A World Half Full: Difference between revisions
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* ''[[Fist of the North Star]]'' exemplifies this: just because the world is torn by nuclear fire doesn't mean it can't be rebuilt, and just because violence can be used to oppress the weak doesn't mean you can't use it to protect the weak and and make the world a better place either.
* ''[[Code Geass]]'': A third of the world is ruled by an [[Omnicidal Maniac|insane]] [[Nietzsche Wannabe]]. Another third is ruled by the [[Evil Chancellor|corrupt advisers]] of a pre-teen child empress. They are locked into a state of perpetual war, while we never see the other third. [[Black and Grey Morality|The hero is a cynical JerkAss who commits morally questionable acts with frightening regularity]], and the nicest and most idealistic character in the series is an self-deluded [[Knight Templar]] who is complicit in genocide. However, the ending does provide some measure of hope that things will get better, [[Earn Your Happy Ending|with most of the surviving characters shown to be relatively happy]], {{spoiler|although it's a [[Bittersweet Ending]] for all of the major protagonists.}}.
* ''[[Ghost in the Shell (manga)|Ghost in the Shell]]'' is a world half full for most of the main characters. They frequently expose corruption and conspiracies, and stop terrorists from killing more innocents, but at the end of the day, their actions don't do anything to change the corrupt and uncaring system of Japanese society. Still, they feel pretty good about what little good they can do.
* ''[[Gundam]]'':
** ''[[After War Gundam X|Gundam X]]'' was all about this, taking place [[After the End]]. We would expect a [[Mad Max]] or [[Hokuto no Ken]] world where the entire earth was an unsafe place where slavers took anyone they like, Raider left behind huge examples of their brutality and the government purging and reclaiming what is theirs. Instead humanity continue to move on. The world isn't some sort of badly irradiated earth despite its share of [[Colony Drop]] and humanity has begun its path towards civilization. Sure we got a few hiccups like the Frost Brothers and remnant of Earth and Space's army wanting to continue the war. But the setting notably light for a supposedly [[Crapsack World]].
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* ''[[Dr. Zhivago]]'': A bourgeois doctor ([[Tall, Dark and Handsome|Omar Sharif]]) chases [[The Dulcinea Effect|the love of his life]] through [[Glorious Mother Russia|Russia]] [[The Russian Revolution|after the Revolution]] and nearly freezes to death in the process, in this [[Epic Movie|David Lean film]] based on the book by Boris Pasternak.
* ''[[
* ''[[WALL-E]]'':
** The titular character's job is to clean up the Earth so people can live there again. It gets delayed a bit.
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== Live Action TV ==
* ''[[Firefly (TV series)|Firefly]]/[[Serenity]]:'' The series starts with the protagonist powerless to prevent the destruction of his home world by a [[Lawful Stupid]] interplanetary bureaucracy and the final defeat of the Independents at Serenity Valley. His faith in humanity and God shattered, he abandons his cause and flees to the edge of colonized space, where begins life anew as an outlaw space pirate/mercenary. Over the course of the series, The heroes face many hardships, and even their few victories cost them dearly, but ultimately, they are able to find it in themselves to carry on. And when the dust clears, they're still flying. They may not be able to save the galaxy, but they can at least save themselves. And that's a start. By the end of the movie, they've actually unveiled and broken a government human-experiment conspiracy, unlocked River Tam's hidden Badass, inadvertently brought about the decimation of the Reavers, and given the tyrannical government two black eyes and a bloody nose. Dozens of their friends and two of their crew have died, and they're now on the run for their lives from the government's vengeance, but that wasn't much different from what they had before so it's all good. It is indicated that any government vengeance may very well be passive at worst. From the Alliance point of view, the crew of Serenity has done all the damage they possibly could. Indeed, their (implied) victory over the Reavers' fleet could even let them spin this into a huge victory and come out in an even better position than before. It looks like they even helped repair Mal's ship, though that might have just been the {{spoiler|[[The Dragon|Operative]] using his unquestionable authority to pull strings.}} That's not to say they probably aren't still wanted criminals, with a number of enemies even among the outlaws, but they're still flying. Which is enough.
* While [[Joss Whedon]] likes to use [[True Art Is Angsty]], one can say one can view the world as either [[World Half Empty|half empty]] or half full in his works. For example, ''[[Titan A.E.]]'', Earth is gone and we have only begun to rebuild our lives after spending so many years in an inhospitable system mocked and slowly dwindling. Earth was eventually recreated and a new life begins. It will be a while before humanity becomes a superpower, but it is a start.
** The [[Buffy the Vampire Slayer|Buffyverse]], especially ''[[Angel]]'', tends to bounce back and forth on whether they live in a half full or half empty world. Angel himself expresses an existential take on the whole matter; striving for a living in-the-moment application of [[Good Feels Good]] despite the bleakness of the big picture.
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* ''[[Deus Ex]]'', depending on your personal beliefs, any of the endings can fall under this.
* The Milky Way in ''[[Mass Effect]]'' is a dangerous and brutal place to live. Filled with monstrous aliens, pirate fleets, amoral mercenaries and cruel slavers, with the largest civilized government hamstrung by red tape and millennia of tradition and unwillingness to budge, an entire species has been driven from their homeworld and is locked in a 300 year long [[Hopeless War]] with their mechanical creations, and {{spoiler|every 50,000-odd years, all technologically advanced sapient life is purged and consumed by [[Eldritch Abomination]]s.}} Yet in spite of this, ''[[The Messiah|one person]]'' can make an incredible difference, galactic peace can be attained, pirates can be brought to justice, slaves can be freed, the aforementioned [[Hopeless War]] between the exiled species and their creations can be negotiated to a possible reconciliation, and you ''can'' [[Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?|punch out Cthulhu]].
* Arguably, the Light Side path of [[Knights
* ''[[God of War (series)|God of War]] III'' is this at the end. The world has gone straight to hell due to Kratos killing damn-near every Olympian there is. {{spoiler|However, Kratos, in one of his rare acts of selflessness, decides in the end to restore Hope back to the world by sacrificing himself rather than simply handing the power back to Athena.}} It's still more like "A World ''Millionth'' Full", though, when you consider just how many people and creatures he killed [[For the Evulz]].
* ''[[City of Heroes]]'', heavily inspired by both [[Marvel]] and [[
* ''[[Baroque]]'' is set in an [[After the End]] world where humanity has been reduced to a handful of [[Body Horror|mutated freaks]] whose forms are based on their own individual psychoses. {{spoiler|At the end, you don't fix the world. But you do make it so that the world has a chance}}.
* In [[Shin Megami Tensei|a franchise]] where God is almost ''always'' [[God Is Evil|evil]] or [[Devil but No God|out of the picture]], and the heroes never save the day without a [[Bittersweet Ending|huge sacrifice on their part]], ''[[Persona 4]]'' stands out by having this type of message at the end. It basically boils down to "Humans can act like assholes, but we can change for the better if we have the courage to accept [[Awful Truth|that fact]] first."
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** Even the HIV pandemic is a good example of how much we've progressed. In about three decades, the first world has determined the etiological agent of the disease, discovered its structure, broken down its genome, figured out a very complete picture of what it does to our cells, completely mapped its genes, discovered how it spreads and how it could be prevented from doing so, found ways to hold it in check and keep patients from succumbing, and implemented public health programs which have brought the pandemic to heel in the first world. Compared to how any other time period in history would have fared, it's nothing short of miraculous. By contrast, Sub-Saharan Africa is being devastated in a manner which is simply heart-wrenching to watch as well as a chilling reminder of what other great pandemics did ''before'' we learned how to fight back.
** There are about 1,000 cases of polio yearly in the world. At its peak in the US, there were over 55,000 per year. The disease was scheduled for complete eradication (like smallpox), but unfortunately fanatical groups in a few remote areas in Nigeria have preached the vaccine is a "Western mind control drug." India has some severely crowded, hard-to-treat populations heavily affected by polio. A few cases from these regions enter the neighboring African and Middle Eastern nations. All of Europe, north and east Asia, the Americas, and Australia are completely clear. That's almost 5,000 American kids dead per year in the 50's to ''zero'' today.
** We are increasingly [https://web.archive.org/web/20131030061355/http://www.ted.com/talks/stewart_brand_on_squatter_cities.html specialized], [https://web.archive.org/web/20140227025311/http://www.ted.com/talks/matt_ridley_when_ideas_have_sex.html interconnected] and [https://web.archive.org/web/20110622085502/http://www.ted.com/talks/steven_pinker_on_the_myth_of_violence.html tolerant]. We are indeed earning our collective happy endings. Together.
** Do you think [http://www.avaaz.org/en/ glorified spam] can stop internet censorship, cluster bombs or capital punishment for sodomy? Well it ''did''. [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HAh9IIHVb7c Life has never been better.]
** Not to mention how far we are moving in terms of renewable resources and sustainability, and corporations are trying hard to become green and sustainable for the future. Of course we have some ways to go, but we're getting there.
* Of course, while this situation seems all fine and dandy, resources becomes scarcer by the day and won't fulfill the needs of an always growing population anytime soon; space technology is stagnating, meaning the solution to this problem could be not found in time; pollution and deforestation are ruining more than ever the environment and biodiversity. How long will it last before Earth becomes a [[World Half Empty]] [[Double Subversion|once again?]]
* As of the mid-2020s there has been a ton of controversy surrounding the commercialization of specialized AI software as the first step towards a potential technological singularity. Some post-singularity predictions lean ''heavily'' on the optimistic side of things - imagine a world where you ''don't'' have to go to work 9 to 5, but still get a healthy amount of money so you're not poor. This along with the automatization of chores means people would be having an ''unprecedented'' amount of free time for sports, entertainment, art and sex, to the point a working world would be absolutely unrecognizable. The only reason that the world would ''still'' be half full rather than full is that AI in this scenario might be ''too'' much of a crutch while also destroying the concept of privacy due to face-recognition surveillance.
{{reflist}}
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