Restart the World

"Too bad buddy, this twisted game needs to be reset. We'll start over from Zero with this V2 and entrust the future to the next generation."

— Larry "Pixy" Foulke, Ace Combat Zero: The Belkan War

The world has just gone too far to go on any longer like it is. It's time to drop the bomb and destroy everything, Let the Past Burn and rebuild from scratch After the End, believing Utopia Justifies the Means.

Often accomplished by a Depopulation Bomb or Doomsday Device. Sometimes will include an ark or vault of some sort to keep the chosen alive. Often intended to lead to an Adam and Eve Plot in a New Eden.

If this isn't just a motivation but also a part of nature (and it has happened more than once), it's Eternal Recurrence.

Often the goal of a Mad Scientist, Diabolical Mastermind, General Ripper, Evil Luddite, Evil Reactionary, or a group of anarchists. You can likely expect a Misanthrope Supreme to want this to solve the "problem" of those pesky fellow humans "ruining" the world. A subtrope of Omnicidal Maniac. Compare In Their Own Image, Burn Baby Burn (which is this on a very small scale), Apocalypse How (Class 2), Reset Button.

---

Examples:

Anime & Manga

• In Cross Ange, this was the original goal of Embryo, who made numerous attempts to fix what he saw was a corrupt, broken world that births nothing but conflict. By the time he appears in the show, however, he has sunk into huge Motive Decay and no longer cares about making the world better, instead recreating it for the sake of finding new "playthings" for his Battle Harem. At the end of the series, he tries to destroy and recreate the world again, just so he can have more women to potentially seduce to his side or force himself upon, ultimately showing his motives to be purely selfish.
• The goal of Fire Punch's Big Bad is to reset the world via the World Tree. Considering that it's a dying Crapsack World and they just want to return the civilization to the way it's used to be like, it sounds noble, but their methods and motivations, specifically solely to watch a new Star Wars film that got canceled in her time, are not so.
• Gundam:
  • Mobile Suit Gundam: Char's Counterattack: Char hopes to do this by dropping Axis onto Earth, getting rid of the elitist humans who cling to it and "putting it to sleep for a while" so it can recover from all that humanity has done to it while the remainder of humanity stay in space and become Newtypes.
  • This is believed to be what happened at the end of the Dark History in ∀ Gundam, when the unknown pilot of the Turn A used the Moonlight Butterfly across the whole of Earth. The details of why that decision was made are lost to history.
  • Wang Liu Mei and others want to use Celestial Being to destroy and remake the world in Mobile Suit Gundam 00.
• Harlock: Space Pirate: In the 2014 CGI Captain Harlock movie reboot, this is the true motivation of Harlock. Although he's led his crew to believe that resetting the "Genesis Clock" would simply rejuvenate the dying worlds in the setting somehow, it's revealed his plan is to simply destroy everything and everyone to start over.
• JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Stone Ocean: Enrico Pucci's aim is to complete the goal of DIO, which is to achieve heaven. In order to do that, he uses Made In Heaven to accelerate time and completely reset the universe. And in the process, he manages to slaughter the entire main cast save for Emporio. This results in the creation of a universe where humanity has fully-engraved knowledge of their own fate, but as Emporio successfully kills Pucci before the process is completed, Pucci's universe is completely undone and he becomes Ret-Gone, while Emporio arrives in a newly-restored world where he meets all of his friends, now revived as new people.
• In Sailor Moon, this is the duty of Sailor Saturn. If the world can't be saved, then she brings down her Silence Glaive to destroy it, at which point Queen Serenity or Sailor Moon uses the Silver Crystal to restore the world. She did this to the Silver Millennium after the Dark Kingdom's victory, allowing the Sailor Senshi to reincarnate in modern Earth.

Comic Books

• The DCU:
  • Batman: The Eco-Terrorist Ra's al Ghul has this as a standard plot in all his incarnations.
    "Our world is not for everyone. Only those who prove their worth will enter it. The rest will be purged... and if nine hundred and ninety-nine must perish for every one who lives... so be it!" — (Azrael Vol. 2 #18)
  • The Legend of Wonder Woman (2016): This turns out to be Zeus's plan, to kill most humans on the planet while destroying all of their civilizations and preserving only a handful who will be subjugated and forced to serve him and the new glorious civilization he intends to bring. Of course, he feels that the world is ruined and humanity has fallen mostly because essentially no one is worshipping him anymore, which is causing his power to fade and will eventually kill him.
• One Double Duck story is about a secret society which plans to destroy the world and humanity by causing a series of seismic events. They believe that this will allow them to create a utopia, and their leader plans to stay behind and die in the cataclysm while the other members take to shelters. Naturally, Donald and Kay are able to prevent this.
• In Hellboy and B.P.R.D., this is a very common motivation for the various individuals and Apocalypse Cults trying to summon the Ogdru Jahad and end the world — they all think a new paradise will grow from the ashes. Some think civilization is corrupt and needs to be destroyed. Others think the apocalypse is inevitable, but if they are the ones to cause it, at least they can mitigate the destruction and guide the rebuilding afterwards.

Films — Live-Action

• The League of Shadows from The Dark Knight Trilogy want to subject Gotham City to this, believing that it cannot be saved from the corruption that has permeated it. Bruce Wayne, their newest disciple, sees things differently.
• Escape from L.A. has a technological version of this. Snake Plissken is once again forced into a mission for the government as he was in Escape from New York, but this time he becomes convinced that both the US government (which has seemingly absorbed the worst of both the American left and right wing, and which is holding a Doomsday Device that will destroy all technology over the head of the rest of the world) and the enemies of it are too corrupt and flawed to be worth backing or working with. He winds up using the superweapon himself to destroy all the advanced technology all over the world in the hope that when people rebuild the world, maybe they'll get it right.
• Gods of Egypt: The villain Set is disheartened when he learns that his harsh upbringing and infertility was his father Ra's way to prepare Set for the duty of protecting the world from being devoured by the monster Apophis, a lonely job where Set will have no company. Set thus decides to let Apophis consume both the mortal world and the afterlife, reasoning that afterward he'll be able to create a new world without death.
• Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019): The British Army colonel turned eco-terrorist leader Alan Jonah, is so bitter and disillusioned with the human race and the world that we've created, that he wants to set as many Kaiju loose on the world as possible to decimate humanity and ostensibly restore balance to nature. Except he doesn't really care about the latter part to begin with, as unlike his partner, he's perfectly happy to let King Ghidorah kill everything on Earth.
• James Bond:
  • In The Spy Who Loved Me, Diabolical Mastermind Karl Stromberg plans to start a nuclear war between the U.S. and U.S.S.R. by launching a nuclear missile against each nation simultaneously. His justification:
    "Today civilization as we know it is corrupt and decadent. Inevitably, it will destroy itself. I'm merely accelerating the process.
    I intend to change the face of history [snip] by creating a world. A new and beautiful world beneath the sea."
  • In Moonraker, the Big Bad decides to destroy mankind with a nerve toxin, and then repopulate with his own super race preserved on a space station.
• Marvel Cinematic Universe:
  • Alexander Pierce of Captain America: The Winter Soldier expresses a motive of this. Through Project Insight, he hopes to make a new world that is safe from evil because potential terrorists can be killed before they can act. However, it later turns out that the new world will be run by HYDRA, and that those terrorists were funded by them in the first place specifically so HYDRA could sow chaos and scare the public into approving mass surveillance. In short, the old corrupt world became corrupt because HYDRA and Pierce made it so.
  • Ultron doesn't start this way in Avengers: Age of Ultron, but his Motive Decay throughout the movie eventually shifts to this point by the final act when he determines that the only real way forward is to trigger a human extinction then repopulate the world with machines, believing that humanity isn't fit to be in charge of its own destiny.
  • Ego starts off as a well-meaning father figure for Peter Quill in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, but then it's revealed that the real reason he brought them together is because he needs the Celestial-half of Peter's biology to power a universe-leveling event. Having traveled the cosmos for eons, Ego has become dismayed with mortal life and thinks it needs an upgrade, so he wants to wipe the slate clean and start over with a new universe built on himself as its core template. To that end he sired children across the cosmos, luring them back to his home planet to test their composition to see if it will let him execute his plan, killing them when it doesn't.
  • Thanos in Avengers: Endgame has traveled from a different timeline to a timeline where his counterpart managed to succeed in his original mission of eradicating half the population of the universe in order preserve the living half, using the power of the Infinity Stones. However, all that he has witnessed is those who remained do whatever it takes to undo his life's work. Angered by this, he then decides that mortals only pine for their losses when something is taken from them, not realizing the blessing they have been given and that to ensure that people won't be trapped in the past, vows to eliminate the entire universe and start over with a balanced universe to ensure that no one misses that which they lost.
• Noah has this as the Creator's plan: flood the Earth to end The Descendants of Cain, using Noah and his family to save the land-dwelling animals and birds. There's a twist, though: Noah doesn't think the Creator wants humanity to start over, but for his new, pristine world to exist without the stain of humans. He takes this from a Despair Event Horizon over seeing the Cainites go cannibalistic. The latter part of the movie deals with him condemning his family (and humanity) by not bringing wives for his sons and later threatening to kill any granddaughters Illa may give birth to. In the end, he chooses not to kill his granddaughters and allow humanity to repopulate, Illa's reasoning being the Creator left that choice to Noah.
• This turns out to be Umbrella's plan in the Resident Evil Film Series: use the T-Virus to wipe out humanity while their chosen survivors ride it out in cold sleep, then re-emerge to rebuild the world in their image.
• In Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, the Klingons believe that the Genesis device was meant to be used for this weaponized purpose — destroying life on inhabited worlds and remaking them favorable to human life — rather than its stated purpose of creating life on lifeless worlds.
• Tenet: It turns out that the reason why people from the future are interfering with the past is because the future Earth is so damaged by climate change that these people would rather permanently reverse the flow of time to return to a healthier planet.

Literature

• The rebirth of the world forms a core plot during the closing chapters of Avesta of Black and White. Specifically, whenever either side wins the war of Good and Evil, the whole world is restarted with the sides and their roles shifted. Additionally, after Magsarion kills Nadare, the whole universe restarts again as it's supposed to after which he goes on his killing spree with the new Good and Evil both fearing this faceless monster killing and destroying world after world. It's an omnicide that will keep on going until there is no one left but him and God, and due to Nadare never getting a successor this go around this will be the last reset before Magsarion himself ascends to godhood and recreates the world in his own image.
• Nightfall (1941): Discussed. When the eclipse happens, the population Goes Mad from the Revelation of all the stars in the sky and burns down their civilization, leaving the survivors to start over from scratch. There is archaeological evidence that this has happened multiple times in the past, but the one time we witness it the records of the previous event are considered a myth only believed in by a few crazy cultists. The cultists believe it is the wrath of their god, destroying their civilization and starting over.
• Rainbow Six: Eco-terrorists plan on releasing an Ebola virus at the Olympics, sickening thousands, and then sickening the rest of the world with their "vaccine", planning to kill virtually all of humanity to save the planet.
• In the Well World novel Twilight at the Well of Souls, the Well of Souls, the giant computer that keeps most of the Universe in existence, is slowly being destroyed by spreading damage caused by a human superweapon. Nathan Brazil and Mavra Chang must enter the Well of Souls, shut it down (destroying most of the Universe in the process — only the 'original' Universe of the Markovians will still exist), and then restart it, creating a new Universe to replace the old one and not-incidentally giving the Well Computer the opportunity to repair itself.

Live-Action TV

• In Arrow, several season Big Bads have this as their motivation. In Season 1, the Tempest conspiracy led by Malcolm Merlyn wants to destroy the crime-ridden neighborhood of the Glades so Starling City can flourish without it. In Season 2, Brother Blood wants to send all of Starling City into chaos so he can gain absolute power over the city and rebuild it to fit his vision (except it turns out that he is working for Deathstroke, who just wants the whole thing destroyed out of revenge against the Arrow, and Blood turns on Deathstroke when he realizes this). In Season 4, Damien Darhk has the same idea but on a global scale; create a nuclear holocaust and use the Black Magic created from the deaths of billions to reshape the world. Malcolm Merlyn even points out that he is siding with Darhk because it is basically the same as his plan, only larger.
• Babylon 5: This is essentially the motivation of the Shadows. They appear every thousand years and provoke all the races of the galaxy into a giant Darwinian war. The "unworthy" races are driven to extinction, leaving the surviving races to rebuild from the ashes.
• Doctor Who: In "Invasion of the Dinosaurs", the scientists' plan was to do this to the world by loading a select few colonists onto a fake spaceship and then turning back time to a pre-technological age (while telling the colonists they were actually going to a new world).
• When the Judge in The Good Place is clued in on the fact that the system for morally evaluating people is fatally flawed, her first impulse is to completely reset the world and start over. This would eliminate all the characters, so they go to a lot of trouble to talk her out of this.
• Heroes: Adam Monroe has this as his primary motivation in Season 2. Having lived for hundreds of years due to his regeneration ability, he's seen how evil humanity can be (living through wars, genocide, and Hiro stealing his girl 400 years ago), so he plans to unleash an unstoppable virus on humanity that will eradicate mankind save for the "evolved humans" who will repopulate the Earth and bring about peace.
• In Stargate SG-1, Anubis wants to destroy all life in the Milky Way and rebuild it in his image. Being half-ascended, he can survive the superweapon.
• The Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode "Our Man Bashir" has one in Julian's James Bond-esque holonovel named Dr. Noah, who wants to obliterate mankind with a global flood and use his mountain palace of geniuses to repopulate.
• Tomica Hero Rescue Force: The end goal of the Neo Terror terrorist organization is to "reset" the world by wiping human civilization off the face of the planet in order to correct the environmental damage humanity has done to it.

Music

• The Doctor Steel song "Ode to Revenge" basically advocates the anarchist version of this trope.
  This is the only way
  To build a better day
  So let me hear you say
  Let's burn it all down.
• Zager & Evans' "In the Year 2525" is on the brink of reaching this point after five millennia of dystopian decadence with all sorts of prosthetics taking the place of your arms, legs, eyes and teeth, and marriageless test-tube babies:
  In the year, 7510, If God's a-coming, He oughta make it by then,
  Maybe He'll look around Himself and say, "Guess it's time for the judgement day",
  In the year 8510, God is gonna shake His mighty head,
  He'll either say "I'm pleased where man has been", Or tear it down, and start again...

Myths & Religion

• Aztec Mythology: The Aztecs believed that four worlds existed before the current one, each of them destroyed in different ways by the Jerkass Gods for various reasons, and replaced with a new one. The only way to prevent the destruction of the fifth world was through Human Sacrifice.
• The Bible:
  • God Himself, in the Book of Genesis, decides mankind has become too sinful to continue, and decides to destroy the world in a flood, saving a small group consisting of Noah, his wife, sons and daughters-in-law and two of each animal (and seven of the ceremonially clean ones) to repopulate Earth afterwards.
  • The Book of Revelation, the final book of the Bible, ends with the old heaven and earth being destroyed along with the wicked souls, and a new heaven and new earth being built in their place.

Tabletop Games

• BattleTech: After the fall of the Word of Blake, one of the splinter groups to arise from its remnants was the White Hand, which plots to destroy the Inner Sphere so it may be remade in Jerome Blake's "divine" image. While they are considered a nuisance compared to the Clans and the Successor States, it is said that they are far more powerful than people realize.
• Exalted: The Kukla is a titanic Elemental Dragon of Earth whose mere passage is apocalyptic, as it can among other things turn large swaths of the landscape into freshly tilled, uniform and lifeless soil just by being in their vicinity. However, the topsoil it produces also blooms with extremely vigorous life after it leaves, and the Kukla's passage also forcefully purifies shadowlands and forces back the Wyld; consequently, it's treated as a last-resort weapon of mass destruction in case Creation should be lost to the dead or The Fair Folk — releasing the Kukla will essentially reset the universe to a primordial state, so it would only ever be released in situations where Creation is utterly unsalvageable otherwise.
• This is the core goal of the Current of Acheron from Siren: The Drowning. Where all other Sirens are working to stave off The End of the World as We Know It, the Colecanths are those Sirens who see the Deluge as a chance for a fresh start and a chance for a less twisted and rotten world than the one in which they live.

Video Games

• Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs: This is the Engineer's motivation. He saw horrific visions of the 20th century, which included the Holocaust and the two world wars (in which Mandus's children die), and came to the conclusion that the best way to prevent it from happening was to destroy humanity and start over.
• Avalon Code: The world is set to end, and it's up to you to create a new one. You do not, and the ultimate goal is to save the current world, rather than wipe it and start a new one in its place. You get to see how the new world would be if you did create it, but the system used to shape it is very shallow.
• Baroque: If the player character makes it to the bottom of the Neuro Tower and kills God's Avatar, they'll gain her Baroque Crystal. Mission control reveals the crystal can create a new world, but the player character immediately decides to reset the world instead, which unfortunately does not prevent the apocalypse and effectively rewinds time.
• Crash Bandicoot 4: It's About Time: This is ultimately the plan of Doctor Nefarious Tropy. After Neo Cortex is defeated by Crash and calls it quits, Nefarious reveals himself and ends his alliance with him. He explains that while Cortex is content with just ruling space and time, he would rather "start from scratch". Using the rift generator, Tropy plans to "wipe the slate clean" by rebooting the entire timeline and rebuilding it to his liking, with him as the only god, of course.
• This happens in the true ending of Cruelty Squad. The main character reaches the Cradle of Life, kills the avatar of Life, and becomes godlike. He then ends the universe, putting an end to its perversion of the cycle of life and death and allowing a new universe to come into being in its place.
• Demon Hunter: The Return of the Wings: The Tower of Sin is a Lost Superweapon that would wipe out the entire Akoron if fully charged, which is something Elen aims to do to become the god of the new world.
• Dragon Age: Inquisition: The Big Bad Corypheus, one of the Ancient Tevinter magisters who invaded the Black City and became darkspawn, is trying to cause this in order to restore his homeland to its former glory, the ritual for which is actually interrupted by the player before the game even starts. As it turns out, the other Big Bad, Fen'Harel, who it turns out is actually Solas' true identity, was trying to do the same thing by collapsing the border between the real world and the Fade so he could reshape reality to 1000 years earlier to undo his mistake that condemned the elves to subjugation in the first place. Both plans, by necessity, would result in a massive death toll throughout Thedas.
• In The Elder Scrolls, the universe runs in "kalpas", cycles of time. At the end of every kalpa, Alduin, the draconic Beast of the Apocalypse, performs his divinely mandated duty of "eating the world" so that it can be remade anew. In the current kalpa, Alduin discovered that he prefers to be worshiped as a god, and decides to shirk his duty and try to Take Over the World instead. The ancient Nords temporarily defeated Alduin by using an Elder Scroll to cast Alduin several thousand years forward in time. He emerges just prior to the events of Skyrim, in which he serves as the Big Bad and the Last Dragonborn must defeat him. Given that his soul is not absorbed when the Dragonborn defeats him, it's implied that Alduin is not truly defeated, and will return when it is the appropriate time for him to fulfill his duty as world-eater.
• Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon: Colonel Sloan intends to nuke human civilization out of existence, then build a new world around the principles of Social Darwinism.
• Fate/Grand Order:
  • The Big Bad of the first arc wants to do this because Goetia is a Well-Intentioned Extremist who believes mortal lives are finite and full of suffering (unable to grasp the advantages of a mortal lifespan), so he burns the timeline to ash and wants to use the collected energy to travel back to the beginning and make mankind immortal and flawless.
  • The crux of the second arc is that the world has been wiped clean by the Foreign God who assigns the seven Crypters to fight for which of their Lostbelts will replace Proper Human History going forward and giving their denied worlds a chance to grow. Chaldea represents the Proper Human History and must defeat each Lostbelt to restore the old world (and deal with the moral dilemma of just what is "right" when victory means genociding so many innocents whose only "crime" is being born in the wrong timeline). It's unclear just why the Foreign God wants this, especially since its original plan was to have just one Lostbelt and Crypter and only made it There Can Be Only One when that Crypter (Kirschtaria Wodime) insisted his fellow Team A members have a chance. Wodime himself took this as an opportunity to both complete his own plan to "restart" the world by turning humanity into god-hybrids and go behind the Foreign God's back in the hope the new humanity would be able to unite and defeat it.
• Horizon Zero Dawn has a heroic example in the GAIA AI system, which was built to do this after the Faro Plague devoured Earth's biosphere, using terraforming to restore organic life and ecosystems to a barren husk. One of its subroutines, HADES, was meant as a reset button in case GAIA messed up the terraforming process and had to start over.
• Kid Icarus: Uprising: Viridi, Goddess of Nature, planned to use the Reset Bombs to wipe out humanity without damaging the rest of the life on Earth.
• Kingdom Hearts: This is Master Xehanort's true plan in Kingdom Hearts III; to completely destroy all worlds and rebuild them from scratch so as to achieve true balance. Despite this, he still wants be a leader, and was still mostly interested in uncovering the secrets of light and darkness.
• Mega Man:
  • In Mega Man X8, Big Bad Lumine aims to create a world only for New Generation Reploids like him, with the Jacob Space Elevator project being used to migrate everything they need to the moon before he exterminates all Old-Gen Reploids on earth and rebuild the world after that. He also states that, with the already broken and corrupt state of the world, it needs to be rebuilt from scratch anyways.
  • In Mega Man ZX Advent, Master Albert's grand plan revolves around using the completed Model W to "reset" the world, with him at the reins as its god. In The Stinger exclusive to Hard Mode, it turns out that Master Thomas, while disliking Albert's method, agrees with him that the world needs to be reset.
• Near the end of Obsidian, Ceres, the nanobot-generating AI, decides that Earth should not have humans, since they were the ones who caused the pollution it was programmed to reverse. Ceres drew this conclusion based on the dreams you and your partner Max had during its construction, which the AI physically built to study. In the final realm, after Max rigs the Crossover Switch to crash Ceres' systems for good, you're given the choice between this, and permitting the Conductor, Ceres' avatar, to "reboot" the world using its nanobots, leaving you and Max the only humans left alive.
• Pokémon:
  • Pokémon Diamond and Pearl: Cyrus, the leader of Team Galactic, plans to reset the universe to his liking with the power of legendary Pokemon without The Evils of Free Will.
  • Pokémon X and Y: Lysandre and Team Flare wish to use the Ultimate Weapon powered by the box legends in order to kill every non-Flare human and all Pokémon in order to start the world anew.
• The Secret World: The Gaia Engines provide a way to restart the world in case shit hits the fan too hard for anyone to do anything about it; the only known times that has happened was when the Dreamers woke up. The disadvantages to doing this are that they're now damaged and might not be able to do it again, and it restarts the world all the way back.
• In Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne, Hikawa triggers the Conception, a cataclysm that reduces the world to an egg-like state from which a new world can be born. His goal is for the new world to conform to his philosophy of Shijima, a World of Silence in which humanity is unified with all that is in a single, great mind (sort of a universal Enlightenment). In fact, the entire proposal of the Conception hinges on giving up in the old world and convincing God that It Is Beyond Saving so it can all be torn down so a new cycle can begin.
• Splatoon 2: The Big Bad of the Octo Expansion DLC is a renegade AI who wants to exterminate the current species on Earth for finding them a disappointment, then replace them with a self-engineered race that it will deem to be worthy successors.
• In Super Paper Mario, Count Bleck wants to do this so he can make a new world without sadness, or so he claims. He actually intends to let it all be destroyed for good, unable to see any value in existence after losing his love. Dimentio, on the other hand, plans to remake the world in his own twisted image.
• In Time Crisis 5, Robert's true goal is to reset the whole world with a pain and fear relief drug Keith had to protect in a mission three years before the start of the game, knowing that the drug can turn humans into zombies as a side effect. The mission fails, and Robert takes the drug for himself so he can zombify the entirety of New York three years later.
• Warcraft:
  • This is the reason why the Burning Legion exists. The creator of the Legion, Sargeras, was originally the champion of the titans whose duty was to protect the universe from demons and other horrors. After spending aeons fighting the forces of evil, he concluded that the universe itself was flawed and tainted, and the only way to rid it of evil was to destroy it and remake it without the flaws, so he united the demons he had been fighting against into an army whose sole purpose was to burn down the universe.
  • Algalon the Observer, an Optional Boss from World of Warcraft, represents the Titans, the creators of Azeroth. His job is to assess the world in order to determine whether or not the world is too corrupted to be allowed to continue existing in its current form. If it is, the Titans are to destroy Azeroth and create it anew. Due to the crapsack nature of Azeroth, and in particular the corruption of the Old Gods, Algalon is set to deliver an unfavorable report to his masters when you meet the guy, and you have to take him down to prevent the world and all life upon it from being destroyed.
• Watch Dogs: Legion has the villain, Zero Day actually Sabine Brandt, has this as their motivation. They want to restart the clock (hence the name), which requires destroying the city of London by turning its technology against the city.

Web Animation

• This happened once in RWBY. After Salem turned the whole of mankind against the Gods of Light and Darkness, the God of Darkness decided to kill them all to punish and spite her, breaking the moon on his way out. To atone for what happened, the God of Light allowed humanity to return, though the species was forever stripped of magic and the faunus came into being.
• Velma Meets the Original Velma: Every time Scooby's ability to talk is questioned, he kills the entire cast, takes a bit of their essence, and recreates the world in a new iteration. He's done this enough for there to have been over half a dozen iterations, with the Velma one being the most recent and, in his own words, the most flawed.

Web Comics

• No More Heroes 3: Alternate Struggles: Paradox Bandit's goal is to do this to the world of Masters of Explosion with FU's help in such a way that he will never be in danger of being discarded or deconstructed (or challenged or changed in any fashion) ever again.
• The Order of the Stick:
  • Downplayed; the Dark One wants to use the threat posed by the Snarl to coerce the other gods into giving the goblins equality with the other races. If that fails, though, his backup plan is to let the Snarl unmake the world, so he can use his influence as a Deity of Goblin Origin to make sure the goblins have a better place in the next world that the gods create.
  • However, this turns out to be the primary goal of the goddess Hel, who is maneuvering to destroy the current world before the Snarl breaks free because doing so will give her a favorable position in the next one.
• This strip from The Perry Bible Fellowship, in which a spaceship finds a reset button in the middle of space, which starts evolution all over again and creates a Stable Time Loop.

Web Original

• This is the setup for Season 2 of Epic SMP after the total destruction of the Season 1 finale, as a result of SwaggerSouls building a portal into the Void and offsetting the balance of the universe.
• SCP Foundation:
  • SCP-2000 serves as one of these for the human race, though it's less of a deliberate restart and more of a backup file in case the Foundation is unable to prevent an apocalypse. It's been activated at least twice already, who know how many times it's actually been activated, and apparently setting the restart point too far back will screw up history too much (it's hinted going too far back once caused World War II to happen).
  • The Foundation also has SCP-001-J, an homage to The Ren & Stimpy Show episode (see below).

Western Animation

• Big Hero 6: The Series: Obake wants to do this to San Fransokyo, not for any well-meaning reasons, but just because he wants to be remembered forever.
• The Ren & Stimpy Show: In "Space Madness", Stimpy is charged with guarding a literal red reset button ("The beautiful, shiny button! The jolly, candy-like button!") that would erase history if pressed.
• The third season of ReBoot ends with one, a justified case as the show takes place Inside a Computer System. Megabyte, a virus, has infected Mainframe so badly that it cannot be saved, so Phong creates a backup of all the programs in the system, and lets the whole computer crash, hoping "The User" will hit the Reset Button.
• The Big Bad of the final season of Regular Show — and by extension, the whole series — is Malum-Kranus, also known as Anti-Pops, Pops' Evil Twin. He believes that the universe is broken and wants to destroy it in a battle with his brother. The battle has happened over and over, and every time the universe is destroyed and then restarts all over again. Pops defeats him by giving him a Cooldown Hug while they fly into a sun, thus sparing the universe.

Real Life

• According to legend, the Roman emperor Nero wanted to do a small-scale version of this. He had a vision of a "new Rome", but decided that in order to build it, the old city needed to be razed, so he had fires set. And then famously fiddled while Rome burned. When public opinion turned against this act, he blamed it on the Christians.
• Posadism, an offshoot of Trotskyism, has been noted, alongside other peculiarities (such as an interest in UFOs), for advocating nuclear war as a means of bringing about a socialist revolution.
• Accelerationist groups like the Atomwaffen Division advocate the use of terrorism and mass destruction as a means of rebuilding civilization into their "ideal" (read: fascist) vision of it. Originally, this was a Marxist concept that advocated instigating socialist revolution. In time however, it began to refer to the Neo-Nazi ideal of destroying human society as we know it.

---