Apocalypse How is, indeed, basically a Sliding Scale trope: a scale of natural and artificial disasters from "town gets damaged by tornado" up to "total annihilation of The Multiverse". It's a relic of the early days of the wiki when we were more concerned with trying to be clever than with trying to make sense.
Edited by StarSword on Sep 4th 2024 at 4:35:59 AM
Trust me, I'm an engineer!I'd ask if moving it to the Sliding Scale/ namespace would be possible, but I'm not so sure with the number of wicks it has.
Works That Require Cleanup of Complaining | Troper WallI am a little confused about how it differs from The End of the World as We Know It, it seems the latter is just the former but not requiring you to put it on a scale, and in practice everyone just includes both redundantly on the work. Maybe we should keep The End of the World as We Know It for the tropes page and Apocalypse How as a trivia item? Also sometimes Apocalypse How is potholed when describing an apocalypse even though I think in that case it should pothole The End of the World as We Know It and Apocalypse How should be reserved for work pages categorizing an apocalypse by severity.
Edited by molokai198 on Sep 7th 2024 at 11:36:34 AM
Apocalypse How seems to be half trope and half index, certain a result of being one of the oldest tropes on the site.
The End of the World as We Know It is a plot trope, the characters having to face the actual end of the world. Apocalypse How is the ways it can play out in the story or in an After the End backstory. Independence Day is The End of the World as We Know It, Fallout is more Apocalypse How.
Comics are just words and pictures. You can do anything with words and pictures.I went looking to see whether there were other threads raising similar concerns. Findings:
- August 2011
: Trope Repair Shop reworked the original single-axis Sliding Scale into a two-axis scale of target area and severity. That's what resulted in the "archived" subpages.
- September 2011
: Morgued projects thread following on from the TRS thread to clean up wicks to use the new system.
- May 2023
: Previous Trope Talk thread noting some of the same issues as this thread, particularly the Type Labels Are Not Examples issue. Died after four comments.

Apocalypse How is a very popular trope, ranked #413 right now for popular pages, and with 6,054 wicks and 44,000+ inbounds.
Which is a problem, because I'm not sure what the definition of this trope even is.
The Laconic states the following:
Looking at the description, it seems like a sliding scale trope of sorts? As in, "different ways the world can end" — which sounds like multiple tropes in one. Is it a supertrope? If not, it might be able to be worked into one.
And of course, as has been noted
before
, (note too that the first thread linked was from 2011, indicating that this is a long-time problem), the page also functions as a massive violation of Type Labels Are Not Examples, with all examples grouped into "Class X" pages. The description encourages this, unfortunately, with a long list of "types" of apocalypses.
So, what is the definition? And what, if anything, can be done here?
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