The Night That Never Ends

"Since the beginning of time, man has yearned to destroy the sun. I will do the next best thing; block it out!"

"Remember this day, little ponies, for it was your last. From this moment forth, the night will last forever!"

— Nightmare Moon, My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic

The big brother of Total Eclipse of the Plot, who crashes on the couch for a "few" days.

This trope usually involves a Big Bad's attempt to bring about either an eternal or extremely long night, for whatever reason. He could be trying to put out the sun^note it takes eight minutes for light from the sun to get to Earth, block it, or just find a metaphorical light switch. This is often the goal of a vampire, for obvious reasons. The only requirement is that the darkness is supposed to last a ridiculous length of time, ranging from a hundred years to an eternity. It rarely does, though, thanks to those pesky heroes, who somehow manage to get past all of the looting, panic, and mooks to Cue the Sun.

In Real Life, the amount of sunlight reaching the surface of the Earth can be dimmed to a surprising degree by dust thrown up by major volcanic eruptions (volcanic winter), the asteroid strike at the end of the Cretaceous Period credited with killing off the dinosaurs (impact winter), and, in theory, the fallout of a nuclear war (nuclear winter).

In practice, these endless nights tend to be apocalyptic in scope. The lack of sunlight kills and withers plant life, spreading famine and destroying ecosystems. The loss of solar radiation will also cause temperatures to plunge, causing sufficiently long-lasting examples of this to often cause an Endless Winter or a Glacial Apocalypse. Sometimes, something — magic, geothermal heat, technology, or some other sort of Applied Phlebotinum — will allow life to trudge along more or less stably, but this is still not going to be a pleasant experience for people caught in it. The few exceptions tend to be monsters that are Weakened by the Light, which will be free to run rampant across the world; vampires in particular tend to greatly enjoy these events.

This is often the setting for a literal Darkest Hour, and can result in widespread Darkness Equals Death. Don't be surprised if a Dark World happens to have a bad case of this.

Compare Always Night and Partly Cloudy with a Chance of Death. This can sometimes overlap with The Stars Are Going Out, Total Eclipse of the Plot, Spring Is Late, Endless Winter and Hostile Terraforming. A Tidally Locked Planet will always have this on one side. Contrast Cue the Sun and Endless Daytime.

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Examples:

Anime and Manga

• The Arms Peddler: A group of standard-weaknessed vampires created a forest where night never ends, bringing a village of humans along to keep themselves sustained. One of them turns against the others after they ate his human girlfriend (and turning some of their children into vampires who can survive in daylight).
• In Digimon Adventure 02, MaloMyotismon tries to drown both the Digital World and Earth in darkness, even saying "You foolish DigiDestined, watch closely now! Your world is being consumed by eternal night!"
• Night Warriors: Darkstalker's Revenge has Demitri inflicting this upon the Earth, driving humanity to desperation — and setting up Light Is Not Good symbolism when Big Bad Pyron drives the night away with his presence.
• Hades in Saint Seiya wants to bring the Greatest Eclipse which would darken the earth forever.
• Time Stop Hero: The Forces of Darkness are demons who lose their invulnerability while in sunlight, so they counter this by spreading magical clouds to block out the light.

Card Games

• Magic: The Gathering
  • The dual plane of Lorwyn/Shadowmoor switches between the two settings every few decades. Lorwyn never gets darker than dusk, while Shadowmoor never quite sees dawn. It's also very unpleasant, since most of the creatures that were nice in Lorwyn are monstrous in Shadowmoor.
  • The plane of Diraden (inspired in part by Shadowmoor) in The Purifying Fire was put under a curse of eternal night by the evil vampire Prince Velrav.
  • In the March of the Machine storyline, the Phyrexians block out the sun when they invade Ixalan, plunging the plane into perpetual night. They did this by compleating the elder dinosaur Etali, who can create and control storms, and having it cover the whole plane with a sun-obstructing Perpetual Storm. Huatli ends this unnatural darkness by summoning the other five elder dinosaurs, who Mercy Kill the corrupted Etali and let the dawn break through the dying storm.

Comic Books

• Avengers: No Road Home: Nyx's ultimate goal is to rewrite reality and do this to the entire universe.
• This is the whole premise of DC's Final Night crossover event, when the Earth's superheroes are completely and totally unable to keep the Sun from being eaten, even with help from the villains. Only the Heroic Sacrifice of Hal Jordan saves the day.
• After the Crime Syndicate defeated the Justice League and assembled every supervillain they could enlist in Forever Evil (2013), Ultraman pushes the moon out of position to block the sun, casting the Earth into perpetual eclipse so it won't interfere with his powers (being the reverse-Superman, sunlight weakens him and kryptonite empowers him).
• In Blackest Night, a famous Green Lantern story by Alan Moore features a planet where this is, in fact the natural state of affairs orbiting a star that somehow produces heat but not light.
• In Invincible, the Batman Expy Darkwing operates in "Midnight City" which was the end result of this; because of a supervillain known as the Midnight Magician, it's perpetually midnight over the city. The government paid citizens to relocate, and as a result, the city became a Wretched Hive with only looters and the handful of people who refused to leave inhabiting it.
• Judge Dredd: During the "Necropolis" arc, the Sisters of Death blacked out all light in Mega City One while the Dark Judges began to murder the whole population. The temperature soon dropped to 10 below freezing and the supply system quickly collapsed. Only several months later did Judge Dredd succeed in banishing the Sisters and restoring daylight.
• Justice Society of America
  • Obsidian attempts to spread darkness over the entire world in one arc.
  • He does it again with the help of Mordru and Eclipso in the "Princes of Darkness" arc... and succeeds.
• 30 Days of Night has a variation. The vampires don't actually cause the night, they just take advantage of the fact that the sun doesn't rise for a very long time in Barrow.

Fan Works

• Abraxas (Hrodvitnon): San's memories reveal that Ghidorah uses its Weather Manipulation to turn the skies of the planets it conquers and destroys into neverending hypercanes which no sunlight can penetrate.
• Adopted Displaced: In There's Nopony I'd Rather Be Than Me, after her first growth spurt, this becomes an automatic feature in the games when Nightmare Moon is playable. She also enacts it in Equestria when she returns, but has it set up so the moon is directly in front of the sun and serving the same purpose as the sun's own rays, averting the negative side-effects that would normally come about from Night Eternal.
• After That Fateful Night: Nightmare Moon brings about eternal night after conquering Equestria. The problems of this causing frosts and crop failures is addressed by Nightmare Moon giving the moon 'night cycles' which are just like normal nights, and 'day cycles' in which the moon emits heat to warm the world.
• Anonymoose's Monster Girl Saga has this eventually happen to the kingdom of Yaleria. Unusually, this is presented in a positive manner as it benefits the undead who take over.
• Antipodes features both this and Endless Daytime, with the sun and moon freezing in place.
• Beneath The Sun's Surface: Unintentionally, because Princess Luna doesn't know how to raise the sun, Equestria stays in the dark for more than a week until Luna is able to.
• A Brighter Dark: Nohr lacks a sun. The implications this has for the ecosystem are not addressed.
• Chains of Reality: As explained by Bun-Bun, this is more or less the function of Proto-Luna's Eternal Night Dome: It encases the given area in a massive dome that then subjects the area to a night that basically lasts forever.
• Cutie Mark Crusaders 10k: Nightmare Moon envelops Equestria in perpetual night to prevent the Crystal Kingdom from invading the land in full force.
• A Diplomatic Visit: In the fourth story, The Diplomat's Life, during the fight with the Pony of Shadows, it's revealed that this is their plan, enveloping the entire planet in darkness. Given that Umbrea (another of their people) intended the same thing as Nightmare Moon, it's not surprising (Rainbow Dash even lampshades it with "Eternal night? Again? Tch. Figures.").
• Elementals of Harmony: In the chapter before the epilogue, references to Nightmare Moon's plans for "everlasting night" are mentioned.
• The Elements of Friendship: When Nightmare Moon brings about her endless night, this causes temperatures to drop and a lack of food as crops die from a combination of that and lack of sunlight. Meanwhile, the other half of the planet is suffering from Endless Daytime, everything burning and the boiling oceans resulting in megastorms. All told, only a narrow strip of the planet at the day/night border, the twilight zone, is habitable, and that quickly starts to be overwhelmed by refugees.
• Inner Demons: Not quite, but Queen!Twilight's goal, in addition to conquering Equestria, is to plunge it into a state of eternal twilight, which she eventually accomplishes by freezing the sun in place at early dawn. Though this is a tremendous drain on her physically and magically, which is what forces her to seek ascension to Alicornhood.
• The MLP Loops:
  • Since the baseline loop starts just a few days before Nightmare Moon returns, this comes up a lot. The loopers generally defeat her in a variety of amusing ways very quickly, but occasionally they just talk her down by pointing out (or letting her do it and figure out for herself) that eternal night has a lot of consequences she's not prepared for. Among other things, since the world is (usually) a globe, if half the world is Eternal Night then the other half is Eternal Day, which ruins the symbolism and causes severe weather problems. At one point, Gilda suggests that since the Griffon Lands are in the twilight region of the Eternal Night, Nightmare Moon could "wobble" things to give the griffins a relatively normal day/night cycle while the ponies still have their Eternal Night.
  • In a few early loops, Twilight pretends to go crazy and declares an Eternal Twilight across the land. Of course, this makes even less sense than Eternal Night, as only a very narrow band will be Eternal Twilight. She initially gives up, but later comes back by creating magical cloud cover that blocks the majority of light but also provides just enough to be considered twilight.
• My Little Pony Chronicles: Tirac's ultimate goal, but not played as straightforward as it usually is. The purpose of the Darkness shrouding the land isn't to block the sun, per se, but to spread Tirac's supreme dominance all over the globe, granting him power over everyone and everything such that even the sun will only shine where he sees fit.
• Night's Favored Child, a My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic fanfic, shows what would have happened if Nightmare Moon had succeeded in defeating Celestia. Notably, the story manages to avert the Word of God about this trope's consequences (see Western Animation below), as Nightmare Moon created a second moon to take the sun's place during the former daylight hours, one that magically generates enough light and warmth to keep the world from freezing without disrupting the night.
• Past Sins: One of the first things done by Nightmare Moon once she becomes the ruler of Equestria is bringing upon the eternal night she wanted so badly. However, the sight of ponies suffering from the ensuing famine and cold makes her regret this quickly and go back to the usual day and night cycle.
• Sunshine Superman: The Vampire Wars began when Dracula used the Darkhold to cast an eternal night on the eve of a solar eclipse, allowing his army of vampires and demons to roam free from the sunlight and attack humanity directly in the open.
• Thy Kingdom Come, a Sailor Moon fanfic, has an alternate universe villain Calcite. In the vanilla setting, Calcite and his friends and family are genetically predisposed towards good in a species of demons. But in the universe, he goes above and beyond to capture the dark goddess Metallica within himself to attain god-like powers. He is much smarter than other series villains and quickly dispatches the Sailor Senshi before launching an invasion of Earth from the Dark Kingdom. Actually, "invasion" is a bit of a misnomer. He make a grand announcement to all the world leaders, they defiantly vow to resist him to the last breath, and then he sets a magic dome of darkness over every landmass on the planet. Within a matter of months, there are massive ecological disruptions as plants cannot grow, animals can't eat plants that aren't there, and so forth. Calcite then imports nocturnal-growing plants from the Dark Kingdom and feeds them to the nations that surrender. Dark Kingdom flora and fauna quickly adapt and thrive and fill in the missing ecological niches. To keep the planet from total extinction, the sun still shines on the oceans after about a hundred miles away from land to promote plankton growth and so on. After he is defeated and the sun is restored, there is another wave of extinctions as the Dark Kingdom-based life dies off, along with another big percentage of humanity who have adapted to it to survive.
• Twilight the Terrible: A variant. While it's technically Endless Daytime because the sun is always visible, it's also always stuck on the edge of the horizon, meaning plants aren't getting enough sunlight and it's always cold, meaning this fic has a mix of Endless Daytime and the effects this trope would cause. Incidentally, seeing the effects of the Twilight That Never Ends causes Nightmare Moon to give up on her own plans to put this trope in place (well, that and a good talking to from canonverse's Luna).

Films — Animation

• Barbie: Star Light Adventure: The stars going out prompts Barbie's search to find out why before the entire universe goes dark.
• When The Emperor's New Groove was in its conceptual stages and called Kingdom of the Sun, Yzma's original plan involved summoning Supai, an Eldritch Abomination God of Evil, to snuff out the sun and plunge the kingdom into eternal darkness. She wanted to remain beautiful forever, was aware that direct sunlight gave her wrinkles, and concluded that plunging the world in never-ending night would allow her to stay young and beautiful forever. She even got a great song about it.
• Happens in Rock-A-Doodle... sort of? Not exactly night, but the sun does go into hiding, and the weather is perpetually gray, rainy and miserable, resulting in dangerous flooding and other nastiness.

Films — Live-Action

• Blair Witch: The Witch can control time and space within her domain, and traps her victim in one long eternal night once the sun goes down (in contrast to the first movie which actually did feature a normal night/day cycle).
• Dark City (1998): The Strangers die when exposed to sunlight, so they keep the title city in a constant state of night.
• The Day the Earth Froze (based on The Kalevala, seen on MST3K) has the witch Louhi cause this by stealing the Sun, resulting in a never-ending winter night.
• Deep Impact: The president explicitly states after the comet splits in two that the larger piece will cause an impact winter that will darken the Earth's skies for two years.
  "All plant life will be dead within... four weeks. Animal life within... a few months."
• Dungeons & Dragons: The Book of Vile Darkness: The point of the Book of Vile Darkness. Seith openly hopes to see a time when there's only darkness, with no light. Toward the end Shathrax (whom they bring the pieces of the book to) promises it too.
• Grave Encounters: After the main characters find themselves trapped inside the asylum due to the entrance mysteriously looping back into the building, they suddenly realize that it's mid-morning but it's still night outside. The rest of the movie is implied to take place over several days, yet it remains pitch black outside. The same happens in the sequel, and the new film team run into the main character from the first movie who's been surviving for nine months in darkness (which makes it even weirder as years have passed outside in the real world).
• In A Knight's Tale, Will flirts with Jocelyn along these lines, saying if he could ask God for one thing, it would be to stop the moon, so the night would last longer and he could spend more time with her.
• Legend (1985): The Big Bad Lord of Darkness is attempting to bring this trope about by killing the world's unicorns (the source of the world's light.)
• In The Matrix, this is done by the humans to stop the machines, since the machines are solar powered and it was assumed they'd run out of power if denied the sun. Instead, they won the war anyway then turned the humans into a new power source. Even if they hadn't, the plan was beyond suicidal on humanity's part, as it predictably killed off the entire biosphere. How the Machines manage to feed those humans they plugged into the Matrix is itself Artistic License – Biology.
• MonsterVerse:
  • Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019): King Ghidorah's Weather Manipulation once it begins spreading, begins darkening skies all over the world with massive storms. The novelization notes that if it keeps up for days or even months, the decreased daylight alone (never mind all the other devastation) will have the practical effect of a nuclear winter, causing plant life to die and then the animals to follow in a domino effect, even without Ghidorah and the other Titans actively creating an extinction event with other disasters.
  • In the Kingdom Kong graphic novel, Camazotz who is Weakened by the Light inflicts the Hostile Terraforming type upon Skull Island; drawing Ghidorah's leftover Perpetual Storm into the island's own Perpetual Storm barrier so that the island is enveloped in a neverending storm which blocks out the sun, before Camazotz emerges to claim his new kingdom. Although Camazotz is defeated and thrown back into the Hollow Earth by Kong, the change to Skull Island's climate is permanent — by the time of Godzilla vs. Kong, the island's entire ecosystem is invariably dying and Kong can no longer live on the island as a result.
• In Rollo and the Spirit of the Woods, the protagonists must make peace between their feuding peoples and bring their forest back to balance (literally balancing giant scales that measure good and evil). They're warned that if evil conquers the world, the forest will be veiled by an eternal darkness, and all life in the forest (and elsewhere) will die without sunlight. This ends up happening when the hostilities lead to one of the protagonists dying, with the sun being covered by the moon. This is fortunately reversed when good and evil become balanced once again.
• Vampirella: Vlad's big bad plan is to use a system of satellites to create a nuclear winter on Earth, allowing vampires to hunt humanity to extinction.

Gamebooks

• Lone Wolf: In the series backstory, Agarash the Damned's reign of terror was called the "Age of Eternal Night". In the series proper, Agarash's lieutenant Deathlord Ixiataaga uses his powers to maintain a permanent cloud cover over the city of Xaagon which prevents any sunlight from reaching it.

Literature

• The Adversary Cycle by F. Paul Wilson. At the start of Nightworld the sun rises five minutes too late. Repairman Jack can't understand why the scientists are so disturbed by this, but when portals to Another Dimension open all over the world, spewing a horde of Eldritch Abominations every night, the fact that every day the sun inexplicably rises later and sets earlier than the last becomes a reason for serious panic.
• The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay has a justified (and realistic) example of the trope, when Joe and Shannenhouse endure a winter at a military base in Antarctica; it has detrimental effects on their mental health.
• Black Jewels: Heir to the Shadows sees Jaenelle create an illusion of this in order to force the government to let her stay with her guardian.
• One of the biggest divergences in the Alternate History novel Ash: A Secret History is the fact that the sun has not existed in Carthage's heartlands for the past four centuries, leaving it in darkness known as being "Under the Penitence" or the "Eternal Twilight". Though all of its food has to be imported from its outlying provinces, it's noted to still be pretty warm there. The sun is still there, but all light in the visible spectrum from it has been blocked out. At least until the Carthaginians launch their invasion of Western Europe, at which point not only does the Penitence start getting very, very cold, but it also begins to spread over every land they conquer, to the alarm of everyone including themselves. Popular history states that the Penitence fell the moment one of Carthage's amirs executed a certain Rabbi who had built him a learning golem/tactical computer. Late into the book, the conflict shifts from Carthage alone to the Wild Machines masterminding Carthage's invasion, the aforementioned tactical computer's sort-of ancestors, who really caused the Eternal Twilight by manipulating electromagnetic fields, have turned it up to block out all light, and who want to end all human life by spreading it over the entire world.
• In The Boy and the Darkness, the people of the parallel world have traded away their sunlight piece-by-piece to interdimensional traders for many boons of modern civilization like electricity and plumbing. At the end, the Sunny Kitten becomes this world's new sun.
• Victorian poet James Thomson wrote "The City of Dreadful Night" as a metaphor for his depression, which often left him with prolonged insomnia during which he wandered the streets of London:
  The City is of Night; perchance of Death
  But certainly of Night; for never there
  Can come the lucid morning's fragrant breath
  After the dewy dawning's cold grey air:
• The Darkening in Companions Codex: a powerful spell taught to Tsabrak Xorlarrin by Lolth herself, it plunges the sky over the entire Silver Marches into artificial darkness. It serves as intimidation tactic aswell as relieves the invading drow of their weakness to bright sunlight.
• In The Courtship of Princess Leia, an ex-Imperial warlord punishes a rebellious planet by employing an "Orbital Nightcloak", a system of satellites that not only keeps all sunlight from reaching the surface, but also blocks all signals they send to other planets asking for help. This will kill every living thing on the planet quite soon. He's a jerk like that.
• Let's not forget the classic: Darkness by Lord Byron. Long story short, society collapses as all people panic and unsuccessfully try to save themselves. Biblical imagery is repeatedly introduced, but any related tropes are deconstructed, and the overall tone is one of cynicism.
• After the Dreadmount erupts in A Day of Fallen Night, a volcanic winter leaves the sun shrouded and weak for the next year. This has serious consequences for the weather and agriculture, resulting in food shortages in all locations visited by the story.
• In A Deepness in the Sky, the planet central to the plot, Arachna, orbits a star that spends about thirty years around sol brightness and two hundred as a brown dwarf. The planet therefore has a few decades of normal day-night cycles and a couple centuries of endless night. Arachna's native inhabitants have adapted to hibernate during the dark periods and recolonize when the star relights.
• Robin Jarvis' The Deptford Mice: Jupiter intends to put out the sun and cause eternal winter.
• In Empire of the Vampire, Daysdeath is the term used to describe the sudden shroud of ash and smoke which rose into the sky twenty-seven years prior to the beginning of the story. The exact cause remains unknown, though most people suspect a falling star which crashed into the earth with enough force to send tons of debris into the lower atmosphere, blanketing the skies and preventing more than a smidgen of sunlight from passing through the shroud. The shroud has not abated in strength over the following decades, and the results have been devastating - repeated crop failure and abysmal harvests, the withering of forests and other natural greenery and the resulting food and material shortages, but perhaps worst of all, the undead no longer being constrained be the daily need to hide from the sun, their numbers quickly multiplying as the lesser vampires were no longer destroyed by the sunlight. The ancien vampires soon realized the opportunity this afforded, and not only have they embarked on a campaign of global conquest, they actively work to eliminate any chances of mankind dispelling the shroud through artificial means.
• In N. K. Jemisin's The Fifth Season, the continent-shattering earthquake at the beginning of the book opens a volcanic rift continually pouring out enough ash to blot out the sun for thousands of years, kicking off an Endless Winter.
• In the Doctor Who Missing Adventures novel Goth Opera, vampires use a 'time freeze' to bring this about so they can go about their plan to vampirise humanity without having to worry about getting caught in the sunlight.
• In Gulliver's Travels, the first punishment for cities rebelling against Laputa is to stop the island over the city, denying the people sunlight. If that doesn't help, they start dropping rocks down. The final stage is landing the island on the city.
• In Haroun and the Sea Of Stories, the Earth's second moon, Kahani, is locked into a position where half of it, known as Gup, is always in daylight and the other half, Chup, in darkness. Subverted in the end when Haroun breaks it free in order to destroy the shadow kingdom in the dark half.
• In Have Space Suit – Will Travel, by Robert A. Heinlein, the intergalactic security council decides to punish a race by sending the race's planet to a separate universe... without their sun. Earth avoids this fate only by the hero's Patrick Stewart Speech and actions.
• In In Search of Dorothy, the Witch casts an eternal night sky spell in the second book to blot out the sun.
• In the final book of The Kane Chronicles, The Serpent's Shadow, the chaos-snake Apophis basically swallows up the sun-god and if he had won, it would have been this. The official description for the final book even states, "He's b-a-a-ack! Despite their best efforts, Carter and Sadie Kane can't seem to keep Apophis, the chaos snake, down. Now Apophis is threatening to plunge the world into eternal darkness, and the Kanes are faced with the impossible task of having to destroy him once and for all."
• An old folk story, adapted as The Moon in Swampland by M.P. Robertson, reverses the trope to have the Moon vanish, but with a similar effect. The Moon visits a swamp out of curiosity about the world below, where she's quickly captured, chained up and thrown into a sealed well by the bogies. Once her light's gone, they completely rule the night; every sunset ushers in hours of horror for the miserable humans, until a hero returns the world to normal by finding and freeing her.
• The Night Land: Millions of years in the future, the sun has burned out and all of the other stars in the universe are dead as well. The last few million humans still alive stay warm by means of the "Earth Current", or geothermal heat.
• The Night of the Triffids begins at 9 AM in summer, and when the main character awakens it is as dark as midnight in winter. A combination of very dense clouds and an asteroid cloud passing between the Sun and Earth is the cause. Later in the story, when the clouds leave, there is light, but the sun looks like it is dying.
• Oto × Maho: one of the major steps of the Big Bad involves plunging the world into a cursed blackout, not only blocking all natural light (even starlight), but forcing every non-magical person within into a deep sleep full of nightmares, conjuring an empire of Noise monsters that are born from negativity.
• In Fritz Leiber's story "A Pail Of Air", Earth has frozen over after being pulled out of its orbit and cast into deep space.
• The Seventh Tower: Unusually, this done by the good guys in backstory to wipe out a race of evil shadows; without light, there are no shadows. The villains want to restore the sun, and the heroes have to stop them.
• In The Shattered Kingdoms, the sun (and moon, for that matter) haven't been seen in one particular country for time immemorial. The country's inhabitants are generally Weakened by the Light, and look (at least in the opinion of other people) rather like corpses.
• In The Shattered World, the Floating Continent of Xoth is almost entirely shielded from the sun's rays by another, nameless fragment. This makes it an ideal shelter for the light-sensitive Cthons and their equally-averse cacodemon minions. At least until the sequel, The Burning Realm, in which Kan Konar destroys the shielding fragment's Runestone and it drifts sideways, exposing Xoth to the light.
• Silverwing: The ultimate goal of the vampire bats in Sunwing is to free their god from imprisonment and bring about eternal night.
• Simon R. Green:
  • Forest Kingdom: In book 1 (Blue Moon Rising), the title evil moon also brings with it a side order of eternal night.
  • The Nightside hasn't seen a sunrise since prehistory. It's always three in the morning there. Unlike most examples of this trope, the unending night hasn't done it any harm; in fact, the usual Night-That-Never-Ends plot is inverted when one novel's Big Bad plots to call the Sun back to the sky, which would bring disaster.
• PJ Masks: Apophis, the antagonist of the "Les Pyjamasques et la momie d’Apophis" two-parter, wants to cause an eternal night by stealing the solar disc from Bastet.
• In A Song of Ice and Fire, a character tells about the Long Night back in the Age of Heroes about 8000 years ago, which lasted a generation when The Others almost overran all of Westeros. And now, they're rising again... In "The World of Ice and Fire" it's mentioned that other cultures, such as the Rhoynar and the people of Yi Ti, have stories about a similar event.
• In Steelheart, Newcago (Chicago) is locked in permanent darkness by the power of an Epic named Nightwielder.
• A Russian children's poem "Stolen Sun" by Korney Chukovsky narrates how the crocodile consumed the Sun and how the bear gave him a proper pummeling and forced him to release the star back into the sky. No, it doesn't make sense in context either, but it does take on the motifs of Slavic myths about a dragon stealing the Sun and imprisoning it for thirty-three years, cueing global night and cold.
• The Stories of Nypre series features the Night Land, a place of eternal night. People who enter it tend to get mind controlled by the Big Bad. Oh, and it's expanding.
• In The Strain, by Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan, the goal of the Master is to do this (or, at least, something very much like it) via nuclear winter. He succeeds.
• Tolkien's Legendarium:
  • Sauron does a minor version of this in The Lord of the Rings, to depress his human enemies' morale, and because a lot of his armies consist of creatures such as orcs and trolls which can't go out in daylight or are seriously impaired by it. He uses toxic fumes from his volcanoes to just blot out the sky for days at a time.
  • Morgoth does this three times in The Silmarillion:
    • The first time he knocks down the Two Lamps originally set to illuminate Middle-earth with Endless Daytime, plunging the world into darkness and doing enough damage to shatter a continent. The Ainur are the only sapients existing at this point (this being before the Awakenings of Elves and Men), and they end up moving to the continent Aman. On Middle-earth, life only survives because the Ainu Yavanna put much of it into hibernation. ^note J. R. R. Tolkien, realizing this made Middle-earth uninhabitable for the Elves, Ents, and Dwarves who lived there during the darkness, planned to radically change the whole cosmology and prehistory to make the Sun much older, but never got beyond drafts. Darkness in Middle-Earth remained absolute until the creation of the stars, which remained the only source of light until the much later creation of the Sun.
    • Later, after the Awakening of the Elves, Morgoth and Ungoliant destroy the Two Trees which the Ainur had created to light Aman, and spread clouds of "Unlight" to hide even the stars. The effects probably wouldn't have been quite so bad if Morgoth hadn't previously sowed dissent among the High Elves, and/or hadn't stolen the Silmarils, the only things that could have resuscitated the Trees. During the period of darkness following that, we have, in short order: the rebellion of the Noldor, Elves slaughtering each other in the first Kinslaying, the declaration of the Doom of the Noldor, Elves betraying each other left and right, and the deaths of countless more of them crossing the Grinding Ice (after which the Moon and Sun rise for the first time).
    • Morgoth responded to the creation of the Moon and Sun by covering his Hell-fortress in volcanic clouds of toxic fumes, and then started spreading the fumes southward to blot out the sunlight over Hithlum and Beleriand.
    • Morgoth is further prophesied to cause this one last time during Dagor Dagorath, the battle that will end the world, when he will destroy the Sun and Moon. This great night will eventually be ended when the Silmarils will be given to Yavanna, who will use them to restore the Two Trees.
• Lois Tilton's "Vampire Winter" revolves around a Nuclear Winter that allows a vampire to stay awake all the time and ravage survivors in several small towns.

Live-Action TV

• In the US, most daytime soap operas appear to take place in eternal night. No sets ever have windows visible, and exterior doors always open to darkness. Rare outdoor scenes are shot with a blue filter for an ambiguous day-for-night look. The characters don't acknowledge this, and generally avoid mentioning the passage of time clearly.

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• Simmons spent the time between seasons two and three of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. trapped on a world where the nights last for years and the days only last a few hours.
• Angel: The Beast blocked out the sun over Los Angeles, giving vampires and other demons a chance to come out and play without worrying about their curfew. After a few days or weeks of this, L.A. begins to look distinctly After the Endish. If not for Angelus, the block would have spread all over the world.
• Battlestar Galactica (1978) : Every planetary surface visited is cloaked in night for at least the first fourteen episodes.
• Doctor Who has used this trope a couple of times:
  • The Doctor, Martha, and Jack travel to the end of the universe in "Utopia". All the stars have burned out by then.
  • The night caused by the Daleks' theft of Earth in "The Stolen Earth". The theme is even called "The Dark and Endless Dalek Night". Everyone not freezing is explained as the Daleks using an "atmospheric shell".
• Game of Thrones: Winter is coming, and with it the days grow shorter. There is an in-universe Fairy Tale of a Long Night that lasted a generation the last time the White Walkers invaded Westeros. Stannis mentions it by name in "Second Sons" when discussing Melisandre's prophecies with Davos. Bran Stark as the Three-Eyed Raven outright confirms that this is the Night King's plan for all of Westeros.
• The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power: Due to orcs not being capable to live under the sun, Adar plotted to cover the Southlands with a massive volcanic cloud to counter this weakness. Said cloud would hang over the now-named Mordor for millennia afterwards.
• Sanctuary: Played with in "Carentan", where a localised time bubble causes time to pass at an accelerated rate for the inhabitants of a French town. Because of this, six years pass for every day outside of the bubble and the nights last for over 3 years. Due to the lack of sunlight during this period, the temperature drops to near-freezing and one of the inhabitants explains that many people do not survive.
• Star Trek: Enterprise: One episode takes place on a Rogue Planet that wanders freely in the interstellar void. Unlike many examples, it's actually a fairly nice place, with a thriving ecosystem sustained by a very active geology. The hunters that the crew meets on the planet mention that there are higher primates, implying that the planet might eventually produce a civilization.
• Tin Man: The ultimate goal of the Wicked Witch is to lock the position of the Binary Suns behind the moon during a rare double eclipse, using a large Magitek device originally intended to slow the suns down for better crop growth.
• The Twilight Zone (1959):
  • In "I am the Night - Color Me Black", the Sun fails to rise over a small town on the morning that a wrongfully convicted man, Jagger, is due to be executed. This is caused by the prevalence of hate in the community. It becomes even darker after he is executed. A radio report indicates that the same thing has happened in North Vietnam, a section of the Berlin Wall, Chicago,^note There was a race riot going on at the time there a street in Dallas, Birmingham, Alabama and Shanghai, all places where hate abounds.
  • The Cruel Twist Ending to "The Midnight Sun" is that the young woman who'd dreamed of a broiling Endless Daytime woke up into a freezing world headed for The Night That Never Ends.
• The Twilight Zone (2002): In "Sunrise", after a group of college students accidentally disturb the site of an ancient Aztec ritual that was supposedly to maintain the sun, they find that the world has been plunged into darkness. They eventually decide that they have no choice but to perform the ritual (which involves making a human sacrifice) themselves. At the end, the survivors learn that according to scientists, the darkness was caused because a rare stellar cloud had been blocking the sun's rays from Earth, but no one can really be sure if it was a coincidence or something more.

Music

• Jonathan Coulton's "Always The Moon".
  Remember when there was a you and me?
  When there was such a thing as gravity?
  And the tides came in and the tides went out again
  But the water got too high
  And the sun began to die
  And I tried to make you stay
  But the world pulled you away
  And now there are darker longer colder nights
  And the sun has gone for good and so here we are
• The Kovenant's (formerly Covenant) debut album In Times Before the Light had this as a recurring theme in many of its songs, with lyrics referring to the "forevernight". They're from Norway, which might explain a few things.
• The Cat Empire has a song titled "The Night That Never Ends".
  As long as I am living
  I never forget
  That the sun is never rising
  And it never set.
• Opeth's song, Blackwater Park, features the closing line of both the song, and of the album: "The sun sets forever over Blackwater Park."
• Despite the title, Iron Maiden's Total Eclipse appears to actually be about this.
• Invoked in mind.in.a.box's cyberpunk-industrial music, which takes place in a future dystopia controlled by a secretive government agency. As the song continuity progresses, daylight is mentioned less and less, and the nights seem to grow longer. From the 3rd album onward, the cover art all depicts the protagonist at night. From "World of Promises":
  What I would do to have it back; a sky above that isn't black

Mythology and Religion

• The Bible: The Ninth Plague that God sends upon Egypt is three days of total darkness, which affected the Egyptians but not the Hebrew slaves.
• Where The Bible mentions an anomalous eclipse following the crucifixion, The Book of Mormon goes it one better and drops the American continents into three days of darkness (as was previously prophesied by Samuel the Lamanite).

Podcasts

• Maxwell Rayner and his Dark cultists try to extinguish the sun and replace it with an evil version of itself created by their fear god in The Magnus Archives.

Puppet Shows

• Dinosaurs ended with Earl accidentally starting the ice age that will kill the dinosaurs by blanketing the Earth in a cloud cover.

Tabletop Games

• Dragon Strike: The Sunstone absorbs all daylight, plunging the kingdom into eternal darkness.
• Dungeons & Dragons
  • Illithids have a history of trying to bring this about. In 2nd Edition, mind flayers had excellent darkvision but could only see in darkness and were Blinded by the Light, so one adventure series features illithids seeking an artifact to put out the sun. 3rd Edition downplays how much sunlight negatively impacts mind flayers (it doesn't harm them, they just find the sensation of sunlight about as appealing as the average human would find being bathed in blood), but mentions that some of the more unstable elder brains who rule them plot to knock out the sun.
  • Mystara: While the Hollow World usually experiences Endless Daytime, the disruptions brought on by the Wrath of the Immortals causes the planetary interior's central sun to go dark for a week. Most inhabitants thought that the world was coming to an end.
  • This is the sign for the Elder Evil (from the book of the same name) Father Llymic, who becomes slowed (and eventually frozen over) when the sun is shining. Notably, this night comes with a flat ban on all light of any kind; as Father Llymic comes closer and closer to freedom, the sun ceases to rise, the moon dims, the stars go out, fire ceases to burn, and light-producing spells stop working. In the final battle with the monster, the sun has completely gone out, allowing him to burst free of his icy prison and try to wreak havoc over the entire world.
  • The first layer of the Lawful Good outer plane Mount Celestia, namely Lunia, the Silver Sea, has eternal nighttime under a star-filled sky. Similarly, the mildly Neutral Good plane of the Beastlands has the layers of Brux, cast in perpetual dusk, and Karasuthra, where an eternal moon shines down upon the most dangerous night predators.
  • The Plane of Faerie, or Feywild, is a downplayed example in that it is bathed in an eternal twilight (or perhaps pre-dawn). The sun is visible low on the horizon, but it never moves, making the plane a shadowy place.
  • La Notte Eterna takes place on a world where a war in the heavens resulted in Laon, the sun god, being captured, and consequently, the sun has not risen on that world in over a hundred and sixty years. As one can imagine, this has had drastic effects on that world; the rise of the vampires has been the least of their problems compared to things like the near-extinction of plant life outside of magically warded areas — famines nearly destroyed civilization utterly and were only halted thanks to the introduction of plants adapted to life Beneath the Earth. Life survives at all mainly because Laon was able to give a sliver of his magic to the moon before being captured, allowing it to shine with its own light; that and deliberate magic are all that prevent the world from becoming an uninhabitable ball of ice and rock.
• Nightbane: The Day of Darkness — 24 full hours of unnatural darkness (no stars, just a solid sheet of darkness across the sky) — heralded the weakening of the barrier between our world and the Nightlands, allowing the Nightlords and their minions easy access to our world.
• Exalted:
  • A Wyld pocket in the East manifests as a forest where the sun never shines. Its trees are bone-white or black as night with blood-red leaves, and tend to die quickly when exposed to sunlight, and grow interspersed with gigantic mushrooms. The forest is mainly home to oversized nocturnal animals, such as giant owls and bats, alongside mobile fungi and bat-headed hobgoblins.
  • Near the end of Return of the Scarlet Empress, the Ebon Dragon causes an eternal night by assassinating the Unconquered Sun. Unusually, this backfires on the villain by distributing the Unconquered Sun's nigh-infinite power directly to the Exalted themselves.
• Fate of the Norns: Ragnarok: During Fimbulvinter, both the Sun and the Moon are devoured by giant wolves, stars are falling out of the sky, and no one will ever see the light of the day again.
• Grim Hollow: A lot of Soma is under constant magical darkness that seeps out of the City Bellow.
• Kingdom Death: The world is shrouded in near-constant darkness, the only source of light being lanterns that mysteriously show up in several places, or bioluminescent body parts on certain monsters (which are sometimes said lanterns, creepily enough). Any celestial body you may see somewhere up in the sky... isn't.
• Monsterpocalypse: The ultimate goal of the Subterran Uprising is to block out the sun, allowing them to rule the surface without harming their photosensitive eyes.
• Pathfinder: The powerful, costly "Curse of Night" spell permanently blocks out the sun over a one-mile radius and impedes Light 'em Up magic in its area of effect. It's devastating for plant life in the area, but a huge boon for undead and other creatures that are Weakened by the Light.
• RuneQuest: Before Time, Orlanth killed his enemy Yelm, the god of the Sun, which plunged the world into darkness broken only by the squabbling of Yelm's sons as they fought over who would be the new Sun. Things only got worse from there — a clan of winter gods used the chaos to expand their icy hold over the world; hordes of trolls and worse, driven from Hell by the sudden brightness brought by the arrival of the dead sun god, ran free over the gloom-shrouded world and preyed on humanity at will; and then Chaos came. That age was called the Great Darkness, and it ended only with Yelm's resurrection.
• The Strange:
  • The full moon is fixed in Halloween's midnight sky, bright and clear except when streaming clouds veil it.
  • The tiny sun at the core of the Hollow World Pellucidar has an immobile moon which provides the one area of perpetual night in the recursion, known as the Land of Awful Shadow.
• Strike Legion: Operation Eternal Night, which the Empress initiated to prevent the Imperium from losing the first war with their own rebelling Gens, involved using a titanic Mastery project to isolate every star system in the galaxy for thousands of years.
• Ten Candles is set after an unexplained event causes all natural light to cease. The cycle of day and night technically continues, but only in terms of temperature. Then They show up and begin hunting people down. (What They are is defined by the GM, assuming it needs to be defined.)
• Trail of Cthulhu: As the surrealists change the Dreamlands, the sky above Celephaïs permanently darkens into a cloudless, starry night. The city's blue spires stand out against this lightless background, for the city itself is illuminated by an eternal day.
• Vampire: The Masquerade
  • The "Crucible of God" Gehenna scenario features the Antediluvian/ancestor of the Clan Lasombra blanketing the Earth in darkness for three weeks while it consumes its childer/descendants. No explanation is given as to how or why the darkness abates.
  • During the Week of Nightmares, Kuei-Jin elders created a supernatural storm to shield them from the sun to battle Ravana, the Antediluvian ancestor of the Clan Ravnos — who was practically a vampire-god at this point. Then the Technocracy bombed them all, killing everyone who joined the battle; werewolves, Kuei-Jin and their own Agents. After storm dissipated, they scorched Ravana with orbital mirrors, a spirit nuke and then some more end-world scenario weapons. The battle damaged the reality so much that it started the events that nearly ended the world. Perhaps letting the night never end was the better idea in the long run?
  • This is also one of the long-term goals of Clan Giovanni — tear down the Shroud that separates the world of the dead from the world of the living, thus creating an endless twilight kingdom where flesh and ephemera are one.
  • There are also extremely high-level rituals in Abyss Mysticism, practiced mostly by the Lasombra due to their connection to Obtenebration, that allow the caster to blot out the sun for one hour. No doubt, some elder scholars have tried to take this even further.
• Warhammer:
  • One of the realms of the Enchanted Forest of Athel Loren, Modryn the Night Glens, is shrouded in eternal night, and the forest spirits and elves that live there are known to practice dark magic prohibited in the rest of the forest. It used to have a regular day-night cycle in the distant past, but became shrouded in darkness after the dark elf queen Morathi poisoned the soul of Ariel, the queen of Athel Loren, which among other things cast most of Athel Loren into darkness. Ariel eventually recovered, but night never lifted again from Modryn.
  • Kholek Sun-Eater, one of the oldest Dragon Ogre Shaggoths, is so named because his approach is heralded by storm clouds that precede and follow him. Whatever it is the dragon-ogres did so the Chaos gods would give them immortality at the beginning of the world, Kholek's deed was so horrible the sun refuses to see him, hence the clouds.
• Warhammer 40,000: The Night Lords legion's homeworld was Nostramo, a polluted hellhole with a black, sunless sky, and as part of their terror tactics, those Astartes have worked out how to trigger similar phenomena on worlds they attack. In fact, one of the reasons for Nostramo's eventual rebellion was that when the Emperor arrived, he showed the Nostramans that there was light in the galaxy they would never get to see.
• Werewolf: The Apocalypse:
  • The Society of Nidhogg is a secret society within the already shady tribe of the Shadow Lords. They believe that, since their tribe draws power from a spirit that represents an eternal storm, they can gain enough power to enact their will if they just do something about that pesky sunlight that gets in the way of their totem's influence. It says a lot that their most prominent member, Nightmaster, is absolutely insane and lives in the depths of a treacherous lightless realm within the Umbra.
  • In a Time of Judgment scenario where the Shadow Lords fall to the Wyrm, Grandfather Thunder uses his power to blanket the world in storms and clouds and sends his servants to attack Helios directly. The darkness serves as cover for the fallen Lords to launch terror attacks and awaken monsters across Eastern Europe and Central Asia, and allows vampires and Wyrm spirits previously held in check by the Sun's light to crawl out of cover across the world. The darkness only parts at the climax of the Apocalypse, when Grandfather Thunder gathers his strength to attack Helios directly.

Video Games

• Ambridge Mansion: Subverted. The titular haunted mansion is located inside of its own world in which there is nothing at all outside of the house, only infinite blackness. There is no day or night, but the constant blackness makes it appear to be this trope.
• Arx Fatalis: A neverending winter night is the setting of the game. Luckily, sun was dimmed over five years, giving the population enough time to move underground. In the end, it's revealed that the sun is obscured by a giant space dust cloud and is barely visible even out of the atmosphere.
• Billy Hatcher and the Giant Egg: The Crows have already succeeded in bringing eternal night to Morning Land. Billy's job is to bring the day back.
• Bloodborne: Yharnam is a land without sunlight, lit only by the moon. This is justified however, as the Hunter is trapped inside a dream. And the Moon existed as a presence. Should they free themselves from the dream, the morning sun would be seen again. However, if the Hunter chooses to free Gehrman by killing him and taking on his role or become a Great One by defeating the Moon Presence, the Hunter will never see the sun again.
• Castlevania: The titular castle, in virtually every game in the franchise, is accompanied by an aura of eternal night, usually complete with a full moon. The source of this unnatural night is explained in Castlevania: Lament of Innocence. Justified, since the primary antagonists of the series happen to be vampires. The eternal night usually ends after the antagonist is defeated, allowing the sun to shine as the castle itself crumbles to its foundations.
• City of Heroes: Happens ever year during the annual Halloween event, in which for two weeks in late October and early November the game's normal day/night cycle is replaced by endless nighttime.
• The Darkside Detective: A Fumble in the Dark: In one case, the villains steal a Mineral MacGuffin that can be used to plunge the world into endless darkness.
• Dark Souls:
  • In the first game, the First Flame that originally brought forth life is slowly dying, and sunlight is dying with it. There are already regions of the world that are covered in permanent darkness such as Anor Londo, which only looks sunlit thanks to an illusion. While the ostensible goal of the Chosen Undead is to rekindle the First Flame, the Primordial Serpent Darkstalker Kaathe claims that The Age of Dark won't necessarily be a bad thing for everyone in the long run.
  • Dark Souls III: Two different endings appear to create these. The "End of Fire" ending is foreshadowed by the Untended Graves area, which is an area of deep darkness and vicious, fast-moving hollows. Meanwhile, the cinematic that plays in the "Usurp the Fire" ending shows that the sun, which has turned into an eclipse resembling the Darksign by the time you fight the Final Boss, has become a black disc surrounded by a white ring, resembling the design for Humanity throughout the series.
• Dark Vengeance revolves around a perpetual solar eclipse due to a Black Magic spell, cast by the Dark Elves in revenge for their previous defeat by the High Council.
• Destiny 2: During the Season of the Splicer storyline, the Last City is trapped in an endless night by a Vex spell/program, forcing the Guardians to invade their network to bring the sun back.
• Diablo II has a quest in which a cult of snake demons causes an unending eclipse and the player character has to go hunt them down to make it end. Though the scenario is rectified quickly, it's not ever treated with much urgency.
• Dominions:
  • The Mandeha Rakshasas of Lanka have the sole goal of devouring the sun and plunging the world into darkness, and are themselves surrounded by darkness as they frighten away the rays of the Sun.
  • There's also the global Death enchantment Utterdark, which begins a perpetual night and screws over anyone without the ability to see in the dark and most of the provinces.
• The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim: The Dawnguard DLC has a Vampire Lord seeking to blot out the sun through the use an Elder Scroll. You eventually gain the tools to do this yourself, and learn it isn't quite as permanent as advertised, though easy enough to repeat on a daily basis. In addition to the vampire hunters opposing the Big Bad's scheme, he is also opposed by other vampires, although at least one does so not so much due to any moral or ethical concerns as that she judges the end result of the scheme to be less 'eternal vampiric reign' and more 'mortals get ''really'' pissed off and focus on killing off every vampire they can find until day returns'. The possibility of dragons taking it as an insult against Akatosh (and upstarts trying to muscle in on their territory) and reducing every vampire to smouldering piles of ash for the offense is never explicitly mentioned, but then again it'd be a bit redundant, since all that would matter to the vampires is that now there's a competition about who can murder the most vampires the fastest.
• Faria: The endgame has the Evil Sorcerer magically blocking the sun's light from reaching Faria, whose inhabitants are freezing.
• Final Fantasy:
  • Final Fantasy III: Xande sinks most of the world into perpetual darkness and suspended animation because he does not wish to die after being blessed with mortality.
  • Final Fantasy: The 4 Heroes of Light: The second half of the game gives the world a red-and-black sky and the "night" music becomes permanent while on foot thanks to the time-breaking flood of darkness you unleashed from Rolan's soul.
  • Final Fantasy XIV: The Primal Tsukuyomi seeks to create an endless night to bring suffering to the people of Doma for the Hell she, as Yotsuyu, suffered growing up.
  • Final Fantasy XV: This is a concern for the people of Eos: with the daytime growing shorter and the nights growing longer, the threat of daemons, who are kept at bay by light, is of grave import. Late in the game, this comes to be: Lunafreya's death causes the days to grow shorter faster until, by the end of the Time Skip, daylight is completely extinguished and Eos exists in perpetual darkness, leading to the entire planet becoming infested by Daemons.
• God of War III: The death of Helios the god of the sun causes black clouds to blot out the sun and throw Greece into eternal darkness. It's implied this in turn contributes to Hera's plants dying later on.
• Golden Sun: Dark Dawn: Luna Tower is triggered in part by the protagonists (who'd been told not to) and by Ryu Jou (who had no choice in the matter). It ends up creating an artificial eclipse that casts a massive shadow over three or four countries that lasts until it absorbs enough sunlight. Unfortunately for everyone duped into starting it, it also caused things that live in the shadows to come out and start attacking people left and right. The eclipse is finally stopped by using a magitek laser to fill up the tower's capacitors almost instantly.
• House Flipper: Samarta Myers' House exists in perpetual darkness, made even worse by flickering lights. Cue the Sun when the player breaks the curse on the house by burying the coffin in the backyard.
• Kingdom Hearts: According to Word of God, The World That Never Was is always night because it is located extremely close to the Realm of Darkness, which itself is also always night. Other than that, it seems that sufficient darkness will shroud places in eternal night. For instance, Traverse Town (made up of the lost pieces of worlds that have been consumed by darkness) has never been seen during the day. Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep reveals that Castle Oblivion, formerly the Land of Departure, used to have a normal day-and-night progression, but since Master Xehanort corrupted it with darkness, it has been perpetually gloomy.
• The Legend of Spyro: The Eternal Night: The Night of Eternal Darkness does not actually last forever, but it will happily bring along with it evil forces that are all too glad to make it so.
• The Legend of Zelda:
  • The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time: It is always nighttime at Ganon's Castle. Even if you go there in the middle of the day, time will jump to nightfall and stay locked there until you leave.
  • The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker: Ganondorf casts a curse onto the Great Sea that prevents dawn from ever coming. Fortunately, this does Link more good than bad, as it ensures that Link will always get Nayru's Pearl first due to the pirates taking time off at Windfall Island until morning; the curse is lifted once the Pearl is obtained. This same curse is also used in a more-localized fashion in the Forsaken Fortress, Ganondorf's base of operations. When Ganondorf abandons the joint to go after Zelda, however, the curse is lifted there, as well.
• Master of Magic has a spell that does this. Yes, you can cast it. It's not as dramatic as it sounds though...
• MediEvil opens with the Big Bad, Zarok, casting a spell that plunges Gallowmere into eternal night, and it stays that way the entire game until Dan defeats Zarok, with the sun rising as he returns to his crypt.
• MeiQ: Labyrinth of Death kicks off its plot with this, due to the fact that the planet has stopped rotating. While this causes monsters of all sorts to appear, one can't help but wonder what things are like on the other side of the world...
• Might & Magic VIII features the Nightshade Brazier, which can produce this effect in a region, and was developed by the Necromancer's Guild of Jadame but stolen by their enemies in the Church of the Sun. At one point in the main quest you have to choose between recruiting either the Guild or the Church into The Alliance, and the Guild's quest is to retrieve the Brazier so they can plunge their home region of Shadowspire into perpetual night, thus allowing their vampiric troops to defend Shadowspire from attack in the day, freeing up other forces to go on the offensive (it also gives their vampiric citizens more freedom to move about without having to acquire a highly expensive sun-protecting amulet).
• Ninety-Nine Nights: The King of Ninety-Nine Nights is so named because during his last reign he caused darkness to fall for ninety-nine straight days.
• Nintendo Wars: The meteorite impact in Advance Wars: Days of Ruin kicks up a ton of dust which blots out the sun.
• Ōkami: Partly used during the "Day of Darkness", when the monsters get stronger. Amaterasu being the sun may also have something to do with it.
• Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan: In Ouendan 2, the sun is growing cold and it's up to the Ouendan team and the entire population of the earth to cheer up a Combined Energy Attack big enough to restart it.
• Paper Mario:
  • Paper Mario 64: The Puff Puff Machine produces clouds that blot out the sun over Flower Fields, causing the area to experience The Overcast That Never Ends.
  • Paper Mario: The Origami King: The Scorching Sandpaper Desert is stuck in perpetual, undead-haunted nighttime because the sun is missing, thanks to Hole Punch, who punched it out and stole it. And what for? To use as a disco ball for an eternal disco party. Once Mario defeats him, the sun returns to its proper place, the undead vanish, and the desert goes back to its normal daylit, scorching state.
• Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Time and Darkness: The Bad Future was stuck in an eternal night because time had stopped.
• Quest for Glory IV: The vampire Big Bads want to release Avoozl the Dark One in order to permanently cloak the world in the eponymous Shadows of Darkness.
• Shadow Man: You're tasked with collecting an artifact which will bring nighttime immediately, as opposed to simply waiting for it to come naturally. While this probably wouldn't be permanent, the practical effect is that eternal day is switched to eternal night, allowing you to use your Shadow Man powers in Liveside so you can kill the bosses in that realm. You can't simply wait for night because their plan needs to be stopped right now; giving them any free time is simply out of the question.
• Shin Megami Tensei IV: Tokyo has been living in one for twenty-five years, due to the existence of a layer of bedrock that was set up by Masakado to protect Tokyo from a nuclear strike that would've otherwise obliterated the entire metropolis. There are people living down there who have never seen the sun. The lack of sunlight means that growing agriculture, though not impossible, is very, very difficult. To make it worse, the entire damn city is encapsulated in a bubble of slowed time. Outside it's been more than fifteen centuries. The Neutral ending has Masakado returning to lift the bedrock barrier, allowing Tokyo to finally be granted sunlight once again.
• StarCraft: Shakuras was shrouded in perpetual twilight for a considerable length of time. There were no plants, but plenty of fossils. The world lightened up after a significant plot event, but the Expanded Universe novels tell us the world is still fairly dark.
• Tales of Xillia: Fenmont is a localized and benign version of the trope. The city is situated within a spirit clime that creates an unending night. This is apparently just normal for the city.
• Tokyo Xtreme Racer features a non-villainous example of this due to the attempt to integrate the system's clock into the game. There is an In-Universe Game Clock that matches up to the system clock, and is used for certain events, such as Wanderer opponents that only appear at certain times. However, the game is always set at night to reflect the nature of street racing as a nighttime activity; even if there's broad daylight outside your room and your system clock is set correctly, you will never see a single second of daylight in-game. Downplayed in Import Tuner Challenge where you can select the Daybreak option.
• Touhou Project: Touhou Eiyashou ~ Imperishable Night sees the fugitive Lunarians in Gensokyo using powerful magic to seal the land from their home world, with a false moon placed in the artifical sky created as part of the spell. This causes lots of problems for humans and youkai alike, which in turn requires the heroines to help solve the problem.
  • Subverted big time; the Night That Never Ends is caused by your heroines to buy time. The false moon only appears at night, and if you fail to reach the source of the problem and fix it before the supposed time for dawn, the game ends. Also, Keine Kamishirasawa (who defends the humans) and either one of Reimu Hakurei (who enforces law) or Marisa Kirisame (who is pissed off with your unnatural magic) will fight you to stop your heroines' madman scheme. Let's You and Him Fight, definitely. Supplemental material even indicates that most people in the land were completely unaware of the true threat and just assume the heroines actually solved the problem of the unending night.
  • In fact, during the True Final Battle, once you defeat Kaguya, she uses her power over "eternity" to tear apart your spell causing the imperishable night. Every time you die to a section of her final spell card, the time advances 30 minutes. If it reaches 5:00 during that time, the sun rises and the game ends. That doesn't cause a bad end, but losing all your lives during her stage will speed time all the way to 5:00 in one go and triggers the bad end, presumably due to her power. Cue the Sun is subverted big-time here.
  • Touhou Koumakyou ~ the Embodiment of Scarlet Devil: The Big Bad Remilia Scarlet's scheme is to block out the sun with a thick red mist, just so she, a vampire, can go outside whenever she wants. Following her defeat she instead gets around the problem by bringing a Parasol of Prettiness.
• Tyranny: Near the end, depending on your choices you can potentially gain the ability to cast the "Edict of Nightfall", which will plunge the lands into eternal darkness. This causes both plants and animals to wither away while the people will freeze without a sun. Gameplay-wise, this grants you a sneak attack bonus while enemies all have penalties to perception and accuracy.
• Warcraft: The Moonstone from Reign of Chaos is a Night Elf item that causes an eclipse, giving thirty seconds of nighttime (they're the only faction with spells that only work at night).

Webcomics

• Aurora Danse Macabre is set in The Night That Never Ends.
• MYth: A Promise is set in an endless night because Cronus kidnapped Eos to avoid Helios of rising the sun to keep the eternal darkness that he controlled. To avoid it, Selene is being in the sky for who knows how much time. Luckily Eos was rescued and the sun cue before she got exhausted.
• In Two Moons, the sun hasn't risen in 500 years, and life sucks. Humanity is kept alive, at least in one little city, entirely through genetically engineered food grown in unregulated for-profit labs. Much later the sun does rise, and it apparently won't set for another 500 years, which will probably make life suck almost as much. The cause is never explained, but the planet's orbit and rotation have likely been whacked by asteroids.

Web Original

• A minor character in the Animated Spellbook planned to perform a ritual that would "Unmake the sun, so that the High Devils will be born again". He gives up because Bashew cast Erratic Hammering, which made it impossible to perform any ritual within 1000 feet of him.
• Everyman HYBRID: In the non-canon video "Welcome to the ARK", Vinnie mentions that the sun has not been out in three days, and the video seems to show a storm raging outside.
• Hank J. Wimbleton in Madness Combat causes this by killing the Sun after the Improbability Drive brings it alive to attack him.
• The dark future in Spes Phthisica: "a carmine ember that could once have been a sun burns coldly in the sky, giving scarcely any light or warmth."
• Terramirum starts with the sun imploding and the moon getting blown away, and works from there.
• Speaking of the The Slender Man Mythos, Stan Frederick implies that a "Month of Night" occurred in New York before the series began.
• The Sun Vanished: Naturally without the sun, their world is plunged into an eternal night. This is the least of their worries though.

Web Videos

• Critical Role: A non-villainous example. The city of Rosohna's primary population are drow who live on the surface instead of underground. To accommodate their sunlight sensitivity, the entire city is kept in a magically induced eternal night.

Western Animation

• Ben 10: Zs'Skayr (to whom sunlight is fatal) tries covering the sunlit side of the Earth with a shell of radioactive material in one episode, so he can rule it as his domain. (The fact that this will mutate the entire population of the Earth is an unfortunate side effect.)
• Castlevania (2017): In Season 2, Alucard mentions having seen plans that Dracula wrote in old books for using smoke-producing aerial machines and other scientific methods to permanently darken the skies and block out the sun. He seems to be indicating that bringing such an endless night will be the next phase if Dracula and his vampire War Council succeed in Killing All Humans. However, it's implied to be subverted, as it becomes clear over the course of the series that Dracula is a grief-fueled Omnicidal Maniac Death Seeker who wholly expects the vampires and then himself to die if he succeeds in wiping out all humans.
• Elena of Avalor: Orizaba, a moth fairy, has attempted to cause one using the Eye of Midnight out of belief that it would be better for everyone. In ancient times, she was sealed away by the Maruvians before she could succeed and Elena has to reseal her when a Total Eclipse of the Plot frees her in one episode.
• Harley Quinn (2019): In the fourth season, Lex Luthor plots to thicken the ozone layer enough to block out the sun, weakening his nemesis Superman and rival Poison Ivy.
• Jackie Chan Adventures: The combined power of Tarakudo's nine generals could summon enough Shadowkhan to shroud the earth in darkness. It is later revealed that in order to do this, they can't summon any of their Shadowkhan.
• My Little Pony: The Trope Namer.
  • My Little Pony: Rescue at Midnight Castle: Tirac's goal is to use the Rainbow of Darkness to cause eternal night, although why specifically he wants to do this is not discussed.
    Tirac: The Rainbow of Darkness the darkness sends! Now begins the night that never ends!
  • My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: Nightmare Moon, the show's first villain, is the former shepherd of the moon and ruler of the night who was driven mad by jealousy over ponykind favoring her sister Celestia's sun and daytime. She eventually decided that she was just going to have to make everyone appreciate her, which she tried to by means of overthrowing Celestia and bringing about nighttime eternal. Celestia managed to defeat her and seal her in the moon, but as the show begins her banishment ends and she tries to pick up where she left off. Word of God later clarified that this would have caused the death of every living thing in Equestria, by starvation if nothing else. The season 5 finale, however, may have refuted this by having the Bad Future where she rules show no signs of such apocalypse and actually look the least terrible of all the Alternate Timelines visited. Whether this is because it's truly averted, that it's just not deep enough into Nightmare Moon's rule to start showing the signs, or if Nightmare Moon did know and simply invested in learning a spell that could deal with this is left unsaid since Twilight doesn't stick around long enough to learn much besides the basics.
    Nightmare Moon: Remember this day, little ponies, for it was your last. From this moment forth, THE NIGHT. WILL LAST. FOREVER!
• The Powerpuff Girls (1998): In "Boogie Frights", the Boogie Man blocks the sun with a giant mirror ball so that monsters can stay outside forever. Even worse, they turn Townsville into a "nightmare nightclub", causing enough racket to keep the whole town awake.
• The Real Ghostbusters: Samhain attempts to bring this about (along with eternal Halloween) in an episode.
• The Simpsons: In the two-part season cliffhanger "Who Shot Mr. Burns?", Mr. Burns funds the construction of a sun-blocking device in order to force increased energy consumption by the town — an act of such astonishing evil that even Smithers comes under suspicion when Burns is shot.
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2003): Big Bad Sh'Okanabo and his progeny's weaksauce aversion to Earth's sun, part of his ultimate plan for world domination involved preventing the sun from reaching Earth via a series of satellites. It worked, too... for a few minutes.
• Trollhunters: This trope (referred to in-universe as "Eternal Night") is Morgana's ultimate plan in Season 3, to enable the Gumm-Gumms to conquer the surface world without fear of sunlight killing them. During the Grand Finale, she puts this into motion by causing an eclipse, allowing a full invasion of Arcadia though once she's sealed in the Shadow Realm, Merlin undoes the spell.
• Xiaolin Showdown: In one episode, the Snowlem Raksha used the Lunar Locket to have the moon block out the sun, plunging the world into endless night, cold, and snow.
• Xyber 9: New Dawn: This is the Evil Overlord Machestro's ultimate plan. The Eye of Darkness would block the sun, allowing him and his legions to rule the surface world without being Weakened by the Light.
• Yin Yang Yo!: This is the goal of Carl the Evil Cockroach Wizard. As it turned out, this was also the Night Master's intentions so that he could be all powerful. Carl got upset over him copying his idea.

Real Life

• A scientific journal detailed a Death World simulation where they took a standard climate simulation model, shut off all solar input and saw what happened. It took less than a week for the continents to reach 270 K (i.e., freeze over); the equatorial oceans lasted a few weeks longer because of their large heat capacity.
• Places in the far north or far south such as Longyearbyen, Svalbard or Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station have a polar night that lasts for several months, bracketed on either side by one month of polar twilight.
• One of these probably occurred after the asteroid impact that killed off the dinosaurs. Dust thrown into the upper atmosphere partially obscured the sun for years (volcanoes can do a lesser version of this). While it wouldn't have actually been dark as night all the time, it would have been enough to kill off many plants (the things which support the entire food web) and reduce ocean temperatures (many marine organisms are very sensitive to temperature changes).
• The Great Smog of London in December 1952 would probably be the closest example in human history. The light-blocker was smoke from fireplaces and factories, with smog from cars and buses, which was not unusual. However, add cold weather, an anti-cyclone over London, and a lack of winds, and Londoners got a smoke denser than usual, with visibility only being a meter, and that was during the day. Out of all mechanized transport, only the London Underground operated anywhere near properly — buses had to have people in front holding torches. Concerts and movies had to be cancelled, because of the smog seeping indoors. Worse, it turned out to be a worse environmental disaster than originally thought. The smog caused severe illness to around 100,000 people from a combination of hypoxia, the sulfur content of the smoke turning the fog acidic, and the resulting tissue damage rendering people vulnerable to viral and bacterial infection. Estimates vary but between 4,000 to 12,000 people died during the week of smog.
• A planet that is tidally locked to its sun would have Endless Daytime on the side facing the sun and The Night That Never Ends on the side facing away. It used to be thought that Mercury was like this, but that turned out not to be the case. However, Mercury has polar craters deep enough that they never receive direct sunlight, and spacecraft data show the presence of water there, making them potential targets for a future Mercury base, much like the lunar example below.
• In the polar regions of our moon there are a series of valleys knows as "The Vales of Eternal Night" where due to the low position of the sun in the sky and the surrounding mountains are believed not to have seen any daylight for over a billion years. They are actually seriously considered as a location for a permanent moon base since there is evidence that there may be water ice from comets still there and the same geography that keeps them in perpetual darkness would also block radiation from solar storms. Power would be provided by putting solar panel farms on the nearby "Peaks of Eternal Light"
• The Norwegian village of Rjukan used to be entirely in darkness from September to March, until a large mirror was built on a nearby hillside.
• Some Roman Catholics believe in a prediction of "Three Days of Darkness" in which the only light will come from blessed beeswax candles. St. Hildegarde of Bingen and Padre Pio are among many who have predicted this.
• The small Italian town of Viganella is situated at the bottom of a very steep Alpine valley, where the mountains completely block out the sun for 83 days between November and February. The residents finally got fed up in 2006 and built a computer-aimed 8-by-5 metre steel mirror array to reflect sunlight down into the village.
• Due to the tilt of the Earth, the Arctic and Antarctic Circles each have an annual cycle of time during which the sun cannot reach their latitude, causing what's known as a polar night. At the absolute North and South Pole, this polar night lasts for about 11 weeks, with the duration becoming shorter at greater distances from the poles; most inhabited areas within the polar night region (the far northern regions of Russia, Canada, and Scandanavia) experience polar night for about 3-5 weeks. Areas that experience this will also experience an annual period of Endless Daytime of roughly equal length at the opposite time of year, corresponding with the polar night of the opposite pole.
• Rogue planets, thought to have been flung out of their solar systems by gravitational effects from passing planets or stars, drift in the emptiness between stars, with no sun to illuminate them.
• This will happen to whatever is left of the Earth once the Sun finally burns out as a black dwarf star - assuming of course that it isn't incinerated when the sun turns into a Red Giant star and blows out its outer layers. And given enough time, it will happen right across the universe, as very slowly over aeons, all The Stars Are Going Out...
• Uranus's axis is 97.77 degrees off perpendicular to the plane of the ecliptic and has a year 84 times longer than Earth's. Together these combine to create a light/dark cycle that lasts 42 Earth years.

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Narrator: So Once Again, the Day Is Saved... Get it? The day was saved? Because it was going to be eternal night! They saved the day — literally!

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