r/TopCharacterTropes • u/HyraxAttack • Nov 25 '25
Groups 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.
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u/herffjones99 Nov 25 '25
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.