Apocalypse Now, Or Never: Apocalypse Always

[Jubal]

Apocalypse Now - Or Never?

By Jubal

Part 2: Apocalypse Always

Is the promise of modern fantasy "you can prevent this"?

In the first part of this article series, I looked at the history of apocalypses, and particularly at the difference between the historical idea of apocalypse and that used in modern fantasy. The most fundamental difference in these ideas is that religious and mythic apocalypse is usually fundamentally impossible to avert: it is a matter of fate rather than choice, and it is revelatory, both of the ultimate way that divine plans will unfold, and in revealing the flaws and problems that made the present world rotten to begin with.

Modern fantasy apocalypses, meanwhile, are very much possible to avert. They have more in common, as we saw last time, with older European fears of steppe conquerors than fears of religious apocalypses, and they often represent and reflect very modern anxieties about human-scale actors being able to achieve global destruction. This very feature is core to how we set up disasters that heroes can overcome – and therefore to modern fantasy as a whole.

Of course, not all fantasy operates on this sort of world-ending scale, but it's undeniable that quite a lot does, and in a lot of cases it's operating on this scale from the audience's perspective. For example, it's not made wholly clear in Baldur's Gate 3 to what extent there are still forces on Faerun who might be capable of resisting the villain (or a villainous player character) if they win and achieve god-like levels of psionic power. But from the perspective of the game-world, this is an irrelevant question: you and everything you might have cared about are definitely lost. The world that is ending, in short, doesn't need to be the multiverse to make something apocalyptic, it needs to be the world as an audience perceives it. A totality of destruction that leaves either nothing at all behind, or a world so changed that it's twisted out of recognition.

Modern fantasy also tends to rest on the premise that the world is under threat and that the role of heroes is to stop that threat. This is rooted in a sort of inherent small-c conservatism in the genre, derived in part from Tolkien's scepticism of machines and industrialisation: the status quo or past and its protection are the essential objective, and enemies are often seeking some form of darkly transformational 'progress'. Even where the world is rotten and is fundamentally changed by the heroes, this is often presented as a return to an older, more balanced or more free form of existence: Aragorn's fourth age Reunited Kingdom will not at least to begin with have the corrupt lethargy of Denethor's retreating Gondor, but this is a return to or echo of the Numenorean past rather than a move forward into a new and reimagined future.

That's not to say that fantasy needs to operate like that, or always does: something like NK Jemisin's Broken Earth books would be a prime example of questioning through fantasy whether worlds and their status quo situations do, in fact, need to be broken. Nor is it to say that there's anything wrong with an external threat as the core of a story. Tolkien wasn't wrong that the protection of the natural world, and of what we retain from the past, are things with real value, nor was he wrong that there's something that sits badly with the practice of breaking things for the sake of knowledge-seeking or avarice. The tendency to make the external threat the core of the genre, though, is one of the things that makes apocalypse so embedded in fantastical literature. It's also how moving such a world-ending event forwards becomes a necessary part of plot writing, and therefore is key to the birth of another feature of the apocalypses we know today - the modern villain.

The devil acts through the evil hearts of men. Thanos just acts.

Think how many villains want to end or destroy the world in some significant way in modern media. It's probably a higher number than want to actually rule the world, which is curiously damning regarding how good we seem to think our own planet and its fictional counterparts are. Some of these want to destroy the world in order to replace its current inhabitants in some way, reflecting a lot of modern fears about obsolescence and change, whereas others want to destroy the world in service of some other goal.

This represents another shift in apocalypses: they are often now produced by much clearer, sharper villains than are the case in much premodern literature. Whilst yes, Loki is ultimately responsible for Ragnarok, he is far from consistently the scheming villain of Norse myth, and in a biblical apocalypse, Satan really has rather little agency in bringing it about. These figures might precipitate and symbolise apocalypse, but they don't have a fundamental motivation for it, in part because they don't have a motivation for very much. The devil is presumed to want to tempt mortals on account of being evil, but it's incredible just how rare it is that one actually sees him planning anything whatsoever: his role is to show and bring out the evil that was already within people through temptation, not to be a figure with true narratively described agency to create and cause evil. Few writers since perhaps CS Lewis have described apocalypses that have this sort of moralising character to them, and Lewis very explicitly was drawing on Christian models.

Consider that against Thanos, whose active quest to gain the infinity stones is a major driver of the plot, or Corypheus in Dragon Age, who actively seeks to use the breach in the veil to enter the Fade and claim the empty thrones of the gods. These characters, as apocalyptic villains, are oriented around particular plans and goals that the heroes must compete against. They are active characters in a way that really can be said of very few literary villains of past ages, and in many cases they, not the hero, are the driving force behind the plot. As we saw above, an active threat to the status quo gives something for the hero to come up against.

But why from the audience perspective are they used quite so much? What makes this particular formula work?

Good guy or not? Iif the world needs saving, everyone has to chip in.

The essential reason why apocalypses keep getting used in modern SFF is that they are a very efficient plot driver. The impending apocalypse is a quick and easy way to ensure that there is something bad going on that is relatively easy to telegraph to a viewer, reader or player. We have a well developed visual language for absolute villainy, rooted in a mixture of classical and biblical imagery combined with cultural memories of twentieth century fascism. Deploying that alongside a sense of immediate threat engages an audience fast, buying attention span that can then be used to develop the world later. It is normal that at the starting point the scale of the apocalypse isn't fully revealed, but this is to allow for a slowly escalating scale of threat as the media develops.

This is especially interesting for developers of role-playing games, because an apocalyptic system maximises possibility while minimising necessary buy-in for players. If the player's very survival relies on them facing down a threat, then there is no need to ensure that the player is otherwise bought into the values or necessity of protecting any other thing in particular. In a game context, where one wants to get the player involved in the game fast with minimal backstory dumping, this has very great utility. Unlike for a book character, who can immediately act according to an in-world perspective, players of a computer game don't immediately have mental access to all of the surrounding lore and how the world works. Short-cutting that with an immediate large threat is, therefore, extremely useful.

An opening threat can also be a good driver of secondary action, for example by creating scenes where the audience and point of view heroes are aware of how bad things are right at the start but where the rest of the in-setting world takes time to catch up. This helps set up a lot of potential interactions and persuasion to come together against a common threat (Dragon Age: Origins and Mass Effect both pull this one as examples, but indeed we get it in Tolkien as well in the tragedy of Boromir). This necessity of pulling together against a common threat also allows for a wider character cast.

In particular, that's especially important for players with evil outlooks or motivations. The apocalypse is the threat that allows someone who is essentially self-serving and venal, or even pledged to some other horrible goal that is at odds with the one being pursued by an apocalyptic villain, then they can still be part of the action. In a situation that's this bad, you might need all the help you can get, even if that help is pretty grim itself – or even if you're pretty grim yourself. You know things are bad when the world is calling on you of all people, and it's certainly true that a villain – where else are you going to steal, murder and pillage if you don't have a world left to do it in?

The adventuring party of unlikely or varied heroes as a stock trope therefore is significantly ease in its setup by having a common threat to unite against. That in turn allows for the kinds of writing that people often want in SFF and in stories in general, where we get contrasting characters from different walks of life. This is especially useful in stories with varied secondary-world settings, because it means we can have characters who understand different elements of the world taking part, and it's useful for creating a lively, diverse points of view core character group to begin with.

Having built up our heroes, we come to a third key point about apocalypses: apocalypse implies climax. Especially if there is a villain behind the apocalypse to confront, but even if confronting the apocalypse is a matter of turning back some non-human force, there must be a turning point or final confrontation where the apocalypse is defeated. That is, basically, the moment when a writer gets to let rip with their special effects budget: destroying bad things is fast and punchy and can be truly spectacular. An apocalyptic climax helps give the audience an immediate, visual sense of achievement: think the fall of Barad-dur, or Alduin the dragon crashing to earth, or all the big explosions at the end of Fallout 1.

One can have a big explosion without a strictly apocalyptic threat, of course, but if the threat is apocalyptic, it gives a much bigger scope for "problem solved" as an endgame situation. A merely human scale threat begs the question of why another, similarly human sized threat won't rise again in the near future: there will always be scheming viziers and cruel kings and ruthless generals. The very apocalyptic nature of a threat tends to make it something that genuinely is irreplaceable, such that at the very least the next apocalypse will need to look rather different. This amplifies the sense of achievement for a game player, or relief for a book reader, in imagining the world after the heroes' adventures.


So there are some thoughts on why apocalypses are useful – and why we have quite so many of them knocking around SFF books, media, and games. We've seen how apocalypses are good for helping audiences rapidly enter a story-world, for explaining a story pulling together diverse character casts, and building strong narrative climaxes with a sense of achievement. We've also seen how that's often underpinned by driving, plot-defining villains that threaten a status quo that needs protecting.

There are, however, still some questions left to be answered, and in part 3 of this series I'm going to look at the problems with the apocalypse as a driving narrative force – when it shouldn't be used, whether it's over-used, and what creators could do to vary or change the format in what they write. Until then!



This is the second part of a series. You can read part one, A Brief History of the End of the World, here.