I’m embarrassed to say that I have encountered this, this particular type of story on multiple occasions… So I got curious, is there a name to this trope?
I have no idea the answer to your question, but I now know like 99% of people on lemmy have shitty reading comprehension.
What’s the etymology?
Assuming it’s a surprise, this is Earth All Along. Genre Shift is similar, but that’s more about tone than plot
Specifically the After the End variant
You maniacs, you blew it all up!
Yeah, Adventure Time
Star Wars is fantasy, not sci-fi. (Technically it’s a space opera, it not at all about science or how that science might impact society.)
Just because there’s technology, or it’s post apocalyptic doesn’t make it not fantasy.
Shanara chronicles, too.
I really like the term “Science Fantasy”. It acknowledges the parallels with Science Fiction but respects how they differ as well.
Shanara chronicles, too.
Yep, they visit ruins in one series that is pretty clearly the ruins of Tacoma or some place like it.
Terry Brooks happens to live in that area. Coincidence? :)
The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. is my personal favourite of Bruce Campbell’s work. Starts off as any ordinary western, before getting very, very weird.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0105932/
Come to think of it, Firefly might count, after watching Serenity at the end of the series.
Good shit.
I knew a tvtropes link was going to be here as soon as I saw the question lol, here goes my next three hours I guess
You mean like Adventure Time?
They are pretty obvious about it being a post nuclear war reality.
Hmm not sure. I guess I’d call it post-apocoliptic fantasy lol. But I know exaxctly what you mean and I love that genre. The Horizon games and even the Witcher books/games fit into this genre.
Not 100% sure, but these come to mind.
- Science Fantasy
- Dying Earth
- Post-Apocalyptic Fantasy
These sound right to me, especially Dying Earth - a podcast I listen to covered Gene Wolf’s Book of the New Sun trilogy and they described it as such. Wikipedia calls it Science Fantasy. Great books by the way
The American dream
The Elder Scrolls. It’s not explicitly stated, but iirc it’s highly suggested it’s post-apocalyptic. That said, it’s still fantasy, there’s still magic, spellcasting and so forth (there’s no indication that the magic is the result of lost tech becoming indistinguishable from magic); it’s just that the lore highly suggests it may be post-apocalyptic.
Sauce? It’s not even on TVTropes
There is a fan theory that Fallout lead to TES because of radiation. It holds about as much water as a sieve, but its fun.
Oh man, you have no idea how deep the Elder Scrolls lore hole goes.
Can’t find anything on this specifically though
Oh wait, do you mean on the post apocalypse idea? Ehhhh I’m not certain it is. There is a creation story, and then a “do over” in the lore. But nothing like our civ level in the past for it.
There’s probably a lore video about it on YouTube somewhere though.
EDIT: Found a video, and it’s a short one.
https://youtu.be/7MrAWS-MiMU?si=qvRmLC5IP0d-FpPHI’d recommend YouTube for easy to find lore breakdowns. For text stuff look up Michael Kirkbride.
Here’s a bunch of his stuff:
https://en.uesp.net/wiki/General:Michael_Kirkbride’s_Texts
NK Jemison’s Broken Earth trilogy comes to mind, fantastic series it that’s your thing
You mean like “dwarves and elves are GMO humans” and “magic is actually tech gadgets” ?
For a pure magic example
The Mistborn era 1 (books 1-3) are fantasty magic.
Mistborn era 2 (books 4-7) occur hundreds of years later in that worlds “industrial/steam” age. Still, with magic.
So, for example, some allomancers can push or pull on metals. In Era 1 that’s used for combat but also for rapid movement. An allomancer can fall from a wall, throw a coin and “push” off of it causing them to bounce forward and upwards. As they’re starting to reach the azimuth they “pull” the coin, catch it and repeat.
They also in combat throw and then “push” coins or metal fragments like shrapnel.
In Era 2. A sheriff (who’s an allomancer) leaps across a gully, aims and shoots a bullet into a wooden crate and then “pushes” on it to cross it.
Another time during a shootout one “pushes” gunfire away so it deflects around him. Not guaranteed to get all of the bullets but useful in situations like that.
There are other uses and other allomantic abilities but the entire shift of the format was just done phenomenally.
Can’t recommend the Mistborn series enough
Yeah, Sanderson earned the cred on the original trilogy. It’s a fantasy series, but the magicians are basically Jedi. Great stuff!
And the powers, as in all the cosmere series, has limits which balances it out.
No endless pushes, flying, etc. every world has some resources or constraint so you’re not left with a “Superman” kind of scenario.
To clarify, are you asking if there’s a specific genre to Planet of the Apes where there’s a big reveal that this is actually just earth after some society ending disaster? (And similar stuff but that’s the first that came to mind).
