Is there a name for the trope where a story is high fantasy at first glance, except for it's not fantasy and is actually set in a post-apocalypse dystopian future?
Is there a name for the trope where a story is high fantasy at first glance, except for it's not fantasy and is actually set in a post-apocalypse dystopian future?
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?
Assuming it's a surprise, this is Earth All Along. Genre Shift is similar, but that's more about tone than plot
Specifically the After the End variant
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TomatoSurprise is the wider trope
You maniacs, you blew it all up!
Flintsonian/Jetson
Thanks! I think this is it... because I guess the more important part to this trope is that "hehe this is actually the world that you - dear viewer - lives in"... the high-fantasy part is secondary and depends on the genre I guess.
I think the trope From Cataclysm to Myth actually fits better. It even says in the description "Cousin to Earth All Along, but a premise or a plot twist rather than a Twist Ending. "
What happens when the story is not set on Earth?
I have no idea the answer to your question, but I now know like 99% of people on lemmy have shitty reading comprehension.
Seriously. There's a dozen links to TvTropes and almost none of them match OP's description, but they're all upvoted to high heaven. Not to mention the unrelated replies talking about their favorite stories which don't actually match the trope either.
Pity, 'cause it's a great question, and a great trope. I can think of a few good examples. Maybe it's time to start a TVTropes account and get editing.
People on here seem to not know what a trope is. Holy hell.
I... agree. Did get a lot of great recommendations tho!
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!
Aladdin (1992). The Genie is the last survivor of the AI wars and has mental damage. The Cave of Wonders is another remnant. “Magic” is low level AI responding to human intent. Iago is an uplift. Agrabah is literally a generic Middle Eastern country because it was assembled from the fragmented records of what remained of the Middle East.
Do you think the genie got it from twitter war brainrot or just did too much of the sensory content back in his skibidi days?
Yeah, Adventure Time
You mean like Adventure Time?
They are pretty obvious about it being a post nuclear war reality.
Not 100% sure, but these come to mind.
- Science Fantasy
- Dying Earth
- Post-Apocalyptic Fantasy
These sound right to me, especially Dying Earth - a podcast I listen to covered Gene Wolf's Book of the New Sun trilogy and they described it as such. Wikipedia calls it Science Fantasy. Great books by the way
Dying earth isn't really a genre, it's series of books by Jack Vance that popularized this trope and was also a major inspiration for DnD
Star Wars is fantasy, not sci-fi. (Technically it’s a space opera, it not at all about science or how that science might impact society.)
Just because there’s technology, or it’s post apocalyptic doesn’t make it not fantasy.
Shanara chronicles, too.
I really like the term "Science Fantasy". It acknowledges the parallels with Science Fiction but respects how they differ as well.
Shanara chronicles, too.
Yep, they visit ruins in one series that is pretty clearly the ruins of Tacoma or some place like it.
Terry Brooks happens to live in that area. Coincidence? :)
You mean like “dwarves and elves are GMO humans” and “magic is actually tech gadgets” ?
For a pure magic example
The Mistborn era 1 (books 1-3) are fantasty magic.
Mistborn era 2 (books 4-7) occur hundreds of years later in that worlds “industrial/steam” age. Still, with magic.
So, for example, some allomancers can push or pull on metals. In Era 1 that’s used for combat but also for rapid movement. An allomancer can fall from a wall, throw a coin and “push” off of it causing them to bounce forward and upwards. As they’re starting to reach the azimuth they “pull” the coin, catch it and repeat.
They also in combat throw and then “push” coins or metal fragments like shrapnel.
In Era 2. A sheriff (who’s an allomancer) leaps across a gully, aims and shoots a bullet into a wooden crate and then “pushes” on it to cross it.
Another time during a shootout one “pushes” gunfire away so it deflects around him. Not guaranteed to get all of the bullets but useful in situations like that.
There are other uses and other allomantic abilities but the entire shift of the format was just done phenomenally.
Can’t recommend the Mistborn series enough
you probably already know this, but for anyone else:
The Cosmere Series (of which the Mistborn Saga is a part of) does heavily feature Sci-Fi as well as post-apocalypse themes alongside (mostly) fantasy (Sci-Fi: the sunlit man, tress of the emerald sea; post-apocalypse: Stormlight Archives, Yumi And The Nightmare Painter), which made me think OP was talking about this series specifically.
In some of the other books it is mentioned that all of the powers originally came from a being called Adonalsium (basically God). what fuels all these manifestations of powers is called Investiture. Each Shard of Adonalsium manifests different Powers, Allomancy is just one of them.
so it's a unique mix of classic fantasy, sci-fi, and post-apocalypse genres in a single gigantic saga, in which the sci-fi and post-apocalypse themes are intentionally kept vague and in the background.
highly recommend all of the other books!
they are great in their own right, and also give a LOT of extra bits and peaces of the overall lore!
what's best about the series is, as you've already explained, the "hard-fantasy/sci-fi" approach to powers: all power requires some kind of source, everything comes from something.
best to do the Stormlight Archives after Mistborn (either order works), then the rest; order doesn't really matter, although i recommend Tress of the emerald Sea and The Sunlit Man to be read last, because they contain a lot of sci-fi lore, which is best enjoyed last (imho)
also: Stormlight Archives Book 5 is coming relatively soon, i think it's december?
Death Gate's cycle says hello!
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.
NK Jemison's Broken Earth trilogy comes to mind, fantastic series it that's your thing
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).
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.
Post Apocalyptic Fantasy and Post Apocalyptical High Fantasy are two phrases I keep seeing.
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.
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.:-)
Saying Chrono Trigger had shitty graphics for it's time is the hottest take I've ever seen lol.
Where have you seen this? I've been looking for some stories like it
The Wheel of Time does this.
Yeah, though clues are few and far between; the
spoiler
museum in Tanchico with the Mercedes hood ornament
is the biggest clue. From Jordan's other writings, the
spoiler
First age was our time, then humans created an AI powerful enough to genetically engineer humans to be able to do magic,
and that led to the Age of Legends.
I've got to check these recs out
Shanara chronicles are set after humanity fucked everything up, demons came and fucked more shit and got sealed away and are now coming back.
It’s otherwise your sword and horse fantasy, though.
The YA book series The Tripods, is medieval dystopian.
The Broken Empire trilogy. Also Red War trilogy, which is spin-off (though uses these themes a bit less)
Yor: Hunter From the Future
The Steerswoman series by Rosemary Kirstein, though sadly she never finished it.
Shan ara chronicles has just that and I searched it in tvtropes: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Series/TheShannaraChronicles#:~:text=The Shannara Chronicles is an American post-apocalyptic fantasy drama television
The Reveal: Not that the characters particularly care, but Safehold turns out to be the 3000 year old remains of San Francisco
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.
I wonder who did this first? Didn't ultima have a storyline like this, or am I misremembering a game from before I was born
Planet of the apes
Exactly what I was thinking, I'm not sure of any example coming before the original Charlton Heston version.
Don't have a name for the trope tho
i think pops up in early computer rpgs like ultima a lot because the original Dungeons and Dragons was full of that kind of anachronistic stuff. TSR probably didn't intentionally make it post-apocalypse though. they were just cramming whatever they thought was cool at the moment into their game, which is why you're just as likely to find a downed spaceship as a dinosaur in Blackmoore. the post-apocalypse angle probably game to be when early crpgs wanted to ape that but wanted give it a proper story justification
i've also heard people say that the silmarillion has scifi elements, but i'm not sure how much of that is what tolkien intended versus what people read into it. i've also heard that the trope originates from medieval people coming across ruins of ancient roman architecture, but no examples were given- although it's funny to think we have robots in The Legend of Zelda because aquaducts
Now that you mention it, I seem to remember Xenophon stumbling across giant ruins that perplexed him while out on campaign. I think they were Persian? It very much could be drawing on the experiences of people seeing the ruins of fallen empires.
Edit: AI is telling me that Xenophon traveled through the impressive ruins of Assyrian cities, he was fighting the Persians.
The American dream
Honestly, “America broke down and now it's Medieval Europe over there” sounds more like the dream of some European patriots.
I don’t quite think that there’s a name for this genre (yet?) but I’ll take this opportunity to blast out my favorite story-focused game serieses
Xenoblade is a nice fantasy RPG if you really like Storytelling! And all 3 core games are available on Switch!
Generally speaking, Xenogears and Xenosaga have amazing stories too, but Xenoblade got translated and dubbed waaaay better
Edit: just thought of this the last couple of minutes, and, if there was a name for this genre, it would spoil the whole game/movie/book for you! Imagine watching Planet of the Apes for the first time (it’s old by now and I hope there’s no one here who didn’t watch it already) and exactly knowing what planet it is
if there was a name for this genre, it would spoil the whole game/movie/book for you
Not really. A work doesn't have to be marketed as a specific trope, that doesn't mean it isn't categorised as such. There are entire categories on TvTropes that carry mass spoilers - looking at any of the examples will spoil that work for you. This is just one more such category.
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
Movies like
My Name is Bruce.
The Thirteenth Floor