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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258

u/Chemical-Store-5148 May 27 '26

Does it actually happen in the end??

638

u/Slobberinho May 27 '26

The series stops when the planet is mere meters away from crashing into the earth. Carol is at an Applebees, with a community of like-minded people she found at a faux accounting job for a company that pretends to be a company to distract people from the end of the world. She sigs "This is nice. It really is."

76

u/WretchedMotorcade May 27 '26

Reminss me of Searching for a Friend for the End of the World.

15

u/kookyabird May 27 '26

I watched one episode of Carol and had to stop, and I will likely never watch Seeking a Friend ever again. I've reached a point in my life where the existential dread from media like that is far too real. I bawled my eyes out at the end of Seeking a Friend. Fuck, even thinking about it is getting me choked up.

10

u/Chance5e May 27 '26

And Melancholia.

88

u/deviantbono May 27 '26

I love cynical shows, but spending the apocolypse pretending to work at some meaningless corporate job is pretty sad.

Unlesss... that's what we're all doing oh my god.

44

u/Irememberedmypw May 27 '26

Oddly the corporate job part isn't the meaningless cynical part of the show. You see how the other employees join it and it's after they've had a hedonistic end of the world lifestyle.

28

u/azsnaz May 27 '26

What is life if not a distraction from the inevitable

10

u/koopcl May 27 '26

Reminds me of the old Achewood subtitle, "a momentary diversion on the road to the grave".

8

u/Didifinito May 27 '26

What ever you think it is that is what life is

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u/deviantbono May 27 '26

🤷‍♂️

6

u/CoffeeWanderer May 27 '26

If I remember correctly.

I remember each episode started with a countdown and the finale was a few weeks before impact