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The End Of The World As We Know It
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alt title(s): End Of The World As We Know It 
It’s the end of the world as we know it
It’s the end of the world as we know it
It’s the end of the world as we know it
and I feel fine.
— R.E.M., "It's the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)"
This is what will happen if the heroes don't stop the Big Bad or the Omnicidal Maniac from doing its nasty work. It can be either supernatural or superscience, depending on the villain, but in either case the bad guy must be beaten down and his toys broken in order to save the planet, or the universe, depending on the focus of the story.
Usually it's figurative — expressed as "merely" the death of humankind, the obliteration of Civilization, or its subjugation to aliens, for example — rather than the literal rendering of the planet down to gravel.
This is a common trope in Speculative Fiction, horror and over-the-top espionage shows, as well as many anime series. It may serve as a prequel to an After The End series. May also include Cosy Catastrophe and/or Scavenger World elements. It's also very common in video games, where it's occasionally unavoidable, sometimes occurring halfway through the game; in other cases, poor play may result in the world coming to a bad end.
If the heroes are slated to succeed in preventing the End, they (and the audience) may be treated to a detailed preview of what's coming.
Inevitably draws the suitably heroic into a Saving The World plot. See Apocalypse How for various types of End Of the World. For when Take Our Word For It simply won't do, Apocalypse Wow is this trope given dramatic form. When asked just why they want to destroy the world as we know it, villains usually say something from the " Why You Should Destroy The Planet Earth" list. That is, if they even have one.
Examples:
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Advertising
- In many political ads, this is the implied consequence of voting for anyone other than the person who paid for the commercial. The most famous example, and perhaps the trend setter, is the 1964 presidential election "Daisy" commerical, which literally said that voting for Barry Goldwater, or indeed not voting at all, would cause The End Of The World As We Know It. See it for yourself here
 .
Anime & Manga
- The Digimon multiverse, which shares similarities with the Pretty Cure worlds except for the whole shounen mon series thing, has the exact same looming threat every time.
- Magic Knight Rayearth.
- Mai-HiME threatens the end of the world with the approaching of the HiME Star precipitating natural disasters and the last surviving HiME gaining the power to remake the world as she sees fit.
- Kannazuki No Miko.
- The first two seasons of Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha involved unstable Lost Logia and the heroes trying to prevent the destruction of a few worlds, including the one they call home. The third season, however, had a Big Bad who knew how to handle Lost Logia, and thus would have only ended with The Federation obliterated and the entire multiverse effectively taken hostage should the heroes fail. Jail's an Evilutionary Biologist, not an Omnicidal Maniac, after all.
- The final Story Arc in Magical Project S revolves around saving Earth.
- Neon Genesis Evangelion has not one but three groups trying to destroy the world, each in their own way and for their own reason. Gendo Ikari wishes to be re-united with his dead wife, which involves ending the world as we know it. SEELE wishes to end the individuality of the human race in accordance with Ancient Prophecy. The Angels merely want to eliminate all of humanity.
- While the main cast of Pretear eventually succeeds in preventing The End Of The World As We Know It (the standard Big Bad's goal), the manga gives a nice description of the world drained of Life Energy — not only without living beings, but without wind, sounds, temperature, light. The anime version further illustrates the possible outcome by having the Big Bad destroy the local Magical Land.
- Anyone living in the world of any Pretty Cure series should try not to get too attached to the universe. It was already one lost fight away from total destruction in the very first episode, with multiple near-misses along the way; in particular, almost all life was wiped out near the end of Futari Wa Pretty Cure Splash Star, though the heroines managed to reverse it by defeating the bad guy.
- The main goal of the Ancient Conspiracy from Rah Xephon is to both cause and reverse this.
- Sailor Moon comes close to this here and there. The Moon Kingdom was completely destroyed in the past; the Earth is constantly in danger, as one villainous group invades it after another. In the manga, the world (along with the Big Bad) is destroyed at the end of the third story arc by Sailor Saturn... only to be immediately restored by Princess Serenity. The last season's Big Bad has already rendered most of the Galaxy dead before attacking the Earth.
- The Earth too, during the Grand Finale, at least in the anime. In fact, only five beings in the entire Milky Way are still alive by the time the Big Bad is stopped. Don't worry, the galaxy got better.
- In Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon, in addition to the destruction of the Moon Kingdom in the past, Princess Serenity does the same with the Earth at the end of the series.
- The Suzumiya Haruhi franchise has a rather unusual condition for The End Of The World as We Know It to happen: if the title character becomes too bored with her life, she could inadvertently destroy the universe in a subconscious attempt to create one more to her liking. Not only that, the rest of the SOS-dan suspects that she has already done it at least once before — but obviously no-one can tell.
- Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann is set After The End, when most of humanity was wiped out by the machinations of the Anti-Spiral. When they start making a comeback thanks to the protagonists, a failsafe kicks in to drop the moon on the planet and finish humanity off.
- In Tokyo Mew Mew, the aliens want to cause this by accelerating humans' destruction of the environment, just so the Muggles can see what they've done to the Earth and actually care about it.
- In the anime X/1999, both sides actually believe they are fighting to prevent the end of the world. The Dragons of Earth are attempting to destroy all humans to prevent humans from destroying the Earth, while the Dragons of Heaven are trying to save humanity from the Dragons of Earth.
- The second and third season of Yu-Gi-Oh (dub version only), emphasized with a mantra frequently repeated by Yugi to the point of exasperation: "The fate of the world depends on it!"
- This is also the goal of the Big Bad in The Movie. This motive is questioned (and lampshaded) by Yami in Yu-Gi-Oh!: The Abridged Movie, where he asks the Big Bad what he hopes to gain from the destruction of the world. Receiving an unsatisfactory answer, he dismisses the Big Bad as "the most disappointing movie villain since General Grievous."
- Carried over in the second season of Yu-Gi-Oh GX but with the pressure upped even more, when Jaden is told, "The fate of the universe now rests with you."
- Of Drakengard's Multiple Endings, two imply the end of the world, one overtly and the other not so much.
- The Pokemon films typically leave preventing The End Of The World As We Know It to the ten-year-old Ash Ketchum.
- Standard thing the heroes of Dragon Ball Z are trying to prevent, although the ante was upped in the Buu saga, where the Big Bad could easily have wiped out the entire universe had he not been stopped.
- Bokurano takes this trope to a whole new level of cruelty by adding a twist: to save the world from ending the kids must cause the destruction of other worlds. And let us not forget that the pilots die regardless of the outcome of the battle.
- In the end of Saikano the world does come to an end. Chise loses her body in a climactic final battle and becomes a ball of light and Shuuiji is the sole survivor in the entire planet.Few things could be sadder.
- Parodied in the Clannad game with this quote:
Misae: For Sunohara to have such a cute sister, and for Okazaki to have such a cute girlfriend... If it were the end of the world, it'd be bad for the sister and Furukawa-san, but... I'll say it. It's the end of the world.
- In Super Dimension Fortress Macross, the SDF-1, after a year of fighting, returns to Earth only to witness the nuclear bombardment of the planet by Boddolza's main Zentradi fleet of over 4,000,000 warships (killing "most" of the population and destroying 95% of the environment), however, with a little help from a wave motion cannon back on Earth, and Lynn Minmei of course, the Macross nukes Boddolza's remaining flagship. The remnants of humanity and the Zentradi are then shown to be co-existing on what remains of the planet, but because of some of the bored Zentradi, their alliance quickly turns to crap.
- This is Friend's ultimate goal in Twentieth Century Boys. He comes dangerously close to succeeding, too.
- It is feared that this is what will happen if there should ever be a "Second Summer Of Love" in Eureka Seven.
- In The Lucifer and Biscuit Hammer this is the goal of the Big Bad, and also the main characters, Sami and Yuuhi. (The aim is to literally smash the planet to rubble, too.)
- Full Metal Alchemist, Father opens the gate sacrificing the Earth itself so he can defeat God, and rips the souls of nearly every living thing on the planet with only a select few remaining humans and homunculi remaining. A true Wham Episode.
Comic Books
- The Lucifer comic books, somewhat ironically, involved the Devil's efforts to prevent this.
- Not at first. He starts off by leaving, it's only when he finds out that all his work will be undone that he works to stop it.
- Many a comic book Crisis Crossover has this as its premise, the archetype being Crisis On Infinite Earths (see below).
Film
- In Armageddon, a large asteroid is coming with enough force to blow every last bit of life into oblivion, and two teams are sent with a very large amount of explosives to split the asteroid in half
just at the right moment before it's too late, so the two halves fly over and under the earth.
- The Day The Earth Caught Fire (1961). Massive nuclear testing at the poles throw the Earth out of orbit towards the Sun, but a series of massive nuclear detonations in Siberia may avert the catastrophe. The last scene shows the journalists waiting in the print room with two next editions ready for printing, one saying "WORLD SAVED" and the other "WORLD DOOMED".
- In Kevin Smith's Dogma, the continued correct functioning of the laws that govern the universe are all dependent on/derived from one truth: that God is infallible. The heroes have to stop the "villains," angels cast out of Heaven, from exploiting a loophole in some obscure Catholic canon to get themselves re-admitted to Heaven, thereby contradicting God and unmaking the whole of Creation.
- Fallen (1998), with Denzel Washington. The demons of the film are said to desire the destruction of human civilization, which they call "the fall of Babylon" and pursue this by possessing people. Though not said, this would presumably account for much of the evil in the world. Also not said but speculated is that true believer Christians will be immune to demonic possession.
- The film (and book) of Douglas Adams' Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy puts a comedic twist on this — the world is destroyed to make way for an interstellar bypass. The joke is that the protagonist was trying to stop his house from being demolished for much the same reason...
- This becomes even more of a Shoot The Shaggy Dog moment when it is revealed that the destruction of Earth took place mere moments before the unveiling of the Heart of Gold and Infinite Improbability Drive, which render hyperspace bypasses completely obsolete.
- Playfully subverted in Men In Black — the universe is inches away from Armageddon due to alien interference all the time. The Men in Black casually erase the memories of anyone who catches wind of these impending disasters to prevent a general panic. Very similar to The World Is Always Doomed.
- What did the Earth do before the MIB? It was only formed in the 60's. Surely all the Global Disasters weren't kindly waiting in the wings for the Earth to develop the means to defend itself before attacking?
- Likely nobody in the outer Universe knew we existed and that before making contact it was just a dim backwater somewhere out on the western arm of a small spiral galaxy.
- Sky Captain And The World Of Tomorrow (2004). The distant-planet-colonizing rocket seems benign, until it's revealed that the rocket's afterburners will ignite the Earth's atmosphere.
- The sun is dying in the sci-fi movie Sunshine and has to be reignited with a nuclear bomb the size of Manhattan Island.
- Godzilla Final Wars not only has the titular monster saving the world from an asteroid, but also dozens of other monsters as well.
- The British film Threads and its American counterpart The Day After both deal with this trope in a very grim and realistic way. In both, nuclear war breaks out between The U.S. and the Soviet Union, resulting in a dark Scavenger World inhabited by the hapless victims of the catastrophe. Both were Anvilicious in the sense that they resorted to scare tactics to show people what the world would be like if they allowed political tensions to get the better of them, but at a time when some people thought nuclear war was survivable and a handful even cried out for war, this may have been a good thing.
- Cthulhu (2007). Although loosely based on "A Shadow Over Innsmouth" by HP Lovecraft, the movie also works in elements of "The Call of Cthulhu" in that humanity is beginning to descend into chaos as a prelude to the return of the Old Ones from the sea, with scenes of rioting, madness and murder.
- Remember how in the Transformers cartoons and the first movie the Decepticons were merely after energy sources and planned to use them to power their armies? Well, Transformers: Revenge of The Fallen tops it all. In that film, they plan to use a Weaponized Landmark to blow up the sun, thus blowing up the Earth and harvesting the raw energy output created by it. Thankfully Optimus Prime blew up the machine, so it's all good.
- An independent movie called Last Night deals with this. It takes place on the very last day before the end of existence and it focuses on how different people are dealing with their impending demise. What's strange is that everyone knows that the world is ending at midnight, but what it is that's causing the world to end is never explained or mentioned.
Literature
- Spider Robinson's novel Callahan's Key is based on the notion that if the heroes do not accomplish the save-the-day task, the entire universe not only will cease to exist, but will retroactively cease ever to have existed.
- Every couple of books, the Discworld is threatened with The End Of The World As We Know It. In The Light Fantastic, it nearly collided with a red star; in Sourcery, the birth of a sourcerer nearly brings about a second Mage War and the Apocralypse [sic]; in The Last Hero, Cohen the Barbarian's scheme to get revenge on the gods threatens to destroy the magic that holds the Discworld together; and in Thief Of Time, the Auditors trick a human with unusual abilities into building a clock that will leave the Discworld, and possibly the universe, frozen in time forever.
- Double Subversion in Weis and Hickman's novel series The Sword of Joram, in which Joram succeeds in stopping the destruction of Thimhallan by the attackers from the Earth, only to end up destroying the magic that made it habitable
- An angel and a demon team up to prevent the scheduled Biblical Apocalypse in Good Omens. Hilarity ensues.
- Subverted in an old Ray Bradbury short story titled The End of the Beginning. The narrator describes people all over the world staring at the sky waiting for the world to end because they know the exact date, time and place that it will begin. Eventually a searing white light appears in the sky and ends the world. The twist is... I'll give you a second to guess... The bright light is a spaceship that has visited the first intelligent life humanity discovered. Naturally this marks the "end" of the world and the "beginning" of the universe.
- Many of the Dragonriders of Pern novels concern the heroes' struggle to avert the End Of The World As The Pernese Know It, by defending human civilization against Threadfall. Granted, it's not the same world as this trope normally concerns itself with, but it still ought to count...
- The Laws of Magic books by Terry Goodkind, where Richard and Kahlan save the World as we Know it... again... and again... and again. One can only assume that, since the world was just fine before they met, it's them knowing each other that's the ultimate cause for all the trouble they have to go through.
- Some time before the beginning of Hyperion, the Earth is destroyed by an experiment with black holes conducted in Kiev. Later on, it is revealed that the error was not due to human fault but was deliberately orchestrated by elements of the TechnoCore to promote usage of the Farcaster network, which allows them to exploit humans for computational power.
- It's then revealed that the Earth was not destroyed, but instead whisked away to the Lesser Magellanic Cloud, implying that the Kiev Experiment was the Techno Core's first attempt at the creation of a Farcaster.
- The story then doubles back on itself, saying that the Techno Core did intend to destroy Earth, but instead in an attempt to move their existence into Planck Space / The Void Which Binds and promote usage of the Farcaster network. They then encounter the Others (dubbed the Lions and Tigers and Bears by one element of the TechoCore) that are vastly more powerful than they are and leave Planck Space, desperately trying to prevent the black hole from destroying Earth. Before they can do so, the Others whisk Earth away to the Lesser Magellanic Cloud for their own experiments. Whew.
- S.M. Stirling's Dies the Fire and its various sequels are set in a world where every kind of "energy-dense" technology stops working, plunging the human race back in The Dung Ages... forever. Not the end of the world, but certainly the end of the world we know. (And, for the overwhelming majority of people, the end of them: try feeding seven billion people with twelfth-century technology.)
- In Fragment, scientists and the military must act fast to eradicate the hyper-lethal, hyper-invasive wildlife of Henders Island, before it can spread to other landmasses and spell The End Of The Biosphere As We Know It.
Live Action TV
- Jack Bauer and his allies have 24 hours to stop the End of the World As We Know It.
- Buffy The Vampire Slayer built each season around a Big Bad whose plans usually threatened the End of Everything if he wasn't stopped by late Spring. At one point, when Giles proclaimed the Big Bad was about to cause the end of the world, everyone present groaned, "Again?"; one of Buffy's boyfriends once lamented that hanging around her had caused him to need to know "the plural of apocalypse."
- Heck, in one episode, averting the apocalypse was the B-plot.
- When Angel spun-off, the world was often facing two ends at once, one L.A.-based in the form of Wolfram & Hart's ongoing plans for Armageddon, the other Sunnydale-based with a different villain threatening the world each season. It even reached the point where, in the Buffy Grand Finale, Wolfram & Hart helped stop Sunnydale's apocalypse, partly because it interfered with their own apocalyptic plans.
- With the alarmingly frequent amounts of Apocalypses going on, it's pretty safe to assume there are several happening all at the same time. Wolfram and Hart has an archive specifically devoted to upcoming Apocalypses for Christ's sake!
- This troper remembers one occasion when Giles said "It's the apocalypse!" someone checks the clock and replies, "It seems a little early." This is because the apocalypse that Giles was talking about was happening in the middle of the season. The real one shouldn't be up until the end of the season.
- The aliens in the 1980s miniseries V intended to harvest the human race for use as snack food and were turning the planet into a thinly disguised version of Nazi Germany to make it easier.
- The destruction of all life on Earth happened, then un-happened, at least once a season on Seven Days.
- The series The Dead Zone has a recurring Arc about Greg Stillson somehow being responsible for The End Of The World As We Know It in the near future, and Johnny Smith has to find a way to stop him.
- Star Trek, repeatedly and in many different ways.
- Most notably, the third season of Star Trek Enterprise features the ship in a race against time to save not only the World, but the Universe As We Know It. If a group of genocidal aliens succeed in destroying the Earth, it will alter history and the Federation will never exist. An episode called Twilight showed what might happen if they succeeded.
- Supernatural has a demon apocalypse on the horizon. Any day now. Really. Soon. We promise.
- Subverted in the Doctor Who episode 'The End of the World'. The Doctor takes Rose to see planet Earth finally bite the dust billions of years in the future, but it's a natural event that's supposed to happen. When asked if he's going to swoop in at the last moment and save the planet, he replies that there's no point because everyone has moved to greener pastures already.
- Played straight several other times, though. Menaces such as the Slitheen, the Daleks, the Cybermen, or the Master are all the time trying to cause The End Of The World As We Know It.
- The Master actually succeeds towards the end of "The Sound of Drums", but then the Doctor reverses time, saving the day, er, year, and only a select few people remember 'the year that never was'.
- And then, of course, we can't skip over a mention of Davros and the Daleks attempting to destroy the entire universe across all possible realities in the season 4 2-parter finale.
- The premise of Battlestar Galactica is that this has already happened, and now the Colonials are on the run in search of a new home.
- Of course when they get there it had already been obliterated in a nuclear attack 2000 years in the past. They find another one though.
- In the sci-fi series Lexx, the main characters go through much of the second season unaware that an enemy they defeated earlier is still alive. The villain, Mantrid, rebuilds himself, takes an army of simple-minded floating robot drones, and destroys much of the "Light Zone", one of two parallel universes. The heroes eventually stop him, but soon afterwards, the entire universe collapses in on itself. The main characters (and their ship, the Lexx) are spit out as interstellar debris into the "Dark Zone", the second universe.
- One episode of Big Wolf On Campus has hero Tommy Dawkins prevent the end of the world by winning a wrestling match against a demon.
- Occurs during the Timeskip between seasons 16 and 17 of Power Rangers. The entire biosphere has been destroyed globally, except for a single city fighting for survival.
- Channel 4 ran the "documentary", Life After People, which speculates on what would happen to the Earth if humans suddenly disappeared...
Music
- ''We will all go together when we go...''
- The Trope Namer: "It's The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)" by R.E.M. Whether or not the lyrics of the song accurately reflect the title, this troper couldn't really tell you.
- The 1982 hardcore punk wave was also called "no future" punk, as the fear of an imminent nuclear holocaust, or environmental destruction was a common theme.
- The Ayreon [1] depicts the world ending around 2084-2085 despite warnings from the prophet who foresaw it's end the end comes thanks to technology and the like.
- This happens twice in Fireaxe's Food For the Gods album. Once with the earth itself being destroyed by waring ideologies and their prophets. The second comes when Satan faces down God himself and enrages him to destroy all creation. This leaves only him and the darkness goddess in what the song describes as "cold and dark infinity"
- "It's all over, and I'm standing pretty / In this dust that was a city..."
Tabletop Games
- From Bliss Stage: "The effects of the Bliss were sinister and immediate: every human above the age of 18 were struck with a sudden weariness, and when they fell asleep, they did not awaken... ...Society, particularly industrialized society, begins to collapse one month later, as food production and utilities break down."
- Dominaria, the central world of Magic The Gathering, has suffered no less than three apocalypses: the Brothers' War (the entire face of the planet shattered, two thousand years of ice and snow), the Phyrexian Invasion (the greater part of the world's population slaughtered by demonic invaders), and Karona's apocalypse (all magic in the world briefly extinguished); each of these had the good guys fending off an even greater threat, but at high cost. The "Time Spiral" crisis was an attempt to keep the entire plane from folding in on itself in the wake of these and various other huge magical events- an apocalypse caused by having too many apocalypses, and this doesn't count near-apocalypses like the end of the Thran War. It's a wonder the old rock's still holding together.
- Quite a few D&D game-settings have a World-Shattering Kaboom in their backstory, such as Krynn's Cataclysm or Mystara's Great Rain of Fire.
- Warhammer 40000's universe is entering the eleventh millenium of the ongoing end of the world. The only reason the world's lasted this long is because most of the bringers of the end are as happy to fight each other as humanity.
- You're talking about The End of the Galaxy as we know it. The End of a World As We Know It happens all the time. But what's the loss of one planet when there are billions more out there?
- Actually, That Troper is talking about one of The Ends of the Galaxy As We Know It. On the one hand, the legions of hell are fighting everyone, including each other, in an attempt to destroy everything, on the other hand, a race of undead machine... things are trying to wipe out all life, and on the third hand (probably hacked off of a fallen enemy) there are a group of genetically engineered bugs that EAT ENTIRE GALAXIES arriving. It's also been argued that if the orkz ever collaborated as an entire species, they could wipe out all of the other factions on their own. So, uh.... yeah.
- This what mostly likely will happen if the Titans win in Scion
- The Crapsack World of Battle Tech ends and restarts (just to meet another horrible end) several times, including the fall of the Terran Alliance, the fall of the Star League (the closest thing to a golden age Battletech has ever had), the Word of Blake Jihad, and the destruction of the HPG communications network and subsequent "Dark Age". This is because the universe of Battletech is a horrible place populated by horrible people that do horrible things on a daily basis.
- Which End Of The World As We Know It are we talking about when we talk about the Old World Of Darkness?
- Well, there's Gehenna from Vampire The Masquerade, when the Antediluvians rise from their slumber, run roughshod over the earth and devour their vampiric children.
- And then there's the Apocalypse from (duh) Werewolf The Apocalypse, the final battle against the Wyrm and his corruptive forces.
- Mage The Ascension featured a somewhat optimistic end of the world in its endgame, where all of mankind Awakens at once and the constraints on reality are lifted as everyone becomes a god unto themselves.
- Changeling The Dreaming has the overhanging threat of Endless Winter, a time when imagination, belief and hope are all but gone and the world of the fae slowly withers and dies.
- Wraith The Oblivion ended the line with the Sixth Great Maelstrom, where a harrowing wind tore through the Shadowlands as Oblivion ran roughshod and Stygia fell. Orpheus let the players explore the aftermath... while, incidentally, dealing with Grandmother, the thing that spawned Wraith's big horrors and threatens to devour the worlds of both the living and dead.
- Incidentally, the Sixth Great Maelstrom is also hinted to have kicked off the events of Hunter The Reckoning and Demon The Fallen, given the general tone in both works of, "Something really bad happened behind the scenes, and it only feels like the opening act..."
- Exalted has several factions planning their own, most notably The Fair Folk (who don't like order very much) and the Neverborn (who don't like anything very much).
Video Games
- The Super Robot Wars Alpha sub-series's finale had several endings that involved trying to stop the death of all sentient life in the universe. The worst one involved the embodiment of life and rebirth going nuts and using its Wave Motion Gun at the party... which kills everyone in the quadrant.
- City Of Heroes... if there were a time when the world isn't imperilled by callous villains, giant robots, aliens from Another Dimension, Experiments Gone Wrong and so forth, it was probably removed in beta. Even the villains get a few cracks at saving the world in a bit of Destiny subversion a certain arc shows you what would happen if you fulfill your potential as a Destined One and take over the world — there'll be no world left to take over. You then have to thwart Big Bad Lord Recluse in the future to convince the present Recluse not to go through with the plan... which really does mess with the whole ball of Timey Wimey Stuff, not to mention player's heads.
- Treasure of the Rudras pretty much followed this pattern of extinction of races about 5 times before the game actually begins; Every 4,000 years, a being called Rudra kills off the current race and creates a new one. This turns out to be a plan established by Mitra: Creator of the world in order to create a race that can defeat invaders from destroying the world in the first place when she is defeated or unable to do her duty.
- In Star Ocean: The Second Story the main antagonist plans on erasing the universe by causing the Big Crunch. His plan goes through anyway even after you defeat him.
- The Halos in the Halo video game series are weapons designed to wipe out all sentient life in the galaxy, ie The End Of The Galaxy As We Know It, to prevent the Flood from spreading; naturally enough, when such an outbreak occurs in the first game, the Player Character has to stop the weapon from firing.
- Commander Keen had to prevent this a couple of times in the classic platform-game series by Apogee. His first game-series was titled The Earth Explodes, and he had to prevent the mind controlled Vorticons — who were being manipulated by his Evil Counterpart — from doing just that. The sequel, 'Goodbye Galaxy', upped the ante as suggested. The next series was supposed to be about him preventing the end of the entire universe, but at that point, Apogee was running out of money, and he only got enough funding to save his babysitter.
- In the second game it is in fact possible to blow up the earth by 'accident' by flipping the switch on one of the Death Rays before disabling it, leading to a Nonstandard Game Over.
- This is the main goal of the Big Bad in the Chains of Promathia expansion in Final Fantasy XI. It really doesn't help that the avatar Bahamut thinks that the best way to prevent this is to wipe out all sentient life on Vana'diel.
- In The Legend Of Zelda Majora's Mask, a falling moon threatens to wipe out the world of Termina. In most other games in the series, the villain's only trying to rule the world.
- A Similar event occurs in Dark Cloud 2: The being who is the true identity of the assumed Big Bad is the one who has invoked and is responsible for stopping the Star of Oblivion from falling.
- Would have been the fate of the world in three of Drakengard's multiple endings if not for the intervention of the protagonists.
- In Kingdom Hearts, The Darkness is attempting to extinguish the Heart of reality itself. The protagonists get a glimpse what will happen to the multiverse if they fail when they visit a place literally called "The End of the World." It's the center of all Darkness — a bleak, mostly formless mess made up of the stuff of worlds devoured by The Heartless, who themselves are made up of the stuff of people devoured by The Heartless or devolved by their own descent into evil.
- In Super Paper Mario, Count Bleck and Dimentio wish to destroy ALL worlds via the Dark Prognosticus. They actually succeed in destroying the Sammer Guys' Kingdom — almost while the heroes are still in it.
- In Live A Live You are actually given the option to end all of existence by your own hands just by selecting the Armageddon option!
- Every Shin Megami Tensei game (including the spinoffs) deals with this in some fashion or another.
- In one of those spinoffs, Persona 3, the Main Character is explicitly told pretty much from the start that "the End" is coming soon. If he chooses, he can delay it a couple of months and have it come without knowing it's coming. Or, he can go out fighting, but it's ultimately portrayed as futile. And then you win.
- In Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne (or Lucifer's Call), the world ends after the first hour of gameplay and you spend the rest of the game rebuilding it while not getting ganked by the Demons who roam freely now.
- In Digital Devil Saga, another spinoff, not only does the world of the Junkyard end at the end of the game, but the real world that you end up in was half destroyed five years ago, and starts literally disintegrating into the sun halfway through the game. Your goal is, of course, to stop it.
- There's a free online flash game Pandemic in which the player assumes control over a virus by spending evolution points on symptoms like fever or making the virus transmited by air. The goal is to kill every single human on earth.
- This is at least part of the villain's plan in almost every Final Fantasy game.
- Subverted in Final Fantasy VI, wherein the Big Bad Kefka actually succeeds in destroying the world, despite your best efforts otherwise. You watch as countless NPCs are killed as their land is ripped apart, and the world map is left permanently scarred. The rest of the game is basically spent trying to get revenge because you failed the first time around and trying to break his tyrannical grip on society.
- It is heavily implied that all plant and animal life on the planet is gradually going extinct due to Kefka's influence, so the heroes at least get to prevent a more thorough The End Of The World As We Know It.
- In Final Fantasy X this is subverted towards the end, as the protagonists try to end the "eternal spiral of death" that had the entire world in it's grip for a thousand years, bringing The End Of The World As We Know It. In Final Fantasy X-2, the world is recovering from the confusion left after the removal of the Corrupt Church. It's played straight with the original creation of Sin, which turned a futuristic cyber world into a society of villages outlawing the use of machines and advances technology.
- In Chrono Trigger, the driving point of the game is to prevent Lavos from destroying the world in 1999 AD. (Bear in mind that the 'present' year in the game is 1000.)
- In Mass Effect, Shepard's mission is to prevent the End of the Galaxy As We Know it at the hands of Saren, whose ship is in reality an AI known as Sovereign, a representative of an ancient race of sentient machines (A Is) who are responsible for bringing about the destruction of all sentient organic life in the galaxy every 50,000 years or so.
- Terranigma kinda reversed it. The world has already ended from the start of the game and it's then the job of the Hero to starts the world again.
- All four games in the Guild Wars series involve a looming threat that will destroy the world if the player characters don't stop it. The first game (Prophecies) twists the trope by having you discover at the end (just in time to be able to do something about it) that you've been duped by the Big Bad, and all your actions have been helping to bring the end of the world, instead of averting it. The next two (Factions and Nightfall) play the trope straight. The fourth (Eye of the North) subverts it at the end, when a cutscene seen by the players (but not the characters) hints that you didn't actually kill the Big Bad, and something end-of-the-world-ish is still going to happen anyway. Word Of God has confirmed this interpretation in pre-release information about Guild Wars 2.
- In World Of Goo — and this meets the original definition of sheer — the world becomes incompatible with its inhabitants, like software, when it's upgraded into three dimensions.
- Super Mario Galaxy has one, but purely by accident and is not a part of Bowser's plan. After beating Bowser for the final time, his star reactor sinks into the sun, causing a huge chain reaction that creates a massive super black hole that begins to suck up everything in the universe. This is literally the end of the universe as they know it! All the Lumas throw themselves into the black hole to stop the destruction in a Heroic Sacrifice.
- Avalon Code has this as its premise. The world is going to get destroyed, and your job is to collect (well, scan them by hitting them with the book...) anything worth being recreated into the next world. It turns out that this particular end is happening too soon, due to Werner and Olly's meddling.
- Mother 3's Dark Dragon would easily destroy the world if Porky's minions managed to pull at least four of the Seven Needles.
- He does anyway, but in the finale you find that most if not all of the good characters survived, presumably to be reborn into the next world.
- Several of these in the Wing Commander series.
- In Wing Commander III, one of the missions is to shoot down missiles carrying biowarfare warheads that would render a planet uninhabitable by humans for centuries. Also the fate of Earth in the losing scenarios of the game, though just hinted at with a Terminator-esque scene of a Kilrathi boot crushing a human skull.
- Believed to be the fate of humanity by Tolwyn in Wing Commander IV, without his plan to shape humanity into a race focused on killing, as enacted by the Black Lance.
- The novel Fleet Action, by William Forstchen, not only has the Earth threatened with orbital bombardment by "dirty" nukes (averted by a Big Damn Heroes moment), but actually kills off a colony in orbit around Sirius by that manner, on the way to Earth.
- Two colonies. And there's Wing Commander: Standoff, a fan-made space sim that follows the course of said novel.
- In Armored Core for Answer, it's implied that the main character wiped out the rest of humanity on ending C. Other paths to humankind's extinction exist in the game as well...
- The Resistance series on the PS 3 features The Virus systematically conquering and assimilating humanity in an alternate history setting.
- This is the goal of pretty much everyone in Ar Tonelico 2. There are two different Instrumentality plans: Ascension halfway through the game and Sublimation at the end. You yourself almost destroy the known world when you screw up singing Metafalica early in the game, and at the end you have to destroy half of it in order to reveal the Very Definitely Final Dungeon.
- In The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, the demonic lord Mehrunes Dagon seeks to destroy the mortal world, so Player Character & Friends have to stop him. In the expansion pack, the player must save another world...from its own creator, who is insane and has an irresistable urge to destroy his creations every once in a while.
- Touhou, in its eleventh game, finally featured a Big Bad who was actually willing to pull one of these off. She just happened to be a crow who was powered by nuclear fusion, and turning the underworld into a new Sun.
- Skarin from Viking Battle For Asgard brings this about. Granted it's more the extremely uncomfortable variety but it still counts since he unleashes Fenrir who kills the Gods thus bringing about the Norse version of the Apocalypse.
- The World As We Know It Ends on October 23, 2077.
- This is apparently one of the possible endings of Fahrenheit.
- How did the 4th gen DPP Pokemon games didn't get mentioned yet? The Big Bad of the game wants to get rid of the world and create a new "perfect" one using Palkia and Dialga.
- The End of the World level in Sonic 06.
Webcomics
- College Roomies From Hell. Don't be fooled by the early years; the "from Hell" part is quite literal.
- In The Wotch, Anne actually laughs at Xaos when he reveals that he wants to use her to destroy all worlds, claiming she is "not sure [he] thought this diabolical plan all the way through."
- This is the threat K'Z'K poses in Sluggy Freelance. Other dimensions shown in the series have visited have faced similar threats. On a couple occasions the main characters have helped save these other worlds; on a couple other occasions, they're actually the ones responsible (directly or indirectly) for the destruction of the human race. Oops.
- Tom Siddell described City Face (a Gunnerkrigg Court interim comic) as "a story of how love can save the world". It turns out to be literal: a fairy informs City Face that if he doesn't win the heart of his dream girl, the world could be destroyed, prompting the quote at the top of the page.
- Averting this trope is the main reason The Order Of The Stick have been struggling to foil Xykon and Redcloak. May turn out to be a subversion, as recent revelations suggest there's more to the Snarl's prison than both good and bad guys have been led to believe.
Web Original
- If the Dimensional Guardians from Dimension Heroes don't find the seven cybaspheres and fix the rip the space/time continuum, both their world and Creturia will destroy one another.
- In the animated Urban Fantasy Broken Saints, the Evil Plan of The Omniscient Council Of Vagueness involves the death of almost every major politician and military leader on the planet, which, combined with the psychic trauma to surrounding populations and visions of "the eye of God" watching from the sky, will result in a collapse of modern societies, allowing for the Big Bad to rebuild civilization anew, more in keeping with his enlightened, philanthropic, and humanitarian views.
- In the Giant in the Playground Freeform Roleplaying section, this has apparently been threatened three times, and a fourth is planned. Although this one's going to be a conquer, not destroy, the world.
- Only Four? Back in the days when it was still known as "The Town," FFRP was threatened by a new end of the world scenario every week. From AMEN causing Apocalypses or the current BBEG threatening the World Tree to Irate Drakens causing blizzards. These Traditions have been carried over to The Town spin-off, Enupnion.
- SCP Foundation catalogs these as "XK-class end-of-the-world scenarios", and has many Artifacts Of Doom capable of triggering them.
- This video. You've probably seen it, it's the one with the nuclear holocaust and the fucking kangaroos.
- In the Orion's Arm universe, the Grey Goo plague of the "Nanoswarm Era" destroys the original Terran civilization (although many humans, robots, and A Is sruvive to create new civilizations from the ashes). The Amalgamation is threatening to do it again, and more completely.
- In the flash game Mastermind, this is your ultimate goal; of course, the titular Mastermind forgets to tell his henchmen this rather important fact. When it comes time to push the button and end the world, they're understandably freaked out. Then hilariously parodied when the Mastermind, having made his escape into space, looks back on the debris of Earth and muses "Now what do I do? Hm, maybe I should've thought this out more."
Western Animation
Real Life
- Well, in a few billion years, the Sun will become a Red Giant, which will mean the end of the world. Hopefully, we'll have found a better place to live. Maybe by the year 2525?
- If man is still alive...
- If woman can survive...
- Won't someone PLEASE think of the children?
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