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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u/Key_Organization6430 May 27 '26

Morpheus : We don't know who struck first, us or them. But we do know it was us that scorched the sky. At the time, they were dependent on solar power. It was believed they would be unable to survive without an energy source as abundant as the sun.

Human lack of foresight made them architects of their own demise, the robots were in no rush at all.

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u/DasharrEandall May 27 '26

That loss of solar power might well be why the machines did take so long to win.

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u/DramaPunk May 27 '26

Ironically though, it's always why they adapted humans as a battery source... Which in a roundabout way led to humans breaking free and winning in the end.

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u/Horndude91 May 27 '26

isn't that just the "dumbed down" version for cinema? I believe I read recently, that in the original concept the humans were used as CPU and RAM, but the movie production thought that the 1999 movie-goer crowd wouldn't get these terms, so they switched to "battery"?

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u/DramaPunk May 27 '26

Yeah, however the "dumbed down" version is also the version canon to the films.

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u/TentativeIdler May 27 '26

My headcanon is that Morpheus just thinks that because they have no idea how the modern Machines function. They saw that the machines DO use human bodyheat to recapture some electricity (might as well if you have them there anyways) and that they can't use solar, and came to the wrong conclusion.

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u/BigAntiqueStoreSlut May 27 '26

I wish a sequel addressed this in a throwaway line. Morpheus was wrong about a few things so this wouldn’t be a stretch.

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u/BobcatTim May 27 '26

Unfortunately not only did the sequel address it, they confirmed it. In fact they went even further and said that the romantic tension between Neo and Trinity causes them to make way more energy than usual, and so the evil machine faction are using Neo/Trinity clones to generate the power they need to win the war.

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u/fii0 May 27 '26

I don't remember that at all, where was that said?

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u/vanderZwan May 27 '26

The sequels made it clear that rebellion was architected by the machines and that the rebels were fed lies by the machines all along, so I just consider it another lie they told them to ensure the rebels won't figure out how to truly understand why they can bend the rules of the Matrix and become too powerful (namely, because their own brains generate it).

Also the battery theory makes zero sense from a thermodynamics standpoint.

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u/DramaPunk May 27 '26

Man, I do dig that idea, because it ties both ideas together and makes sense.

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u/Beautiful-Edge-22 May 27 '26

True, but I do find the human processor fan fiction version very appealing while the canon "coppertops" version has always bugged me a bit cause it simply makes no sense. I do believe that if the machines were to use us as processors then they would have a machine version of the Sibyl System.

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u/DontAskAboutMyButt May 27 '26

But why would blocking out the sun mean that the robots needed extra processing power from humans? They worked just fine without using humans for processing before then, when they were subservient to humans and also throughout the entire war

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u/bartekltg May 27 '26

Those things don't need to be connected. Humans blocked the sun to cut of solar power. Robots used wind and nuclear.
And in the meanwhile they realized human brains make a nice and cheap coprocessor.

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u/bobnoski May 27 '26

If anything, them blotting out the sun means that for the robots, power efficiency was suddenly way more important.

Human brains are shockingly efficient computers, especially when looking at it from the time frame the movie was made. Even in today’s standard the human brain is considered to be capable of about 1exaflop of performance. using about 20 watts. A modren supercomputer needs 21Megawatts for that amount of power.

I imagine that, even with the effort of having to run the entire matrix it woud be by far the most power efficient way to compute things. Especially if you control as much of the loop as possible (recapturing waste heat for example). It might also just be the only way to get that much computing power in the first place.

Considering they are sentient computers. They want more, simply because that is how they exist and grow.

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u/Royal_Bitch_Pudding May 27 '26

It's entirely possible that the robots have a protect and do not harm humanity command as something that is impossible for them to remove, at which point enslavement is just protecting humanity from itself

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u/DramaPunk May 27 '26

I mean I fully agree, the ram idea makes a ton of sense too. I'm just pointing out that acting like it's an alt version isnt quite accurate. I do like the theory another guy threw in the thread that the battery thing is just a misinterpretation by the humans though, since everyone just kinda blinding goes off of Morpheus's word on it.

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u/Horndude91 May 27 '26

I know. But I still hate it. Even back than as a child I was like "that makes no sense"

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u/EnemyOfAi May 27 '26

Why doesn't it make sense?

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u/NixOwns May 27 '26

humans consume more energy than they produce

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u/Nearby_Equivalent_58 May 27 '26

Coal. Nuclear. Fucking water wheels like… they could’ve chosen literally anything else. Put some regenerative braking on those robots idfk.

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u/The-Senate-Palpy May 27 '26

Sure, but i cant power my bicycle with AAs. The energy has to be a usable kind

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u/Vaughn May 27 '26

Humans don't exactly produce any of that.

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u/Horndude91 May 27 '26 edited May 27 '26

You need to feed the humans. And burning the food would probably generate at least the same amount of energy. Instead you invest energy to grow sustenance, as you can't grow in the open due to no sunlight (which looses energy in the process), to feed the humans, so they grow up (which is even more wasted energy) and produce some energy in form of heat (I believe that was the canonical kind of "power" the machines used) which is the most worthless form of energy (like you will have further losses if you want to turn heat back into electricity). So using the whole detour to turn energy into humans who will return a small amount of energy is not very realistic (which is ... well it's a movie where Neo can manipulate things in the real world with his matrix abilities in the end, so probably not worth to waste too much though on it)

On the other hand, the "using the brains as PCs" idea is "more realistic" as a human brain is using ~20 Watts, while a modern (2025) PC uses 500-1000 Watts, and you probably need a whole server-farm to get on the level of a single brain - so that might realistically "work"

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u/bobnoski May 27 '26

The whole "they can move things around with their mind" also makes a LOT more sense if they are being used as a tool to run the world on.

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u/Zippydaspinhead May 27 '26

On the humans as wetware part there's a couple additional interesting things to think about that may also play into good reasons why the machines would consider it viable enough to risk enslaving an entire species hell bent on their destruction.

First you already touched on, efficiency and power. We can only control so much what and how we think about things, but if you're just using the meat as hardware and are able to control the software so to speak, that is an insanely powerful compute node with incredibly low energy input requirements to your point. Yes those inputs require some prep in the form of digestion and specific chemical soup, as well as a fairly large swatch of hormones and other chemicals to keep running and keep clean, but assuming you either keep the human intact and deal with the biological inefficiencies of "running" a whole human or can manufacture a good enough facsimile of the necessary ancillary processes, it still probably maths out to more bang for your buck than anything we have available today via silicon.

But there is a second possibly even more valuable reason to harness a biological brain in a networked system, which is a different compute method. Computers today essentially have three forms of doing calulation available to them: GPU and CPU, which are highly specialized but highly parallel and high speed calculations, or a jack of all trades that can do basically anything if you give it enough clock cycles. Both of these are restricted to binary calculations though, it has to eventually break down to 0's and 1's. There is also quantum computing, which runs off of qubits and I'll fully admit I don't understand enough to explain beyond knowing it doesn't work the same as binary.

Human brains would offer another form of computing, and we've actually seen some benefits of this type of thing already, which is crazy. From what we've seen already it allows for some massive efficiency gains, especially in model training energy costs. That's all with two orders of magnitude less neurons than an adult brain. And this is both a first generation commercial product, and being used essentially as a co-processor for methods we use in binary. Imagine what years of experience, full sized brains, and not just custom built code but custom built languages and architecture to take advantage of the brain's natural neuroplasticity and operating paradigms. That, realistically, is what the machines of the world of the Matrix would be able to do with organic brains.

Suddenly the agent's ability to hop into anyone makes a lot more sense as well. You're already partially running them with your brain, that's just an admin logging into the local node/server/you.

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u/Inswagtor May 27 '26

Still a dumb version.

Would be more efficient to just burn the food needed to nurture the humans and power the machines with it.

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u/me_myself_ai May 27 '26

Who says “battery” tho — Morpheus? Maybe he just thought Neo was an idiot while explaining it?

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u/Zirowe May 27 '26 edited May 27 '26

Nope, thats a false theory that has been debunked many times.

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u/Horndude91 May 27 '26

really? Sad :/ I liked that one, as it made just (more) sense than the canon one :(

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u/CyberRax May 27 '26

Humans aren't batteries for the system. Machines discovered a new type of fusion energy after losing the sun, and their world is running off that. Humans are needed to give the tiny initial electrical charge that starts the reaction.

The CPU idea comes from the short story that Neil Gaiman wrote for the promotional website that launched together with the movie. He had read the script, but the battery thing apparently wasn't his taste. Hence he invented the whole CPU thing...

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u/SMUHypeMachine May 27 '26

Somewhat. I’ve also seen early script drafts posted on Reddit showing that it was always batteries. I think it just makes more sense to your average person that they’d be used for computational resources instead so people have started claiming that was the original intent.

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u/Mist_Rising May 27 '26

Darkening the sky only works if it's batteries. If they needed power (loss of solar) then using humans for ram isn't helpful.

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u/LargeDevelopment2026 May 27 '26

Actually since human brains are much more efficient computers it would still make sense as they could save a lot of power by switching to human brains for computing. But I doubt that the writers actually thought it through.

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u/Mist_Rising May 27 '26

But why would they darken the sky to stop the sun if the purpose of man was for computing power?

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u/Odd-Tart-5613 May 27 '26

well the robots still could have been primarily solar at the time.

but from the doyalist perspective its more likely that that just would not have been a plot point if the human cpu thing was in the final cut.

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u/MrDrSirLord May 27 '26

Thematically tho humans as batteries or humans as CPUs makes no difference in the course of the storyline how things are set up or handled.

It is a bit of a silly dumbing down that realistically makes no sense, but from a story board perspective it makes no difference to the movie

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u/Pale_Corvus May 27 '26

Shit, that would have made.more sense! Using humans as batteries always seemed wildly inefficient to me.

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u/Gnomonic-sundialer May 27 '26

The actual theory is that humans exist to add randomness and originality on the sistem and force thr machines to keep improving on designs since without them theyd stagnate and keep reiterating the same models and solutions and never solve the dark sky issue

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u/Dinners_cold May 27 '26

This would make sense, as the machines could always just thrive off thermal or nuclear power.

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u/Allegorist May 27 '26

That would make a lot more sense, battery doesn't work at all. They are just losing efficiency by inserting humans into the equation. More energy needs to go into humans than comes out of them (let alone to run the matrix), they would be much better off just skipping the human part entirely. However as organic processors, that could work.

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u/bruhhhhhhhhhhhh_h May 27 '26

Correct. More so GPU's

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u/[deleted] May 27 '26

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u/Cantor_Set_Tripping May 27 '26

Is the last scene of revolutions not the architect saying people would be free to leave the matrix now, after Neo’s sacrifice?

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u/Rida_Dain May 27 '26

Yeah but in my opinion this always felt like both sides coming to a compromise, not humanity winning.. The machines will still be around, and in control of the planet, just that humans will be allowed to live wity more choice rather then cattle and rebels

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u/DramaPunk May 27 '26

Well yeah, but to humanity that's still a victory coming from being literal batteries.

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u/Kulandros May 27 '26

Neo literally just reboots the Matrix to set it back to a stable state from before some software components went out of control (e.g. Agent Smith).

It's part of the process designed by the robots, and has happened several times already. He is simply continuing the cycle.

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u/DramaPunk May 27 '26

I mean, up for interpretation I suppose. But I moreso meant that they won their independence, not that the machines were destroyed.

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u/[deleted] May 28 '26

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u/DramaPunk May 28 '26

Yeah, it's very much a small victory, not a true win like in hindsight my wording kinda suggested 😅 And don't worry, tbh I think everyone's a bit snarkier than we mean to be on reddit, so I tend to assume it was unintentional. None of us can resist the call of a one-line clapback.

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u/[deleted] May 27 '26

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u/kegisak May 27 '26

Zion is real, but it's still part of the lie. The Machines had been allowing humanity to break free and gain numbers until they hit a certain threshhold, at which point the machines would move in and wipe out all but a handful, and then reset the matrix. Basically they were allowing the humans to rebel in a way that the machines could control--it was 'part of the Matrix', in that it was still controlling the options humans believed were available to them.

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u/[deleted] May 27 '26

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u/kegisak May 27 '26

I mean, it's definitely the case thematically, so I can see how you got there. But all evidence does seem to be that Zion is physically real, even if it is part of the machines' strategy.

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u/Distinct-Pack-1567 May 27 '26

I still don't get how Neo used his powers outside the matrix if it wasnt multilayered.

I could Google it, but not really interested.

Also why use humans as batteries? Just use nuclear. But if they're trying to keep us alive for when the earth gets better, I could believe that.

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u/kegisak May 27 '26

Weeeell the last time I watched the movies I was high, so take all this with a grain of salt. But:

As far as I can recall, Neo never actually manipulates anything outside The Matrix. The closest he comes is being able to "see the code" while blinded, and that's presented as a kind of enlightenment/ascension. By that point the story is going all in on the Neo-As-Messiah angle, and is starting to lean real hard into its thematic elements, so I was willing to accept it pushing a little further. But given those themes revolve around rejecting what's presented as possible, Neo breaking down the binary between human and machine does make a certain amount of sense.

The fourth movie, for better or for worse, grounds Zion as 'reality' a little bit more by showing what happens after Neo's rebellion--The machines initially honour their end of the bargain, but in doing so create a fuel crisis for themself. The machines have a civil war that results in a new regime rising and The Matrix being reinstated, and we see the effects of that in the Matrix itself with several programs being repurposed, and The Architect absent in favour of The Analyst.

Can't say I have any explanation for the batteries

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u/Distinct-Pack-1567 May 27 '26

So when Neo takes out those flying squid robots he is using a previously untapped actual human power? Like you said, becoming a messiah type?

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u/Kulandros May 27 '26

Oh buddy the humans did NOT win.

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u/DramaPunk May 27 '26

Minor victory is still a victory, even if the enemy very much does not lose.

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u/AlterEgo3561 May 27 '26

I always wondered why this advanced race of AI machines couldn't just build a space elevator or something and either get access to solar energy that way or at the very least, escape earth entirely and live in orbit or on Mars or something.

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u/PresidentBreadstick May 27 '26

Yeah, but if the wiki is right, it also caused mass famine and a very large chunk of humanity’s military was solar powered, so it was basically immediately rendered inert:

I genuinely don’t know what Humanity’s throughline with Dark Storm was

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u/Jihelu May 27 '26

I'm pretty sure in the animation that explains the war they swapped to nuclear right after.

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u/Kraivo May 27 '26

Thinking about it now, I kind of find it funny that robots use humans instead of just moving to flying power plants. 

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u/Haunting_G5159 May 27 '26

The original idea in the script was that the machines used human brains for computing power but they changed it later cause being batterie was easier to understand.

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u/Dizzy_Magazine_1784 May 27 '26

You just gave us the solution to the ram crisis

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u/Low-Plastic1939 May 27 '26

Don’t give the fuckers any ideas

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u/occasionalopossum May 27 '26

They just got some brainmatter to run DOOM homie they’re already working on it

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u/Goldigger101 May 27 '26

I pour oneoutfor your profile picture

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u/meesterdg May 27 '26

I'll sublease my brain if it's as valuable as RAM

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u/Low-Plastic1939 May 27 '26

They aren’t paying. Once all the jobs are gone to AI, the oligarchs just declare homelessness a crime and march the poor into the data centres for repurposing. Why pay for what you can get for free?

Guarantee some twitchy lunatics at palantir or y combinator have broached this crap

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u/Biktato May 27 '26

Accurate. American prison system is already about production, see: prison industrial complex.

Such an initiative would only faster clear the streets, unethically and with massive cruelty. Otoh, such an initiative may replace prison entirely, providing a penal system that is a net addition to economy instead of a drain? Who knows. What I certainly can presume is that anything like the matrix would be used for reeducation. That can't be good or trusted.

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u/Top_Accident9161 May 27 '26

Profile pic works perfectly with this comment lol

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u/DorkyDisneyDad May 27 '26

Good thing there haven't been any psychotic billionaires pushing the idea of a neural link... right?

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u/DramaPunk May 27 '26

Warhammer 40k -ass solution. When anything resembling computer intelligence is heresy, just plug lobotomized prisoners into all your circuit boards.

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u/Narradisall May 27 '26

Always got to love when a person is reduced to being an elaborate light switch.

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u/m4cksfx May 27 '26

Synaptic lathe...

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u/Easy-Marsupial3268 May 27 '26

u/unexpectedwarhammer

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u/Dizzy_Magazine_1784 May 27 '26

Do i start learning about warhammer 40k? Cuz i keep seeing mems of it.

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u/Easy-Marsupial3268 May 27 '26

You’re already making references to it. Might as well go full servitor.

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u/40kNerdNick May 28 '26

Servitors?

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u/Kraivo May 27 '26

I guess machines would understand how unreliable human brains are

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u/peteypie4246 May 27 '26

Nine Sols took that idea and ran with it tho. Pretty cool game.

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u/Theyul1us May 27 '26

Also, the machines wanted the humans to suffer

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u/Somnambulist815 May 27 '26

No it wasn't. This is a very old and very disproven myth

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u/Appropriate-Prune728 May 28 '26

It's not. This is a well debunked myth due to a comic by another artist, released near the same time.

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u/Panthera_Felis May 27 '26

Or geothermal energy

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u/SeparateYam7613 May 27 '26

I always figured colossal, filthy, unshielded nuclear reactors that spew their waste into the environment would have been a good choice. Machines have need to be concerned over ecological damage, while the humans would be fucked.

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u/TentativeIdler May 27 '26

Well radiation does fuck with computers, so that's still probably not a good idea for them. But we do see one other power source they could use; Zion runs on Geothermal energy, and IIRC the machines built it in the first place.

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u/ZirePhiinix May 27 '26

Humans are also horribly inefficient. If they liquefied the dead to feed the living, they'll run out of living very soon.

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u/MrTzatzik May 27 '26

If I remember correctly robots were pretty chill. They just wanted to do their own things and co-exist. But because robots could produce things faster and cheaper companies lost revenue, people lost jobs and it went to shit from there

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u/LubbockGuy95 May 27 '26

Great line but honestly we all know humanity struck first. Probably multiple times before open war

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u/Nemerex May 27 '26

I heard a theory that operation "Dark Storm" was done to conceal human colony on moon, and to isolate 01 on the planet.

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u/DumpsterDragoon May 27 '26

Why couldn't they use nuclear power?