Basic Trope: There's always something threatening the world.
- Straight: The Super-Awesome Hero Squad must save the world each week from villains who want to take over/destroy the world.
- Exaggerated: No more than 5 minutes from saving the world from Emperor Evulz, our heroes have to save the world from another villain who wants to take over the world.
- Downplayed:
- Villains try to take over the world once every few months.
- There's always something threatening one city or another.
- Justified:
- The world is full of people with the magical powers or technological capacity to destroy the world, and naturally some of those people who are able to threaten the world will be villains or at least dangerously incompetent.
- The world is at the end of its lifespan.
- It's a long time coming, but everything must come to an end. note
- Inverted: There's always a hero ready to defend the world, causing Eric the Evil a lot of problems.
- The world has an inherent ability to heal itself, making it impossible for any apocalyptic damage to occur.
- Subverted: The heroes lose, and Derek the Demented's master plan has come to fruition! Except the results of the plan only lead to more heavy monitoring and Derek giving Doom Troopers freedom to do as they see fit, which turns out to be a lot more benign that people thought.
- Double Subverted: Under Derek's rule the Super-Awesome Hero Squad is disbanded only to find out that it was Derek giving them some time off while his Doom Troopers took care of daily world threatening plans so they aren't the only ones saving the world. Derek's plan was simply the best way he could see to help split up the task of saving the world.
- Parodied:
- The villains form a line, patiently waiting their turn to challenge the heroes.
- Due to the fact that this trope is in play, everyone treats the world being doomed as just another minor problem, and carry on with their lives even though it could all end within seconds.
- Zig Zagged: Just how much destruction could result from a plan succeding constantly shifts, from Magic Feather backup plans to very week and ineffective Doomsday Devices
- Averted: There is a reasonable amount of time in between threats to the world.
- Enforced: "Viewers lose interest in stories where the stakes are small, and once we've already included our "Save the World" Climax, anything else would seem anticlimactic. So let's make every villain try to destroy the world!"
- Lampshaded: "Sheesh, it seems like every time we save the world, there's a new villain we have to defeat!"
- Invoked:
- Rather than dooming the world outright, instead an evil plan is made that will give a large number of people the ability to doom the world.
- The supposed Big Good of the setting is actively creating the constant threats to the world so it can justify totalitarian control under the guise of "protection".
- Exploited: A Con Man convinces people to join his Cult that claims the world is ending, and gets a lot of followers since his ideas seem perfectly realistic in the world he lives in.
- Defied: The heroes decide to go after the Inherent in the System reasons why the world is being endangered so often rather than just putting out individual fires.
- A villain sees the high failure rate of the many other villains who have tried to destroy the world before, and decides it is too ambitious and risky and chooses a more humble plan.
- Discussed: ???
- Conversed: ???
- Deconstructed:
- People become used to the fact that the world is always being endangered, and become apathetic and fatalistic.
- People could become dependent on The Super-Awesome Hero Squad to save the world from villains, and society is thrown into a panic when their heroes aren't there to save them.
- Alternatively, the heroes themselves fall into despair believing that their efforts don't matter, since one day someone will destroy the world and Evil Only Has to Win Once.
- Or the cause of the apocalyptic events is revealed to ultimately be Inherent in the System, explaining why it happens so often.
- The heroes becomes realistically exhausted by having to save the world every week.
- Reconstructed: But the heroes realize that even if they can't save the world forever, they could still be buying it years, decades, centuries of time, all of which is enough for generations of people to live their lives in peace who would have otherwise died or suffered, so the world is still worth fighting for.
- Genre Savvy heroes set up contingencies for whenever the world is in danger again, growing more and more Crazy-Prepared over time.
Back to The World Is Always Doomed.
