History Main / ChildlessDystopia

* The ''ComicBook/JusticeLeague''[=/=]''Comicbook/YoungJustice'' storyline "World Without Grown-Ups" was, as the title suggests, a [[TeenageWasteland world without grown-ups]] along with a mirror-world without kids. It served as an {{Plot Tailored to|TheParty}} [[Comicbook/{{Shazam}} Captain Marvel]] who could shuttle between the two being a biological adult in superpowered form and a kid in his normal one.

* The ''ComicBook/JusticeLeague''[=/=]''Comicbook/YoungJustice'' storyline "World Without Grown-Ups" was, as the title suggests, a [[TeenageWasteland world without grown-ups]] along with a mirror-world without kids. It served as an EigenPlot for [[Comicbook/{{Shazam}} Captain Marvel]] who could shuttle between the two being a biological adult in superpowered form and a kid in his normal one.

** Whether Baravada is a utopia or a dystopia is debatable, but it certainly is nearly childless. Only two children are seen by the four while they're there, and one of them is actually [[spoiler: As'taris's mother Brox, reborn as a five-year-old boy after she was murdered for her... [[ItAmusedMe unique sense of humor]]]].

** The [[spoiler: Aschen Confederation]] offered the people of the planet [[spoiler: Volia ([=P3A-194=])]] a cure for a terrible disease on their world. However, the vaccine also resulted in sterility. A once thriving world of millions was reduced to chaos and riots, and then to a peaceful but empty world, with a few thousand apathetic residents and automated machines tending farmland. An earlier episode portrayed a BadFuture in which the same race was in the process of doing this to Earth.
** In "Past and Present", [=SG1=] arrives on a world where everyone is a young adult with amnesia and, while there are pictures of older people and children, they are nowhere to be found. [[spoiler: It turns out that a MadScientist's experiments with longevity caused everyone to revert to a younger age, making the elders young adults and the children nonexistent.]]

-->'''Lupa''':Have you ever seen a child here in the Junkyard?
* Wellington Wells, the setting of ''VideoGame/WeHappyFew''; There are no children anywhere, and some adults can be seen playing with the playground equipment "Because if we don't, who will?" That's because during an alternate World War II, the Germans occupied the village, and the people had to do a Very Bad Thing-- Namely, give away anyone under 13 to the German Military. The guilt eats away at the Wellies so much that they take a FantasticDrug to forget what they did, but still fly into crazed frenzies when they are reminded. One article you find describes a "Breeder Riot", where an angry mob killed a pregnant woman. [[spoiler: Sally Boyle is mother to the only baby in town, and her storyline is trying to escape Wellington Wells before someone discovers it.]]

[[folder: Web Original ]]

* PlayedWith on ''WesternAnimation/YoungJustice'' -- [[HumanoidAbomination Klarion]] and his minions use magic to split the Earth into two dimensions, one containing everyone under 18 and the other with everyone older. From what we see the kid world functions surprisingly well, with teenagers doing all they can to care for unattended children. The adult world, however, breaks into riots from [[AdultFear desperate parents whose kids vanished right before their eyes]] [[spoiler: that were egged on by The Light in order to provide cover for The Light's goals]].

[[folder:Fairy Tales]]
* ''Literature/ThePiedPiperOfHamelin'' punishes the town for refusing to pay him by leading all their children away.
[[/folder]]

* ''Film/ChittyChittyBangBang'' features a {{Ruritania}} in which the ChildHater rulers have actually outlawed children. Yes, it makes no sense. It's not clear what the government does to the children, except that they're rounded up by the infamous "Child Catcher".
* In ''Film/IndianaJonesAndTheTempleOfDoom'', Indiana and his companions end up in an Indian village that had been raided by members of a [[ReligionOfEvil Thugee cult]] who had stolen a [[MacGuffin sacred relic]] and all the children.

* PlayedWith on ''WesternAnimation/YoungJustice'' -- [[HumanoidAbomination Klarion]] and his minions use magic to split the Earth into two dimensions, one containing everyone under 18 and the other with everyone older. From what we see the kid world functions surprisingly well, with teenagers doing all they can to care for unattended children. The adult world, however, breaks into riots from [[AdultFear desperate parents whose kids vanished right before their eyes]].

* In ''Literature/TheHandmaidsTale'' by Margaret Atwood, future Earth is so irradiated that most humans are sterile, and the births that do happen are usually "Un-Babies" with severe defects. This leads to a theocracy in which the few remaining fertile women become [[SexSlave sex slaves]] for powerful men.

* In ''Literature/TheHandmaidsTale'' by Margaret Atwood, future Earth is so irradiated that most humans are sterile, and the births that do happen are usually [[UnPerson "Un-Babies"]] with severe defects. This leads to a theocracy in which the few remaining fertile women become [[SexSlave sex slaves]] for powerful men.

* ''WesternAnimation/TheEasterBunnyIsComingToTown'' features the adults-only city called Town, which oddly is ruled over by a child king and his older aunt. There's a subversion involved in that near the Town is the children-only city called Kidville.

[[folder: Anime and Manga ]]

[[folder: Fairy Tales ]]

[[folder: Comic Books]]

[[folder: Fan Works]]
* Whether Baravada in ''Fanfic/WithStringsAttached'' is a utopia or a dystopia is debatable, but it certainly is nearly childless. Only two children are seen by the four while they're there, and one of them is actually [[spoiler: As'taris's mother Brox, reborn as a five-year-old boy after she was murdered for her... [[ItAmusedMe unique sense of humor]]]].
** The childless problem appears to have been solved in ''Fanfic/TheKeysStandAlone'' after the G'heddi'onians replace the tirin; there are plenty of kids around. However, one of the Geddies tells the four that the Baravadans (now known as the “Natives”) are still not having children. At one point John speculates that too much magic makes people sterile, which would be why in ''Fanfic/WithStringsAttached'' magic was forbidden in Ketafa.

[[folder: Film]]
* Notably averted in the ''Film/MadMax'' franchise. Every film in the series has children involved. Excluding Max's daughter, children are more prominent in ''Film/MadMaxBeyondThunderdome'' and ''Film/MadMaxFuryRoad''.

[[folder: Literature ]]

[[folder: Live Action TV ]]
* In ''Series/StargateSG1'', the [[spoiler: Aschen Confederation]] offered the people of the planet [[spoiler: Volia ([=P3A-194=])]] a cure for a terrible disease on their world. However, the vaccine also resulted in sterility. A once thriving world of millions was reduced to chaos and riots, and then to a peaceful but empty world, with a few thousand apathetic residents and automated machines tending farmland. An earlier episode portrayed a BadFuture in which the same race was in the process of doing this to Earth.
** In "Past and Present", [=SG1=] arrives on a world where everyone is a young adult with amnesia and, while there are pictures of older people and children, they are nowhere to be found. [[spoiler: It turns out that a [[MadScientist Mad Scientist's]] experiments with longevity caused everyone to revert to a younger age, making the elders young adults and the children nonexistent.]]

[[folder:Mythology & Religion]]

[[folder:Tabletop Game]]
* ''TabletopGame/DungeonsAndDragons'' supplement ''Heroes of Horror'' (which focuses on adding horror elements to a D&D session) has a chart of random creepy elements. One of them is "After spending some time in a village, it dawns on the heroes that there are absolutely no children."

[[folder: Video Games ]]

* ''VideoGame/{{Fallout 3}}'''s DLC ''The Pitt'' is affected by a contagion that disfigures and sterilizes the residents, or worse, makes them go crazy or become Trogs. The only child in the area is Marie, the infant daughter of Lord Ashur, and she has an immunity to the TDC (Troglodyte Degeneration Contagion) that raises hopes for an eventual cure.
* It's not ''completely'' childless - one in a thousand survive - but this is pretty much what happened to Tuchanka in the ''Franchise/MassEffect'' games when the genophage was deployed, and the krogan culture has spent the last 1500 years spiraling below the DespairEventHorizon as a result. It's telling that one of the GoldenEnding slides for the krogan, if you cure the genophage, depicts them with children again; it is the happiest you will ever see them.

* Zig-zagged in ''WebOriginal/SeventeenThousandSevenHundredSeventySix'', set 15 000 years after every sapient being spontaneously developed CompleteImmortality and [[ImmortalProcreationClause became infertile]] for unknown reasons. For the most part, people feel that LivingForeverIsNoBigDeal and pass the time in deliberate ModernStasis with hobbies like increasingly [[{{Calvinball}} bizarre variants]] of football. The infertility issue is usually carefully talked around, but one character mentions finding a modern-day mural of children and breaking down in tears.

[[folder: Western Animation ]]
* ''TheEasterBunnyIsComingToTown'' features the adults-only city called Town, which oddly is ruled over by a child king and his older aunt. There's a subversion involved in that near the Town is the children-only city called Kidville.
* PlayedWith on ''WesternAnimation/YoungJustice''--[[HumanoidAbomination Klarion]] and his minions use magic to split the Earth into two dimensions, one containing everyone under 18 and the other with everyone older. From what we see the kid world functions surprisingly well, with teenagers doing all they can to care for unattended children. The adult world, however, breaks into riots from [[AdultFear desperate parents whose kids vanished right before their eyes]].

* A variation occurs in the ''WesternAnimation/PhineasAndFerb'' episode ''Phineas and Ferb's Quantum Boogaloo''. In process of child-proofing everything, eventually children themselves were child-proofed and stored away until adulthood. Under the rule of Emperor Doofenschmirtz, children are not allowed any more.

[[folder: Real Life ]]
* Many [[UsefulNotes/NativeAmericans Native American]] communities became this in the late 19th and early 20th century, when their children were forcibly removed and sent to government-run residential schools under the "kill the Indian, save the man" assimilation policy. Thousands died (mainly from disease), and those who survived returned to their families scarred from abuse and stripped of their language and culture. The impact of this policy (which in some places didn't end until the late 1990s) is still felt in Native American communities to this day.

** Many nations and ethnicities have seen their populations drop below replacement level reproduction and begun population declines. Some countries have encouraged or relied upon immigration to make up the difference, to varying levels of acceptance by the native born. Though mathematically the declines have terminal points, how low they will actually go is anyone's guess, since a turnaround is a simple matter of population members being willing to have more children. As an example, Japan's current rate will drop its population from 128 million in 2010 to 87 million in 2060.

* The ''JusticeLeagueOfAmerica''[=/=]''Comicbook/YoungJustice'' storyline "World Without Grown-Ups" was, as the title suggests, a [[TeenageWasteland world without grown-ups]] along with a mirror-world without kids. It served as an EigenPlot for [[Comicbook/{{Shazam}} Captain Marvel]] who could shuttle between the two being a biological adult in superpowered form and a kid in his normal one.

* Many [[UsefulNotes/NativeAmericans Native American]] communities became this in the late 19th and early 20th century, when their children were forcibly removed and sent to government-run residential schools under the "kill the Indian, save the man" assimilation policy. Thousands died (mainly from disease), and those who survived returned to their families scarred from abuse and stripped of their language and culture. The impact of this policy (which didn't end until the 1970s) is still felt in Native American communities to this day.

* Notably averted in the ''Franchise/MadMax'' franchise. Every film in the series has children involved. Excluding Max's daughter, children are more prominent in ''Film/MadMaxBeyondThunderdome'' and ''Film/MadMaxFuryRoad''.

[[folder: Web Original ]]
* ''Wiki/SCPFoundation'': [[http://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-1322 SCP-1322]] is a rift to AnotherDimension whose denizens were briefly friendly to the Foundation, until the Foundation tried to help them by developing a vaccine to a widespread illness. Tragically, it had the side effect of sterilizing the population, and the furious "Last Generation" launched a LensmanArmsRace specifically to get {{Revenge}}.
* Zig-zagged in ''WebOriginal/SeventeenThousandSevenHundredSeventySix'', set 15 000 years after every sapient being spontaneously developed CompleteImmortality and [[ImmortalProcreationClause became infertile]] for unknown reasons. For the most part, people feel that LivingForeverIsNoBigDeal and pass the time in deliberate ModernStasis with hobbies like increasingly [[{{Calvinball}} bizarre variants]] of football. The infertility issue is usually carefully talked around, but one character mentions finding a modern-day mural of children and breaking down in tears.
-->'''Ten:''' It's a free play, buddy. Clock's all zeroes. It's after the end of the world.
[[/folder]]

* ''Series/TheHandmaidsTale'', like the novel it's based on, takes place in a theocracy that began after the birthrate went down. The show has a flashback depicting June/Offred at the hospital with her child, looking at an empty nursery. Later, someone actually attempts to kidnap her baby.

* ''Wiki/SCPFoundation'': [[http://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-1322 SCP-1322.]]

* ''ThePiedPiperOfHamelin'' punishes the town for refusing to pay him by leading all their children away.

** This is one of the reasons the krogan Clan Nakmor was chosen to join the [[VideoGame/MassEffectAndromeda Andromeda Initiative]], as they, apparently, exhibit a measure of resistance to the genophage.