Dying Race: Difference between revisions

{{quote|''"A thousand years they have ruled. Yet now, there are only ten. A dying race, ruled by a dying Emperor, imprisoned within themselves, in a dying land."''|''[[Dark Crystal]]''}}

 

 

A race of sentient beings is past its prime. There are only a few of them left, and they're slowly dying out.

* ''[[Metroid]]'': It's kind of implied in [[All There in the Manual|the manga]] that this is why the [[Sufficiently Advanced Aliens|Chozo]] trained Samus to be a warrior when they adopted her.

* The Shadow Angels in ''[[Genesis of Aquarion]]''.

* This is something that worries the vampires in ''[[Karin]]''. There are more vampires dying than there are children being born. The protagonist's parents are looked up to by younger couples since they have three children while most other parents only have one at most.

 

** The Ents from ''[[The Lord of the Rings]]'' are a much better fit even than the Elves. Although they're nearly immortal, the fact that all of their females have vanished means they can't reproduce themselves, and therefore they are on a slow but inevitable road to extinction.

*** ''Everyone'' in that setting is dying. Elves are leaving, Ents are unable to reproduce, Dwarves are... the one dwarf we hear from jokes about how rare dwarven women are. Goblins and Orcs find themselves dying off in droves after the fall of Mordor, reduced to being monsters under beds and gremlins that mess with machinery. The last Balrog and the last Giant Spider die and retreat from the world, respectively, in the course of that story, and the last of the [[Giant Flyers]] that the Riders use dies as well. The time of human heroes is over and will never recover, which means that even humanity is doomed to a slow, sick death. The only ones untouched are the Hobbits, and even they are breeding only slowly, and growing increasingly human-ish.

* Thomas Burnett Swann used this in most of his novels for all the mythological creatures that were being displaced by encroaching humans.

* The people of Elric's race in [[The Elric Saga]].

* The Neanderthals from the ''[[Earth's Children]]'' series are, of course, destined for extinction, although it's hinted that at least some of their hybrid offspring may interbreed with modern humans and so have descendents.

* In the ''[[Harry Potter]]'' universe, the giants can be considered as such: Wizards have killed many of them, and the few that are left have a tendancy to fight each other to the death.

* [[Our Dragons Are Different|Kantri]] of [[Tales of Kolmar]] are just starting to enter this phase in ''Song In The Silence''. Five thousand years ago the total population of sentient "greater" Kantri was cut in half and the remaining two hundred retreated to isolation on an island. In that time their numbers haven't rebuilt at all, in fact the opposite is true, though the dying is very slow. The species is just becoming collectively dispirited and there are fewer mated pairs and fewer births all the time; they live long, but not forever. Only a few of them recognize that it's happening in that book. {{spoiler|In later books it's solved, and they manage to flourish.}}

 

** "Return to Tomorrow" featured a race that had been all but destroyed in a massive war thousands of years ago, and by the time the episode occurred only three individuals had survived as [[Soul Jar|disembodied consciousnesses preserved in storage devices]].

* ''[[Star Trek: The Next Generation|Star Trek the Next Generation]]'' episode "Up the Long Ladder". The inhabitants of the planet Mariposa reproduce by cloning and are suffering from a disorder called [http://memory-alpha.org/wiki/Replicative_fading replicative fading] that occurs when DNA is cloned too many times. If not corrected, they won't be able to reproduce.

* ''[[Earth: Final Conflict]]'': the Taelons are dying.

* ''[[Farscape]]'''s Ancients, the ones who gave John the wormhole information.