r/TopCharacterTropes • u/RagingRider • 3h ago
Lore (Cosmic horror trope) The apocalyptic event isn't just inevitable, but INNATE to the world
- Walkers (The Walking Dead) : While technically viral in the tv series, if any character dies with their brain intact, they become walkers, bitten or not. When a recently corpse turns into a walker with no bite, it's theorized EVERYONE'S already a carrier.
- Zombies (Dead Island 2) : The Autophage (zombiefication) is something built into the human DNA. It was just triggered several generations earlier than expected by SOMETHING ELSE.
- The Undead Curse (Dark Souls) : To immortalize his Age of Fire and Gods. Gwyn screwed with the cosmic order of the world, Fire, and Dark (which are tangible and cosmic elements in the setting). One of its byproducts was the Undead Curse, a point in time where everyone possessing a shard of the Dark Soul (all of humanity) turn Undead, the flow of time gets fucky, and Dark starts overflowing and mutating everything else.
Dark Souls 2 reveals that the Age of Fire WILL be replaced by an Age of Dark, only for the process to have been repeated and will repeat ad nauseum.
Dark Souls 3 reveals what happens when even this cycle reaches its end, after it burns the whole world.
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u/Jam-Man1 3h ago
Some heavy-duty spoilers for the end of Darkest Dungeon, although I feel even putting it here gives the game away somewhat.
It's revealed at the end of the game Darkest Dungeon that the horrifying monster at the bottom of your ancestor's old estate is actually being incubated in the Earth, with the entire world serving as nothing more than an egg for this horrific eldritch abomination from which we all came and to which all shall one day return. No matter how many times the cycle of someone coming to town and putting the thing back to sleep repeats, eventually, someday, somebody will slip up, and it will actually wake up for real, be properly born, and kill everyone.
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u/dead-witch-standing 3h ago
Oh I love the ending of DD, I prefer an even bleaker interpretation of the ending however:
Theres a great YouTube video exploring the theory that You are trapped in a bloody and timeless cycle of feeding souls to the Heart in order to enact its terrible cosmic birth. Every single run you must sacrifice two legendary heroes to the Heart before ‘killing’ it, at which point the broader Heart causes the Estate to revert back into disrepair. The specter at the start of the game is a fragment of the You that died in countless other timelines, warning you against continuing the cycle of sacrifice.46
u/Lokicham 3h ago
That's classic cosmic horror right there. The ancient eldritch monstrosity cannot be stopped, your victories are meaningless in the grand scheme of things, and you will fail because you are insignificant.
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u/MangoMaraudr_ 58m ago
I always loved Darkest Dungeons story specifically because of this ending. It's both hopeful and despairing. Because as long as there are those like the player willing to fight against the heart, it can be kept at bay. But it can never be beaten, not truly, for it is in effect the world itself. One must imagine Sisyphus happy, for the burden is eternal.
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u/Individual_Second387 3h ago
The Santi's planet in The 3 Body Problem.
Simply put, their planet is situated in a system with 3 suns that chaotically affect each other, which the planet suffers from, creating a frequent apocalyptic state for the planet that's only broken up by brief cycles of relative normalcy. Countless civilizations have started and ended due to this cycle and the native population have evolved to basically shrivel up and hibernate to survive these apocalyptic periods.
I think the gif illustrates how the system works. Planet at the center, suns slingshotting each other unpredictably.
Processing img 3vqjrugo1wwh1...
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u/Toucan_Based_Economy 3h ago edited 3h ago
Cthulhu Mythos:
The entire universe is Azathoth's dream. Should Azathoth wake, the universe will simply vanish. You can't fight or get rid of Azathoth without waking him up, all you can do is try and keep him asleep just a while longer.
Lovecraft dubbed Azathoth "the nuclear chaos" not due to any association with radioactive, but because Azathoth was literally the centre (nucleus) of all of existence.
To a lesser extent, Yog-Sothoth. Yog-Sothoth isn't some god that bends time and space. Yog-Sothoth is time and space as a fundamental concept.
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u/The-Name-is-my-Name 3h ago
Depends on which lore book you’re using, Azathoth isn’t specified to dream up reality in Lovecraft’s original works.
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u/SlorpMorpaForpw 2h ago
I’ve an old eldritch murder mystery story in my docs where the Azathoth character is implied to just be the reader. Once you stop thinking about the story, it just doesn’t exist anymore. And when you think of it again, you recreate it; not exactly the same, but all the same histories and presents and futures. Had a chapter with a more eldritch-y priest dude who glimpsed the truth begging the reader for the life of the universe, and another where AUs were brought up (not like high school AUs, like what would have happened if this person survived or this god died) and the characters involved realize that all of these hypothetical universes are indeed being created (via the reader’s imagination), living through their entire realities, billions of years from creation to the single moment of change, and being discarded as irrelevant stray thoughts and ground to dust in just seconds.
Not that great a murder mystery or even story all things told, but I should probably get back to it someday. I really liked that idea, I just wasn’t a good enough writer to make it compelling and not cringe.
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u/That-Grim-Reaper 3h ago
This idea originally comes from Lord Dunsany’s Gods of Pegana, with the being called MANA-YOOD-SUSHAI, and the drummer Skarl keeping it asleep
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u/CheatsySnoops 2h ago
Wouldn't "nucleic" make more sense?
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u/4LeggedGod 2h ago
No. It's the same logic as why we call a nuclear family a nuclear family.
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u/CheatsySnoops 2h ago
All this time, I thought it was referring to how this type of family was pushed for during the Cold War!
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u/Farlybob42 3h ago
Uzumaki
In the series, it shows a mysterious spiral disaster effecting all the residents of the town. At the end of the manga/anime, they show that all the townsfolk, including the main characters would become intertwined by the curse and then rests. It then will reactivate years later when the new residents live there.
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u/EvergreenDwarf 3h ago
Even worse, it’s a metaphor for contamination by pollutants, mixing issues like the insanity from longterm lead ingestion and radiation from the atomic bombs with mass hysteria and the conformity of conservative communities meeting weird trends.
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u/Capable-Commercial96 1h ago
Literally the story with the greatest boy friend that ever lived. Did nothing wrong, and loyalty was his damnation. Wish Ito would do another story but he likes his one shots.
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u/Lokicham 3h ago
Dark souls 3 implies if not outright states that rekindling the fire has diminishing returns, to the point that there are only ashes left and a pitiful flame by the time you get to the kiln and eventually you can't rekindle it anymore.
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u/aka1908_ 3h ago
So like heat death of their universe kind of way?
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u/Lokicham 3h ago
In a sense. It is the metaphorical and literal end of an age, perpetually kept in stasis unnaturally.
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u/RagingRider 2h ago
Yep. The kiln of the First Flame in DS3 is basically the Big Crunch with the kingdom folding in on itself to feed the First Flame.
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u/Gentlemenbig 3h ago
Dead Space. The events of all the games are and elaborate reproductive process for an apex predator. The markers are spread around to cause sapient life to discover them, experiment with them, and eventually trigger them. That leads to Necromorphs and eventually a Brethren Moon. Crazy stuff
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u/left4ched 3h ago
There's this one setting where people live next to a giant fire that provides all the energy they can ever use. But eventually that fire will grow bigger and bigger until it consumes them and then after that it'll go out completely.
But even if they manage to move on to a different fire before that happens, the same thing will eventually happen to every fire in the world. Can't quite remember the name of it, though...
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u/chai_zaeng 3h ago
Not only that, the giant ball of fire has the capacity to induce horrible burns on people without even needing to touch them. These burns can be so fundamentally damaging that they alter your genetic make-up to the point of making your own cells grow indefinitely. The only thing keeping this ball of fire from obliterating us with its pure radiation is an invisible thin layer of air that is beyond delicate
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u/PM_ME_YOUR__INIT__ 2h ago
That giant ball of fire, and other similar balls, indiscriminately shoot out extra dangerous beams of death in random directions. It's only a matter of time before of these beams hit our plucky protagonists
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u/Mindless-Ninja-3321 3h ago
Stormlight Archives by Brandon Sanderson.
Im only just beginning the third book, but the prologue of the first book describes an immortal walking through a cataclysmic battlefield where the humans have won. Despite that, he's in a state of anguish because apparently he has done this countless times, appearing to guide humanity to victory, and when he isn't around, wherever he is is utter torment. He and the other Heralds, I guess, refuse to return.
The rest of the story is humanity facing the apocalypse without him and his peers for the first time, fractured and totally unprepared.
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u/EvergreenDwarf 3h ago
Turns out the Resident Evil outbreaks come from humans discovering dormant things and corporations/narcissists spreading them again.
Las Plagas were mindcontrol parasites, medieval knights drove them to extinction but a madman found the spores in the fossilized remains can be resurrected and tried to use them to take over the world.
Most other biological dangers in the series came from giant ancient caverns of psychic mold that collected the consciousness of people who died nearby it and fed on their remains. One woman driven mad by grief inspired the creation of the viruses in the series by teaching wealthy scientists in exchange for funds while herself later spreading the mold and helping a company miniaturize it into a single person who can create new colonies.
Humanity didn’t really create it, just discovered it and made it WAY worse and put it in places it never originally would be.
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u/Benjamin_Starscape 3h ago
was there ever an explanation for the walking dead and everyone being a carrier? i cannot remember.
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u/C0urt5 3h ago
It was the Wildfire Virus being released into the air. It spread quickly throughout the human population but didn't have any notable effects due to the carriers being alive. Once the carrier dies via a method excluding major brain trauma, the virus hijacks the brain and reanimates the corpse into a walker.
Additionally a walker's bite doesn't spread the virus itself; it merely injects the victim with a boatload of bacteria that causes them to die within two days thus making them meet the Walker transformation criteria.
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u/ballistic503 2h ago
I feel like that makes more sense because … well I mean I’m not a doctor/biologist but in my understanding if it were a virus it wouldn’t make sense that you could avoid zombification by amputating the bitten limb. Again I could be wrong but dying from the bacteria of a walker bite and then the zombie part coming from the virus makes more sense to me in terms of how they settle into the body.
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u/MeiNeedsMoreBuffs 1h ago
In general that's true, but there's a process some viruses (such as rabies) use called Neurotropism, which is when a virus spreads through muscles and nerves rather than through the bloodsteam. This has the advantage of being able to bypass the immune system but it is much slower, to the point where amputation actually would stop a rabies infection
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u/Independent-Fly6068 3h ago
The Markers (Dead Space):
It is revealed in Dead Space 2 (expanded on in 3 & various other media) that the Markers are quite literally old as dirt, and are routinely sent to worlds with primitive life on them.
In Dead Space Martyrs, the asteroid that wiped away the dinosaurs is revealed to have contained a Black Marker. And that this marker has been artificially cultivating humanity to be harvested into a Brethren Moon, a moon-sized amalgamation of rock and biomass that can create more markers and send them to other candidates for complex life.
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u/Jabbam 3h ago
SCP-2317, A Door To Another World. Personally my favorite SCP.
Level 0 access tells you that it's a SAFE class wooden door. Nothing suspicious.
Level 1 elevates it to Euclid and mentions a room inside the door with seven pillars doing something to contain a force which requires a ritual that must be performed at solar noon. Standard Foundation object.
Level 2 reveals a massive creature trapped under the pillars. The ritual is described in detail with religious elements. More concern but still basic Foundation stuff.
Level 3 reveals the monster is a world ending threat. The monster was trapped four thousand years ago with magic and instruments that are now nonexistent. There is only one chain holding it connected to the remaining pillar. The situation is dire but the creature can be contained.
Level 4 reveals that the ceremony requires a human and is so unspeakable that they must be drugged and monitored beforehand. The situation is stretching the Foundation's moral and emotional tensions to their limit.
Level 5 is protected by the highest Foundation security; a memetic kill agent for security, basically a picture which murders you if you aren't a member of the O5 Council. It's immediately revealed in a letter from the O5 that the entire procedure is an elaborate fake to convince the upper members of the Foundation that the creature can be contained. The truth is that they intimately know everything about the history of this creature and how it was sealed, everything that could possibly be done has failed, and it is an eventuality that 2317-K will inevitably kill everyone and everything, with the procedure just invented to keep the Foundation functioning until then.
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u/ballistic503 2h ago
How does this fit the trope in the OP? It’s inevitable, yes, but it’s not innate. Let’s mix it with an old trope and say the monster is some type of alien and all technological progress was based on it, or even just the Foundation itself - that would fit the trope a bit better.
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u/-zero-joke- 3h ago
Crossed - everything people are doing is just people stuff dialed up to 11.
Handmaid's Tale - nothing Atwood wrote about is fictitious, it all has some basis in how women have been treated.
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u/SlouchyGuy 3h ago edited 3h ago
City of Stairs by Robert Jackson Bennett - belief creates gods who increasingly are warped by what their believers want, which includes having children. Then some of those divine children or gods start to kill other Divines, and consume their power if they are capable of that due to their domain being defined widely enough to include other domains of meaning, which leads to them becoming an only deity left, which leads to them wanting to do things their way, apoclypsis, remaking of the world and creation of new people who create new deities through beliefs.
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u/MrDeltaXII 2h ago
Lord of the Mysteries.
Technically, there were two Apocalypses, one is also the cause of the other.
So basically the Oldes One/Original Creator, the creator of the universe, the one composed of all contradictions, after screwing his daught/mother(Mother Goddess of Depravity) and her birthing most of the Great Old Ones, the Original Creator decided to go to sleep, he went inside the still forming Earth, in which two of his split personalities began to become beings of their own.
Some time later, in our age, the Original Creator briefly woke up from his slumber, causing an impossible Convergence Effect that pulled bits and pieces of his direct offsprings (MGoD, Mother Tree of Desires and Son of Chaos) and an impossible form of Separation, where the powers he carried inside himself also split and so the planet suffered an unprecedented disaster, that would only get worse when the Original Creator's split personalities manifested as beings in their own right, the Celestial Worthy of Heaven and Earth for Blessings and Primordial God Almighty, these two began fighting for the remaining powers that were brought to Earth. When the Original Creator awoke, he erected a barrier around the planet, making it very difficult to cross and retrieve what had been taken. Humanity managed to preservere, but most of our numbers were decimated.
Thousands of years later, the barrier, as well as the remaining will of the Original Creator, were coming to an end. A bunch of Great Old Ones had gathered around Earth, awaiting millenia to either snatch the powers laying around or to simply reclaim what was once theirs. The end of the barrier was inevitable and so those who defended the planet had to become Great Old Ones themselves, or reach a near enough level of power. Fun Fact: The Devil(not actually, but close enough) chose to fight on humanity's side.
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u/SlouchyGuy 3h ago
Craft Sequence by Max Gladstone - sapience creates belief that fuels appearance and existence of gods through volunteer sacrifice of human souls,
which leads to creation of Applied Theology,
which leads to loaning of faith (and souls) for a percent of returns of power,
which leads to creation of lawyering and soul-related necromantic Craft that doesn't require gods,
which leads to a war on gods, Craftspeople being victorious, wanting more power and souls,
which leads to them finding new planets that are earlier in that cycle, and consuming them.
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u/honeycloudse 3h ago
The last of us
A fungal infection exploits biology itself, turning ordinary human vulnerability into a civilization-ending disaster.
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u/SouthernAd2853 3h ago
The current villain of the Craft Sequence/Craft Wars series is basically a magical alien AI that has trapped many worlds in induced dreams to serve as power sources. There's many such beings out there, taking the form of star-eating spiders light years across, and they attack worlds that have started to develop into new ones and thus have a network to subvert, ideally by absorbing their new AI.
Humanity isn't even the first species on their world to be attacked by one, with a previous attack only fended off by two stone age human twin sisters sacrificing themselves to become giant lava serpents more powerful than gods and inflicting enough damage the spider retreated rather than risk being killed by another of its kind.
The protagonists learn about this and that one is coming and one of them is desperate enough to fuse with a young AI formed by markets trading souls as if they were securities, with the plan of taking full control of the world markets to power a battle with the spider... like countless worlds beforehand, some of which won and became more spiders.
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u/CommitteeInfamous973 3h ago
Sweet Home - Voices in everyone's head, who are turning people in monsters are actual souls of the same people
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u/dankconfidant001 2h ago
The Remedyverse: Control show us that a resonance based lifeform leaking to our dimension can screw up reality. There’s also tresholds in that other worlds overlap with our own and shit gets weird, as in Alan Wake.
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u/vkaefe 3h ago edited 3h ago
I've got a rather obscure (for reddit) example.
GroTTesque are a russian conceptual band. In their songs, two demiurges are having a wager: one creates a world and the other tests it to see whether it is worthy of life or not. The album Return to Talass tells a story of how it was discovered that a great cataclysm periodically "resets" the civilization and an expedition is sent in order to discover a way of preventing it, only to end up deeper entangling mortals in divine games.
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u/seahawk1977 3h ago
Final Fantasy III
The world must be kept in perfect balance or it will end, one way or the other. Too much light, and the planet will burn. Too much darkness and it will fall onto the void.
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u/NineInchNinjas 2h ago
I forget the exact details, but the Death/Last Stranding in the Death Stranding series is an extinction event that has happened before and will eventually happen again. Life on Earth is connected to beaches, other dimensions which have the appearance of a beach with black/grey sands, and that's where life ends up when it dies. Every extinction event has an entity chosen to herald it, this time it's a human woman. The main plot of the first game was to figure out what the Death Stranding is, and then figure out how to stop it. As far as the overall story between both games go, the apocalypse just kinda happens every so often naturally and it's possible to be accelerated by factors like Troy Baker doing some shit.
There's a lot more to it that I don't remember well, but that's the gist.
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u/Afalstein 24m ago
Roughly accurate. My understanding is that it's kind of a result of the Afterlife getting full of spirits after a set period of time, which causes them to overflow into the living world in a Death Stranding event, which causes the dominant species to go extinct and a new species to take over.
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u/Grifasaurus 2h ago
Crossed. The patient zeros all spontaneously become infected all over the globe and we don't really know what caused it. The one patient zero we follow in the thin red line story knows shit that he couldn't possibly know and calls it a cleansing thing.
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u/Afalstein 15m ago
Not so much the Reapers, but what they represent.
The Reapers in the 3rd game finally do explain their rationale. They believe that conflict between organics and synthetics is a part of the progression of the universe. Every organic species will create a synthetic servant-race, and that synthetic servant race will eventually revolt and destroy them. This is why the Reapers go through and cleanse the universe every so often, converting organics into Reaper Cores to preserve their essence.
Of course, this is a variation of the original plot device, the "Dark Energy" twist. Supposedly, originally ME3 was going to feature the revelation that the Dark Energy being used by Element Zero and the biotics of the ME universe was having the unintended impact of causing stars to die more quickly. So the development of galactic societies was speeding up the heat death of the universe. The Reapers were trying to stall it by harvesting societies at their peak and storing them as Reaper Cores.
In both cases, the destruction of the galaxy is truly inevitable. The Reapers aren't even the biggest problem.
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u/BeduinZPouste 3h ago
The sapient life creating another AI that will became sapient and attempt to destroy it's creators. Battlestar Galactica