I’m embarrassed to say that I have encountered this, this particular type of story on multiple occasions… So I got curious, is there a name to this trope?
I knew a tvtropes link was going to be here as soon as I saw the question lol, here goes my next three hours I guess
How was your trip?
Oh you’re still going? Nice. Enjoy your stay!
The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. is my personal favourite of Bruce Campbell’s work. Starts off as any ordinary western, before getting very, very weird.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0105932/
Come to think of it, Firefly might count, after watching Serenity at the end of the series.
Good shit.
NK Jemison’s Broken Earth trilogy comes to mind, fantastic series it that’s your thing
You mean like “dwarves and elves are GMO humans” and “magic is actually tech gadgets” ?
Death Gate’s cycle says hello!
Post Apocalyptic Fantasy and Post Apocalyptical High Fantasy are two phrases I keep seeing.
To clarify, are you asking if there’s a specific genre to Planet of the Apes where there’s a big reveal that this is actually just earth after some society ending disaster? (And similar stuff but that’s the first that came to mind).
Star Trek comes to mind unless you disallow scifi (as high fantasy usually would iirc, though notably “space operas” really do seem to blur the line).
LOTR could be argued as such - there was an earlier age of beings from which only remnants survived, and then we also watch live as a second epochal transition takes place, where the likes of elves disappear. I mean, either way it’s not “our reality” type of age - but then again you couldn’t ask for that from “high fantasy” by definition :-).
And it’s a very common trope in video games - e.g. Chrono Trigger that is arguably the best RPG of all time (shitty graphics, even for its time, but hands-down the best story I’ve ever seen, made btw by the creators of Final Fantasy who were given the freedom to do whatever they wanted for it). Edit: another one like that is Lufia - not a ground-breaking game but highly regarded for doing what it did so very well, at its time mind you.
And I’ve seen some others where like basically Earth is implied to have been destroyed (or at least it is unclear whether it survived a world-ending event), but the singular human remaining lives on, in space, but in something like a series of interconnected “worlds”, some having higher levels of technology than Earth ever managed to reach while others are set in earlier timeframes. And dealing with noncorporeal beings from like higher dimensions, and entities like a god inside the machine - so definitely once again mixing up heavy elements of “high fantasy” (with the likes of swords and magic) and sci-fi.
If you can dream it, someone has likely written it. Books are freaking awesome! 😎 So too are other mediums, when profits are not the exclusive focus.
Saying Chrono Trigger had shitty graphics for it’s time is the hottest take I’ve ever seen lol.
I loved Chrono Trigger! The very first example of this that I ran into as a kid was Crystalis. You are told at the beginning that it’s Earth after an end of the world event, but it’s a sword and sorcery overhead action RPG (think original Legend of Zelda with slightly more RPG, slightly more action, and slightly more varied combat) and ends with you shooting advanced technology with your magic sword.
Yes I played Crystalis! Not like, whenever it was when it first came out, but I like to study the evolution of gaming so I went back and played a bunch like Dragon Warrior/Quest, even the Japanese versions of Final Fantasy, Phantasy Star, etc.
I definitely enjoyed Chrono Trigger more:-). But I was glad to have played Crystalis too, especially with it having been so unique (or at least like rare I guess).
And while I never played it, isn’t Baldur’s Gate also post-apocalyptic, with a high fantasy theme? There are indeed so many that use that trope.:-)
Chrono Trigger (and Chrono Cross for that matter) is a better game for sure but I played Crystalis as a kid when it first came out so it’ll always hold a special place in my heart. Chrono Trigger came out when I was about to become a teen so I had other things on my mind at the time.
As for Baldur’s Gate…kind of? Without going too far into it, most of the D&D worlds had some sort of apocalypse in their past. Faerûn’s apocalypse was so far back that they’ve completely rebuilt, and they were already fantasy so there was no serious genre shift (it’s high fantasy) and it doesn’t fall under the Earth All Along trope. The floating city that crashed when shit went wrong was held up by magic.
Ok, I went further into that than I meant to. I’m an old nerd.
I was poor and so played very few titles when they first came out, but at some point later on discovered emulation, and loved seeing the magical wonderland of all the best games from the past.
I particularly loved seeing the “development” of a genre. Like Dragon Warrior/Quest was a game where the player controls a single character, who only had 8 item slots (though I don’t recall if you could fit like 3 or 8 or sth medical herbs together - even if so it was extremely constraining), and keys were something that you used once but never again. Then Dragon Warrior/Quest 2 added two additional characters to your party - but they were “fixed”, both magic-users, a prince & a princess iirc, who kinda swapped between them which was more powerful at the time as they learned new things. Then Dragon Warrior/Quest 3 allowed you to roll your own characters with a character creation menu in a tavern, and you could reject them and reroll to attempt higher stats, choose their names, classes and even upgrade classes, some like Sage needing special items from the world. Somewhere in there keys became permanent forever-use items, though they also expanded to include different “types” - opening locked wooden, metal, gold, or prison doors.
And Dragon Warrior/Quest 4 was one of the most intricate, multi-interleaving storylines that I’ve ever seen, despite the constraint of having to fit onto an old NES cartridge!:-) Those graphics were NOTHING like the 3-d effects of the later installments in the series, yet so very much of what made those franchises great were there.
Chrono Cross I did not like so much - it was “fine” as a game, but it was not the spiritual sequel that I hoped for:-). I occasionally play through Chrono Trigger every few years, like re-reading an old favorite book - the music, the story, the themes, it relaxes me and I enjoy it, plus it’s so short that such is do-able:-).
That wouldn’t fall under a single trope, but would be a combination of several tropes. After The End would be a requirement, and for technology that is like magic to those who live in the world would be Lost Technology.
Nice, I think yours is the most relevant so far.
Where have you seen this? I’ve been looking for some stories like it
The Broken Empire trilogy. Also Red War trilogy, which is spin-off (though uses these themes a bit less)
The YA book series The Tripods, is medieval dystopian.
OG Planet of the Apes, Horizon Zero Dawn is too in a way
I don’t think there’s supernatural stuff on HZD
There’s not, maybe that’s what he means by ‘in a way’?
Great games, highly recommend them. Not sure they really fit the trope, though.
OG Planet of the Apes took place on Soror, a planet in the Betelgeuse system.
I’ve never actually seen, just the references. Guess it’s worth a go
Yor: Hunter From the Future
Hmm not sure. I guess I’d call it post-apocoliptic fantasy lol. But I know exaxctly what you mean and I love that genre. The Horizon games and even the Witcher books/games fit into this genre.
The American dream
Honestly, “America broke down and now it’s Medieval Europe over there” sounds more like the dream of some European patriots.
The Elder Scrolls. It’s not explicitly stated, but iirc it’s highly suggested it’s post-apocalyptic. That said, it’s still fantasy, there’s still magic, spellcasting and so forth (there’s no indication that the magic is the result of lost tech becoming indistinguishable from magic); it’s just that the lore highly suggests it may be post-apocalyptic.
Sauce? It’s not even on TVTropes
It’s been a long-ass time and some of the lore may have been retconned/clarified since then, however it was a conclusion I came to on my own. Basically, iirc, the Towers are hybrid physical/metaphysical structures which essentially keep Mundus (Nirn + other planes) stable and allow for things like magic to occur. When a tower is destroyed, Mundus becomes less stable and magical ability declines. Let’s hope we don’t destroy any towers then!
Oh wait. A bunch of the towers (are speculated to be) destroyed. Red Mountain (vvardenfell) was destroyed after the false-god Vivec lost his powers and could no longer keep the Ministry of Truth from smashing into the mountain, Walk-Brass zero-summed itself and the race that created it, the White-Gold tower was destroyed during the Oblivion Crisis, I don’t remember what happened to Crystal-Like-Law but I’m pretty sure that’s gone too.
If you wanted to get fancy with it, you could even point to the magic system getting less complex with each mainline game (yes, I know it’s probably just laziness, but I like my explanation more). Hell, it seems like all the crazy, cool stuff happened long before the events of any of the games; it seems like all the races peaked before we ever got a glimpse into that universe.
So while I guess it’s a bit premature to call TES post-apocalyptic, it’s definitely headed in that direction. It seems to be a series about a world that’s slowly collapsing and falling apart.
Edit: I spent some time trying to brush up on my TES lore (fuck, I’m starting to hear the games’ siren song; it’s been years), and came across this wonderful paragraph:
Using his dentition as tonal instruments, Anumaril dismantled his bones and built of them a Mundus-machine that mirrored Nirn and its planets. And when he had used all his substance in fangling this orrery, the Orrery of Elden Root, he placed the segment-sceptre within, hiding it between the Moons.
You… you did what?
I wish the games were half as interesting as the lore.
Edit 2: I remember why I thought it was post-apocalyptic! Space! Iirc all the races have been to space and had spaceships and space battles, except it seems like everyone has forgotten about it by the time the games take place. Combined with the gradual destruction of the Towers, it seems possible that the games could be post-apocalyptic but are being filtered through a lens of ignorance, making the residual advanced tech appear as though it’s magic.
Oh man, you have no idea how deep the Elder Scrolls lore hole goes.
it would be quite interesting to see that trope actually get a name, cause it feels quite overused personally, recently even freaking one piece did it
one of my favorite recent fantasy mangas (helck) also had a pretty…detestably quality with it, the ending was basically “how is thing happening? why? HOW??” and than boom…ancient but also post apocalyptic
however, at least they give it a small spin by basically just being modern day, with a bit of cyberpunk tech
I don’t think there’s a trope name for it, since the trope itself would spoil the story since this is often a twist.
Tap for spoiler
Like Etrian Odyssey 3
Do you often go into a book or movie knowing all the tropes that exist within that story? I don’t even understand the logic here.
