The End Is Nigh (trope): Difference between revisions

''But you tell me over and over and over again, my friend

''You don't believe we're on the eve of destruction"''

 

An obligatory trope for any depiction of [[The End of the World as We Know It]] or other potential disasters is some [[Crazy Homeless People|crazy-looking person]] (usually holding a sign) or street preacher declaring that we should all repent because the world is coming to an end. Ha! [[Cassandra Truth|As if that will ever happen!]]

* Sight gag in an Italian comic book. Two men, holding signs that claim "The world will end tomorrow" and "The world will end the day after tomorrow" respectively, are beating each other in the background. In the foreground, a third man is reading a newspaper article titled "Is the world ending today?"

* In one [[Batman]] storyline, the [[Anti-Hero]] Anarky distributes money to a wide variety of anti-establishment groups and individuals, one of whom is a doomsday prophet who uses part of the money to pay homeless people to walk around Gotham wearing sandwich-board signs proclaiming his message. (Unfortunately, he uses the rest of the money to finance his plan to blow up most of downtown Gotham, which he believes will kick-start the apocalypse.)

 

== Film ==

* In ''[[The Seventh Seal]],'' a radical flagelante comes before a crowd to tell them they're all doomed, and says it several times in succession. Lots of people actually pay attention to him, though, because they're all afraid of [[The Black Death]].

 

* ''[[Doctor Who]]'' ("The Shakespeare Code"). The doomsayer is quite delighted that the end of the world is happening, crying: "I told ye so! I told ye so!"

* [[Miniseries|The mini series version]] of [[Stephen King]]'s ''[[The Stand]]'' featured one of these, played by Kareem Abdul Jabbar of all people. He goes all around [[New York City]] screaming "Bring out your dead" in a reference to the Black Plague, even before people start dying en masse from a disease with a 99% fatality rate. He actually survives the plague, and continues his doomcrying until Randall Flagg kills him personally.

** The character was present in the book too, although in an even smaller role than he had in the miniseries. Like in the series, he does the "Bring out your dead" shouting, but IIRC is a short, overweight white guy who runs away from Larry when Larry tries to approach him.

* ''[[Buffy the Vampire Slayer]]''. Towards the end of Season 7 as the population of Sunnydale pack up and flee, a crazy homeless guy is hauled into the police station shouting the [[Arc Words]] "From beneath you, it devours."

 

== Music ==

* Pretty much the whole point of [[Jethro Tull]]'s album ''Stormwatch''.

 

== Newspaper Comics ==

* ''[[The Far Side]]'' has a cartoon with a flea holding up a sign saying "The end of the dog is coming." He's right.

* A cartoon in ''[[Private Eye]]'' parodied the media's constant scaremongering over issues like climate change and terrorism by having ''everyone'' in a street wearing "The End Is Nigh" sandwich boards, except one man, who is scorned and called 'weirdo' by the others.

 

== Tabletop Games ==

* ''[[Warhammer Fantasy Battle]]'' features Flagellants, mobs of unhinged religious fanatics who are convinced that the latest Chaos invasion, Orc Waaagh!, Dark Elf raid, Skaven uprising, Undead attack, civil war... anyway, they're convinced that it's the End Times and want to take part in the final battle. Since their fervor makes them fearless and they like to bludgeon enemies to death with two-handed flails, Empire generals tolerate their presence, even if army morale tends to suffer slightly.

 

== Video Games ==

* A homeless guy in Santa Monica does this in ''[[Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines]]''. Someone familiar with the game's plot and the [[Old World of Darkness]] [[Metaplot]] will find grains of truth in most of what he says.

* In the "Enter the Metro" trailer for ''[[Metro 2033 (video game)|Metro Last Light]]'', a scraggly homeless man is standing in the middle of a street in Moscow preaching about the end of the world - then he laughs as the [[World War III|air raid alarms sound and ICBMs launch in the background]].

 

== Web Comics ==

* The crazy old guy in ''[[Exiern]]'' who keeps walking around shouting "DOOM!" and narrating to no one that anyone in the strip can see.

* In ''[[Sinfest]]'', [https://web.archive.org/web/20140209163753/http://sinfest.net/archive_page.php?comicID=3007 Seymour interrupts Slick's trying to persuade Monique to sleep with him because everything's wonderful -- and Slick promptly converts to telling to sleep with him because the world's falling apart.]

 

== Web Original ==

* The two goofy unicorns in a ''[[Charlie the Unicorn]]'' short say this phrase and perform an out-of-place frightening image.

{{quote|'''Charlie:''' Okay, that was the scariest thing I've ever seen.}}

 

== Western Animation ==

* A rat wearing a sandwich board made out of two slices of bread can actually be seen warning all the other rats about the floodgates in ''[[Flushed Away]]''.

 

* Parodied in [https://web.archive.org/web/20161117031848/http://images.archives.newyorker.com/djvu/Conde%20Nast/New%20Yorker/2009_01_05/webimages/page0000001_3.jpg?v=v5 this] 2009 ''New Yorker'' magazine cover.

 

== Real Life ==

 

{{reflist}}

[[Category:Ominous Tropes]]

[[Category:Apocalyptic Index]]

[[Category:A Failure to Communicate]]