Basic Trope: The hero(es) travel(s) to the future and discover it sucks.
- Straight: The hero skips a couple of decades, one way or another. He emerges in an oppressive, badly run Dystopia.
- Exaggerated: The hero skips several decades, and emerges to see the galaxy taken over by Satanist Commie Nazis.
- Downplayed: The hero's absence didn't lead to the villains taking over the world, but their attempt at world domination resulted in a massive war in which many people died and left much of the world in ruins.
- Justified:
- The dystopia in question is a Villain World, brought about due to protagonist's absence.
- The Crapsack World is the result of a secretive villain or organization, which the heroes had no idea existed.
- Inverted:
- The villain skips a couple of decades, and discovers that a Utopia has been built in his absence.
- The hero goes back in time a couple of decades and ends up in a dystopian past.
- The hero tries to travel to a golden age. He discovers that the legendary heroes were tyrants and it was worse than even the Villain's goals.
- Subverted:
- The hero arrives and sees that the bad guy has won. However, the villain in question is a Well-Intentioned Extremist, and the world he had created is actually a utopia.
- The future only seems bad to the people of the present because they never experienced the social, economic, political, and scientific progress that brought it about. To the people of the future, their world is better off even if it is different because it is the future they chose for themselves. Example: Transhumanism considers the future to contain such massive leaps in technology and human evolution that our species would be virtually unrecognizable in both appearance and psychology, so it only makes sense that a modern day human would be horrified at first.
- Double Subverted:
- Upon closer examination, the villain's "utopia" turns out to be shallow and hedonistic.
- The "utopia" is comfortable and runs like clockwork, but most people are troubled psychologically.
- Parodied:
- The so-called "bad future" is actually perfectly normal... wait a minute, where are all of the cheesy snacks?! NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!
- The hero travels an hour into the future, and in his brief absence, the entire world has been conquered by an army of cyborg lawn gnomes.
- Zig Zagged:
- The heroes travel into the future to find themselves in a city of ominous dark buildings covered in propaganda. Turns out, all the inhabitants enjoy material luxury, year round free heating, and freedom. Then it turns out, the heating is provided by giant pollutant ovens, depression and suicide is up despite material luxury, and freedom is managed and "fact-checked" by obstructive but not "evil" middle-management bureaucrats. On the plus side, there's no racial and ethnic conflict... because every ethnicity has been assimilated into a single group.
- A time-traveler from the 1800's travels to the modern day and thinks that the modern day world (2020's at the time of writing this) is a horrible dystopia.
- Averted: The future turns out to be Post-Cyberpunk - lots of fancy new technology, but nothing dystopian.
- Enforced: This is a good way for the work to go Darker and Edgier for a limited time - or even permanently, if the writers are so inclined.
- Lampshaded: "I leave for mere twenty years, and they screw everything up. Great."
- Invoked: The villain deliberately sends the hero into a future where he has conquered the world to try and break his will.
- Exploited: The Token Evil Teammate hitches a ride to the future along with The Hero because he knows there are going to be new, super-deadly weapons to arm himself with if the future turns bad.
- Defied: The hero goes back in time and sets right what once went wrong.
- Discussed: "Ten bucks says the future is bollocks."
- Conversed: "What did this guy expect from the future, exactly? Freedom, truth and beauty just like in his own time?"
- Deconstructed:
- The hero(es) could only be on even terms with the villain in their present because they had the government on their side. With all of this government's resources turned against them, they all end up killed or worse in a very short time.
- It turns out that even Black Shirts and the Big Bad aren't really enjoying the situation, because Dystopia Is Hard to maintain.
- Reconstructed:
- However, the dystopian future has also spawned a secret resistance force that is more than willing to give the hero the help he needs to fight back. Seeing what's at stake if they lose to the villain strengthens their resolve to defeat him/her/it for good.
- The Big Bad has an idea that Dystopia Justifies the Means, and some of his Black Shirts follow suit, so the hardness of maintaining a dystopia is seen by them as a challenge.
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