Basic Trope: Just before a catastrophe strikes, the privileged and powerful members of society abandon everyone else to their fates.
- Straight: Just before an apocalyptic disaster is set to destroy human civilization and wipe out most of the species, the elites secure themselves and their families in underground bunkers and leave the rest of society to fend for themselves.
- Exaggerated: The elites caused the apocalypse on purpose to "cull the inferior members of our species".
- Downplayed: When an apocalypse is coming, the elites purchase the best survival gear they can afford, but still stay behind to work with others.
- Justified: The apocalypse cannot be survived, so fleeing is the only sensible option, but only the rich can afford to do so.
- Inverted: A country that recently underwent a communist revolution builds a People's Shelter for the entire population, but forbids overthrown elites of the old regime from entry despite there being space for them.
- Subverted:
- When the apocalypse is announced, several government leaders and wealthy magnates announce they will stay behind to help society through the coming apocalypse.
- When the apocalypse is announced, the elites flee to underground bunkers ... but then announce that there's plenty of room left for the working class population.
- Double Subverted:
- They're lying so nobody notices when they actually leave (until it's too late to retaliate).
- The bunkers actually only have space for a tiny portion of the working class, and then they're forced to work as servants for the elites.
- Parodied: A rich character has a gold-plated "escape rocket" that he jumps into at the slightest inconvenience, including things like an unexpected rainstorm.
- Zig-Zagged: When an apocalypse is coming, most of the elites of society flee to the bunker to leave everyone else to die. A minority of them announce they're going to stay to help their people, but of these only a handful actually stay with the rest escaping to the bunker in secrecy. A document is leaked claiming the ones who actually stayed wanted spots in the bunker but were denied, but the elites who stayed behind claim this document is a lie and the story never makes it clear whether or not this is the case.
- Averted: There is no escaping from the apocalypse, so nobody even tries. Alternatively, escaping is cheap enough that anyone can do it (or at least try) regardless of their class.
- Enforced: A snobbish Evil Genius kidnaps the elites and locks them in his bunker in anticipation for a coming apocalypse, whether or not they actually want to come.
- Lampshaded: ???
- Invoked: ???
- Exploited: A construction company builds survival bunkers explicitly marketed towards wealthy clients.
- Defied:
- The working class population of a city storm the bunker before the elites can reach it, dooming them to endure the apocalypse.
- The organization that controls the bunkers refuses to accept bribes for entry, instead doling out salvation based on some other criteria such as intelligence or random chance.
- Whatever's causing the apocalyptic mess makes a point of destroying any attempt to escape it.
- Discussed: "You know for a fact that there are rich fellas over on a bunker in Colorado drinking Chianti and waiting for the riots to stop, right?"
- Conversed: "Well, it wouldn't be a proper Take That! to [rich Tech Bro du jour] if he didn't had a billion-dollar rocket in his basement to fulfill his little When Worlds Collide fantasies..."
- Deconstructed: Seeing their leaders abandon them in this dark hour causes society to collapse into panic and despair, worsening the apocalypse.
- Reconstructed: Not all the elites abandoned society, and the ones who stayed behind manage to avert the apocalypse. They become celebrated heroes in the world they risked their lives to save, while the ones who fled are derided as selfish cowards.
- Played for Laughs: The elites evacuate Earth when the IRS demands a tax hike for the billionaire bracket of 0.00005%.
- Played for Drama: The detail about how the elites have evacuated Earth during an apocalypse brings further depression to the protagonists who are most definitely not going to survive it.
- Played for Horror:
- The rich people escape Earth and are intercepted by the flesh-eating alien invaders, and they get the goriest deaths of the whole story.
- It is revealed that the rich people had a plan to escape the apocalypse because they are the ones who orchestrated the apocalypse as a spectacularly excessive plan to Kill the Poor.
- The steps the rich people took to manufacture their methods to survive the disaster, have sufficient resources (such as manpower) and make damned sure nobody knew about it are just monstrous.
Back to The Elites Jump Ship.
