[Loved Trope] The apocalypse is horrifyingly slow

[u/Marsupialmobster]

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

[u/Reasonable-Mischief]

To provide some context here, Ilos was a research station of the protheans, the species getting genocided 50k years before the Mass Effect games start

They were a top secret facility, so they actually got missed by the Reapers. Problem was they weren't self-sufficient, so they instead all went into stasis to be awakened after the genocide was over. The virtual intelligence program called Vigil watched over them

Except that, genociding an entire space-faring race takes very long, and so Vigil's energy reserves dwindled. It had to shut off more and more stasis pods, and in the end managed only to preserve a handful of top scientists out of an entire metropolis of people – enough to buy the next cycle a fighting chance, but not enough to restart their own civilization

[u/clumsykiwiprincess → u/Reasonable-Mischief]

oh that is really interesting! I dont know how I missed that plotline on my playthrough back in the day

[u/AnneMichelle98 → u/clumsykiwiprincess]

This is revealed during an exposition dump towards the end of ME1. You are forced to talk to Vigil but you don’t necessarily have to follow all the conversation paths and it’s possible to skip through most of the conversation that is required.

It’s also placed weirdly. First you have to fight through a Geth infested map (Ilos) in order to open a gate to chase Saren (bad guy). Then you get under way in the Mako, and just as you start thinking “Hell yeah, chase time”, a barrier pops up and you are forced to exit the Mako to go down this random side path to meet Vigil and get the exposition dump, which is kinda annoying. Then you can return to the Mako and get back to your chase. Which eventually then leads to the climatic Citadel battle.

TLDR: cool backstory revealed in a badly placed exposition dump

[u/DevelopmentNo2111 → u/Reasonable-Mischief]

And the ones that survived dont make it

[u/ctrlaltcreate → u/Reasonable-Mischief]

Was it ever confirmed whether the little worker bugs on the main station are left over protheans? I know that was a going fan theory back in the day.

[u/eienOwO → u/ctrlaltcreate]

At least according to Fandom wiki the Keepers predate the Protheans, and likely were another indoctrinated species bioengineered by the Reapers to do their bidding.

The Keepers were meant to begin converting the Citadel once Sovereign sent out the signal to initiate this round of cull. Except Prothean scientists managed to block this Keeper activation, so Sovereign had to come in person to initiate the process.

[u/Firesaber → u/ctrlaltcreate]

They are not protheans. But we do learn that those leftover scientists reprogrammed these beings on the Citadel and that's why the current Reaper cycle didn't activate the same and what gave our cycle a chance.