![]() ![]() Sacrificial Planet is when this happens near the beginning of the story to set up the threat level of the villains. The full-on Earth-Shattering Kaboom is a Class X on the Apocalypse How scale, often represented with an Earth-Shattering Poster. Think of it as a Tokyo Fireball on a planetary scale. ![]() 'Cause if you've just got a big laser, all you're going to do is drill a buttonhole in it. Even if your huge laser manages to blast into the planet, you still have to overcome the gravity of all that rock with some sort of explosion capable of sending all thousands of quintillions of tons far enough away that it won't just clump together again (you'd obviously still succeed in slaughtering all the inhabitants if this happened, but then if that was all you cared about you'd have just used the "saturate the surface with nukes" method above). Actually shattering a world is in fact considerably harder than TV makes it look. Wikipedia refers to ships and weapons capable of doing this as Planet Killers. This is Colony Drop and Kill Sat taken to the extreme. In other series, there's no way to stop the Earth-Shattering Kaboom, and the subsequent storylines focus on the actions of the few survivors as they try to carry on, seek revenge or simply live with the fact that their home has been completely obliterated.Ī slightly less devastating (and, due to the vastly reduced energy requirement, significantly more realistic) variation of this is to simply blast the surface of the planet until the air hums with radioactivity and nothing can live on it, for example, the "glassing" of planets in the Halo verse. Some series prefer to have this as the final goal of the Big Bad, with the heroes racing to stop him. ![]() Blowing up an entire, inhabited planet is one of the fastest ways to really ratchet up the body count and cross the Moral Event Horizon. Destroying a planet is usually reserved for the most shocking moments in a Sci-Fi or even Fantasy series. This is understandably worse than just conquering a world or wiping out the present civilization. Science Fiction writers have devised many methods of demolishing a planet: you can blast it with a laser, you can hit it with a really big object, you can feed it to self-replicating all-consuming Nanomachines, or use other, even more imaginative ways. If you really want to end the world, why not destroy the whole planet - tear the very ground from under everyone's feet? Let me know how many you recognize in your daily TV watching, and which obvious examples I left out.Ī warning that some clips may contain NSFW language.Sometimes, The End of the World as We Know It just isn't enough. Because these tropes have been around for so long, some reveal antiquated values about their subjects. Think about how often we see the “hipster” on TV versus how often we saw this character 10 years ago.Īs with any stereotype, there is an inherent bias attached to the assumptions we make about a character. As these move out of fashion, new tropes emerge to reflect the contemporary situations and characters. Since we live in a changing world, in which identity is constantly shifting and adjusting, using a trope can be tricky business. It’s handy and convenient, but also a little lazy. For instance, you know exactly what to expect from a “southern gentleman” or a “damsel in distress” and you inform the universal associations immediately. Writers, producers, and artists use them as a shorthand to communicate the type or kind of character without having to offer a lot of exposition and background. They’ve become so overused that they barely even register to us anymore, but I’m here to call these archetypes out. You’ll recognize them the moment you see them, because you have likely seen them a hundred times before. They are universal themes that cross genre, culture, and medium. Trust me, they’re everywhere.Ī trope is a device that commonly occurs in literature, movies, and TV, that capitalizes on stereotypes, clichés, gender expectations, and archetypes. John Slattery as Roger Sterling – Mad Men _ Season 7, Episode 7 – Photo Credit: Justina Mintz/AMC You’ll definitely recognize these TV tropes, but that doesn’t mean we aren’t super tired of seeing them all the time. ![]()
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