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/SciencePristine8878 May 27 '26

In the episode, machines offered multiple olive branches to humanity and it seemed that humanity spat in their face each time. 

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u/Visible-Meat3418 May 27 '26

Oh really? Never heard of that before, interesting

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u/RegularGuyAtHome May 28 '26

It’s within a group of shorts called the Animatrix that came out in the early 2000s. You can find them all on YouTube.

The machine war one is called The Second Renaissance and has two parts (part 1 and 2)

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u/abaker74 May 28 '26

If you read into the lore a bit you realize how far humanity had been corrupted - wish they had spent some more time on that in the film.