Inferred Holocaust: Difference between revisions

[[File:SymbionicOwnedCity_4646SymbionicOwnedCity 4646.jpg|link=Sym-Bionic Titan|frame|[[Conveniently Empty Building|Only fourteen billion dollars lost in damage.]] [[Sarcasm Mode|Yep]]... [[Never Say "Die"|nothing else to report]].]]

{{quote|[reading a poster] ''[[Motivational Poster|"'Hang in there, baby!']] You said it, kitty. ''[looking more closely]'' 'Copyright 1968.' Hmm, determined or not, that cat must be long dead. That's kind of a downer."''|'''Marge''', ''[[The Simpsons (animation)|The Simpsons]]'', "The Twisted World of Marge Simpson"}}

''[[Star Wars|What happens when you detonate a spherical metal honeycomb over a hundred miles wide just above the atmosphere of a habitable world?]] Regardless of specifics, the world won't remain habitable for long.''

Y'see, [[Happily Ever After]] implies there's arable land to farm, electricity and running water, and a semblance of civilization to go back to; as well at least <s> [[Adam and Eve Plot|two people]] ([[Captain Obvious|of the opposite sex to each other]])</s> several hundred to several thousand people surviving by the end.<ref>exact figures are debated by biologists, but it is known that most species which reproduce sexually cannot survive in the long term if there's too much inbreeding</ref>. A [[Zombie Apocalypse]], [[Nuke'Em|nuclear holocaust]], [[Colony Drop]], or anything that can cause [[The End of the World as We Know It]] will have subtle and far reaching effects ''even if it's stopped''. And even if humanity does manage to survive (humans are ''clingy'' bastards) there's bound to be massive casualties.

Cue the [[Moral Dissonance]] if [[Nice Job Breaking It, Hero|the heroes are primarily responsible]] for this near genocide. The subversion of this trope is if the heroes [[What the Hell, Hero?|fully realize the effects of their actions]]... and choose to follow through anyway. Maybe they are [[Sociopathic Hero|amoral sociopaths]] who do not care, maybe the [[Omniscient Morality License]] makes it such that [[Utopia Justifies the Means|the ultimate consequences will be preferable to the status quo]], maybe things are beyond the [[Godzilla Threshold]] and so anything goes...

Contrast [[Inferred Survival]]. For more general plot points that are chilling when contemplated at length, see [[Fridge Horror]]. A common cause of happy ending becoming [[Esoteric Happy Ending]].

** Not just cartoons. Mythical Creatures in [[Narnia]] will far outlive their beloved kings and queens (the ones that don't get zapped back to England, anyway) and that the kings and queens will far outlive their animal friends. Although, life-spans must be enhanced somewhat, seeing that Reepicheep appears in two books that take place three years apart, and under the best conditions mice only live about two years.

* For some reason, kids' movies about dinosaurs tend to have the plot of an extinction scare with a happy ending. This probably means that extinction will come, but only occur at or after the deaths of the main character/(s) since extinction is the death of a species. And the extinction of the dinosaurs occurred over ''hundreds of thousands of years''. It would only be considered ''not'' a happy ending if their inevitable natural deaths had the same result as well. Still, for some it makes it harder to enjoy ''[[The Land Before Time]]'' movies when the viewer remembers ''[[Fantasia]]'' and what happened to them in that.

* Unless it specifically adressesaddresses the issue (such as ''[[Charlotte's Web]]'' or ''[[Babe]]''), any talking-animal story that takes place on a farm, and one of the characters is a pig. Why? Because unlike horses, cows, sheep, goats and poultry, you only raise a pig for one thing...

** [[Comically Missing the Point|Truffle hunting?]]

** {{spoiler|Turns into [[Moral Dissonance]]}} in ''[[Rebuild of Evangelion]] 2.0''. {{spoiler|Shinji's [[Crowning Moment of Awesome]] [[Always Save the Girl|involves rescuing Rei]] [[Nice Job Breaking It, Hero|though as a result]] [[The End of the World as We Know It|triggers the Third Impact]]. [[Big Damn Villains|It takes a timely intervention withby Kaworu to stop it.]]}}

* ''[[Ergo Proxy]]'', though already post-apocalyptic, just made it worse when the last known bastion of humanity fell since its patron Proxy abandoned it, as well as almost every Proxy burns to death. The only survivors are a Proxy, two cogito-infected autoreivs, and a person who is either another Proxy or sterile. However, this is considered good because the small populations of humanity who retreated from the planet a thousand years before begin to return due to the Earth finally recovering from the nuclear winter. Every character we knew that even survived will likely be slaughtered because none of them were meant to survive -- Proxiessurvive—Proxies were genetically altered to have a deathly reaction to UV rays and autoreivs were meant to destroy all the sterile humans and then themselves by way of the cogito virus.

* The movie ''[[Spriggan]]'' ends with the destruction of the [[Big Bad]]'s super weapon, the '"ARK" (yes, [[The Ark|THAT ARK]]. It has Dinosaurs). We are shown the heroes emerging triumphant from underground, to be cheered and applauded by the team members on the surface of the mountain. All seems well. And then we zoom out to show the Earth which looks not a little battered, as well as completely reshaped, by the earlier destruction. Clearly the world will never be the same now.

* ''[[Now and Then, Here and There]]''. For all the inspirational music and pictures of the pretty archipelago the desert had become:

## Dying world or not, oppressive destructive [[Complete Monster]] of a dictator or not, there were inhabited villages in that desert.

## There were also animals.

## Desert ecosystems are fragile in the best of times, [[The Great Flood]] just annihilated every living thing there, how do they expect an archipelago ecosystem to evolve from that? Even if the water seeps into the groundwatersubsoil or evaporates, leaving the land water-rich but not a sea anymore, well, there's still that ''utter and complete destruction of everything'' to contend with. A possible explanation is that She only released the water to the south, since it's shown at the end of episode one (when the camera pans back while Shu's hanging from the fortress) that everything south of Hellywood is already gone.

*** All well and good until you consider that, once Lala Ru disappears, the path of the water is no longer dictated by her but by the force of gravity. And that is a LOT''lot'' of water for gravity to act upon. And a lot of villages living below sea level.

* Sure, Trunks of ''[[Dragonball Z]]'' pretty much had no choice but to kill the [[Omnicidal Maniac]] Emperor [[Complete Monster|Freeza]] if he didn't want a literal [[Earthshattering Kaboom]]; but note that he is still ''Emperor'' Freeza of at '''least''' 79 planets. The short -term result is the absence of a dictatorial tyrant; the ''ugly'' civil war created by the power-vacuum in his sudden absence (not to mention that he probably ''kept'' hundreds of warlords from starting their own private wars) would kill ''billions'' if not '''trillions''' of innocent, decent alien lives. [[Nice Job Breaking It, Hero]].

* [[Defied Trope|Defied]] in ''[[Princess Mononoke]]''. It turns out to be a [[Bittersweet Ending]] at best, {{spoiler|especially with the Forest Spirit gone, the war killing so many humans and animals, and San openly asking [["What Now?" Ending|where do they go from here]],}} but Ashitaka openly admits the world can start to rebuild. Even the people at Irontown, specifically Lady Eboshi, decide to make amends.

* ''[[Astro City]]'' has a beauty of a discussion of this trope-- antrope—an aging superhero, who spent his youth as some hybrid of [[The Golden Age of Comic Books|Golden Age]] Superman and [[The Golden Age of Comic Books|Golden Age]] Batman, is called back into service again against a generic giant robot. Instead of [[MacGyvering]] -- and—and he actually tells the audience the kinds of things he'd have thought of back in the day-- heday—he simply beats it to death, ploughing through six residential city blocks in the process. Afterward, he shouts at the policeman who thanks him for his help, telling him to look at the destruction and claim that he ([[The Hero]]) actually helped anything.

* One 1970's1970s ''[[The Avengers (Comic Book)|Avengers]]'' story, in a clear homage to the then-recently -released film ''[[Star Wars]],'' had the team flying around in Quinjets cheerfully destroying an attacking spacefleet sent by [[Thanos]]. The Avengers have repeated many times that they never kill, but all those blown up spaceships had people... er, aliens on board. Oh well. [[MST3K Mantra|It looked cool, though!]] This also probably counts as a [[What Measure Is a Non-Human?]] moment since many Marvel and DC heroes have this attitude toward aliens, surprisingly enough.

* Although the [[Incredible Hulk]] is ostensibly a hero, many of his [[Unstoppable Rage]] rampages have caused enormous and widespread destruction, which raises the question of exactly how many innocents have lost their lives as collateral damage. This was partially addressed in the recent ''[[World War Hulk]]'' (in which Hulk sent prior warning to the citizens of Manhattan to clear out before utterly trashing the place), and again in the ''[[Civil War (Comic Book)|Civil War]]'' arc, where one of his rampages is explicitly stated to have killed 26 people and a dog, making this particular holocaust not-so-implied. To be fair, this could be applied to almost ''any'' superhero whose battles involve large-scale trashing of urban environments.

** [[Lampshade|Lampshaded]]d in a ''[[Damage Control]]'' miniseries after ''[[World War Hulk]]'':

'''Robin''': [[No Endor Holocaust|No deaths]]? Incredible.<br />

* Responsible for a few changes to the end of ''[[WALL-E]]''. During the previews, audience members expressed depression at the end of the film; they'd left with the impression that humanity was screwed on returning to the polluted Earth. The animators added on a series of images to the credits that showed the human race repairing the ecological damage and regaining the skills they'd lost aboard the ''Axiom'', ending with a beautiful landscape and a [[WALL-E/Heartwarming|Crowning Moment Of Heartwarming]] ({{spoiler|hundreds of years later, the plant that Wall-E found has become a gigantic tree}}).

* The ending of Disney's ''[[Pocahontas]]'' is optimistic and hopeful for a peaceful future... until you remember how the battle for land and freedom between the Native American people and European Settlers [[Very Loosely Based on a True Story|REALLY''really'' turned out]].

** That's... pretty par for the course for a Batman/Joker confrontation, if you think about it. Sure the Joker goes down eventually, but he usually accomplishes at least SOME of what he was trying to do. Which is generally "have fun and hurt people". Consider that the whole "slow death laughing toxin" from the Animated Series was supposed to be somehow LESS''less'' traumatic than the Joker actually killing people...

* ''[[Toy Story (franchise)|Toy Story 3]]'': What if Bonnie grew too old for her to own Woody, Buzz Lightyear, and the rest of Andy's (former) toys?

* At the end of ''[[Hercules (Disney1997 film)|Hercules]]'' Herc defeats his archnemesis [[Everybody Hates Hades|Hades]] and decides to stay a mortal with Megara. The problem is, however, that Hades like all gods, is actually immortal, and ''everybody'' goes to the Underworld after they die...

* ''[[It's a Wonderful Life]]'': The tropes of [[Straw Man Has a Point]] and [[Inferred Holocaust]] overlap.

** George makes it clear that he wants to leave Bedford Falls, go to college, and travel the world. All of his dreams are destroyed and he feels he must commit suicide to regain hope. Potter is correct that George’s life has not resulted in personal happiness. [https://web.archive.org/web/20160328052504/http://www.agonybooth.com/movies/Its_a_Wonderful_Life_1946.aspx Agony Booth], [http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/19/movies/19wond.html The New York Times], [https://web.archive.org/web/20110306003808/http://www.salon.com/entertainment/feature/2001/12/22/pottersville/index.html Salon], [https://web.archive.org/web/20110305151932/http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/film_salon/2010/12/24/its_wonderful_life_terrifying_movie_ever/index.html Salon again], [[wikipedia:It's a Wonderful Life#Reception|Wikipedia]], and apparently Cracked.com

* In [[The Andromeda Strain (2008 miniseries)|the miniseries remake of ''[[The Andromeda Strain]]'']], humanity in the future sends a sample of a [[Nanomachines|Nanobot virus]] dead set on killing with humanity with [[Cryptic Conversation|(very roundabout)]] instructions on how to beat it and (presumably) to keep some o' that cure around for when it comes in the future. They stop the virus, but continue with the [[Green Aesop|deep sea excavation]] that will [[Fantastic Aesop|cause the extinction of the only thing capable of stopping it]], so the future is [[Neglectful Precursors|completely screwed because of us.]] This is not helped by the fact that a shadowy government organization kept a small sample of the Andromeda Strain, and it's even implied to have gotten loose since the message sent from the future referred to its storage code.

* At the end of [[The Day the Earth Stood Still (2008 film)|the remake of ''[[The Day the Earth Stood Still]]'']], Klaatu sacrifices his physical form to stop the Gort nanobot cloud... by unleashing a massive EMP-like pulse that covers the entire Earth. The last few minutes of the movie show ''entire cities'' shutting down... and the movie ends. Now, there are two ways to interpret this: the pulse shut down all electronics temporarily (maybe even shutting down all mechanical devices as shown by how Helen's simple mechanical watch no longer works after the blast), which would cause the death of hundreds of thousands of people (such as airplane passengers, people dependent on life support, people with pacemakers...) or it shut down all electronics on Earth ''permanently'' which would not only cause the ''aforementioned'' deaths but eventually lead to the further deaths of ''millions'' due to lack of heating, food spoilage, and the inevitable global mayhem. The implications and the actual effect of such an event are simply ignored due to the movie's abrupt end. The lack of global communications also means that those who knew what happened and why would be unable to warn everyone else why they needed to change. Thus creating the very likely possibility that Klaatu will come back and think we 'squandered' our second chance (when the warning was actually lost) and kill us all.

* ''[[Hellboy (film)|Hellboy II: The Golden Army]]'' has the fairies forced underground by humanity's expansion into their rightful territory. With the entire royal family dead and the Golden Army unusable, their civilisation will most likely be split by rival claimants to the throne, and the BPRD has lost its heroic members, so there's nothing standing in humanity's way to continue expanding, driving the fairies to extinction. And this is without taking into account that in the films, [[Humans Are Bastardsthe Real Monsters]], to the point that when the forest god dies it creates a forest compared in the novelisation to Eden - which humans then pollute and destroy.

** Averted in the comics, the whole world is slowly decaying, not because [[Humans Are Bastardsthe Real Monsters]] (in fact they're one of the nicest groups), but because it's the [[End of an Age]].

* In ''[[Independence Day]]'', the [[Easily-Thwarted Alien Invasion|unmitigated and total victory over the aliens]] is wonderfully uplifting, until you realize that the aliens blew up all the major nations' capitals and several dozen of its primary cities in the days they went unopposed. Did we mention that, thanks to industrialization, around 90% of the developed world's population now live in cities? Also, the effects of a ship 1/4 the size of the moon blowing up (due to a ''nuclear explosion'', no less) cannot be good. Especially not if the [httphttps://web.archive.org/web/20060728101642/http://intuitor.com/moviephysics/independ.html theory] that the alien weapons were powered by antimatter is correct. They also point out that a ship one quarter of the moon's size in geostationary orbit would cause massive tidal waves and earthquakes just by being there. Still, on the glass half full side, we also see that there is a city still standing: Sydney. As in Australia. A very civilized and quite technological city. They concentrated on the US as well, with only a few ships elsewhere, so large parts of Europe and Asia would be still bustling and they could help the human race get back on it's feet.

* In ''[[Logan's Run]]'', all the people are forced to evacuate their city of [[Crystal Spires and Togas]], when the [[AIA.I. Is a Crapshoot|Evil AI]] that ran it is defeated. Despite the evil, it was a beautiful and decadent [[Utopia]] where no one had wants or needed to know a valuable skill or trade. [[Utopia Justifies the Means|The downside]] was it killed them at 30. To put it plainly, these humans are entirely dependent on machines to provide and don't even know what the Sun is. The Sun! Saying 90% of the thousands of refugees died in the winter would be optimistic, as they knew nothing about wilderness survival and had only one senile elder human to teach them how to survive.

* ''[[Resident Evil: Extinction|Resident Evil Extinction]]'' has the last known remnants of humanity flee to Alaska in a four seater helicopter (don't worry, it managed to carry all two dozen of them. It was made out of a [[Clown Car Base]], you see). It's worth mentioning that the T-Virus has completely killed all other plant and animal life. So really, humanity is boned with or without the zombies.

* In ''[[X-Men (film)|X2: X-Men United]]'', the eponymous X-Men [[Enemy Mine|team with]] the Brotherhood of Mutants to stop [[General Ripper|William Stryker]] from using a [[Doomsday Device]] from causing the death of every mutant in the world. [[Magneto]], the only one outfitted with a protective helmet, stopped the device half way and turned it against humans. The film doesn't dwell on it much after the device is fully shut down, but think on this: everyone on earth suffered seizures, first a tiny minority all at once then the rest of the population all at once, within a few minutes. Commuters, pilots, swimmers, skydivers, people with heart conditions, everyone in a hospital... at least thousands of people must have died. The third movie not only ignores these events, they actually suggest that the relations between humans and mutants somehow got better! Plus, even if no one died, every mutant in the world just had painful, highly visible seizures in front of their normal human neighbors, and in turn was perfectly fine when every human had them. If Mystique's small scale [[Superpower Meltdown]] is any indication, some of them will also have very noticeably [[Broken Masquerade|blown their cover]] and taken all ambiguity out of [[The Unmasked World|existence]], and made themselves even bigger targets for hate crimes.

** [[It Got Worse|It gets worse]]. Vulcan was the voice of peace and reason in the Federation. With it gone we should expect a much more violent history. This means lesseless hippie-talk of peace and diplomacy, and more [[They Changed It, Now It Sucks|shooting bad guys]]. Alternately, consider how much deference the world gave to America in general and New York in particular after 9/11: feeling bad for the few survivors of Vulcan, the Federation may allow them too much influence.

* Famously, ''[[The Sound of Music]]'' ends with the von Trapps heading off on foot to Switzerland, which they claim is "just over the mountains" from Salzburg. The problem is, [[Hollywood Atlas|it's not]]. ''Germany'' is though. Specifically Berchtesgaden, the closest thing [[Adolf Hitler|Hitler]] had to a "home". That is of course considering whether or not they make it over the Alps in the first place, with no protection or supplies. ''Also'', the heroic Nurses who [[Crowning Moment of Funny|sabotaged the Nazi's vehicles]]... were probably treated to more than a slap on the wrist. Nazis, eh? Bastards.

** Which is why the real von Trapp family escaped to Italy, then got to Switzerland from there. But that would've been too complicated for a Rodgers &and Hammerstein musical.

* ''[[Surrogates (film)|Surrogates]]'': Somebody sets up a plot to destroy all the surrogates and kill the humans linked into them in the process. The hero manually engages the safety overrides on all the pods but at the last minute decides to have the weapon go off anyway, destroying the surrogates while leaving human beings intact. So one billion surrogates conducting business, operating machines, driving cars, etc., suddenly shut down and one billion atrophied shut-ins must now emerge to try to deal with the ensuing mayhem.

** Except, [[Chekhov's Gun|as seen in the beginning of the film]], the [[McGuffin]] in question actually grants superpowers to everybody holding it, way stronger than the yeallowyellow sun could. As long as Supergirl holds it, she will be invincible.

* The 1935 [[Errol Flynn]] movie ''[[Captain Blood]]'' ends with Flynn's character appointed the new governor of the English colony on Jamaica, based out Port Royal, by the new king, William III. The revolution that brought William to the throne took place in 1688. Port Royal was [[wikipedia:Port Royal#Earthquake of 1692 and its aftermath|completely destroyed by an earthquake]] in 1692.

* In the Chinese science-fiction story [[Translation Train Wreck|''Barrage Jamming''/''Universal Jamming''/''Full-Band Interception'']] by Liu Cixin, The Russians/Chinese ([[SchroedingersSchrödinger's Cat|depending on the version you're reading]]) defeat NATO by ramming the ''SUN'' with a gigantic fusion-engine laden spaceship thereby creating a ridiculously huge EMP. NATO loses all communications and is defeated. Nobody seems to give a damn how to deal with the magnetic field of the earth and all the radiation afterwards. Though in some parts of the story, it [[Literary Agent Hypothesis|is referred to as "history"]], so humanity must have survived somehow.

* The original ''[[Battlestar Galactica Classic(1978 TV series)|The original ''Battlestar Galactica]]'']] was essentially a show about some 50,000 people surviving after their home planets were wiped out. Despite this, ''by the end of [[The Pilot]]'', the cast essentially ignored the genocide.

** In the [[Darker and Grittier]] (and how!) [[Battlestar Galactica Reimagined(2004 TV series)|re-imagined series]], the realisation that there's no one left is brought crashing down on the survivors in all subsequent seasons (though the losses they all would have suffered in the initial attack are continually ignored), the one glimmer of hope being when the Battlestar ''Pegasus'' showed up. And that turned out to be commanded by a loony, power-mad admiral.

* Every episode of ''[[Power Rangers]]'' becomes disturbing to watch when you see how many buildings are toppled by megazords and giant monsters. To be fair, the writers sometimes [[Hand Wave]] this by putting in abandoned places or quarries. Also, one has to wonder what the casualties were in such episodes like "Countdown to Destruction", where all of the [[Big Bad|Big Bads]]s from the first six seasons decided to conquer Earth and some other planets. The whole city gets raided. Even a [[Humongous Mecha|megazord]] gets toppled by a bunch of [[Mooks]].

* In the ''[[Doctor Who]]'' serial ''[[Doctor Who/Recap/S6 E1/E01 The Dominators|The Dominators]]'', the Dominators' plan to explode the planet into a radioactive mess as a fuel source is foiled. But the Dominators have been repeatedly sending messages to the main fleet to come that way. When the fleet arrives, will it sit back and take it? Especially against a [[Perfect Pacifist People]]?

* The ''[[Dungeons and& Dragons]]'' supplement "Elder Evils" is basically designed around this concept. Yes, all of the Big Bads can be defeated (or at least can be temporarily driven off), but their appearance irrevocably changes the world. Take Atropus, the World Born Dead, as an example: even if you manage to repel him, his presence has unleashed hordes of undead upon your world and killed off most of the living inhabitants. The awakening of Leviathan, a serpent so large it encircles the planet, has caused earthquakes and tsunamis that have decimated civilization. Yeah, you defeated the Cosmic Horror... but at what cost?

** Some of them, such as Father <s>[[Narm|Narmic]]ic</s> Llymic, specifically bring up the resultant epic-scale disaster.

* Even the best endings in the "Time of Judgement" supplements for the ''[[Old World of Darkness]]'' are usually a little horrifying. Only Wormwood, the canonical ending of ''[[Vampire: The Masquerade]]'', is limited in its scope, and even then it would have a significant impact-- withimpact—with all those ancient, powerful, influential vampires ashes in the wind, what happens when, say, the creature that had turned the CEO of <s>Kellog Brown and Root</s> Pentex into little more than a hand puppet abruptly vanishes? Still, Wormwood was clear that despite all the rationalizations, Vampires ARE A BAD THING. If nothing else, in the [[Crapsack World]] that is the Old World of Darkness, the loss of all Homo Nocturnis is only a benefit.

** One sourcebook (or perhaps the original rulebook?) stated that the primary issue with mortals was their desire to stamp their mark on history, something that immortals are rather more relaxed about. Humans created nuclear weapons, but it is the work of the immortals that ensured they weren't being used... Since, all World of Darkness sourcebooks are written from the point of view of the relevant faction, it's likely that this is Camarilla material -- whichmaterial—which makes it an ironic statement, seeing as the Camarilla are the ones who are most aggressive about influencing mortal affairs.

* Generally an [[Averted Trope]] in ''[[Warhammer 4000040,000]]'''s media - known for trying hard to be [[Grimdark]], it does not shy away from the implications of a Chaos invasion upon a planet, even if beaten back - many people certainly will be driven [[Brown Note|irreparibly insane]] [[More Than Mind Control|or end up serving Chaos]] and have to be put down, and even those who do not are likely to be killed because [[He Knows Too Much|they've seen too much anyway and it is feared they'll suffer from either of those down the line later]] (especially likely when [[Judge, Jury, and Executioner|the Inquisition]] has to step in), or [[Pyrrhic Victory|the planet itself may be rendered barely useful despite victory]]. The use of [[Earthshattering Kaboom|Exterminatus]] is generally because a planet is simply not worth fighting over for the Imperium as opposed to very explicitly killing everything on it, often as an act of mercy for the population.

* There's an interesting example in the [[All There in the Manual|novelization]] of the [[Lucas ArtsLucasArts]] game ''[[The Dig]]'', albeit part of the [[Backstory]] rather than the main plot. The Cocytans, a race of [[Sufficiently Advanced Aliens]], decided to share their technological wonders with the rest of the galaxy, so they sent off a bunch of probes disguised as asteroids. These probes were programmed to "show up" in close proximity to likely planets and (apparently) threaten to crash into them unless the inhabitants of said planet came to take a look, at which point they would be kidnapped and whisked off back to Cocytus to meet the friendly aliens. (Meanwhile, the Cocytans [[Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence|Ascended To A Higher Plane Of Existence]] and got stuck there, leaving rather a cold reception back at home.) The [[Fridge Logic]] comes in when you ask yourself the question: would the asteroid ships have ''crashed into'' the planets they targeted if they didn't happen to have a native society that was sufficiently developed to stop them? This is, perhaps mercifully, left unanswered.

* The first ''[[Homeworld]]'' ends with the Hiigaran Exiles defeating [[The Empire]] that [[Disproportionate Retribution|saturation-bombed their adopted home planet with thermobaric weapons, killing three hundred million people, for violating a treaty signed by members of their species from four thousand years ago]] and killing its deranged tyrant, aided and abetted by rebel Imperial Navy units. A [[Genre Savvy]] player might well wonder what was going to happen to said empire now that its [[Warhammer 4000040,000|God-Emperor of Man]] expy was dead and buried. According to background material in ambiguously-canon midquel ''Cataclysm'', the answer is "nothing good"; {{spoiler|the resulting power vacuum kicked off a civil war that ended with the old Empire messily Balkanised and an awful lot of military hardware in the hands of Imperial loyalists, warlords or pirates. And then the flesh-eating technogenic [[Cosmic Horror]] turns up.}}

* In ''[[EveEVE Online]]'', the player character cannot be killed even if the ship he is on is destroyed, but it is made explicit in the [https://web.archive.org/web/20150427081645/http://www.eveonline.com/background/potw/default.asp?cid=14-07-05 supplementary materials] supplied by CCP that the ship has a largely-full conventional crew (the player character, a "capsuleer", replaces all command and control crew, but maintenance, etc. is still needed, and on large ships, that's a lot of people). A ship being destroyed is an inconvenience for the player, who in the worst case scenario is transferred to a clone and can start again in a new ship. The rest of his crew (who may number one or two in the smallest of the frigates all the way to tens of thousands in the city sized titans), it's better to just not think about.

** Then there are the NPC ships you can fight, most of which are not capsuleer-controlled, so even the smallest involve full crews being killed off for (virtual) real. See the [[Refuge in Audacity]] entry for ''[[EveEVE Online|Eve]]''.

** A rather sad example in the Shivering Isles expansion -- Soexpansion—So the [[Player Character]] succeeded in {{spoiler|putting Sheogorath's curse to an end, freeing Jyggalag to be himself again, protecting the Realm of Madness from destruction and becoming a ''Deadric Lord'' themselves. [[A God Is You]]! But Jyggalag, by nature, hates madness utterly and violently. You are now the god of madness. The two of you used to depend and like each other... once.}} [[Skyrim]] leaves things ambiguous, but this much is clear: there are only a few hints to prove that the being now called Sheogorath was ever the Champion of Cyrodiil, and Jyggalag is nowhere to be found.

*** Additionally, the Mass Effect 1 codex establishes that the Citadel weighs 7.11 billion metric tons and is 44km44&nbsp;km in length. {{spoiler|In every ending variant save for "Control", the Citadel explodes over Earth. For the sake of reference, a much smaller object hit the Earth with an energy output a billion times that of the atomic bombs dropped on Japan, 65 million years ago. You know, the thing that's believed to have killed the dinosaurs!}}

*** However, in {{spoiler|Control Ending, the Mass Relays and the Citadel remain mostly in one piece. Unlike the Synthesis or Destroy Endings, the only downside in it is Shepard's death(Arguable. Since s/he's now controlling the Reapers, he might still be "alive" in some sense), but the Control Ending not only prevents [[Inferred Holocaust]], but allows Humanity the control of the Reapers. [[Fridge Brilliance|Who's to say you couldn't use them]] to repair all the damage they made? And even research their technology and use of Element Zero to find solutions for the Eezo Earth Poisoning mentioned above? the Especially now, that all races are united and [[Reasonable Authority Figure|She]][[The Hero|pard]] is controlling the Reapers? It's a [[Bittersweet Ending]] for Shepard and his/her friends and possible [[Love Interest]], but a far happier ending for the universe as a whole.}}

* Between ''[[EarthboundEarthBound]]'' and ''[[Mother 3]]''. {{spoiler|Because of the "End of the World" revealed by Leder, everyone from [[MOTHER 1]] and [[EarthboundEarthBound]] died, excepting a select few. This includes the lovable Tendas, Ness's Mom, Teddy, Ana, Loid, Dr. Andonuts, Poo, and possibly the innocent Mr. Saturns, although it's possible that the Mr. Saturns came on their own "White Ship", or that the Tendas hid in the Lost Underworld. Because of the purposely ambiguous ending, it's left to the player to decide whether all these people come back to life or not. Of course, this all depends how long after [[EarthboundEarthBound]] Mother 3 takes place.}} So we KNOW about the Holocaust, it's just the inferred part is who died because of it.

** The [[Noodle Incident]] of "Bring Your Daughter to Work Day", which is implied to have coincided with GLaDOS deciding to murder everyone in the Enrichment Center. So, she slaughtered a bunch of kids with neurotoxin, they became test subjects and died in her [[Death Course]] test chambers, or they became vegetables when the Relaxation Center failed -- youfailed—you pick. {{spoiler|An [[Easter Egg]] reveals Chell to have been one of the girls in question.}}

** Several of the alternate Caves from the Perpetual Testing Initiative implied that many more of this happened in alternate universes, usually involving alternate versions of the pre-recorded messages in the main game, such as Mantis-men overrunning Aperature, a sentient cloud siphoning off people's skins and a space prison escape. Lampshaded with the Sick Boy, who Cave Prime specifically mentioned had died to eliminate any ambiguity on your end. Most of these end up saving Cave Prime's universe by solving his money problem {{spoiler|and scaring him out of building [[G La DOSGLaDOS]]}}.

* The ''[[X (video game)|X]] Universe'' falls to this after the events of ''[[X (video game)|X3: Albion Prelude]]''. The [[Precursors]] shut down the entire [[Portal Network]] to contain the [[AIA.I. Is a Crapshoot|incredibly aggressive Xenon terraformer AI]]. Doing so on a small scale in the past has actually been a good solution to bad problems, but this means not only will the [[Five Races|younger species]] be incapable of travelling or communicating with each other or their own colony planets, they won't even know where the other sectors ''actually are'' to ''try'' and contact each other for years. Many sectors have nothing but manned manufacturing plants, most of which aren't self-sustaining, and even many planetary sectors rely heavily on trade.

** This is also used in ''[[Transformers Armada]],'' where for some magical reason all the discovered Mini-Con panels seem to be in deserted areas. None of them ever pop up under, say, an apartment building in the Bronx.<ref> To be fair, in the original japanese series, one probably did pop up in the city, but was edited out [[Too Soon|for taste reasons.]] </ref>

* This trope is why [[The Fairly Odd ParentsOddParents|Timmy Turner]] always finishes his [[Snap Back]] [[Status Quo Is God]]-restoring wishes with "and that everything was back to normal!"

* An obscured recurring theme in ''[[Sym-Bionic Titan]]'' every time the [[Monster of the Week]] trashes the city. But not even [[Conveniently Empty Building|Conveniently Empty Buildings]]s can overshadow the gianormously huge crater left at the very heart of the city (See image above). Unless anybody who worked in the area had called it a day, then infrastructure damage would be the least of their worries. The [[Unreliable Narrator|unreliable news channel]] said the collateral was no less than 14 billion dollars in damage along with some shaken populace. [[What Do You Mean It's Not for Kids?|Casualties were not even mentioned]]...

*** [[Star Trek: Generations|I plan to live forever.]]