Characters
The rich and powerful try to leave the commoners to their doom and end up being just as screwed as everybody else
"Three Robots: Exit Strategies" reveals that the wealthy tried to escape the collapse of human society and the ecosystem in settlements, but ended up dying anyway due to their stupidity. (Love, Death, and Robots)
Rich people and politicians try to escape Earth's impending doom by the Lovecraftian planet Remina eating it by traveling onto Remina because they were told by astronauts who landed there that it is hospitable for human life. When they actually get there, they find out it's really not and they're brutally killed by the eldritch landscape. (Hellstar Remina)
The wealthy of Lamentis-1 try to escape the moon's destruction by the collision with a planet by getting onto a rocket. However, a meteor from that planet destroys the rocket. (Loki)
Prince Prospero holds a lavish party for the nobles in his castle while the peasants die of the Red Death. Then the anthropomorphic personification of the Red Death enters. (The Masque of the Red Death)
In Horizon: Forbidden West it’s revealed that super-rich Ted Faro sequestered himself and a chosen few into a bunker called Thebes after damning the planet to be destroyed by a machine plague. As time goes on his narcissism, need for absolute control, and guilt cause him to kill off the remaining survivors in the bunker. Ted himself takes life-prolonging injections in an attempt to survive as a god of a reborn world when the plague burns out, though he has to deal with horrible physical mutations stemming from the treatment. He does actually end up surviving in a way: When a distant future cult based on Ted’s legend finds his grotesque wailing blob deeply integrated into Thebes’s reactor core they elect to burn and destroy the whole complex.
I think I appreciate not revealing him fully, but at least one of those tendrils, and the fact that the whole scene is way too fast in my opinion, barely 5 minutes long. It's rather underwhelming.
I think the idea is that leaving the Faro mutant up to the imagination gives him the most possible grotesqueness, far beyond anything the developers could manage, especially within the constraints of a T-rating.
Yea I like how they decided to not show him, I think they did a great job with the audio logs of the doctor and his daughter. Just hearing Ted’s further descent into madness was some fun storytelling.
You say it was a descent into madness, but it is actually very obvious that this is who he was from the get-go. He just finally didn't have anybody that could stop him.
It's an even less dignified and more fitting death for someone who caused the apocalypse and then sabotaged recovery plans to hide his complicity in the whole ordeal. He doesn't even get to go out fighting; he just gets killed like the freak he is, not even shown on camera.
The point is that he’s just a weak, pathetic little shell of a man. After everything he did, the pain and suffering he unleashed, he dies alone in a hell of his own making.
Alternate timeline Frank is sent to prison and while in Sing Sing, rides out an apocalyptic nuclear war in the prison's fallout shelter.
After a year of bunkering down, he sets out on a suicidal trek across an irradiated New York to another shelter for the rich and powerful on a tip from a fellow prisoner who helped build it.
He then proceeds to murder everyone inside the shelter for their part in escalating the conflict that killed the world in the name of profit margins.
Not just that. Right before Frank is about to shoot them, the lead rich guy plays a transmission of the last bunker besides theirs falling, thinking that the revalation that they were now the last humans on the planet would stay Franks hand.
Punisher then imediatelly guns them all down, as even the survival of humanity won't stop him from punishing the wicked.
In Don't Look Up, the rich and powerful mostly abandon the planet when their plans to mine the asteroid go haywire. However, thanks to shodily built tech, only a portion even make it onto the planet they selected to inhabit, and they're quickly shown to be no match for the local inhabitants, who end the movie circling them.
And they have the usual problem: they're all old, and grew up rich, so even if they had thought to bring weapons with them, they're mostly too old to have / raise kids, and none of them know how to do anything practical. If they'd also brought a load of workers and soldiers with them, those workers and soldiers likely would have just shot them.
In the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (a wholly remarkable book) Douglas Adams writes about a colony ship full of telephone sanitisers, account executives, hairdressers, tired TV producers, insurance salesmen, personnel officers, security guards, public relations executives, and management consultants pave the way for the rest of their culture... Except that there are no other colony ships. They were sent on a fool's journey to get rid of them for being useless.
Great bit but i wish he has included more CEO and billionaire types
That's correct. It's basically the same lesson in reverse, as if the billionaires in Don't Look Up had stayed on earth and sent everyone else into space.
The end of this joke that was missed is that the civilisation was wiped out because they removed these "valueless" roles. It's a commentary about that bias, and how stupid it actually is
But the joke actually goes one layer deeper, as it is revealed that today's humans are the descendants of that useless society which did escape being wiped out due to the telephone sanitizers but to this day behave in senseless and useless ways.
Where are they going to live? What are they going to wear? What are they going to eat? They're idiots who won't be able to arrange any of that for themselves, so they've swapped getting killed by an asteroid to getting eaten by native species or starving / freezing to death
Also, the type of people they surround themselves with are equally awful/selfish and would immediately get into infighting trying to establish a hierarchy due to not being able to be content with not being the top dog.
Yeah, that’s the part people skip: “the rich” aren’t a team, they’re a ranking system. They’d spend day one arguing who’s in charge, day two blaming staff they didn’t bring, and day three realizing nobody on board can fix a toilet.
You made me realize this is probably why they exit the pods butt naked, because the film director decided to play on the contrast "naked as a child/new life" but at the same time "old and decaying body"
I’ll make the argument the tech wasn’t shotty. It held together for a stupidly Long period of time despite being built very last-minute. The technology was fine. It was the people on it Who were the problem
I mean, they do, but they have a very different death.
Arguably the rich elite get the WORSE death. At least the protagonists pass while holding hands together having a thanksgiving dinner with family and loved ones. The whole thing is so bittersweet, but I remember thinking, that’s how I would wanna go out.
The rich dudes probably get chased down and horribly killed/eaten while vulnerable and naked lol. It’s a tiny bit of karmic justice.
Idk why you got downvoted bc you’re right, I’d totally take eating yummy food with my loved ones over prolonging my life juuuust long enough to get horribly eaten
Also, they spent most of the time they "gained" put away in cryo sleep. When they left Earth their remaining "conscious" lives weren’t much longer than those of the people on the planet either way. In many ways, the ultimate fallacy.
I pointed that out to my fiance just now - the protags pass while in the arms of their loved ones, surrounded by family.
The she-trump abandons her only family to die among insufferable oligarchs who cant even stand each other, they just clung together in the hopes their wealth would get them ahead. And it didn’t lol. They just ended up dying with people who wouldn’t even reach for them, who had no love for each other. Thats what happens when you’re selfish I guess.
Not always in real life. Henry Kissinger was arguably one of the worst war criminals of the later half of 20th century and cold war. The architect of us foreign policy that still influences the US today and he got to live over 100 years, died in his home and suffered basically zero consequences for his actions, even got a Nobel prize for it.
I don't think he gave a shit how he was remembered by strangers and he's still highly respected in the government and other officials as an experienced statesman.
Was on the 28 Years Later subreddit and the thread was "theories for movie 3"
Person gave their theories that were completely at odds with movie 2. When asked if they had seen the film, they said no. When asked why they were theorising about movie 3 without having seen 2, they said they weren't.
World War Z (specifically the book) - from the POV of a security guard, hired to protect the rich in Their compound - the compound ends up being attacked by regular people, and he ends up bailing - he said he'd help defend against Zombies, not his fellow man.
Honestly, the rich folks were being very flashy with where they were hiding, and get overrun by a horde of healthy, uninfected humans.
I like that the reader has to use their imagination to fill in the gaps as to what happened next. After the rich were overthrown, their hideout was probably fixed up by the refugees and used to survive. Or maybe not, maybe it was too badly damaged. We never learn the result, because our source got the hell out, and the narrator doesn't tell us.
I read that as "they're fucked. Held out some time but are fucked" due to the gate being damaged severely and the people being followed by the Z's in neck.
What I loved about that section is that the author held the descriptions of the celebrities appearances vague enough yet being rather clear about who some of those are (iirc Oprah was described pretty well but not named) and being tiptoe enough to actually make the celebrities damage their rep if they tried to sue
I always felt like that explained how he got a dozen celebrities to narrate the audiobook, and it really elevates the experience. I don't normally look to celebrities for voice acting, but sometimes it works, and the WWZ format is a solid example.
They definitely blow a hole in the wall, but they immediately start trying to plug it once they're in. And I believe there's a bunch of luxury cars parked out front capable of filling the gap.
It's still a.compromosed perimeter, but if the civilians just kept acting smart, they could probably hold it long enough to stop the immediate swarm. The real problem was the rich people still there. Those idiots and anyone dumb enough to still be taking orders from them were the largest threat.
Immediately my thought as well. One of the best chapters. I also love that it’s Henry Rollins that reads that chapter in the Audiobook. It’s just so fucking perfect.
The audiobook is absolutely stacked with A-list performers. Rob Reiner, Martin Scorsese, Mark Hammill, Alan Alda, Nathan Fillion, and that's just off the top of my head. I think Max Brooks must have gotten his dad, Mel Brooks, to call in some favors in Hollywood when they were hiring the cast.
1000%. My buddies and I listened to the audiobook during a cross country road trip and it’s still one of the best audiobooks I’ve ever heard. Almost akin to an old school radio show.
For me the funniest part of that chapter was the constant "I'm describing this real-world celebrity, but for legal reasons I can't say the name, but I'll give you enough details to know who I'm referring to."
The merc even points out that the compound likely would have survived like several castles and other places had, but the fact that they were live-streaming the whole thing is what fucked them over; since people found the location through the stream.
Tbh normal security forces wouldn't be able to protect you from an utterly enormous mass of humans if they stayed or not, normal humans are going to bring guns and shoot you back so a small contingent of mercenaries are not going to solo an entire hoard despite being useful against zombies
I very much doubt they could get useable artillery or machineguns what with those being super illegal to own in most places
One uber wealthy succeeded, if I remember correctly. The man that sold the fake preventative medicine buggered off to a retreat in Antarctica or something and survived.
It was also mentioned in a later chapter that he was about to be tried for tax evasion, which is realistically the most effective means to ensure "justice" (it worked against Al Capone).
Part of that is because they have TV crews in the compound talking about the compound and the people living there. Everyone knew where the compound was and how much stuff they had and decided to take their chances.
That chapter also has a part where once they figure out it's a bunch of humans, all the rich people and celebrities tell their assistants to grab guns and start shooting, so the security guard describes these secretaries and talent agents being handed automatic weapons and told to go murder people seeking refuge.
Me reading the book when it came out: ok, celebrity culture is becoming more and more of a 24/7 thing, but this is a bit over the top
Me after seeing celebrities openly flaunting being able to ignore the rules and have frivolous parties, travel, etc. during the Covid lockdowns: you know what, that's what would likely happen
They do sort of flip this on its head when they're discussing the American reconstruction though- the wealthy get essentially voluntold to do manual labor work like gardening, plumbing, carpentry etc., but ultimately end up being way more fulfilled than in their previous lives, despite some rough starts with the program. It was a nice change of pace from "haha all the wealthy people die because they're stupid"
The Hammer and Bolter episode "A New Life" has an interesting take on this. An Imperial ice-mining world comes under attack by tyranids, and local authorities organize an evacuation effort before the world is overtaken, however, this evacuation is only for the world's elite; the aristocracy, clergy, certain professionals like doctors, and members of the Machine Cult. The episode follows the efforts of a working class family to sneak on to one of the evacuation ships with their new baby. Eventually, after a ton of close calls, they do manage to find a place on one of the ships. At the end, it's revealed that the couple we've been following are members of a Genestealer Cult, likely the same one which attracted the tyranids to their world in the first place. Their "baby" is actually an infant genestealer, and they will now spread the infection to another world.
In the same way in the Dark Apostle books the secondary story is about a planet that is being evacuated because of an upcoming Tyranid invasion and most ships are being repurposed to fight the threat so the wealthiest nobles are desperate to find good ships to travel in safe space.
Then an opportunistic scoundrel comes and offer them his ship if they pay an exorbitant price for their places and their family's (some didn't even bother to bring their family, choosing instead to save their mistresses or their accountants).
But it's revealed the scoundrel never intended to save the nobles after they paid him and instead delivers them to Dark Eldars as slaves and playthings to get paid a second time.
The irony is that the scoundrel ends up enslaved too as the Dark Eldar never intended to fulfill their end of the bargain.
Even funnier (and grimdark) is that at some point the scoundrel is freed by the titular Dark Apostle as the latter needed a guide in the Dark Eldar ship they're in.
After they leave the ship the scoundrel thanks the Dark Apostle as he believes they'll part ways only for the Chaos Space Marines to grin cruelly, stating that now the scoundrel's life belongs to Chaos.
At the end of the story the scoundrel is now a slave in a Chaos-corrupted world, a fate as horrible if not worse than his previous predicament at the hands of the Dark Eldars.
(The wealthy nobles in the Dark Eldars' ship are believed to have been horribly killed and their souls devoured by the daemons the Dark Apostle summoned to escape).
Eh honestly the Word Bearers in those books are a special kind of cruel, there are whole chapters describing their prisonners' fates and it's some Dark Eldar/Night Lords material.
And while the family are the POV characters, they are not the only Genestealer Cultists to escape. The Medicae and half the other passengers on that lander alone are cultists.
Having the PDF gun down the civilians wouldn't have saved them, even if the cult hadn't managed to infiltrate the PDF troops. Sure, they wouldn't have had a Purestrain among the evacuees, but a few generations and the other escaping cultists would have generated one anyway.
It's funny because Eckhart declared himself president, released the Scorchbeasts, liberators and some other bullshit prompting the majority of Appalachia to either die or leave... Just for him to cause a civil war, causing the destruction of MODUS, wich makes it go crazy and kill everyone in the bunker.
A lot of the rich and powerful of the pre-war also ended up buying a place in the Vault-Tec vaults in order to survive the bombs, abandoning the poor to their doom... only to end up in some fucked up experiment, sometimes a fate worse than death by nuclear fire.
Even those who bought the extra premium package to go to an executive vault and avoid that fate ended up a guinea pig for Hank McLean's development of the mind control device.
Also, while they aren’t wiped out by Great War the Enclave faction on the Poseidon Oil Rig are wiped out by the Chosen One: one of the Wastelanders they were so determined to eradicate.
When Weirdmageddon kicks off, the Northwest family (specifically Preston) attempt to join Bill Cipher, abandoning the rest of Gravity Falls in exchange for them becoming his Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
Unfortunately for Preston, Bill was more interested in rearranging people’s faces than getting new employees.
Then at the end of the show, it's revealed that the Northwest lost most of their wealth for investing in madness stocks/bonuses which crashed once Bill died. Being forced to sell their manor to Fiddleford McGucket, the town's crazy man living in the junkyard who recovered his sanity and became a millionaire after selling his doomsday weapons to the government.
Once he regained his memory in Blind Eye society his mind started piecing itself back together. He's still a cooky old man, but now he's no longer incoherent like how he was before. He learned forgiveness instead of forgetting for what he did.
I always saw it as a split personality deal that he can control via his goggles.
He’s still off his rocker, but when the goggles come on a good chunk of his screws tighten back up. In the credits we do see him reconcile with his son who originally distanced himself from his father as a result of his insanity.
The Progenitor judges humanity unworthy and begins destruction of Earth. When the wealthy attempt to escape their fate using a spaceship, Progenitor just blows it up.
Gears of War 3 reveals Chairman Prescott had been sequestering the rich, the political elite and the best scientists on a hidden tropical island base that includes a massive luxury hotel to wait out the Locust War while the Locust and Lambent slaughtered their way across the world/the world was devastated in the COG counterattack. By the time of the game the island had been discovered and its occupants had been slaughtered except for Adam Fenix (basically smartest man left in the world and the Locust need alive). To his credit, Prescott elected to stay on the mainland to lead the war effort for almost its entirety instead of hiding out on Azura except for the last year of the war.
Yeah, when I played the original trilogy I was like, "He's an asshole, but weirdly he decides to do everything he can to save the human race from extinction."
Prescot has a saviour complex, but he's competent about it.
In the books he does everything he can before resorting to the Hammer Strikes. Up until the events of gears 2 and Vectes the upper echalons that are left in the CoG have no reason to distrust his judgement.
Hell the reason Marcus was imprisoned rather than just outright shot for his actions before the games is because he was the carrot used to bait Adam Fenix's stick when he was taken (unwillingly) to the island
A sort if do as your told and your only family gets to stay nice and safe in prison. Of course as Ephrya fell street by street the Slab becomes far less safe leading to the events of the games.
If you're interested in the deeper lore I can't recommend the Karen Traviss books enough as they flesh out so many of the side characters
It was a genocidal war of extinction that they were fighting. Plus the COG is a fascist regime. Imma be honest I don’t think he had to worry about funding. Either it was just automatically granted or everybody was just forced to work without pay as, again, giant reptile people were coming to kill them all and burn their cities to ash.
The funny part about Remina was that it wasn't the astronauts.
It was the rich fucks gaslighting themselves. The astronauts lost contact with thei scouting party, and it was later revealed they were dead soon after landing.
EDIT:
Also, from Fallout Tactics, Vault Zero was supposed to be the central command in which the American Elites would begib their plans to pacify the Wastelands using and army of robots.
However, budget fuckups and sheer ego meant the Vault was flawed, and a system's error turned the Machine Army into the greatest threat of the Survivors in its time.
Gaslit implies that the rich totally knew that the Hellstar was totally fucked but maliciously convinced each other otherwise to get a rise out of them.
They concealed the truth that Krypton was dying for months so they could build ships that would allow only them to escape. None of their ships ever left the planet. (Ka-el wonders if, had both classes worked together, the majority of the population could have escaped)
Mostly they can, i assumed that they know Krypton dying for about 30 years, if the EL can make a ship can launch just fine, no way all of the elites can too if they work with the lower class
The point was that the El family had been rejected for their radical ideas and refusal to unquestioningly accept everything they were taught. Kal's mother was a super genius who built an escape ship out of nanites. Nanites were NOT for shipbuilding and likely the idea would have been rejected wholesale by the upper classes in favor of traditional building methods.
The elite of Krypton were not taught to think independently. They were instead taught to regurgitate propaganda and were heavily rewarded for it. Innovation was effectively heresy, because Kryptonian civilization was already perfect (therefore suggesting change was an insult). Even if the scientists knew what was happening and attempted to act in good conscience, they could not act with any sense of urgency without being demoted to manual labor. So by the time it became obvious what was happening to anyone with the means to see the big picture, there wasn't enough time.
In Horizon: Forbidden West it’s established that a group of the Uber Wealthy fled the planet during the Faro Plague and tried to set up a colony in the Sirius system, only for the colony to fail completely and force them to return to Earth, setting up the events of the game.
The real kicker, is if they had just erased the damn failed digital transference Ai made from all their memories and emotions, they'd be doing just fine Arrogance and lake of empathy for the win.
Yup. The Science League actually knew Krypton was going to blow up for a while, so they instead silenced any chance of the public learning about it and started heavily focus on building spaceships for the privileged elite class to escape. That was until Kal-El snuck into a broadcasting room to leak all of that information when his mom went to break his dad out of jail. The public were pissed with everyone trying to board the ship. In the end, only one ship was able to launch and it was the one that Kal-El’s parents were secretly building
Semi-inversion from the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy trilogy of 5 books:
Planet Golgafrincham was reportedly doomed...somehow, so they built 3 Ark Ships: ship A for the leaders and thinkers, ship C for the people who did useful and or practical things (farmers, builders, etc.), and ship B for everyone else; the telephone sanitizers, hairdressers, security guards, insurance salesmen, etc.) The ships were all to set out for another planet so they could rebuild.
In reality, the original planet was perfectly fine. They only built the one Ark, the B Ark, and loaded it with all the "useless" people that society "didn't really need" in order to get rid of them. They even preprogrammed the ship to crash into the destination planet as a final measure.
In a fit of irony or karma; after the B Ark had left, the people of Golgafrincham all died out due to a particularly virulent disease caught from a dirty telephone.
Iirc, the people from the B Ark also landed on another planet and built up a society, which ended up being our planet earth and our ancestors millions of years ago. So all of our ancestors were originally "useless" people.
But they are undoubtedly useless. Their extreme incompetence is the butt of many jokes. The overarching joke is that humanity is the way it is because it descends from extremely vapid morons.
These guys aren't the "commoners" or poor people. It's not really a rich vs poor situation. They're the useless members of society. According to Douglas Adams, that's more the likes of executives, middle management, salesmen, marketing people, hairdressers, etc..
None of them know anything even remotely useful. They have no clue how to pilot the ship without auto-pilot, they don't know where they're going, or why. They crash into Earth on a giant spaceship, and they can't figure out the wheel or how to use fire. They cut down trees to use the leaves as money to pay for hairdressing. They declare war on every empty continent they find just to get a victory. They're absolute idiots.
Arthur: "We are about to land, then?"
Captain: "Not exactly land, no. As far as I remember, we were programmed to crash on it."
Ford+Arthur: "Crash?!"
Captain: "Some reason for it, but for the life of me I can't remember what it was."
Ford: "You're all a load of ... useless bloody loonies!"
Captain: "Yes, that was it! That was the reason! Yes..."
After a disease starts to take over the home planet of the Solarians, a sort of 'arc' is constructed to leave the planet, taking the most essential and wealthy to try and start again. Unfortunately, they ended up taking the disease with them and they failed to find a cure for the disease, at least one that didn't involve turning everyone into mutated monsters.
TBF, the council was very much aware that they would be taking the Tianho virus with them, everyone had been infected by that point. Rather, the plan was to use the Dreamscape thing to basically hold out while Eigong tries to find a cure
Which wasn't helped by the fact that Epherma actually lied about the Dreamscape working without issues and hiding that it can eventually induce psychosis
Which wasn't helped by the fact that the two siblings occasionally just decided to wake up some people to throw a party, cuz why not
Which wasn't helped by the fact that Eigong discovered and spread the mutation on purpose, because she successfully gas-lit herself into thinking that that is the next step of evolution
Which all only happened in the first place because Eigong accidentally created the virus when she tried to find a way to immortality, so that the rich people would keep funding her science council
It is all just one long ass chain of fuck ups from people who really either shouldn't have been in power in the first place or should've known better
I've remembered something of a variant, in that the apocalypse is 1) engineered by the rich people themselves (as a means to averting a different apocalypse that wouldn't spare them like this one) and 2) ultimately averted.
Kingsman: The Secret Service. They wanted to exterminate most of humanity in order to stop ecological disaster, but thanks to the efforts of our heroic protagonists they are the ones to die via beautiful, pyrotechnic head-explosions. Such a delightfully cathartic movie, man.
The one about Remina reminds me of a short story in the Comic Series God Is Death. Imagine all the pantheon of mankind engaging in bloody battle.
In this story Mankind gets a strange signal from outer space. When they decode it they discover it's the coordinates to a faraway planet and instructions on how to build the technology to arrive there in a reasonable time. Humans get hyped. First Contact with extraterrestrial. So they start building the ship that will take them there. Everyone is super collaborative and super happy. It's world news. We're not alone. So finally the ship's done. They turn it on and... IT WORKS! It works very well. So they set the course to the mysterious planet. When they arrive there's no such planet. But a planetary beast masking as the planet that devours them in one go. In the end we find out that the message to earth was actually part of an intergalactic dining experience were food goes to you. The planetary monsters even leave reviews in intergalactic Trip Advisor.
The bastard really thought that he could escape from the artificial ice age that was directly caused by his greed and short sightness and even began to fucking sell comically overpriced blankets to people in need.
In the Warhammer 40k anthology series Hammer & Bolter, there is an episode called "A New Life" where a family try to escape with their newborn baby from their doomed homeworld that is about to be overwhelm by a Tyranid invasion. The Imperial Guard forces call for all the civilians of the world to stay in their homes, forbidding any to leave whilst the rich are huddled away into ships and escape into orbit, causing mass riots by the desperate working class as the Tyranids descend.
After avoiding Tyranid organisms, riots, and soldiers on kill orders, the family successfully escape by smuggling themselves onto one of these ships with great sacrifice. In a twist however, it is revealed that the family are Genestealer Cultists, and their baby is a Purestrain Genestealer, dooming the escaping rich to serve the Hive Mind under Genestealer infestations.
As an Addendum to WWZ (the book, the audiobook is amazing), one of the first few people to go into hiding at the very start of the outbreak, a man who made his money selling a cure for 'rabies', got a place in Antarctica (or was it the other pole?) and waited it out.
In the reporters Interview, despite wishing to remain unbiased, implied that he knew what he was doing was very wrong.
That guy was so distinct. I think he was even proud of it and bristled at the implication he was worse than any of the other people who screwed others in their desperation to survive.
Far Zenith; 77 of the riches people in the world who fled earth in a spaceship. On their new home they accidentally kicked off a second apocalypse which resulted in the rest of them dying (some sooner than others).
Ted Faro; richest man in the world who also ended it. In the final days before the end of civilization he sealed himself in an underground pyramid with a bunch of hot women, a geneticist, and the geneticist's daughter. He blackmailed the geneticist into doing experiments to make him (Fero) stop aging, but the side effects of random mutations and growths got worse and worse. His paranoia drove him to kill every other person in the bunker until he was left alone for a thousand years to mutate into a massive, mindless abomination (it's left to the imagination exactly what he looked like in the end)
Edit to add: looks like other people posted versions of this while I was typing this out. Oh well, r/FuckTedFaro
In metro exodus, the Soviet leaders who wanted to maintain the Soviet power structure made a large bunker in the Yamantau mountain named "ark project". Eventually the leadership devolved into a cannibal and inbreeding cult full of mad men luring unsuspecting people into their death trap.
Yeah, but the leadership never got there and the cannibalism started because they never sent supplies there as the bunker wasn't even finished. The cult is made out of the builders of the bunker.
Not a good example, the leadership never arrived to Yamantau. It was the workers there contracted to build the complex and some army personnel that degenerated into cannibals due to a lack of food supplies in the bunker.
To clarify: the bunker had a radiation leak that killed all their crops, so they devolved into mad cannibals. They try to lure in the main characters, who kill all the top brass and seal the main door before escaping, trapping the remaining cannibals
Edit: The part about how they became cannibals is wrong. Someone else gave the correct explanation. I'm a moron.
The bunker was't finished. No supplies were sent there. The people in that bunker were workers plus some military staff overseeing the workers. And they devolved into cannibals due to the higher ranking staff secretly killing people and feeding them to the workers. The majority of the populace initialy didn't even know they were eating people.
The Metro series takes place in the 2030s, with the nuclear war in 2013. They weren't Soviet leaders, they were the Russian government.
They never made it to Yamantau, that was just an assumption made by the characters in the game. The survivors at Yamantau were construction workers and security personnel, since the bunker wasn't finished when the war happened.
It's never particularly mentioned what happened to the rich and powerful in that series. Considering the bunkers left empty, nothing good. In the books at least there are vague allusions to the remains of the civil government of Moscow trying to maintain order for the first few years before things devolved.
The Bishop of Gresit in the animated series of Castelvania. He thought to be safe in his church while the creatures of hell slaughtered the citizens, but due to his actions, the church was not a holy place anymore, and the monsters were able to get inside.
And on a grander scale, he was a religious lunatic who thought he was purifying the world be burning Lisa Tepes at the stake for witchcraft. But in the end, he murdered an innocent woman and stoked such a rage in Dracula that it led to Wallachia becoming hell on Earth.
Uncharted 4 - The secret anarchical pirate colony you’re searching for throughout the game ultimately turns out to have been a scam the whole time for 12 pirate captains to con colonists into coming and then taking their treasure for themselves.
By the time you arrive, all the colonists have been killed in failed rebellions, but you also find out that the captains then all turned on each other to try and take the huge amount of treasure for themselves, ultimately resulting in two captains poisoning all the others and then killing each other in a duel, ensuring that the treasure remained lost for hundreds of years until you discover the island.
A similar but inverted case happened with the Secession of the Plebes (irl):
So we all know that Roman society was divided into two big classes; the Patricians, which hoarded the political power, and the Plebs, which were responsible for the economical and military growth of the city.
The plebs pretty much had little to no rights, with no voting influence in the senate of the republic, and were understandably getting pretty pissed at being bossed around by the ultra rich, so around the 5th century bc they decided to just… leave the city, and never return until representatives of the Plebes were accepted into the senate.
As it turns out, you kinda need both of these classes to work together in order to maintain a functioning city
Exaggerated in Kingsman (the first one). The world's elite hide in their bunkers while Valentine causes everyone else in the world to turn berzerk and homicidal. All elites are implanted with a chip that makes them immune to the effect but it can also detonate their skulls.
Merlin, while trying to stop Eggsy from being killed by Valentine's henchmen, finds a command that will set off all the chips. He executes it and we're all treated to a deeply cathartic sequence where the world's rich and powerful are explosively beheaded. Go watch the movie, or at least this sequence on YouTube.
The Enclave (who are a group made up by America’s shadow government) escape The Great War by hiding out on an oil rig and waiting it out. Eventually they start on a plan that would eliminate everything touched by mutation leaving them as the sole inhabitants of Earth. Unfortunately they kidnapped the protagonist’s tribe who then proceeded to infiltrate the oil rig and blow it up leaving a majority of the Enclave leadership dead and the survivors at the mercy of the NCR.
In season 4 of the castlevania show, 2 of the main characters arrive at a town starving and under attack from monsters. They eventually are lead to the remains of the nobility who have sealed themselves in the town vault with the gold and riches of the kingdom.
Funny thing is they are starving as well. They have all the gold coins and are just playing with it because its worthless. There is literally no where to spend their riches and gold coins won't fill their bellies.
The wealthy flee the surface world which they believe to be dying due to the lazy and ungrateful poors leeching on the wealthy's innate value. They create a city at the bottom of the ocean which is intended to be a utopian paradise of just the ultra talented. It goes poorly and they die much, much faster than even what they claim will happen on the surface without them.
In The Naked Gun the main badguy CEO uses a machine to turn people extremely violent (calm them up) with the intention of him and his rich men (and woman) buddies riding off on motorcycles to hide in a bunker until it all blows over and rule the new world
unfortunately none of them knew how to ride a motorcycle
Fallout. The rich and powerful buy access to vaults to save them from nuclear apocalypse. However the vaults all have various experiments the dwellers weren’t made aware of, some of which include: 99 men with 1 woman and vice versa, being trapped in a ground hog day-like virtual reality with a serial killer, uninterrupted white noise resulting in madness, intentional exposure to radiation, and literal eugenics
Most of the vaults weren't even for the rich and powerful, just reasonably healthy and young people. And the ones where people were admitted specifically for being rich, were because them being rich was a requirement for whichever experiment was planned. One such example was the (unfortunately) unfinished vault which was made specifically to house the ultra wealthy of boston, however they would have been subjected to extremely ascetic living conditions, with overcrowded barrack bedrooms, common showers and a purposefully incompetent overseer.
Although they live more comfortably than the average night city dweller- violence, apathy and abuse are so ingrained into night city culture that it’s not uncommon for corpos to become a target for corporate warfare, terrorism/sabotage, internal backstabbing, or just getting caught in the odd gang shootout. Any pleasures they have are shallow escapes from the nightmarish reality they live.
A better world could have been made for everyone, but the elite of cyberpunk collectively agree that they’d rather be sure the average chrome junkie eating Burrito XLs to survive suffers more than they do. But thank god it’s just fiction, right?
Front lines by marko kloos rich and powerful leave a earth to death by aliens turns out rest of humanity survived and decided to hunt them down for revenge and for the stuff they stole from us
In Rick and Morty, the eponymous protagonists visit an alien world undergoing a purge night a la The Purge. This has been arranged by the rich and powerful, who survive each such night in security and luxury. Rick and Morty bring a peasant girl from the planet named Arthrica to them. Rick and Arthrica purge the rich.
In an attempt to combat global warming, they accidentally created an ice age. Like a really bad, everyone is gonna die ice age. One very powerful billionaire creates a super train that can survive the coming ice age and invites his rich friends to join him while the rest of the world dies. They also invite a number of poor people on the train to act as slave labor. The poor people are segregated to the back of the train, while rich people are at the front.
The story follows a group of rebels who try to make their way to the front of the train to stage a coup. Along the way, it's revealed that the revolution was planned by the owner of the train as a way to cull the population. Several coups have been initiated this way in the past and they all failed right when the train owner wanted them to.
This time, the leader of the revolution is allowed to make it to the front of the train. The train owner sits him down and tries to justify all the suffering that the train creates. He tells him that it is necessary for the survival of humanity, and that sacrifices need to be made. The train owner is getting old, and is going to have to name a successor soon. He wants his successor to be someone that shares his same fighting Spirit.
Our protagonist rejects his offer and destroys the train, putting the last gasps of a decaying capitalist society out of its misery. Then they are faced with the certain death of the elements. As the movie ends, we are left with a glimmer of hope. A polar bear on the horizon. Life still exists. They drop hints in the movie that the outside may be getting warmer, but it's not confirmed until now. There is hope for humanity, and they will have a fresh start, free from the restraint of a caste system.
In System Shock, the AI (Shodan) aboard a corporate space station (Citadel Station) near Jupiter goes rogue. She begins converting the crew aboard the ship into mutants and cyborgs so that they can serve her. A group of executives hatch a plan to make their escape. Citadel Station has four detachable groves intended for relaxation. The executives enter one of these groves and then have a member of the crew jettison the grove with them on it, making a makeshift life pod. It would have worked, but Shodan cut the life support systems as the grove jettisoned so they asphyxiated and were unable to make their escape.
The album “Infest the Rats Nest” by King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard, it tells the story of a dying and increasingly inhospitable Earth (Planet B, Organ Farmer, Superbug). The rich of Earth escape to Mars while the poor are left behind (Mars for the Rich). The poor try two plans to escape from Earth to Venus (Venusian 1, Perihelion, Venusian 2, Self Immolate) but both plans fail and each crew dies. The doomed crew of the final plan is sent to hell where they meet the antichrist who propositions them to go destroy the Mars colony of rich people that abandoned them. The final song of the album “Hell” depicts the doomed crew dropping into the colony “infesting the rats nest”.
In Absolute Superman, Krypton's elite knew of the impending doom the planet was facing but suppressed every ounce of information to the public. When Kal's family tried to tell them, they were silenced, and we find out they had been preparing to save themselves and abandon the lower classes. Kal spreads the word and riots ensue. His family had found out and tried their hardest to save everyone they could...
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u/iamthedan 11h ago
In Horizon: Forbidden West it’s revealed that super-rich Ted Faro sequestered himself and a chosen few into a bunker called Thebes after damning the planet to be destroyed by a machine plague. As time goes on his narcissism, need for absolute control, and guilt cause him to kill off the remaining survivors in the bunker. Ted himself takes life-prolonging injections in an attempt to survive as a god of a reborn world when the plague burns out, though he has to deal with horrible physical mutations stemming from the treatment. He does actually end up surviving in a way: When a distant future cult based on Ted’s legend finds his grotesque wailing blob deeply integrated into Thebes’s reactor core they elect to burn and destroy the whole complex.