Rework: Apocalypse How

Classes 0-4 need reworking, IMO, as they are too restrictive and do not adequately reflect the potential range for sub-"planetary extinction/annihilation" disasters in fiction.

Case in point: The Second Impact from Neon Genesis Evangelion.

1. It is worldwide in extent, with practically all coastal areas being devastated, implications of massive outbreaks of natural disasters (tsunamis are confirmed; volcanic eruptions, earthquakes and others appear to be an implicit given), and subsequent wars and civil strife, altogther halving world human population from the pre-Second Impact estimate of 6 billion. This implies Class 1: Human Die-Back.
2. Nevertheless, human civilization is not knocked back to the previous century, and by 2010 (i.e. pre-series) it actually has already surpassed Real Life (Humongous Mecha, 7th-generation AI-capable supercomputers, and too many other stuff to mention). This implies Class 0: Regional Catastrophe.
3. Additionally, the Rebuild Of Evangelion film series' version of the Second Impact goes as far as annihilating all marine life across the world's oceans, and leaving the terrestrial ecosystems so critically damaged that Mankind had to directly intervene in order to preserve them. This a borderline case of Class 4: Biosphere Extinction, as far as animals are concerned.

edited 9th Oct '10 3:05:07 AM by MarqFJA

Why are we copying the "Eschatological Taxonomy" scale verbatim, anyway?

Perhaps at the end, there should be a section for works like NGE where the scale of destruction is difficult to classify.

And isn't putting Rebuild Of Evangelion in the same continuity as the original series still Wild Mass Guessing at this point?

That's a good suggestion, but still doesn't address why we're copy-pasting an online article's scaling system for such an important trope.

And where did I say that Rebuild and TV NGE are in the same continuity? I only said "Rebuild Of Evangelion's version of the Second Impact", since it's basically The Same But Worse.

edited 9th Oct '10 12:45:29 PM by MarqFJA

Bumping. What the hell is up with all these 1.5 and 2.5 examples? It doesn't mean anything.

Exactly my point. The current 0-4 classes are ill-defined in a overly restrictive way that forces "1.5" and "2.5" classifications, because the examples technically have several crucial traits of the higher class but ultimately fall short of fulfilling it.

I'll gravedig a little here:

That's pretty much in the nature of this trope - most sentients are capable and in most cases willing to react to their Apocalypse, actively trying to reduce the class of the event by prevention, survival and recovery. Final classification of such events is only possible if the storyline gives enough clues about what happened afterwards. This might warrant downgrading all the "anything.5" examples to their respective lower class, as the class is only achieved when ALL criteria are met. That's rather unnerving with class 1 examples, as class 0 doesn't state that the area affected has to be a (small) fraction of the total area in the story. Most problematic examples would be those featuring multiple sentient species. The motif of a spacefaring or otherwise worlds-travelling race causing anything between class 3 to X-1 onto an planet-bound race and registering it as class 0 at best is very common.

On the example above: while the immediate aftereffects of the Second Impact in NGE may look like class 3b-4, it's clearly a class 0 by Nietzsche and Pratchett: that which doesn't kill us, makes us str(o/a)nger. The classes don't have recovery time limits.

edited 23rd Nov '10 1:50:18 PM by jlt314

I'd say it's fine the way it is. Granted, like you say some examples have qualities of higher levels but fall short, but that's not unique to this. In fact, in just about any form of categorizing/categories in existence that happens. A Jeopardy question about the Battle of Yorktown has qualities of a Historical Persons question, but it falls short of that and is delegated to General History.

Clean out the .5 classifications. Either it meets all the criteria for the higher level or it doesn't. If it doesn't, it doesn't, and it's the next level down. We simply aren't set up to do an accurate scale by parts of a level.

One of the Babylon 5 examples (concerning humanity basically nuking itself and thus reducing technology to dark age levels, with significant population loss but some technology and knowledge kept) is in both the 2 and 3 categories. The reason for this is, between 2 and 3, their only difference seems to be population and just how much technology was reduced. Perhaps the two could be combined? At the least they shouldn't be so arbitrary about how they're separated.

X-4 is also a big problem we should focus on, since it covers both an entire universe being destroyed, and anything beyond just on galaxy. There is a huge difference between destroying two galaxies out of billions, and destroying everything in the universe. Maybe X-5 could become "whole universe", while X-4 is "more than a galaxy, but less than a universe."

That refinement to the X section seems reasonable, but if we do it, we'll have to change X-5 (currently destruction across multiple universes) to X-6 as multi-universal destruction is a significant step up from destroying a single universe. This point (single vs cross-universal destruction) was raised in the discussion where the X levels were expanded, although it seems we overlooked the difference between destroying something bigger than a galaxy but less than a universe.

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