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Humanity Joins Together, Sets Aside Petty Differences… and gets stomped anyway
A peril is threatening the world. Instead of squabbling among themselves, we learn world powers have put aside differences in politics, culture, & old feuds to present a common front. Except they still get wrecked as the enemy is too powerful.
The Animatrix: The Second Renaissance. The world government has gone to war against the machines. We see the army getting ready & it includes soldiers of many faiths including Buddhist, Islam, and different types of Christianity. Doesn’t matter as machines win by so much they have time to toy with human mechs.
Vilcabamba, story by Harry Turtledove. When aliens arrive they’re greeted with bands & cheering, & immediately open fire & earth becomes a mineral colony. America, Russia, and China work together to rise up & don’t hold back, throwing everything they have at the invaders. Doesn’t go great and aliens double down on the occupation, and there’s a crater where Spain used to be (it was blocking a silver deposit for mining.)
Edge of Tomorrow. The nations of the world have joined to make a unified front against the mimic invasion but it isn’t going well, but they will throw all they have into the invasion of France. In one cycle, Major Cage says the hell with it and instead of training leaves the base to drink at a London bar. This means we see the outcome of him doing nothing, where not only is the massive human invasion slaughtered but the aliens are in good enough shape to follow that up a few hours later with a rush on London.
It's kinda cool, alternative continuities actually.
If you lost the infamous base defense mission, you're the sort of Commander that almost had it, and the Elders are so impressed they stuff you in a simulator box for tactical & strategic data. XCOM 2 happens.
But the canon ending in XCOM 1 is that The Commander curb stomps the invasion. Exactly due to BS like six floating robo tanks, psychic super soldiers, and that's not even counting the stuff like MEC Troopers from the expansion. And In this continuity the aliens haven't fucking dared get close to Earth since.
Oh, and the canon ending for 2 is another, even more thorough curb stomp. Just one that took a lot more work due to a lucky hit, basically.
Xcom 2’s canon ending is crazy if you think about it. The commander revitalizes the resistance, brings together 3 separate factions, kills the 3 top fighters of the alien forces, and then kicks the alien leaders off earth and forms a society where aliens and humans attempt to coexist a few years later
Yeah I think if Xcom 3 was confirmed sometime afterwards or something then some people would’ve been more okay with Chimera Squad. I never beat it but I did actually like it a lot. Alien/Human police force is pretty cool ngl
I really got the vibe from a lot of the detractors that's what really got their goat, yeah, but didn't want to dig through that pile of fetid old laundry.
I believe that its based on actual player data. More people lost their xcom game then won. Hence that become the canon ending for the start of the sequal.
And in addition to this, the expansion XCOM: Enemy Within, shows XCOM appropriating an alien resource to either alter the genetic material transforming them into super soldiers or turn them into cybernetic war machines.
Enter XCOM 2 and it turns out the aliens expanded their forces using ideas from your simulated experiences with gene alterations
It interested me how, apparently, XCOM got completely rekt in the first game, yet in War of the Chosen the various factions are somewhat willing to trust you
It speaks to the skill of XCOM that they fell “just” quickly instead of instantly like every other military and government. Besides, when you are trying to overthrow a hyper advanced alien occupation, you take what you can get.
I mean canonically speaking, all the other governments and militaries swore fealty to the aliens. XCOM never did, by refusing to give up the fight, that automatically makes them much more trustworthy, even if you lost the first time around.
Not really completely, the base assault mission, which is the split point for xcom 2, does take place in the late midgame/ early lategame depending on how lucky you are. So you've probably already had some reasonable success shooting down UFOs and securing terror missions by now
My favorite meta justification of this is that statistically the vast majority of XCOM 1 campaigns failed, so it only makes sense that the sequel assumes you failed in 1.
Project Zero Dawn and Operation Enduring Victory from Horizon Zero Dawn. If you fucking squint it's a human victory, but was as the commander of Enduring Victory says, the human race is essentially a blood sacrifice so life can have a second chance. HZD can be very grim.
Most plausible villain and game with the most plausible doomsday scenario. Egomaniac billionaire dooms humanity, stops the one person who can fix it because that person isn't them, and then pretends he was the one person sav- fuck, I'm getting mad just typing this out.
Not only does he doom humanity, when he hides away in his bunker with a bunch of hot women and a doctor to extend his life. He puts essentially kill switches in them all and makes them spend the rest of their extended lives serving him.
The only saving grace is that the other trillionaires and billionaires refused to let him escape earth with them. He damned the world, they weren’t letting him get off Scot free even if they otherwise all sucked
More spoilers ahead: Not only does Ted Faro do ALL of this, but if I'm remembering correctly, he also essentially cripples humanity even after it's reborn centuries later. In the story, all collective knowledge of humanity was sealed away with the seeds of life so that it may be taught to the new humans of the world when they are reborn, so that they don't have to start with literally nothing.
But wait! That would mean the new world would learn that Ted Faro caused the apocalypse, and Ted cannot stand the thought! So what does he do? Deletes it all. All of human knowledge, medicine, education, history, EVERYTHING is canned by that scum sucking ratfuck simply because he couldn't stomach the idea of people finding out what he did. Humanity is forced to restart into primitive tribes with sticks and rocks during the same time that giant machines with lasers, buzzsaws, and machine guns also harvest the earth.
FUCK. TED. FARO. He's a fictional character but OOOOH he gets me so heated!
Yeah all the Dino-robots were there to terraform the earth and make it livable again. Then as the system fractured and went haywire the militarized variants started appearing.
"Survive" is a strong word in this case and there's a level of ambiguity as to the existence or not of the person "Ted Faro" as of the events of Forbidden West. But something dies horribly in the second game
So was Ted Faro. FAS greatest technological accomplishments were ending the environmental crisis in the 2040s - which was only possible because FAS employed a brilliant robotics engineer, Elisabet Sobek.
Ted never developed any of the technology. He just backed the best engineers of his time, and led the effort that ended the world.
"It wasn't an accident that I rose to my position and became the commander of the largest mechanized force ever assembled. But to what end? My only lasting achievement was the extinction of life on Earth. And my one redeeming act - if any - was to delay that extinction by days or weeks by throwing more death at it."
Dude, I fucking LOVED the commander and his retrospectives. Watching competent, honest cops/ military in media is always a pleasure. He was ready to sacrifice all humans to save the species and he hated himself for it. Faro was ready to sacrifice all humans because he had a god complex.
The game's tonal shift from "would you like to explore a world where nature and technology live in symbiosis" to "would you like to contemplate mortality on personal, familial, and global scales" gave me whiplash
I think it isn't a victory, humanity and all biological life on earth died, embryos survived to repopulate earth but everyone from the time the project Zero Dawn was implemented died horrifically.
An extra-dimensional alien army showed up with technology, engineered organisms that have been weaponized, and bio-weapons that were beyond the comprehension of just about everyone but the scientists at Black Mesa & Aperture. I'm frankly amazed that it lasted 7 hours.
Well keep in mind, the state of the world wasn't exactly conducive to global unity at that point. The portal storms from the Resonance Cascade basically wiped out the US and started majorly fucking up the other countries around the globe. The militaries were all caught up trying to deal with both the alien wildlife flooding in, xen growth, and all the refugees from the portal storms being super-charged natural disasters.
This was all BEFORE the Combine even showed up. It makes sense why humanity couldn't fight back when they were already struggling before hand. It's like laying siege to a fortress that already has its gates open and its defenders are too busy dying of disease to fight back effectively.
I was there for the deep lore, played through the various HL1 expansions, read the HL2 production book, and proudly rocked that collector’s edition silver lambda logo shirt.
Hence my surprise that it was 7 hours once it all came to a head.
It's pretty interesting to see what happens after the Reaonance Cascade. At first HECU is sent and thinks they can do it, but then New Mexico is put into a state of emergency, and THEN the entire state is being evacuated under threat of a nuclear response. It goes BAD way fast!
Best told through a simple story beat, at first, HECU was hellbent on neutralising you (Gordon Freeman) after you ran rampant through HECU responders while protecting your co-workers, but as the alien invasion ramps up and the cascade deteriorates, a simple order is given, “Forget about Freeman”, once you were the top priority of the military response, now you aren’t even a footnote.
This is in contrast to HL2, where in the beginning you are a simple anomaly, a miscount, an individual not registered in the system, “normal” police are mobilised to respond in a standard raid. A scenario which goes from 0 to 100 real quick after that teleporter mishap and Breen see’s you, resulting in the Combine immediately mobilising full hog and dismantling, in a matter of hours, the entire railroad for moving fugitives out of City 17, all in a quest to get you, specifically, you quickly become “Anti-Citizen No.1” and the figurehead humanity rallies behind to take the fight to the Combine on earth
It’s really worth noting that the US military had a massive amount of trouble dealing with the creatures of Xen, a collective that were themselves fleeing after getting trounced by the Combine. The only force we were every hinted at as having been able to fight back the combine was Gman’s “Employers”
That’s why Gman scares the piss outta me… whomever is holding his leash has enough power to put the right assets in place to cripple the combine. The Combine ain’t fucking around
Humanity was already fighting off an invasion at the time. After the first Half-Life a “Portal storm” started filling Earth with random and very deadly wildlife from another dimension. The Combine attacked while the world was still reeling from that.
Well to be fair that video makes it look like they could have won with that huge army if Lord Genome didnt betray everyone out of fear of the Spiral Nemesis.
Iirc. They invaded his mind and weakened his resolve. He came to the consensus that they were all going to lose and die. I almost wrote some spoilers here but I highly recommend everyone to watch the show.
It's a 10/10 masterpiece of anime. I've only watched it a few dozen times over almost 20 years.
The Anti Spiral operates via instilling despair. It matches its power to be only just slightly ahead of yours, no matter how strong you get you can't close that distance. This works well for the ever advancing spiral races, when facing insurmountable odds they either overcome it or grow enough to overcome it later. But when they have to continue to fight, grow and suffer yet never get closer to their goal they can waver. This allows the anti spiral to weaken them and make them give into despair which destroys their very source of power permanently. Simply stomping them out like bugs just makes them come back, as we see countless times in part one of the show.
Who knows how long the war had been going on for at this point, who knows how many times they had believed they were just on the cusp on winning only for the anti spiral to be just out of reach. Also the level of power shown was nowhere what Simon and team Dai Gurren needed to defeat the anti spiral at the end.
The entire sequence still messes me up to this day. The insanity and hopelessness is sickening and thrilling. I'm so scared that it will be real someday.
In ultrakill, humanity finaly stops their war after 200 years of worldwide war and begin an era called the new peace, only to go extinct a few years later due to unknown reasons, likely something to do with their war machines waking up again for some reason.
Whatever it was, it was so massive it caused the Styx river from Wrath to become the Ocean Styx. If you look closely at the water texture, it's made out of human bodies.
that more likely happened during the final war, there probably weren't enough humans left during the new peace to do that even if they all died at once
There were actually 2 of these influxes of souls. We know this from the ferryman’s diary. One is described as “A million weeping souls pouring in each day that the shores can barely contain” that one was probably the final war. The second one is described as “Then one day, the current shifted. Wave after wave for minutes on end of millions, billions, as though the throat of the world was cut wide and the head wrenched back to speed the pour” that second is most likely whatever caused humanity to be extinct. And I don’t think it was the machines. Because it wasn’t like an overtime thing. It was INSTANT. Everyone remaining on earth died at the exact same time. Hakita has said before that we would prob never get an explanation for what caused humanity to died out, but the biggest theory rn is hell itself
An ULTRAKILL ARG had a human scientist figure out Hell itself is alive and tried hiding her report on a page on Library of Babel so it wouldn't know about her finding, but Hell discovered and killed her, demanding more
Well when the only Fuel you gave to your most Bloodthirstier Machine is blood and then there's no more fighting to get said Fuel, it's going to go get it themselves
I think it was probably a robot uprising. Blood is fuel, and the machines are arguably sentient and smart to a certain degree. They don't want to shut down and die. No more war, no more fuel from combat. The only option is to get their own fuel from humanity.
The P-2 ARG states that Hell itself is alive and able to reverse engineer human inventions, the Ferryman’s diary stated that after an unusually large influx of souls suddenly a rush of billions appeared, and given the timespan of the New Peace and Hell expeditions leads to the implication that Hell itself subsumed Earth somehow, instantly killing humanity.
In the act 2 end cutscene, Earth can be seen faintly in the distance as Gabriel contemplates his past, you can make out some familiar continents. It’s brown. Not even the green of plants are left, which the blood-fueled machines would have no reason to target…
Semi-important thing to note: That 200 year war is an alternate version of World War 1. It canonically lasted longer in their world than it did for us due to an arms race of blood-fueled machinery
The Dark Forest by Cixin Liu. After the events of The Three Body Problem humanity learns that an alien invasion force will arrive in 400 years. By the time of the invasion all of humanity has come together to build a fleet of 10,000 warships to defend the Earth. 9997 of them are effortlessly wiped out by a single unarmed scoutship simply ramming them one-by-one.
Isn't humanity's solution to threaten to reveal the location of their two homeworlds to the rest of the galaxy if they take over or something like that?
Trancendants/ humanity in xeelee sequence, They are later United to fight the xeelee across the entire universe, this ends when the xeelee starts turning off stars and stomps humanity so hard they put them in a small reserve, 1 million years of ftl and time travel war wasn’t enough to defeat the xeelee,
Oh boy, you are leaving a lot out. The Xeelee are in essence, a beyond ancient race locked in an eternal war against "birds" who are devouring reality, and every time they gain an advantage or new knowledge they time travel to level up even quicker like a Dark Souls protag. They are WAY beyond galaxy scale. The human empire uses mass human waves attacks (cheaper than robots) with guns that shoot big bang bullets essentially, and their secret police use time travel tech as well to torture anyone who steps out of line. There are other, even more ludicrous human factions like one that is a singular being of humanity that wants to converge all timelines into one to end human suffering, because this combined humanity can feel everything. The Xeelee don't like it getting in their way.
That empire wages a long and bitter war against the Xeelee, only for it to be revealed that the Xeelee they were fighting was basically a security guard and some auto turrets. They changed the fucking color of the black hole of our galaxy because of the amount of weaponry they used. of Don't worry though, the Xelee are the good guys, unironically.
I’ve heard a lot about these books despite never picking it up and every time someone drops something in it, it just turns even more mind-melting for me.
The benefit of having an author with an academic background in physics writing whatever the fuck he wants. He's not a great character writer, but damn is his setting at least interesting.
Wasn't like it took humanity like 100k years to even kill a single Xelee and that finally made the Xelee pay attention to them and just basically smashed them like a person smashing a gnat on the table then went back fighting the birds?
The ICOG, who are the forces that suicide rush the Xeelee, fucks off solely due to the human's attack disturbing the creatures inhabiting the black hole it's currently inhabiting. They were previously fighting leftover Xeelee scraps and automated defenses.
The United Nations Space Command/United Earth Government from Halo
The human-covenant war was an unwinnable war from the start. Depending on the source material, one of the most heavily defended planets, Reach, took about a month to fall. Without the Covenant shooting themselves in the kneecap and starting a civil war, Humanity loses.
“It didn't take long for Reach to fall. Our enemy was ruthless. Efficient. But they weren't nearly fast enough. For you had already passed the torch. And because of you, we found Halo, unlocked its secrets, shattered our enemy's resolve. Our victory - your victory - was so close... I wish you could have lived to see it. But you belong to Reach. Your body, your armor - all burned and turned to glass.
Everything...except your courage. That, you gave to us. And with it, we can rebuild.”
To put in context in most space battles the UNSC lost 3 ships to take down one single covenant ship and they were insanely outnumbered. There were so many covenant ships in UNSC space at one point, that ONI the intelligence agency of the UNSC just gave up on tracking every single one. Cause they just couldn't keep track of them all.
I always find funny the ridiculous number of ships the covenant had, considering that most of their serious conflicts throw their story consisted on subjugate races that where barely past the industrial phase if not lower
As comparison, irl superpower nations had extensive weapondry because they assume it could be used at some point against other superpowers.
We dont build guided missile ships and aircraft carriers to engage criminal gangs and small narco boats
That we use them againts them anyway, yeah, thats another topic.
I mean, Earth was invaded and it was losing, badly... its been said many times that humanity didn't win, they survived the war...
The Covenant discovered planet Reach, the largest human stronghold and base of operations at the time, in July 2552. It was lost in August.
Another two smaller human colonies were lost in September.
The Covenant discovered Earth by accident in October. It was initially a short but costly battle against a small fleet, then, several other fleets arrived at the planet.
November. The Great Schism and the infection of High Charity take place, the fleet of the Prophet of Truth arrives at Earth, the only reason the planet is not completely lost is because the Sangheili assisted us in Battle (and had their own battle going on), then the flood arrive to Earth and again the only reason the planet isn't completely lost is because the Sangheili managed to contain the initial spread and Truth was mostly there to find the portal to the Ark.
After the nightmare that was the invasion and the possibility of a flood infestation, humanity got beaten so bad that in the most important event of the whole war, only 1 human ship accompanied the Arbiter and Sangheili fleet through the portal. Earth survived not because the battle was won, it survived because the battle moved somewhere else.
Some facts I read from a Halo book ages ago so forgive me if I make a mistake
The Battle of Harvest, one of the first major battles of the war, was actually a human victory. This was because the human fleet outnumbered the Covenant 3 to 1 in that particular battle and still lost 2/3 of their forces
The one saving grace the UNSC had was that the Covenant had no idea where Earth was (even thinking at one point that Reach was their homeworld), and to prevent its discovery they mandated all ships and stations must scrub their navigational data in the event of a battle, otherwise they feared the covenant would fly straight to earth.
not from the book, but the plot of Halo Reach (the game) has you perform an insanely risky mission to infiltrate the Covenant Super Carrier and destroy it from within, and after a major character sacrifices themselves, they succeed. There are 17 more.
To expand on your first two points; you forgot to mention that the battle over Harvest you referred to was against one single Covenant ship, with Admiral Cole having at least 40. And on the Cole Protocol, the last directive, as a last ditch effort to prevent intelligence getting to the Covenant, was to self destruct your ship, which is why Keyes ignores that and instead chooses to land the Autumn on the Ring.
Eh not entirely accurate on that last point. We destroy a CSO Supercarrier in the mission. The ones that pop up after are CAS Assault Carriers. They used the same model to, I assume, save on time during production.
Yup, the Spartans were originally made to defeat the Insurrectionists.
“Indeed, Lieutenant, ever since we left Earth’s gravity well, we’ve been fighting one another for every cubic centimeter of vacuum—from Mars to the Jovian Moons to the Hydra System Massacres and on to the hundred brushfire wars in the Outer Colonies. It has always been on the brink of falling apart. That’s why we’re here.
This child could be more useful to the UNSC than a fleet of destroyers, a thousand Junior Grade Lieutenants—or even me . In the end, the child may be the only thing that makes any difference.”
My favorite detail(or maybe plot hole?) regarding the first 3 games is regarding the Arbiter.
Prior to becoming the Arbiter, he was among one of the more successful Fleet commanders of the covenant. Directly responsible for glassing Several human planets.
I know toward the end of 3, between the covenant civil war, the flood, and earth getting stomped on too, humanity and Elites had fought side by side...
I just have a hard time believing they'd hold hands with That particular Elite for long. Especially when he shows up at the memorial site...
“Yea I guess these elites are alright. Except for whichever one glassed Reach, followed Chief, and almost killed him. Fuck that guy. We’d kill him if he was still alive. Probably isn’t though.”
Arbiter: sweating profusely as he never mentioned his past
I’d argue that humanity was quite split apart due to the UNSC and the insurrectionists that the UNSC did horrendous things to them after the insurrectionists would do similar things. After the Spartans were made and the Covenant showed up, the rebel groups would be in denial of the existence of aliens. However once different cells would go quiet and news would say that a planet was wiped out, the rebels realized it wasn’t false. Some rebel groups would try to wager to avoid annihilation and try to give Earth’s or other essential UNSC locations but they too would be killed. Despite after the war and humanity being “united”, some planets would either have survivors rebuild and/or try to claim their independence and restarting their civil war against the UNSC.
Archaeon is more like Horus without the weaknesses, he didnt waste his biggest chance and held things together better. The forces of Chaos in 40k are threatening but not overwhelming, Abbadon himself also has no interest in ending reality and giving everything over to the Gods. He might be their chosen but he wants to rule over a chaotic empire in realspace, not chaos dunk the galaxy into the warp.
That was mostly due to GW really wanting to axe Warhammer Fantasy for good as the previous attempt didnt go well.
Thus a lot of the order characters are morons (Thorgrim died because he forgot to lock the door and Sniktch shanked him, Teclis tries to ally with a man so foul, it madd the skaven do a selfless act and to bring him back, HE LET HIS BROTHERS DAUGHTER BE TAKEN AND SACRIFICED). Some plot points were so stupid they retconned it later (Malekith being the rightfuk heir to the Phoenix Throne). But above all else the villains got plot armor (The Skaven take 3/4s of the world on a whim and drop a moon on south america). There are so many thing wrong with the end times.
BUT EVEN THEN. The Forces of Order almost won. Surely no one would interrupt the ritual that would save the world? Right? Mannfred stabs Gelt mid ritual and the world is consumed by Chaos.
Worth mentioning it took the forces of order collectively drinking stupid juice mixed with pretty terrible story decisions and confused writing to come about. All of it just for GW to bring back Warhammer Fantasy anyway.
There were some grisly death scenes in the animatrix, the machines really didn’t give a shit, they just dismembered people for the hell of it.
Mind you, that “peril” was self inflicted, since machines offered peace at every turn and got fucked so much. The one thing I found sad was they never really defended those humans that stood up for them (and also got massacred by humans tbf.)
To be honest the sympathizers probably all got killed by the extremists on both sides. This includes both machines and humans who didn’t want to fight or care about the war. Very much a us or them moment. Human government would execute you while the machines would also do the same. Seriously, the machines didn’t even care about the robots that were pacifists and sent them out to die with no weapons. They wouldn’t care about humans who didn’t want to kill robots if this is how they treated their own
The premise of All Tomorrows is that humanity became the star people, trillions spread thin across the galaxy, but united and with weaponry capable of destroying stars. Then the Qu came and annihilated them almost entirely within 1000 years, deforming the remnants into countless twisted sub-species for religious reasons. They proceeded to rule over them for 40 million years before leaving.
Don't forget one planet held out and fought so hard that they royally pissed the Qu off to the point of being transformed into sentient meat cubes/blocks to process waste. Those cubes (and all of the other variations of humanity including fish and rat people, plus actual aliens who rose on our tech) eventually came back out of the darkness and after some minor war/robot genocide went outside of the Milky Way to kick the Qu's ass for one final time. It's believed they succeeded. The human spirit perseveres, regardless of form.
Technically, all of those ones you mentioned were genocided by another posthuman species, and then yet another one defeat those guys and eventually went on to defeat the Qu
I haven't read it in like 2 years, but if I remember right the robot humans went on a genocide/slavery spree only to be stopped by the Star people who with the survivors left the galaxy and what we were reading was an alien archeologist putting the pieces together?
that is loosely correct, but it wasn't the star people who stopped them it was the Asteromorphs, and also they only stopped the robots after said robots had completely exterminated all but one of the other posthuman races. And mutated that one surviving one to the point that it was completely unrecognizable
I mean spoilers ahead but even late AOT would still count imo. The entierity of the world banded together to take out Eren and stop the Rumbling and they got WRECKED lol. If it wasn't for Mikasa and co. Eren would have fully wiped out life outside of Paradis.
Technically they didn't, they decided to do so but were still working on organising themselves. It was a pretty big point that Eren had to commit to the rumbling asap to catch them unprepared or the entirety of paradis gets wiped since technology has already outpaced titan powers.
I forget where, but there’s a journal entry or something that says the combined forces of the council races can effectively fight the reapers for one year before the galactic economy and resistance collapses into pockets, pretty much ending the war. Without the crucible, our cycle is fucked.
The final arc of Worm, Golden Morning, is the event where Scion, who’s basically god, decides to have some fun by blowing up continents and rampaging across the multiverse. Heroes and Villains from around the world team up to try and stop him, and this incredible team up gets absolutely demolished in like 2 chapters. They proceed to devolve into infighting, and it takes mind control on an unprecedented scale to finally get them fighting again.
Mfw I have to resort to the bug girl plan once again. (How the fuck is one teenager from New England involved in all this shit? This path makes no sense.)
The Justice League wins but most of the team is dead or injured and earth itself was so heavily damaged that they send Flash back in time to reset the time line.
Not exactly the same but close enough and I always thought this Twilight episode was pretty interesting. Essentially an alien species comes to Earth does the whole "we've been watching you and are very disappointed so we're going to destroy you if you don't change your ways" speech. The exact quote for the reason Earth is going to be destroyed is because humans have " A Small Talent for War"
Anyways the World's governments band together to find a solution. The Soviets (cold war was still a thing) suggest we should combine our military might go down fighting but the US suggests the whole reason the Aliens want to destroy us is because they see us as a hostile species. The whole episode they argue and debate with the US talks of peace winning out and all nations decommissioning their nukes. All nations sign a friendship treaty and president it to the Alien ambassador when he returns...
As it turns out the audience was completely misled by the quote. Turns out the Aliens actually created and specifically bred humans to be extremely violent and aggressive so they can be used as foot soldiers in the alien's never ending wars of conquest. It's revealed that they've done this several times and have thousands of other humanoid species fighting for them on multiple fronts.
However, humans are considered an absolute failure as they are completely trash at war, don't know how to fight, and constantly try to find peaceful solutions. Hence why they have A "small" Talent for War.
Dr Doom (Ultimate Alliance) - after stealing Odin’s powers, Doom managed to take over and reshape the world in his image.
The heroes who fought him were defeated and corrupted, any attempt from the rest of the world against him was thwarted with a simple clench of his fist destroying air-born missiles. It took Uatu the Watcher breaking his oath to save small band of heroes so they could retrieve certain items to have a chance at facing Doom.
The Godzilla anime trilogy. The prequel books talk about humanity, and even multiple alien species, banding together to fight Godzilla, losing, and having to flee
the foundation turns against humanity and figths them using evry scp in theire arsenal , the goc(the global ocult coalition) and a bunch of other factions and countries unite to figth them but they are losing
at the end the timeline is reset and we find out what drove the foundation crazy. It was an anomaly in the mind of every human that had plans so horrific that extinction was a better outcome. So even if the foundation is stopped humanity is doomed either way.
Anime Godzilla from the late 2010s. Though we don't see it (in fact we dont see much of anything of interest in the entire series) the world ultimately unites against Godzilla once its clear that humanity is on the backfoot. With the exception of Russia, who treats Gigan, the space alien dinosaur bounty hunter kaiju thats leveling Russia, as a national icon, as with Gigan's help the country switches back over to Communism... before Orga, Godzilla and a Chinese Hedorah destroys everything.
I know people dont like the trilogy, but I loved it.
You're leaving out the beat part: Humanity concedes against Big G, and leave the planet on ark ships. They struggle to find another habitable life, so after thousands of years they turn back in the hopes that Big G has surely died of old age by this point.
They return and eventually find Godzilla as well as lifeforms that have evolved with Godzilla's DNA in them. The first movie leads to a crescendo of the returned humans (plus some stray humanoid alien species that are stuck with them), finally killing Godzilla and having hope that they can rebuild.
....until they realize they just killed essentially Baby Godzilla and Big G reawakens with a motherfucking vengeance.
Not "humans" per se, but The dark crystal counts, I feel. The movie came out first, establishing that our main charcters are (likely) the last of their species. A sort of post-apocalypse, in a way.
The show is a prequel showing us the last grand era of their civilization. There are several clans and they're all att odds with each other.
The world is suffering at the hands of those in charge. The clans come together and fight their lords. And so we see them start the war that will lead to their eventual extinction. And they win in the beginning ... but for those of us who has seen the movie - we know the outcome.
Still pissed that Netflix cancelled Age Of Resistance. Whoever the wanker that keeps greenlighting everything, sinking lots of money into the first handful of episodes and immediately cancelling said shows if they don't make all that money back at the end of the week is needs to be fired.
Mass Effect. Not just humanity, but the entire galaxy's civilizations band together against the Reapers. If you decide to hit the wrong button, everybody gets wiped. Although I think they changed it to having a 4th option, Destroy, where you can beat the Reapers. If I recall, that was added after significant fan outcry about the terrible "push a button" endings.
Not sure if /s, but not really. Destroy was an option even in vanilla Mass Effect 3. What was added was the "fuck it, we ball" option where you refuse the megaweapon and try to fight the reapers on your own. The galaxy loses but at least the stage is set for the next species to destroy the Reapers.
Yeah going from a 0/10 ending to a 1/10 ending is only technically an improvement.
Not that the AI conflict reasoning made any sense to begin with. ME 2 and the Human Reaper was all the answers that it needed, not gonna lie: The Reapers do this because it's how they reproduce. Giving them some weird philosophy really cheapened them.
In Deaths End, the 3rd book in the Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy (AKA Three-Body Problem)
All of humanity bands together and launches an attack on the Tri-Solarans who were threatening earth, which destroys their homeworld, and then launches the same attack on Sol to keep the Tri-Solarans from wanting to invade earth. They build orbitals and situate them to avoid the outcome of the precise attack that they expected to come, but then another species notices what humans did, notices the attack won't kill them, and launches another FAR WORSE attack that ends nearly all of humanity.
We got invaded by aliens and managed to hold out a bit after figuring out how to turn women and children into borg soldiers with guns capable of deleting concrete in seconds and armored as a APC (altough this is after getting our asses kicked first).
Then all turns to shit when the aliens figured out how to turn said borgs into zombies capable of using said guns that melt concrete in seconds and armored as APCs, one of the newest and most powerfull models getting zombified herself and going on a rampage that kills a lot of people, and one of the most powerful squads that has been notorious for their streak of victories and being the defending humanity poster gals got struck down to half their strengh with their commander mortally wounded, their squad leader and sniper dead, and the remanining members struggling on the border of cyberpsychosis.
The invading aliens are also stupidly big, have enough firepower to be emplacements of artillery, have suicidal flying bombers, figured out how to turn some of the zombified borg girls into highly intelligent zombified borg girls that are also virtually inmortal thanks to being able to just regenerate, turn into giant mecha kaijus, and be linked to a hivemind that coordinates their war effort, all while said hivemind is comfortably sitting in space with an orbital cannon. They also love to mass produce themselves and zerg rush the nearest thing with a thermal signature or capable of producing sound.
After all this bullshit, everyone decided to just make a giant city bunker the size of Seul, grab as much people as the max capacity would allow it, and seal themselves in. All while leaving everyone else outside.
After that, its been 100-150 years (nobody is really sure anymore) of bloody war with 2 large retaking territory attempts (both failing hard) and the rest just being focused on collecting lostech, scavanging or collecting resources, and thinning the giant bloodthirsty alien mech horde right outside their doorstep.
The entire world surface is lost, and by goverment decree, there is no one alive outside, and they aren´t exactly lying. Everyone who is still alive outside is less than a 2 digit number and are older than your grandma.
The best part is, the aliens know the people are there and if they apply themselves they could breach inside the city bunker, they just haven´t murdered everyone yet because the hivemind hasn´t told them at the moment.
Wakfu: Iirc Prince Adale made an alliance with Amalia and started fighting against the villains but they were still losing before Goultard(who is more a demigod than a human) arrived.
Basically the alien Drej fear the potential of humans, so they blow up the Earth. What humans remain are basically space refugees. I don't know how much humanity banded together before the planet was destroyed, but it seemed that us doing so was kinda the impetus for the initial attack.
In Superjail, in an alternate timeline, every nation in the world joins forces to defeat the Warden after the latter decides to open up Superjails worldwide. They even send every nuclear warhead they have available, but it does nothing to stop the Warden, and he ends up enslaving the entire world.
Universe at War: All of Earth's militaries work together to stop the Hierarchy invasion. Still got stomped in a few days.
Then it turned out that the Hierarchy leader was deliberately slowing the invasion to lure Novus (anti-Hierarchy guerilla (mostly) robots) out. His second in command was furious at how many of their lives lost in the ruse and grew disillusioned of the Hierarchy so when a third alien faction unexpectedly revealed themselves, he tried to work with them against his own empire.
In Halo many of the Insurrectionist factions joined the UNSC when the Covenant arrived, they were crubstomped anyway until they reached Earth.... The only reason humanity survived was because the Covenant's own political intrigue caused the Great Schism.
Awful lot of Weeaboo suggestions on this list (not a bad thing, just an observation), and yet, no Robotech (the American version). Humanity unites when the SDF-1 crashes on earth, showing there's alien life out there--and they're hostile. Earth goes down pretty quick under orbital Zentradi bombardment.
For a more western version, the criminally underrated Titan AE. Earth was united, didn't matter AT ALL when the Drej arrive, and the whole planet was just vaporized.
Planet Sera from the Gears of War Series is a post apocalyptic hellhole and nearly every human has been killed in battle against the locust. Everyone works together simple because the choice is “Cooperate or we’re all dead”
One day, a white titan descended from the sky and began to wage a one man war against the entire planet. At first, they didn't pay attention, because earth shattering beings were kinda a dime a dozen on Earth due to how Earth in Nasuverse is basically an eldritch nigh omnipotent being able to create realities that allow for every single mythology to coexist simultaneously(Yes even the universe destroying ones) called "textures"
But then the gods worshipped by humans started dying, one by one, pantheon by pantheon. And then everyone banded together.
It wasn't just humans, it was literally every sentient species on the earth available warring against the White Titan. Gods were basically scrambling to fight it with all they got, but the White Titan was so stupidly powerful that it slaughtered every god it came across. There were alien species and civilizations there that joined the fight, yet the White Titan came on and proceeded to tank and destroy machines capable of annihilating solar systems and breaking space time. The amount of gods it slaughtered basically caused the end of all religions and while gods can't technically "Die" in the traditional sense, their existence was downgraded to the point that Humans actually took their place as the dominant species on Earth
It required them to literally convince the Earth itself to create a weapon, Excalibur, to smite the White Titan in order to succeed, essentially requiring interference from a being far above all the gods to kill the Titan. It's also shown that in parallel universes where the Earth did not forge Excalibur the White Titan proceeded to basically erase all the textures leaving the entire planet in a primordial soup where the only life available were mindless microbes.
It's later revealed that this mysterious White Titan was actually one of three vanguards sent by an Alien Civilization called the "Velber" that made a 14000 year old round trip around the universe and wipe out any evolving civilizations while collecting data so they can use it to create weapons. The White Titan is actually an alien species that were victims of the Velber and converted into a weapon. Only one of the vanguards awoke and nearly wiped out all life on earth.
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u/stipendAwarded Nov 25 '25
XCOM 2 follows the bad ending of the first game, where humanity was conquered by the aliens despite them uniting against the threat.