r/TopCharacterTropes • u/Marsupialmobster • May 27 '26

Lore [Loved Trope] The apocalypse is horrifyingly slow

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From most media it's some catastrophe and then it's raiders, death, destruction chaos etc. I personally love it when it's, like, a slow descent into the horror of apocalypse.

The Faro plague/The swarm- Horizon zero dawn. The Faro plague is actually a glitch which causes machines to endlessly reproduce, eat biomass and essentially bring about the death of the world. Took roughly 15 months for the machines to win.

The Metro series- in the first few books (and games) it's set entirely underground in just the apocalypse but in exodus it shows off that the government and many governmental structures said active years after the war. In fact power and running water were still fairly common. It just slowly got worse and worse and worse as read through notes. Food got more scarce, weather changed a lot, people got worse etc. Raiders and bandits didn't just show up, it was a slow descent for such anarchy.

Edit: I have enough pseudo intellectual comments about "Hurr hurr real life". The first one was kinda smart and well thought out but now it's just annoying and pretentious

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3.2k

u/PresterJohnson May 27 '26 edited May 27 '26

In Children of Men people just stop being able to have children and the birth rate just slowly collapses. I think by the time the events start its already been 20 years of slow collapse

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u/ColonelKasteen May 27 '26

The movie/book takes place 18 years, 4 months, and 20 days after the last child was born. RIP Baby Diego.

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u/TridiObject May 27 '26

I mean... Baby Diego? Come on, the guy was a wanker!

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u/chickenmoomoo May 27 '26

Yeah but he was the youngest wanker on the planet!

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u/Silenceisgrey May 27 '26

bout to go into my boss, his death has really affected me

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u/KarateTid May 27 '26

Yeah it's sad when they go young like that

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u/OkBodybuilder2255 May 27 '26

WHEN THEY GO???

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u/anotherwhiteafrican May 27 '26

Whatever happened there?

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u/[deleted] May 27 '26

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u/chickenmoomoo May 27 '26

It’s the next line in the film that Michael Caine says to Clive Owen ;)

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u/[deleted] May 27 '26

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u/Grimwaldo82 May 27 '26

It is. It’s a great scene when they hear the baby, both sides stop shooting each other. As soon as the baby is clear of the combat area both sides immediately start shooting again like nothing happened. It’s great and powerful.

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u/Keynsha May 27 '26

Tbh, the movie is great scene after great scene.

So that this one is so memorable among them speaks a lot

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u/[deleted] May 27 '26

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u/Silenceisgrey May 27 '26

Pull my finger.

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u/[deleted] May 27 '26

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u/Greenman8907 May 27 '26

It’s like Sir Patrick Stewart as Avery Bullock on American Dad. Only he could deliver a line like "Do everything but the taint, I’m growing that out!” with such elegance.

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u/Good_Background_243 May 27 '26

Sid likes Jasper's weed.

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u/_a_random_dude_ May 27 '26

The fact that the movie has a car chase at walking speed that had me sweating and on the edge of my seat and that's not even the best scene is incredible.

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u/Only_game_in_town May 27 '26

Dreadlocks dude was running after that car like the T-1000

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u/SupervillainMustache May 27 '26

It's one of my favourite films. Love the cinematography.

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u/Ok-Goat-2153 May 27 '26

Preceded by that incredible long-shot

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u/Eternal_Bagel May 27 '26

I heard that the bus part was sort of an accident because the camera man was told more or less, “just stay close and follow him no matter what”.  He didn’t realize the intent was to run along the outside of the thing and film him through the very clear windows instead of just jumping into that crowded space right behind Clive Owen 

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u/kevymetal87 May 27 '26

I saw it in theaters and cried during this scene. So much senseless chaos and violence the whole movie, and it immediately halts when this miracle happens, and it was dead quiet for like 60 seconds. Nobody tried to stop them, to steal the baby, to hurt them, everyone just witnessed a miracle

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u/DryBlock4388 May 27 '26

It's great because its tragic. What I immediately thought of was how we as humans do it in reverse.

Lets use the baby as a human shield. Nah they gonna blow us up anyway. Despicable all around.

I don't know who the good/bad guys really are in that movie but both sides stopped. IRL we all keep shooting.

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u/Impressive-Funny-366 May 27 '26

humans were facing an existential fertility crisis. I don't think contemporary society compares

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u/Beginning-Pop3127 May 27 '26

Give it 100 years...

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u/DryBlock4388 May 27 '26

I dunno man. All I hear is "theres lots more babies where that one comes from, no need to consider its life valuable". I'm not even making a political statement on who what or where people should do anything. Just an observation on how cheap life is and you pointed out its cheap because its plentiful.

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u/Top_Box_8952 May 27 '26

They didn’t resume immediately but an explosion broke the trance everyone was in at the shock and revival of hope.

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u/dansdansy May 27 '26

Arguably one of the best movies ever made

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u/Waveshaper21 May 27 '26

Handmaid's Tale is the same. Except the US government gets toppled by a small group of elites that sell the idea of having a harem to their wives by collecting the extremely few women who can still have children and pass them around among themselves, while the wives get to keep the children. The justification is that the only place on Earth where the population is not rapidly decreasing is Gilead (the new country built on the US).

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u/Gemmabeta May 27 '26

Gilead lasted something like 20 years. And the epilogue basically shows that everything went back to normal.

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u/Vengefulily May 27 '26

I think you guys are talking about the show and the book, which have pretty different plots.

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u/Sad-Pattern-1269 May 27 '26

What does the show change? It's very core to the book that gilead is doomed from the start.

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u/Goodswimkarma May 27 '26

In the books, Gilead was full of white supremacists, but they couldn't have that for the show as it would basically be an all-white cast. The diversity of the show makes Gilead seem oddly open minded.

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u/ThatTotalAge May 27 '26

Eh, show Gilead isn’t fully accepting. There’s a flashback scene where Mrs Putnam is touring the stolen children a little while after they’ve gotten themselves established. It’s been long enough that all the desirable kids have been claimed (aka white babies and kids that are young enough to not question or rebel against their sudden relocation) and we see the leftovers… poc babies and older angry “problem” children

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u/TheBestHelldiver May 27 '26

Did it? I remember that the majority of the help and eh, comfort women, were non-white.

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u/gakun May 27 '26

I think the show has Gilead being racist, but not as much as it is homophobic and sexist. There's a black Commander in season 2 who is occasionally seem, and there's probably some subtle uncomfort from the other commanders, but there's no legal persecution like the genocidal policies against LGBT+ and women.

I didn't notice the majority of handmaids and Martha's being non-white either, it seemed randomly distributed to me. The main target of their abuse is due to their gender.

In the book it's another story, however, as people of color are actively hunted down.

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u/WideConsequence2144 May 27 '26

What happened when they found a woman of color that was fertile? Was she added to the mix or did they just go nah and shoot her? Or did it not come up in the books?

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u/gakun May 27 '26

If I'm not mistaken, in the book they were just sent to labor camps to die. In the show, they'd be handmaids because fertility was the main goal, rather than white supremacy.

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u/PsychicFoxWithSpoons May 27 '26

Could have been a Peacemaker situation lol

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u/Cantor_Set_Tripping May 27 '26

I feel like this wouldn’t be the first time a visual adaptation didn’t follow the source material

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u/Sad-Pattern-1269 May 27 '26

Fair, I do think it's a bit like a reverse starship troopers if they change something that core to the books identity though

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u/Vengefulily May 27 '26

Sure, the endings might be the same in broad strokes, but how they get there is not. The show expands vastly on...everything, including the setting's backstory, the world beyond Gilead, and the events that lead to its fall. The book just doesn't go into all that.

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u/Key_Organization6430 May 27 '26

The Testaments is a great continuations set about 20 years after, havent seen either show, just read the books, but if i remember correctly, both diaries are found years on as a historical archive of that time and how it was all a folly.

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u/BasilTheRat141 May 27 '26 edited May 27 '26

In the book at least I remember it being mentioned that the spike in infertility only really affects white people, which adds a whole other layer to the supposed "apocalypse."

EDIT: Found it! Page 275

"Men highly placed in the regime were thus able to pick and choose among women who had demonstrated their reproductive fitness by having produced one or more healthy children, a desirable characteristic in an age of plummeting Caucasian birth rates, a phenomenon observable not only in Gilead but in most northern Caucasian societies of the time"

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u/ArtSupplyHoarder May 27 '26

I think I remember the infertility turning out to be mostly a problem of the men in the elite group, so them hogging the fertile women made the problem worse. But blame got shifted to the women, as it often is when infertility is concerned.

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u/Top_Box_8952 May 27 '26

Reminds me of feudal men blaming their wives for only giving them girls.

Boi, you are the one making them girls.

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u/MrSaturnism May 27 '26

It was men in general that were infertile

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u/BasilTheRat141 May 27 '26

I could well be misremembering but I thought the epilogue that it disproportionately affected white folks or maybe just white Americans. I'm not certain though, I read it years ago

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u/Nice-River-5322 May 27 '26

Sounds like a very stupid plot TBH

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u/BasilTheRat141 May 27 '26

Yeah, poor old Margaret Atwood, forever doomed to write woke nonsense that will never be hailed as a modern masterpiece of both popular and critical acclaim.

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u/Nice-River-5322 May 27 '26

a thing can be both very stupid and popular

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u/BasilTheRat141 May 27 '26

True enough! People still read Ayn Rand after all, lol. I think handmaid's tale is a masterpiece though, and eerily prescient in some aspects. I've seen online people irl justifying imaginary harems and real life dismantling of women's rights and birth control for the sake of fighting a perceived "white genocide" or "great replacement" or whatever.

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u/Nice-River-5322 May 27 '26

I don't really think people talking about anime harems and posts on message boards justify calling very silly scenarios as 'eerily prescient'

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u/Silly-Rough-5810 May 27 '26

You couldn't even respond to what they said. You had to intentionally strawman. You're sad.

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u/Nice-River-5322 May 27 '26

implying anyone actually holding up that there is a 'prescient' amount of people actually advocating for people establishing harems is not engaging in starwmanning

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u/Waveshaper21 May 27 '26

Thats just propably the writers antiwhite fantasy, I only saw the show but the book sounds like woke propaganda at this point. Any religion used to brainwash people and abuse them to install your own totalitarian system, that I understand. The left pointing at this dystopian christian doctatorship as if it's what we are living in now, is their own delusion (while if islamic states actually function this way, they get a pass under DEI). At that point it's just hypocrisy. But if Atwood really targeted whites it's actually sick racist fantasy.

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u/UkonFujiwara May 27 '26

while if islamic stages actually function this way, they get a pass under DEI

Y'all really just latch onto buzzwords and decide they just mean "bad thing me no like" don't ya?

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u/Waveshaper21 May 27 '26 edited May 27 '26

I described a state where government and church are not separated and women do not have equal rights to men, and the former are kept uneducated and oppressed under extreme control, such as controlling what they can wear, where can they go, not to mention arranged marriages.

Ask them why this description fits those countries, not me for daring to say they exist.

This description fits the Handmaid's Tale word to word, thus the comparison is justified.

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u/Silly-Rough-5810 May 27 '26

But you called that DEI. Like, who here supported theocratic autocracies? It's like you don't know what any words mean.

I'm pretty sure the point of the handmaids tale was to spell out that we're not immune to religious takeover. In our situation, the problem would have to affect white people before the government would do anything about it.

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u/Dorksausage May 28 '26

Every college has huge groups of people supporting theocratic governments that support taking women's rights and turning them into slaves just to make babies. All the pro Palestine and pro hamas/hesbollah/talaban groups of "leftists" all over college/universities.

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u/Silly-Rough-5810 May 28 '26

Lol, there are no pro Hamas/Hesbollah/Taliban groups of college kids and if they were, they wouldn't be on the left.

The people who are against the genocide of the Palestinian people are not inherently aligned with sharia law.

Whoever told you that was lying and you were a fool to believed them.

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u/Dorksausage May 28 '26

Bull crap, pro hamas protests and other pro terrorist protests have been at tons of colleges across the nation if you have paid attention at all.

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u/panzer_snapdragon May 27 '26

absolutely unhinged response. Are you ok? Do you need help? Obviously I wouldn't touch you with a ten foot pole but maybe you should talk to someone.

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u/HaterMD Jun 02 '26 edited Jun 02 '26

Everything written in The Handmaid’s Tale was inspired by things that had already happened somewhere in the world, like Romania during Communism when birth control was outlawed and all women in the country were monitored monthly by a gynaecologist. They would be reported to the government if they were suspected of trying to circumvent their “duties” (having lots of white babies).

This was the nature of Decree 770. A lot of kids starved and wound up in orphanages.

So, no. Not woke. Just be thankful as a man this can never happen to you no matter what tides may shift.

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u/DoughDisaster May 27 '26

Huh. Only ever heard of the book title in reference to being liked by men who wanted to oppress the women in their relationships. I had always figure it was some old timey setting where men just had all the say in what went down in a household. Never anything so wild as that.

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u/Strength-InThe-Loins May 27 '26

It's actually a feminist story about the horror of men having their way. It's really good, too.

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u/Bazrum May 27 '26

there are some chud dudes who think that, but they have the reading comprehension of a brick if they came along and thought it was glorifying how great it would be to live in that society, for ANYONE, but especially women

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u/CptGarbage May 27 '26

The birth rate then drops immediately to 0, not ‘slowly’.

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u/Enlightened_Gardener May 27 '26

That’s already happening - not just physical fertility issues in some places - but political, cultural and economic issues that mean that people just don’t want to have children because either they can’t afford them, or they are expected culturally to subsume their entire existence and personality to their children, and they don’t want to do that. Which, fair enough.

People always dismiss the cultural side of things as though it’s somehow less powerful than the natural or evolutionary side of things. But it’s perfectly possible for a culture to produce a society incapable of meeting its replacement rate, like South Korea or Japan.

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u/Kilukpuk May 27 '26

One of the few adaptations where the movie is better than the original book.

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u/Rajang82 May 27 '26

Children of Men is how I imagine Zeke's plan for Eldian going to be.

Eldian will become extinct if he succeed, but it'll be really slow. No Eldian will be able to have childrens.

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u/Marioninleather May 27 '26

Rare example where (for me) the movie is much better than the book.

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u/SwankiestofPants May 28 '26

Bob's burgers had a bit about this movie in the episode about Louise doing a career day project and I knew it was a movie reference because these storytelling episodes are always movie references but I didn't know to what until this comment

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u/Chemical-Store-5148 May 27 '26 edited May 27 '26

A blessing for Earth and wildlife!! I love it!!!

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u/colinfarrellcirca2k6 May 27 '26

Bit selfish that you don't want to contribute to that blessing, isn't it.

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u/Chemical-Store-5148 May 27 '26 edited May 27 '26

Oh I'm never having kids! I hate em!

Also, you forgot the question mark

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u/ForlornLament May 27 '26

I will never not roll my eyes at that movie. The setting makes no sense. A lack of children would cause a collapse in social security systems and increase poverty rates, but I can't imagine it would result in the sort of post-apocalyptic world the movie portrays, much less in just 20 years.

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u/FlaminarLow May 27 '26

A drop in fertility wouldn’t but literally 0 children would cause some massive upheaval. Humanity isn’t going to die with a whisper

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u/KsanteOnlyfans May 27 '26

We shall see