Basic Trope: Precursors that are deliberately responsible for the problems of the world.
- Straight: The Trope-Xs created monsters that cause trouble in the modern day, left doomsday weapons without any protection, and are generally responsible for the world's current state.
- Exaggerated:
- The Trope-Xs are actively involved in the setting's story as antagonists.
- The Trope-Xs attempted to sterilize the entire Earth billions of years ago, and once they discover there's teeming life there, their primary mission is to wipe it out.
- Downplayed:
- Neglectful Precursors, where the precursors are indirectly responsible for the world's problems, but not malicious.
- Abusive Parents.
- The Trope-Xs operate under Blue-and-Orange Morality that leads them to often be damaging, but they're not intentionally malicious and are even sometimes helpful.
- The Trope-Xs are mainly malevolent, but there are a reasonable number of neutral or even benevolent ones around too.
- Justified:
- The Trope-Xs created the monsters and/or doomsday weapons to destroy the "lesser races" for their amusement.
- The Trope-Xs left those monsters and/or doomsday weapons to punish the "lesser races" for their rebellion long ago.
- Inverted:
- Benevolent Precursors
- Abusive Descendants: The Trope-Y resent their ancestor species and goes to war with them.
- Benovolent Descendants.
- Subverted: It turns out that the Trope-Xs sincerely thought that their evil deeds were the lesser evil.
- Double Subverted: "The lesser evil" would be a less malicious race taking over.
- Parodied: The Trope-Xs unleash an onslaught of pranks onto an unsuspecting civilization such as retooling their partucle accelerators into producing tons of bubble gum, turning all of their airbags into whoopie cushions, and replacing all of their monuments with statues of their particular equipment.
- Zig-Zagged: The Trope-Xs abuses a primitive civilization for the sole purpose of toughening them up for what's to come. Turns out it's all a pretense to brutally crush their hopes and dreams... or is it All According to Plan?
- Averted:
- No precursors, abusive or otherwise, exist in this setting.
- The precursors aren't particularly malevolent.
- Enforced:
- "Okay, we need a jerkass who can really give the heroes a hard time. What's the best way to do this? Let's make them an ancient race of jerkasses, give then advanced technology, and set them loose on an unsuspecting setting."
- "So the heroes have found their creators, they understand their own origins, everything is meaningful now, yada, yada, BORING! What's a new conflict we can introduce?" "What if the creators are evil?"
- Lampshaded: "It's almost like the Trope-Xs made us specifically for the express purpose of making us suffer."
- Invoked: A powerful, ancient civilization with access to doomsday weapons know that the primitives consider them abusive precursors yet have no compunction to change their behavior as they see the difference in power as a moral license to bully those weaker than them.
- Exploited: A Villain wishing to bring a country to its knees searches for weapons of mass destruction left behind by an ancient, malevolent culture in archaeological sites and museums.
- Defied:
- The Federation discovers inactive, doomsday weapons left behind by a race of omnicidal aliens... and hatches a plan to lure the aliens in question to an uninhabited star system in order to give them a taste of their own medicine.
- The Trope-Xs were a violent race that caused problems for Earth, but they actively try to make amends with humanity, reasoning that trying to wipe out a "lesser" species might end badly for them.
- Discussed: "Usually finding this growing artifact amid the ruins of a younger civilization would mean that an older, more immoral culture probably left it there to cause their collapse, right?"
- Conversed: "I would sure hate to have been created by those sick bastards just for their amusement."
- Implied: Nothing is actually said about the precursors, but some of the aliens that humans encounter seem just a little too murderous to be natural creatures.
- Played for Laughs: The Trope-Xs are a race of Laughably Evil Smug Snakes who constantly boast of their alleged superiority and try to wipe out "lesser" species for hilariously petty reasons.
- Played for Drama: The realization that humanity's creators are evil drives people to existential despair.
Back to your true masters, you insignificant microbe.
