Gaia's Lament/Playing With
Basic Trope: Setting in which the environment of the world is in a low state.
- Straight: Tim's world is a smog-filled wasteland, with real food now a luxury, non-human animals are mostly, if not completely, extinct, and no hope for recovery.
- Exaggerated: The world is completely covered with garbage and nasty chemicals; if there is any sort of plant life left, expect it to be few, hidden and zealously guarded.
- Justified: Some Anvils Need to Be Dropped
- Inverted: Nature has destroyed or spoiled civilization beyond repair, see Gaia's Vengeance.
- Subverted: Tim's homeland has been destroyed, but he is able to move to another part of the world that is still in good shape.
- Double Subverted: Everyone else had the same idea, and the sudden overpopulation puts Tim's new home on the path to becoming just like his old home..
- Parodied:
- Usually seen in works that have a comedic crapsack world, the world will be dirty and polluted, but it is usually done for humorous effect opposed to drama.
- Earth slits both of her wrists, cries tears (er, rivers) of blood, buys all her clothing from Hot Topic, and writes fanfiction dissing all the "preps".
- Deconstructed: Two variants, one can argue that humans would never have the potential to destroy the world outright through industrial means, usually explaining the world came about through a natural disaster. The other variant can turn this trope Up to Eleven, showing just how bad a world suffering an ecological collapse would be, often giving hints, or outright stating that there is no possible recovery.
- Reconstructed: The world is screwed up and the ramifications are shown, but things may possibly get better. Usually goes hand in hand with Some Anvils Need to Be Dropped.
- Zig Zagged: The environment has degraded and the degradation had caused problems. But the problems were solved (for the humans only) using science. So the biosphere is perhaps completely dead and some people lament the loss of trees and clean air. While others follow Machine Worship and see the replacement of the "inferior and inefficient" biosphere as a positive for mankind. Basically contrasting an argument from nature or tradition against one from novelty or technophilia, and saying that neither is correct or incorrect.
- Averted: Tim lives on a self-sustaining spacecraft and never visits the surface of any planet..
- Enforced: Green Aesop.
- Lampshaded: "It's funny how we haven't choked to death yet with this crap floating in the air, huh?"
- Invoked: A character tries to stop modern (or futuristic society), because they believe it will, (or it has already) lead to this trope.
- Defied:
- Someone may point out how unbridled industrialization/development may have ramifications in the future. They are listened to too late.
- Gaia always have a strong opinion about her state.
- Discussed: Characters who lived before the environment's destruction will lament how far the world has fallen; characters may suffer a BSOD after witnessing what the world was like/could have been like.
- Conversed: "Our world is just like those cheesy dystopic movies from back in the late 20th, early 21st century, eh? Too bad they hit too close to home...."
- Played For Laughs: Humorous shout outs to Green Aesop movies may be present. (A joke involving a food resembling Soylent Green is usually an indicator.) Usually dips into the more "positive" side of crapsack world, where citizens trash the environment out of stupidity or apathy, opposed to outright greed or malice towards the environment.
- Played For Drama: Much like the second variant of deconstructed, the ramifications of a ruined ecosystem are seen, such as failing agriculture, mass extinctions, flooded coastlines, and at worse, an After the End scenario with a dead Earth.
Back to Gaia's Lament.