Shadow of Impending Doom: Difference between revisions

If you're in a cartoon, an [[Anvil on Head|anvil, safe, or piano]] can fall on you at any time -- often without warning. But when [[Rule of Funny|comedic effect]] demands, your imminent flattening can be several seconds away, portended by a [[Bomb Whistle]] and the slowly expanding [[Shadow of Impending Doom]].

As this shadow - often [[Lazy Artist|circular]] - engulfs the soon-to-be-crushed (an especially large anvil or rock may darken the entire scene), it will be met or ignored with a number of stock responses (such as wondering why it got dark so early). a particularly oblivious flattenee clapping the dust off his hands in satisfaction of a job well done, while the merely stupid will watch in confusion as their partner or adversary flees the scene; if he does notice, there's a good chance the falling object is far to big to escape -- expect him to simply stand there, resigned to his fate, perhaps [[Death by Looking Up|looking to the sky]] in bug-eyed terror, perhaps producing a tiny umbrella or [[Talking with Signs|sign reading "Eep!"]] On rare occasion they might run back and forth within the shadow, too panicked to think to actually leave it. Note that this implies both that the object is falling down perfectly straight and that there's light directly above it.

Of course, the character could try to escape, at which point the anvil will either follow him somehow(with or without the shadow updating) or land on a sloped surface and slide toward its target. But rest assured, those caught in the [[Shadow of Impending Doom|Shadow]] ''will'' meet their (temporary) doom.

* Not a cartoon use per se, but several boss encounters in ''[[World of Warcraft]]'' feature [[Death From Above|plummeting meteors]] or other forms of messy death that must be avoided by players; this is usually advertised by an obvious visual effect on the targeted area several seconds before anyone within it goes splat. Players who die repeatedly due to failing to move out from under the [[Shadow of Impending Doom]] tend to get laughed at by those with sharper reflexes. Some memorable examples include Kael'thas Sunstrider's Flamestrike, Kil'jaeden's Armageddon, Kel'thuzad's Shadow Fissure, the Twilight Fissure used by Sartharion's drake minibosses, Flame Leviathan's multiple [[Kill Sat|Kill Sats]], Hodir's ice stalagmites, Freya's solar beams, Mimiron's rockets<ref> boasting the highest raw damage in the whole game out of all abilities that don't just kill you no matter the HP</ref>, General Vezax's shadow crushes, rocket launchers during the battleships encounter, viscous goo thrown by Putricide during Festergut's hardmode encounter, [[Averted Trope|sudden ]]''[[Averted Trope|lack]]'' of markers for same goo thrown by Putricide in his own battle and exploding cluster slime bombs during Rotface battle, back to visible markers for vortexes of the Blood Princes, ice geysers during Valithria encounter, Sindragosa's frost bombs and [[Big Bad|Lich King]]'s Shadow Traps.

* One of the minigames in the first ''[[Rayman|Rayman: Raving Rabbids]]'' game involves walking a blindfold bunny around a small landscape full of cartoonish instruments of pain, and scoring points for every misfortune that befalls the miserable protagonist. The target score is 51,000 points, and the player might soon discover that this is a tall order indeed, for the scores awarded for blundering into a cactus, or for stepping on a rake or perhaps walking into a beartrap, are generally a matter only of a few tens. It's then that the player notices the [[Shadow of Impending Doom]] at the centre of the game area, which is gradually growing larger and larger. The payoff comes when a colossal 50,000 ton weight crashes down covering the entire arena, awarding 50,000 points on the spot...