Inferred Holocaust: Difference between revisions

{{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"}}

 

 

[[Fridge Logic]] doesn't just find plot holes; it can make your typical happy ending into a [[Downer Ending]], and render even the most flawless moral victory into [[Black and Gray Morality]]. How? By helping the viewer realize that the "survivors" at the end of the movie don't have a future, even though they can't help but celebrate as the [[Evil Tower of Ominousness]] explodes [[Load-Bearing Boss|with its master's demise]]. When authors use large and amazing technologies and world or even galaxy spanning threats, they run the risk of letting the excitement of [[Stuff Blowing Up]] get the better of them and not think through how the survivors will make a living afterward.

 

{{examples}}

== Media in General ==

* All cartoons that have humans interact with animals, short of tortoises and parrots, leave out that that creature [[We Are as Mayflies|is as mayflies]] and will most likely be dead inside of 20 years. ''[[Ratatouille]]''? Remy won't last more than five, so Linguini better start learning how to cook himself. ''[[A Bug's Life]]''? Yeah, they'll all be dead by that time next year most likely. Also every movie with a dog or cat.

** [[Lampshade Hanging|Lampshaded]] on ''[[Family Guy]]'': "Wow, Brian, it's moments like this that make me sad that you're gonna die fifty years before I do."

** Also lampshaded in [[Roald Dahl]]'s book ''[[The Witches]]'': The protagonist not only accepts that he will remain a mouse forever, he is extremely optimistic about his short life span. He is glad that he won't outlive his grandmother.

*** That only applies to the book though. He gets turned back into a human by the Grand-High witch's assistant (after she made a [[Heel Face Turn]]) at the end of the movie.

** Played for [[Black Comedy]] in a ''Citizen Dog'' strip where this is stated to be the reason why old people find pets comforting. "[The average life expectancy for a dog is] just 12 years? Heh heh... I feel better already!"

* Your typical [[Zombie Apocalypse]] movie has this, albeit in some it's part of the underlying horror (or helps the ambiance at any rate).

 

 

* ''[[Blue Gender]]''. A few humans have survived [[Gaia's Vengeance]], and they can all live in harmony with mother nature, free at last of technology! Then the [[Fridge Logic]] sets in - the only survivors will be physically strong people. If you're a cripple, blind, deaf, have a curable terminal disease, etc. then you're hosed. Mother Nature hates you and you have no right to live.

* Inverted in ''[[The End of Evangelion]]''. {{spoiler|The world is supposed to have ended, with everyone but two people (see [http://www.science.mcmaster.ca/biology/CBCN/genetics/skw_paper.htm Rule of 50/500]) converted to protoplasmic Tang. However, it is explicitly stated that nobody died, they all just lost their individuality to the point that they ended up in one big group hug on the metaphysical level, and implied that even normal humans can regain their humanoid individuality with a decent show of willpower. Sort of an [[Inferred Survival]] for everyone on earth.}} Which then leads directly to this trope being played straight. {{spoiler|Unless the threshold for coming back from the Dirac sea is so low that plants and animals start coming back as well, the survivors would perish in short order from lack of food, and if they avoided that, lack of oxygen.}}

* ''[[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—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.

* ''[[Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann]]'' has an inferred ''extinction'': After humans retake the surface, they live (largely) at peace with the Beastmen. However, Beastmen can't reproduce and all of the existing ones were made in [[People Jars]] by Lordgenome. Since they're apparently not making any more Beastmen, they'll eventually all die out (except Viral, because he's immortal) unless Beastmen have access to the cloning technology that Lordgenome used in the first place.

* Really, the champions at this are the ''[[Dirty Pair]]''. Anything they get involved with has a 50% chance of causing mass collateral damage, and it's probably not healthy to dwell on the numbers of deaths that can (indirectly or directly) be laid at Kei and Yuri's feet.

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

# There were also animals.

** Another explanation would be that since Lala Ru is ''water itself'', she mentally controlled the path of the water to avoid all the aforementioned from happening.

* In ''[[Bleach]]'', killing a Hollow (unless it's with a Quincy's powers) causes it to go to Hell if it was evil in life or Soul Society otherwise. Menos and Arrancar are collective beings of hundreds to thousands (possibly even more, at higher levels) of souls, and presumably each time one of THEM bites it, all of the souls within should seem to go to their proper place. Now consider that a massive group of Menos and an entire ''civilization'' of Arrancar have been mowed down as a part of Aizen's power-grab. As of late, the fate of those souls is uncertain {{spoiler|since we saw Szayel and Aaroniero in Hell. Arrancar souls apparently don't split up, which means that the possibly thousands of pluses that were eaten by the hollows they are made up of during their life are gone forever. Nice afterlife, innit?}}

** The ''[[Dragon Ball]] Z'' universe post Buu Saga is both this played straight and inverted at the same time. Everyone except a small handful of people were killed when Earth was destroyed, but wish to bring them back specified that only the good people were to be brought back. An entire world with nothing but good people. On the one hand, there should be massive instability due to the absence of all the world's non good people. On the other hand, with nothing but good people, the world may well become a Utopia. Of course, Vegeta is judged "good" in spite of his recent turn to heroism being more than canceled out by the entire worlds he'd slaughtered or tried to slaughter so the definition is probably very loose. Could be a case of [[Rousseau Was Right]].]

*** Don't forget that Buu actually destroyed two planets full of intelligent beings. Since one of those planets was not wished back into existence, then we have the [[Fridge Horror]] that the good people and animals on the planet died again if the wish accidentally included them. Plus, there may have been people who would have been willing to redeem themselves and become good after spending sometime in Hell. Thus, a few people may have been denied a fair chance. Also, please note, the term "good people" included animals.

* Similar to the ''Dragonball Z'' example above, in ''[[GoLion]]'' the series ends with the deaths of the [[Big Bad]] and his [[The Dragon|Dragons]]. Cue the ensuing war to take his place, and the billions of resulting deaths.

* A lot of Lolicon and Shotacon Hentai can end up this way if you know how damaging incest and pedophilia can be to little kids.

 

== Art ==

== Comic Books ==

* ''[[Astro City]]'' has a beauty of a discussion of this trope—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 he actually tells the audience the kinds of things he'd have thought of back in the day—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.

* [[Lampshade Hanging|Lampshaded]] and parodied in Scott McCloud's one-shot, over-sized comic ''Destroy!'': Two super-powerful heroes fight in New York City (and the surface of the Moon), destroying a good many buildings in the process. Until the very end, the only dialogue is '''Destroy!''' quickly met with '''Shut up!!'''; at the end, a bystander (police?) opines, 'Good thing no-one was hurt.'

* 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.

 

== Films -- Animated ==

** Not to mention that Pocahontas herself died at 21.

** Brighten up - Pocahontas the movie was a fairytale version of the real thing, so for all we know, the British king was "Colours of the Wind"-ed and decided to leave Virginia alone from there on.