Eucatastrophe: Difference between revisions

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*** Cue a [[Crowning Moment of Awesome]]; Seeing both Goku (in spirit form) and Gohan doing the Kamehameha at the same time.

** In the movies, this is kinda Broly's thing. Example: Pre [[Villain Decay]] (well, we're talking about a show where the heroes are exponentially more powerful every season and the Return is about 10 years later), Broly is in an entirely different league from the heroes, to the point no one in the entire cast can so much as stand toe-to-toe with him and trade blows. Broly is so powerful that the [[Blood Knight]] VEGETA is TOO SCARED to fight him until most of the cast is near death. Then Vegeta is put down in about 5 seconds. Goku, with the combined remaining power of the entire cast, lands one punch and it looks like Broly blows up from his own overpowered-ness. And then the planet blows up for unrelated reasons.

*** The Return: Well, teenage Gohan can go toe-to-toe with Broly now. Broly shows a tiny amount of what could be construed as fear when Gohan goes Super Saiyan... at which point Broly goes Super Saiyan 2. And proceeds to [[No ~~Sell~~]] pretty much anything Gohan throws at him. He reacts a little bit to being drowned IN LAVA. The following is possibly the most intimidating [[Out of the Inferno]] ever. Because, y'know, LAVA. The Gohan / Spirit Form Goku team Kamehameha from the Cell arc? Yeah, that's how they take Broly down for the count. With Spirit Goku, Gohan, and Goten, Goku's other son.

*** The Return: Well, teenage Gohan can go toe-to-toe with Broly now. Broly shows a tiny amount of what could be construed as fear when Gohan goes Super Saiyan... at which point Broly goes Super Saiyan 2. And proceeds to [[Won't Work On Me]] pretty much anything Gohan throws at him. He reacts a little bit to being drowned IN LAVA. The following is possibly the most intimidating [[Out of the Inferno]] ever. Because, y'know, LAVA. The Gohan / Spirit Form Goku team Kamehameha from the Cell arc? Yeah, that's how they take Broly down for the count. With Spirit Goku, Gohan, and Goten, Goku's other son.

* ''[[Mazinger Z]]'': Often Dr. Hell and his followers were on the brink of winning, and only through of extreme competence and sacrifice of Kouji and his allies or of utter incompetence of Hell's minions, the situation was saved. It happened several times when they very nearly took the Institute over (the most prominent of them happened in episode 57) or invaded it successfully (episode 87), or managed to steal a sample of Alloy Z... However the most notorious of them happened in the last episode when {{spoiler|Archduke Gorgon's [[Robeast]]s destroyed Mazinger-Z and demolished the Institute. Tetsuya's [[Big Damn Heroes]] moment saved Kouji's life, but the villains finally were victorious against Mazinger.}} That story was greatly expanded in the Mazinger vs Great General of Darkness movie.

** ''[[Great Mazinger]]'': Several of them. Two of them stand out:

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** ''[[Yu-Gi-Oh! 5D's|5Ds]]'' had quite a few Near Villain Victories at the start of the Dark Signer arc - mostly due to the [[Eldritch Abomination|Jibakushin]]. On two occasions, the protagonists only survived due to timely [[Plot-Driven Breakdown|Plot Driven Breakdowns]].

** The "Waking The Dragons" filler arc also had Yugi win his first duel of the season with 1000 Life Points left.

* ''[[~~ROD~~ the TV]]''. Joker has Junior, with the intention of using his body to house the Gentleman (the former head of the British Library whose soul is in a set of books), and is set to brainwash the whole world into believing the British are all powerful (and somehow transforming reality into something 19-century). The heroes are there but since paper is their main weapon, there's none on hand. Trying to talk things out doesn't work. Nenene, who throughout the series was stressing over writing a novel and had only recently finished it, sacrifices the unpublished novel, which is more than enough artillery for Yomiko and the Paper Detectives to stop the baddies.

* ''[[R.O.D the TV]]''. Joker has Junior, with the intention of using his body to house the Gentleman (the former head of the British Library whose soul is in a set of books), and is set to brainwash the whole world into believing the British are all powerful (and somehow transforming reality into something 19-century). The heroes are there but since paper is their main weapon, there's none on hand. Trying to talk things out doesn't work. Nenene, who throughout the series was stressing over writing a novel and had only recently finished it, sacrifices the unpublished novel, which is more than enough artillery for Yomiko and the Paper Detectives to stop the baddies.

* ''[[~~Twentieth~~ Century Boys]]'' uses this to great effect. Friend, for one, {{spoiler|actually ''succeeds'' in ruling the world and being hailed and loved as the world's savior}}. It's only when {{spoiler|he decides to destroy it}}, that things start to turn in our heroes favor.

* ''[[20th Century Boys]]'' uses this to great effect. Friend, for one, {{spoiler|actually ''succeeds'' in ruling the world and being hailed and loved as the world's savior}}. It's only when {{spoiler|he decides to destroy it}}, that things start to turn in our heroes favor.

* ''[[Monster (manga)|Monster]]'' has one at the end when, following the Ruhenheim Massacre, {{spoiler|Johan very nearly coerces Tenma into shooting him and thus corrupting himself forever by [[Complete Monster|threatening to kill a young boy]] only to be shot in the head by the boy's father at the last minute}}.

* The goal of the bad guys in ''[[Digimon Frontier]]'' is to destroy the digital world piece by piece and feed it to Lucemon, thereby [[Sealed Evil in a Can|freeing him from his prison]]. The heroes do all right at first, but then they come up against the Royal Knights, who ''repeatedly'' take out a chunk of the world and the heroes barely escape with their lives. Eventually the Knights succeed in taking the entire planet, forcing the heroes to take refuge on the moons. They're able to rally and take out the Knights at this point, but that still means Lucemon's back, and he's able to start an invasion of the human world before he's defeated.

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== Literature ==

* [[J. R. R. Tolkien]] not only loved this trope - it appears throughout his books - he named it. He coined the word "eucatastrophe" himself, and he identified it as the typical ending to what he called "Fairy Stories". He also pointed out that a lot of beloved stories that don't fit into the fairy-tale category have a similar structure—like the central dogma of Christianity, which is about ''[[God]] Himself being '''killed''','' and then coming [[Back ~~From~~ the Dead]]. Some examples of it in his own work:

* [[J. R. R. Tolkien]] not only loved this trope - it appears throughout his books - he named it. He coined the word "eucatastrophe" himself, and he identified it as the typical ending to what he called "Fairy Stories". He also pointed out that a lot of beloved stories that don't fit into the fairy-tale category have a similar structure—like the central dogma of Christianity, which is about ''[[God]] Himself being '''killed''','' and then coming [[Back from the Dead]]. Some examples of it in his own work:

** ''[[The Silmarillion]]'': The final overthrow of Morgoth by the Valar, in response to the plea of Eärendil and Elwing.

** ''[[The Hobbit]]'': The Battle of Five Armies, saved by the arrival of the Eagles.

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** Of course, whether Kane and the Brotherhood are 'evil' depends on one's point of view.

** In Red Alert 2, the last Soviet mission is a desperate fight to destroy the Chronosphere in Alaska, before the Allies launch an invasion of Moscow.

** On [[~~Runescape~~]] Lucien has {{spoiler|completed the Ritual of Rejuvenation, sacrificing the weakest member of his species to recharge the powers of the rest, and he also has possession of the [[McGuffin|Stone of Jas]]}}, in his attempt to become [[A God Am I]]. Them the {{spoiler|Dragonkin kill him.}}

** On [[RuneScape]] Lucien has {{spoiler|completed the Ritual of Rejuvenation, sacrificing the weakest member of his species to recharge the powers of the rest, and he also has possession of the [[McGuffin|Stone of Jas]]}}, in his attempt to become [[A God Am I]]. Them the {{spoiler|Dragonkin kill him.}}

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** And the last 3 episodes in "Rebirth".

* [[Beast Wars]] Megatron has been just a hair away from victory ''three times.'' {{spoiler|the first time he nearly erased the Maximals from existance by killing Optimus Prime four million years before he woke up. The second was when he found the repaired Nemesis and tried to use it to kill the Autobots still offline in the Ark. The third time he absorbed nearly all the sparks on Cybertron, became a god, and tried to remake Cybertron in his own image.}}

* Happened alot in ''[[Totally Spies]]'', such as the second episode, "The New Jerry", with the Spies trapped in a space capsule and Tim Scam firing on the Earth with the Evapo-Blaster.

* Happened alot in ''[[Totally Spies!]]'', such as the second episode, "The New Jerry", with the Spies trapped in a space capsule and Tim Scam firing on the Earth with the Evapo-Blaster.

* Happens in Season 2 of ''[[My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic|My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic]]'' "The Return Of Harmony". {{spoiler|Discord has [[Break the Cutie|emotionally broken]] and [[Mind Raped]] five of the Mane Cast already to the point the Elements Of Harmony -- the ''only'' magic that can defeat him -- are useless and driven Twilight Sparkle across the [[Despair Event Horizon]], completely shattering the mane cast's friendship. With the heroes crushed and beaten, Discord takes over Equestria, transforming it into a surreal [[World Gone Mad]] that's growing more chaotic by the moment, with Ponyville as his new "chaos capital of the world". However, his victory is snatched away from his grasp when Celestia sends Twilight all the letters her student had sent her over the last season, which restores Twilight's hope and motivates her to restore her friends to normal. Reunited, the group confront Discord and [[Hoist by His Own Petard|his own pride and belief the Elements of Harmony won't work]] causes him not to realize this until its too late. Discord [[Sealed Evil in a Can|is sealed away]] and a [[World-Healing Wave]] created by the Elements of Harmony restores Equestria to normal.}}

** Happens again in the Season 2 finale. {{spoiler|The Changeling Queen has destroyed the barrier protecting Canterlot, unleashed her hordes upon the city to feed off the love of all the ponies, and has even defeated Celestia in a straight-up fight by tapping into Shining Armor's love for Cadence. Even worse, the Mane 6 fail to reach the Elements of Harmony in time, and are captured by the thousands of changelings that now storm the city. Unfortunately for the queen, she forgot that Cadence and Shining Armor are still in the room, ''and'' that Cadence's magic is [[Heart Is an Awesome Power|the ability to make ponies love each other.]] The result is Shining Armor getting a massive injection of the [[Power of Love]], which gives him enough power to reset the barrier and blast all of the changelings out of Canterlot once and for all.}}

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** Then there's the [[wikipedia:Dunkirk evacuation|Dunkirk evacuation]]. A series of Allied military blunders in May 1940 allowed the Germans to break through the French front lines and catch the Allied troops totally unprepared. The British army, in particular, was in a terrible defensive position at that moment. If General Guderian, the German commander who led the breakthrough, had been allowed to follow up his success, he could have swept north and rolled up the entire British army. Instead, his own CO chewed him out for taking "foolish risks", and Guderian resigned on the spot. He was persuaded to rescind his resignation and resume command, but several days had passed by that point, and the opportunity had been lost. Britain evacuated their soldiers from the continent in one of [[Awesome/World War II|WWII's most awesome operations ever]] (only D-Day qualifies as more awesome than Dunkirk), and the war continued. But its still a stretch to say the Nazis came amazingly close to winning [[World War Two]] outright. If the Dunkirk evacuation had failed, the Battle of Britain would never even have been fought. The British would have politely packed up and said "Well! That's that then! Cheerio!"

** Actually, there was a [[WW 2]] Eucatastrophe that outclassed even Dunkirk: the Battle Off Samar. Part of one of, if not ''the'' largest naval battles in history, this battle was a total mismatch: the Japanese Center Force, a battle group comprised of dozens of heavy cruisers, destroyers, battleships, all of which was led by the largest battleships ''ever constructed'', ''Yamato''; the American task force, "Taffy 3", was just a support force made up entirely of ships known as "tin cans"—because they lacked any armor. Six light escort carriers, three light destroyers, and three destroyer escorts (these destroyers had a few torpedoes each, and between two to four 5 inch guns, whose shells would literally ''bounce off the hulls'' of the Japanese ships). Taffy 3 was taken completely by surprise, but responded quickly, throwing up a smoke screen with the light destroyers while the carriers launched all of their planes, in spite of the fact that none of them were equipped to fight ships—in many cases, they ''didn't even have any bullets'', and would just fly straight at the bridges of enemy ships and look threatening. Then the captains of the light destroyers, of their own accord, charged straight at the Center Force, ignoring the fact that the many dozens of Japanese guns outranged theirs by miles. They closed the distance, launched torpedoes—their only effective weapon against the Japanese ships—and sank a few heavy cruisers. Then they continued forward, firing hundreds of five inch shells at the upper works of the heavy ships, whose [[Irony|armor-piercing shells went straight through the armorless light destroyers without doing much damage]]. Eventually, the light destroyers were pummeled to death, a carrier was critically damaged, and reinforcements were at least many hours away. Just as the Center Force was on the verge of total victory (which, on top of annihilating every American ship, meant that they could bombard the crap out of the American landing force and most of their supplies at Samar, which was critical), they turned around and retreated. What happened was the result of several unintentional bluffs and a single bad case of intel—the Center Force thought they were facing an ''entire American Fleet Carrier Battle Group'', due to the smoke screen concealing the carriers from view, hundreds of American planes swarming the Center Force like crazy (and looking like they were dropping bombs or torpedoes, but were in reality fuel tanks or depth charges), light destroyers charging a vastly superior force without hesitation and ''actually sinking or heavily damaging many ships'', and a Japanese intel report that an American fleet carrier force was supposed to be in the area at the time—causing the Japanese admiral to call for a withdrawal, believing that they could at best achieve a [[Phyric Victory]], especially considering the incorrect Japanese belief that battleships were still roughly equal or even greater than carriers.

* [[World War ~~One~~]] had one that if anything looks even worse with the inclusion of economics, and it occurred pretty much at the tail end of the war in 1918. To wit: the entire Eastern front collapsed with the [[Romanovs and Revolutions|Bolshevik Revolution]] pulling Russia out of the war, forcing the surrender of Romania, and generally stranding any and all Allied forces in Eastern Europe in hostile territory (like the fate of the British Baltic sub fleet based in Finland caught between the Germans and the at-the-time pro-German Soviets), handing the Germans effective control of Eastern Europe and its resources, and even worse freeing up a few million veteran German and Austro-Hungarian soldiers to be shifted to the Western Fronts in Belgium/France, the Alps, and the Balkans. The Bulgarian and Turkish armies were suffering from heavy battering but were still fighting on and tying down hundreds of thousands of men, as was von Lettow Vorbeck in Eastern Africa. While the Turks and Bulgarians had been defeated by the time the transfer had been completed, Germany and Austria-Hungary still planned two massive strikes designed to break the back of the Western Allies and force them to capitulate as they had Russia and Romania with the Operation Michael in the West and the Austro-Hungarian Spring Offensive towards Venice against Allied forces that were greatly stretched thin. All the while the untried US military was still on the wrong side of the Atlantic. The result was that the Germans almost smashed their way into Paris and the Austro-Hungarians nearly breached the last defensible line before an evacuation would have been necessary. And within a few months, both enemies had been defeated in what must be one of history's greatest turnarounds.

* [[World War I]] had one that if anything looks even worse with the inclusion of economics, and it occurred pretty much at the tail end of the war in 1918. To wit: the entire Eastern front collapsed with the [[Romanovs and Revolutions|Bolshevik Revolution]] pulling Russia out of the war, forcing the surrender of Romania, and generally stranding any and all Allied forces in Eastern Europe in hostile territory (like the fate of the British Baltic sub fleet based in Finland caught between the Germans and the at-the-time pro-German Soviets), handing the Germans effective control of Eastern Europe and its resources, and even worse freeing up a few million veteran German and Austro-Hungarian soldiers to be shifted to the Western Fronts in Belgium/France, the Alps, and the Balkans. The Bulgarian and Turkish armies were suffering from heavy battering but were still fighting on and tying down hundreds of thousands of men, as was von Lettow Vorbeck in Eastern Africa. While the Turks and Bulgarians had been defeated by the time the transfer had been completed, Germany and Austria-Hungary still planned two massive strikes designed to break the back of the Western Allies and force them to capitulate as they had Russia and Romania with the Operation Michael in the West and the Austro-Hungarian Spring Offensive towards Venice against Allied forces that were greatly stretched thin. All the while the untried US military was still on the wrong side of the Atlantic. The result was that the Germans almost smashed their way into Paris and the Austro-Hungarians nearly breached the last defensible line before an evacuation would have been necessary. And within a few months, both enemies had been defeated in what must be one of history's greatest turnarounds.

* Another example is the so called "Long Night" coined by Western intelligence in the [[Cold War]], dating from 1956 to 1979 more or less. It started with the fiascoes of 1956 - including the humiliation of the fall of Budapest and the Ike-induced rifts between the US and the Anglo-French -, continued straight through Vietnam and the resulting bloodbath, and ended with the fall of the Shah and the loss of one of the last remaining Western outposts in the Middle East. During this point in time, the general consensus amongst historians and strategists - West, East, and neither - was that if the Soviets rolled the dice, they probably would have won. That, or triggered an [[Earthshattering Kaboom]], all depending on whether the West was willing to retaliate.

* This is what the first part of the [[Korean War]] looked like: the North Koreans marched south, destroying or pushing away any and all Western allied resistance, to the point where they were trapped in a tiny split of land around Pusan fighting desperately to hold on to their final foothold on the Korean mainland against vastly superior North Korean forces, living hand-to-mouth for weeks under intense pressure. Termed "looked like" because (as many have pointed out), Pusan could have been evacuated in fairly good order if it were not possible to be held, and the amphibious invasion force that would eventually launch at Inchon was already well underway in planning and organization, so it is questionable to see what effect the actual conquest of Pusan would have had.

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[[Category:Near Villain Victory]]

[[Category:Fairy Tale Tropes]]

[[Category:~~Eucatastrophe~~]]

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