply a cupcake, but the character who eats it says that it was their best one yet.
  • Sym-Bionic Titan: Each successive Monster of the Week gets more dangerous and more creative as the Big Bad progressively learns what is effective and what is not. They start out as straightforward stuff like a lava monster or a multi-headed giant robot, but quickly begin to escalate into regenerating sludge monsters, living EMPs, and intelligent beasts that use complex tactics and pragmatic tricks like playing dead. Towards the end, they start sending multiple monsters at a time, in complete violation of Mook Chivalry. Since the show was a Short-Runner, we sadly don't see how much further the writers would have taken things had the show progressed past the first season.
  • In the Looney Tunes short "The Rabbit of Seville", Bugs and Elmer go through a weapons escalation starting with guns, then bigger guns, then cannons, then bigger cannons, then HUGE cannons, then Bugs offers Elmer a wedding ring, Elmer accepts the marriage proposal and shows up in a wedding gown, Bugs gets a tux, a minister shows up and marries them, and Bugs carries Elmer to the top of a giant wedding cake prop marked "The Marriage of Figaro" and drops him into it. Then Bugs, who is a barber in this short, says, "Next?"

 
Feedback

Video Example(s):

Top

Time In Perspective

Original video at https://youtu.be/Zb5qTdb6LbM -- this version has been heavily cut to fit with the wiki's limitations. With time represented as physical space, every second being one cubic millimeter, very soon we run out of things to compare it to, and even the numbers have trouble catching up. This isn't even the most extreme ends of the scale.

How well does it match the trope?

5 (12 votes)

Example of:

Main / TimeAbyss

Media sources:

Report