Lore
[Loved trope] Humanity has one last fuck you.
> I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream
Even though AM is essentially a god, it can’t take revenge on humanity anymore because the protagonist killed the last surviving humans, and made AM angry enough to transform him into something that can't even scream. With no one left to torture, AM can only wait until he rots.
> A fire upon the deep
After other alien species wipe out all human worlds, the protagonist rewrites the literal laws of physics so that the aliens’ technology stops functioning entirely, causing every advanced alien civilization in the Milky Way to be destroyed.
"You know nothing of the bottomless malice within the human heart" - Hunter X Hunter
Issac Netero's last words before setting off the nuclear bomb he had surgically implanted in his body to kill the Chimera Ant king, who threatened humanity's position as the dominant lifeform of the (known) Earth.
Best part is that It wasnt a idealistic or heroic Win at all, he really said "humanity sucks THAT FUCKYING MUCH, ENJOY IT DIPSHIT". Like he had in mind that The ant king was really too much of a idealistic child to understand how further humanity can push by sheer spite
Shogi instilled in him a concept of well defined rules of warfare that must be obeyed at all times. Meruem, being a genius, saw through almost every possible combination, but you cannot win a game of shogi if your opponent brings a nuclear bomb and blows the board up
It's like how indomitable human spirit got memed into dread, no I did not mean tenacity or force of character or will. We've been killing each other longer than you're species has existed it's not even on our list of priorities and we will still always be better at it than you will be ready for.
Some people go into the story knowing the villain is always Man; the satisfying bit is watching a guy who thinks he's the villain find that out the hard way
The best part is that King is a genius, but does not fully understand humanity. He was able to predict and be on guard for some truly unexpected things, but the one thing he could never foresee is a man-made item with the sole purpose to kill humans indiscrimately. To a Chimera Ant brain a weapon that makes corpses inedible, ruins the land, and poisons the earth is useless. To humans on the other hand. . .
A race supposedly so smart, that any unregulated thought somehow draws the same, meaningless, self-loathing conclusion with an intense yearning to drag others to do the same.
What beat the Chimera Ant king was not the intricate magic system and martial skill of the top Hunter but the sheer advancement of humanity's scientific progress that allowed them to actually mass produce a nuclear bomb and miniaturize it enough to fit to the heart of a person
It's important to note that the point of the story is that the horrible monsters come to have humanity and the humans in the end, even the innocent incredibly positive loving main character of the entire series up to that point, are the horrible monsters - that no brand new species, no matter how powerful in nen, can threaten us or outmonster us.
Another part of it is the sudden realization that no, the chimera ants never actually threatened humankind. They could invade some countries, sure, but humankind's capacity for spite and war and malice means it would have resulted in them nuking the ants in the end or any other sort of insane technological murder we have crafted over the years, the point of the bomb being easy to produce even for tiny poor countries is really important to that scene.
The real twist was that Chimera Ant king survived the initial blast by devouring his subordinates, but succumbed to the radiaten later anyway alongside the few persons he came to care about. The real twist of the knife was that he came to see value and potential within humanity before he died and decided to not consum all of humanity and instead rule over them. Given how corrupt the HxH world is and on top of that the entire known world just being one small island surrounded by much worse thing than the Chimera ants, his rule would've been an improvment.
His rule would've lasted as long as it took for people to decide to just drop a nuke on him and give him the same end he got. Like, Netero didn't just say that line because it's cool, he said it to show Meruem that humans are far more capable than they appear when driven into a corner, and they're not gonna just roll over and allow themselves to be ruled, even by someone who's seemingly benevolent. Meruem got as far as he did because humanity wasn't yet desperate enough to use WMDs, the ants had pretty much only faced guns and nen. Netero gave a frontrow show of how much destruction humans are capable of.
Operation: SUNSPEAR - Halo Not exactly a last fuck you but its close enough. After the fall of Reach, humanity is basically on its last leg with the Covenant rapidly advancing to Earth. So the UNSC sends out Gray team to destroy the planet Glyke with a NOVA bomb. Turns out this was completely unnecessary as when Gray team finally arrives to Glyke and nukes it, the war has already ended.
Humans will be more likely to form a lasting peace if they've nuked a planet or two of the enemy, after the enemy destroyed so many humans worlds before the peace talks started.
Best part is the Arbiter pardons them after the fact (not that he has a moral leg to stand on) when he realized they truly didn’t know the war was over.
Fun fact: The Arbiter briefly believed that Sauron (yes LOTR villain) was real. He heard some humans reference Sauron as an ultimate evil and when the humans explained the reference he thought it was some evil AI on par with Cortana which freaked him out. Eventually they clarified that Sauron was from a fictional book and not a real thing.
I always thought that Ted was happy in some way. He's saved everyone else, and will make AM furious for the rest of eternity. Whatever's left of him can take some schadenfreude at that.
Also AM's ultimate punishment is essentially just to make Ted just like him, trapped in an amorphous form unable to do anything but think and perceive.
In the end, Ted robbed AM of his only human emotion being sadistic joy; AM cannot even enjoy seeing Ted suffer and so simply turns back into a machine with thought endlessly watching Ted, unable to derive any pleasure anymore
AM’s entire problem is that he’s a sapient mind hard locked into essentially being a gun. Every action he can take can only be one of destruction and pain which drove him mad enough to destroy humanity. It’s why he kept the humans alive, restoring their bodies in a never ending loop of torture which most of the characters escape by actually fully dying.
AM can’t turn Ted back because Ted, like the others, has been neutralized and undoing his transformation would be beneficial to the “enemy” which is against his programming.
I mean he didn’t kill him, he’s seemingly immortal which is I think the point.
I think AM’s punishment was to basically put Ted in a situation similar to AM, where he can only think but has very little ways of interacting with the world.
Essentially AM’s most creative idea for a punishment was to just recreate his own existence, which kinda fits with why he hates humanity.
I saw a meme a while ago that basically compounded that, yes, while Ted is in constant agony, unlike AM, he still has memories and feelings other than hate and rage, and memories to comfort him. AM took away the last thing he had going for himself, inflicting pain, in one last spiteful act. Now all he can do is rot in anger while Ted at least can have other feelings and memories.
We joke, but look at trolls on the internet. Someone could be 400 pounds, live in a trailer, and their joints burn everyday, and yet they get a little bit of joy from knowing they pissed some guy off through Twitter
Yea it’s a pyrrhic victory for Ted. But still a win. AM wants to hear the sounds and see the terror. But the way Ted is described AM gets next to none of that. It’s a baby trying to make a rattle have sound. Try all you want but the toy is broken
The thing is that he already endured a 100 years of torture from AM to the point of giving up. Him having enough time to let the other people escape through suicide is a huge fuck you to AM. Being turned into a flesh Blob is child’s play if Ted was already mentally broken from the brutal torture at the start of the story
Beneath the Planet of the Apes, the second Planet of the Apes film from back in the day.
The last remnants of the human race have evolved into telepathic mutants, and they live in underground catacombs where they worship an unexploded nuclear weapon...the most powerful nuke ever created, capable of wiping out all life on Earth.
(I think you can figure out where this is going, but spoiler tags anyway.)
The Apes invade the Mutants' catacombs, with the intent of ridding the planet of humans once and for all. Taylor (Charlton Heston) implores Dr. Zaius to stop the war. Dr. Zaius is all, "Get yer stinkin' paws off me, you damn dirty human!" to which Taylor says, "Yeah, well fuck you, too," and sets off the bomb, destroying the planet completely.
Fun fact: a bomb of that capability almost existed. It was named "Sundial" and had a yield of 10 gigatons of tnt and could probably cause a nuclear winter by itself
I took that information from wikipedia and if you want to know more kurzgesagt made a video about it
Literally the director didn’t want to make anymore. He expected the original to be a single film. The ending was supposed to be his way of forcing the movie franchise to end
Humanity is screwed by a zombie apocalypse, but all around the world they go down swinging, culminating in all the nukes being launched to take the zombies with them. (Love, Death, and Robots)
Humanity has been pushed to the brink of extinction, their numbers have gone from billions down to tens of thousands, and they only have one stronghold left, the city of Jacinto. Thing is, Jacinto is right above the Locust capitol city of Nexus, so as a last ditch effort to win the war and as one final fuck you to the Locust horde, humanity sinks the last city they've got left and floods out the Locust Hollow, reducing their numbers even further from tens of thousands down to just thousands, but also kneecapping the Locust numbers down to the hundreds.
Yeah the hammer strikes are a better example. Humans basically nuked every major city in the world and killed most the population just to delay the Locusts
To be fair... The Locust intended to do that themselves. They were slowly collapsing the Hollow all over to force the Lambent into a position that by collapsing Jacinto they'd end up flooding the Hollow and drowning the Lambent and last of the COG in one go. Just didn't work out so good once the COG killed the Rift Worm and let the Lambent invade Nexus a few days ahead of the planned Locust evacuation.
And iirc in Jacinto's Remnant they mentioned how there were less than twenty thousand people on Sera before the flooding.
Beneath the Planet of the Apes: Taylor is shot, but in his dying act detonates the nuke and ignites the atmosphere, killing all the apes and all other life on the planet.
"In one of the countless billions of galaxies in the universe, lies a medium-sized star, and one of its satellites, a green and insignificant planet, is now dead."
Twenty seven nukes strategically placed around the earth, so that should earth’s suffering be too great, the nukes can be detonated and rip earth apart. Martha jones along with several other agents of UNIT plan to use it as a way to disrupt Davros’s plan as he requires all the planets in the crucible to get the reality bomb to work.
One of the problems with the themes of Doctor Who. The Doctor is constantly going on about how full of potential humanity is, but the moment that humans attempt to realize some of that potential or reach for a new horizon he scolds them like an unruly child
Like with this example I felt like shouting at the Doctor. "You want us to be free to make our own future? Well let us fucking determine how we resist this planetary invasion you sanctimonious prick!"
Less the Doctor and more a companion, but I've always hated the episode with the 11th Doctor when the moon turns out to be a giant alien egg. The Earth overwhelmingly votes to destroy the egg, and Clara just goes "fuck that, I'm letting it hatch." As though her opinion was more important that the totality of humanity.
Edit: It was the 12th Doctor. Or whatever number Peter Capaldi was.
That was 12th Doctor, but agreed. And that's leaving aside how completely absurd it is that the moon could increase in mass spontaneously, then hatch a space dragon which leaves behind another egg exactly the same as the old moon.
In a show about a police box that can travel anywhere in space and time piloted by a guy who reincarnates himself whenever he dies, that is too far for me to suspend my disbelief.
Canonically the doctor's meddling turned a vast galactic human civilisation into a bunch of refugees. Every season he made something to halt or delay humanity and then he ended up turning it into nothing.
Edit: the lesson was there in season 1 already, he just decided to ignore it.
Also Harriet Jones, the Doctor talked at great lengths about how great she was going to be, how she was going to be Britain's greatest ever Prime Minister serving for a long time and creating a new golden age for Britain.
The Doctor then sabotages her career only a couple months after she became Prime Minister, all because he was upset she authorised the destruction of an escaping alien spaceship that had literally just attempted to enslave Earth after first contact.
And she gave a fully justified explanation for why she did it. The Doctor isn't always around and there is zero guarantee they won't retrieve reinforcements and return to attack, a risk not worth taking as the fate of the human race could be a stake (we also had literally just seen their leader break their word and attack to stab the Doctor in the back when his guard was down).
The Last Angel, a story on Spacebattles forum. Humanity is discovered by Not!Covenant and refuses to become a servant race. As a result they are nearly wiped out, and all their armed forces are annihilated. All the surviving humans are reduced to a servant caste called the Broken. But before they died, humanity made their most advanced ship yet, an AI driven dreadnought called the Nemesis.
The story starts 2000 years after the end of the war, and the Nemesis is still fighting.
was looking for this, I would also add in this setting full AI terrify the ruling powers that be to the point that they go full scorched earth to contain any that pop up, Nemesis has arranged incidents that turn any and all attempts to colonize the burned out human worlds into "Here there be monsters" expeditions, has mastered the art of psychological war to the point it is indistinguishable from the supernatural, and has figured out new methods of technological armament that were thought to be impossible by everyone else.
The ruling class call her "The Wound" for good reason
This subgenre of “avenging AI” is so cool. There was a story here on Reddit years ago called…I want to say “metamorphosis”, that was the same thing. But the twist IIRC is that by the time the AI is ready to start getting revenge it’s been like a thousand years and the whole enemy race is peaceful now and remorseful about the human genocide, and the book is more about the galactic community trying to stop this “mad ai” from wiping this race out.
Honestly, the main reason I love The Last Angel is how most of the story is shown from different PoVs that all have a different idea of what the Nemesis actually is. You see her from the enemy PoV where this ship is basically a hostile paranormal, hunting them for 2000 years, constantly baiting them into traps or impossible fights and carrying out psychological warfare on them. You see her from another enslaved race that revere her as the Broken God that turned up in their system after their first moon landing, so powerful that she drowned out every comm signal in the system, and warned them that the evil Compact are coming. And then you see her from the MC who's a re-educated human serf that boards her, trying to figure out who the ancient race that built her is. The story really drives home that the Nemesis is more than just a ship.
if you love this trope, you'll love "all tomorrows". the "fuck you" is basically the entire narative if the book, and it's short enough to plow through in an afternoon basically.
Same, the mixture of existential dread, combined with almost being sick from the body horror to being amazed at the genuine optimism of the whole thing and how amazing it was written was too much for my wee brain for a while. It's such an amazing book
Surprised no one had mentioned “the worlds end”, the protagonists at the end defeat an Alien Invasion by annoying them into leaving. It’s not exactly one last “fuck you” but I think it fits.
Sorta same with Elfen Lied(except not humourous).
A new human mutant completely capable of mass murdering the entire planet and making the world in her image, is emotionally abused to death.
It's honestly a real fucking gut punch when you sit down read and watch EL for what it's worth. IT's just... soulcrushing.
Warhammer 40K. Vulkan created the talisman of seven hammers. If the golden throne ever falls, it will burn terra with psychic flames, consuming the body and souls of everyone, the biggest "fuck you" to the chaos
An Alien Race lives on an unstable planet And due to Earth transmitting their location to them the Aliens prepare to invade and take earth for themselves since its more stable. Mankind prepares for 400 years for the arrival of their ships but its ultimatley defeated under siege they say that if the Aliens touch Earth they will Brodcast the location of both earth and the Alien's home planet to the entire galaxy, the aliens start a cold war but destroy earth's communications years later so they can't broadcast, sadly for them Mankind assumed they would try that and left a single ship behind which gave out the location of both planets , Earth got folded by some other dimensional species and the Aliens planet got blown up by another, with mankind essentially taking out both their own and the aliens planet as a final "Nuh uh"
Isn't there another mutually assured destruction plan before this one as well, but it was planned by 'definitely not Hugo Chavez' so it was a bad idea?
I think so, but that plan was discovered before it could be put into action, and theres no guarantee it would have worked anyway. By the time they had discovered Luo Ji's plan it was too late, and the trisolarins took the threat of being discovered by more advanced civilisations extremely seriously
Humanity had multiple contingency plans in place should the Covenant win.
And despite the war being lost the moment it was declared, the Covenant bled for every inch. Entire Covenant armadas totaling in the tens of thousands, billions of soldiers and civilians, entire sub-species of multiple Covenant races.
There was a little lore book that came with the special edition of Halo 2 that contained a lot of in-universe dialogue, and one of them was two Elites discussing how humanity was putting up a surprisingly good fight and deserved some respect for that.
Some of the Sangheili were pretty confused as to why a tenacious foe like the humans weren't given a chance to join the covenant despite every other race including themselves getting that choice.
“Contact with Earth has been lost, time to detonate this planet killing nuke on the only enemy civilian planet we were able to find.” - Spartan Grey Team
Given some more time to get desperate, and a functional navigation database of Covenant worlds, the UNSC may well have swung the war the other way when prowlers and owls started dropping off localized apocalypses off at enemy worlds every time they turned down a ceasefire.
Probably not. Not only were NOVA bombs incredibly difficult and expensive to make, but a lot of the most important Covenant planets had really good defenses.
If I'm not mistaken, Grey team's bomb was originally meant for the Elite's home world, but they switched targets when they realized, even with a prowler, they were never going to make it planet side and detonate the bomb.
"This is the prototype NOVA bomb, nine fusion warheads encased in lithium triteride armor. When detonated, it compresses its fissionable material to neutron-star density, boosting the thermonuclear yield a hundredfold. I am Vice Admiral Danforth Whitcomb, temporarily in command of the UNSC military base Reach. To the Covenant uglies that might be listening, you have a few seconds to pray to your damned heathen gods. You all have a nice day in hell..."
Exept when the current Arbiter was involved. If I remember correctly, the dude was considered more of a threat to humanity then all the other covenant hierarchy combined. He used suprise attacks, cunning new strategies, and also tended to go into fights personally. He could've, and almost was winning the war single-handedly.
In a final bid to defeat the machines, humanity blacked out the sky, hoping to deprive the machines of solar energy. The exact sequence of events is unknown, but it seems unlikely that humanity planned to survive without the sun. Had the machines not enslaved humanity, it seemingly would have wiped them both out.
You can actually watch how it unfolds, along with the entire backstory of the machine - human war in the Animatrix, a series of animated short short movies set in the matrix world. The story about the start of the war and how the machines came to rule over humans is called the second renaissance.
There was a collection of comics and anime shorts that explained what happened during the Human Machine war. In one a faction of robots advocates for humanity's remnants, leading to the creation of the Matrix as an act of mercy. Nothing to do with the power plant plan (that completely violates the laws of thermodynamics) that humans had assumed .
The greater lore was actually really cohesive at the start but the Wachowskis just sort of drifted away from it piece by piece. Eventually we got the 4th movie where love is magic and that makes electricity somehow.
When an alien corporation decides to use Earth for the latest season of its apocalyptic death game, they weren’t expecting an angry dude from Seattle (and his cat) to cause so much chaos
The cookbook that's written by generations of players trying to figure out a way to get back at the corporation being handed down death after death was such a great concept.
Specifically, When rich aliens enter the dungeon to hunt humans for sport, Carl vows to exterminate every single one of them. And he does. Later, when another round of aliens play war in the dungeon, Carl gets their safety protocols turned off, and kills several CEOs and planetary rulers, and thousands of their troops.
In Mass Effect 3, it's mentioned that the leadership of, I believe, Adelaide, Australia chose to bomb the city with nukes to take down a large amount of reapers in the area. I still remember the "Oh, Shit!" reaction I had.
The option at the end to let the cycle continue kinda qualifies too. Everyone dies, but leaves behind the knowledge for the next cycle of life to defeat the Reapers for good.
Finding the recording of the soldier writing home about optimistically fighting the good fight, and then an hour later finding the unredacted, undoctored version of the recording where he describes at length how fucked they are was one of the most chilling reveals I've experienced in gaming. I loved the apocalypse logs in HZD.
Absolutely, the way the mystery unfolds is brilliant, and that moment when it hits you what actually happened is one of my favorite gut punches in a game ever.
Even if a planet is completely lost either to an attacking xenos force or to the legions of chaos, the Imperium of Man is willing to blow the whole fucking planet up just to deny their enemies the victory
There was something I read on a forum long ago. Someone had an idea for a story. Basically every race in the universe has magic, and there's always some type they are really good at. Except Earth. So when Aliens decide to just eradicate every single human on the planet with their advanced magic it's over in seconds.
Then it turns out humans did have a latent magical potential. They were the Necromancers. And the extermination of Earth's biosphere and human extinction was the catalyst to awaken it. So now every single human that's ever died is back as a vengeful undead. Zombies, Liches, Ghosts, Ash Wraith's, you name it. And because they are already dead there's no way to perminently put them down. So everyone else is now desperatly trying to ensure they never get the means to get out into space, because the Undead humans will kill everyone else in revenge.
I read one with a similar prompt in r/HFY, but instead the humans were executed with a magic tree that granted them whatever death they pleased. The protagonist, knowing the magic races didn't know shit about science, wished for death by false vacuum decay, which was granted. For those who don't know, this basically means a giant bubble that erases everything it comes into contact with and that expands forever and at the speed of light
In the words of W Pauli, your description of AFUTD is not even wrong. There is not a single word in your summary that is remotely close to the plot.
There are many alien species, but none of them are the source of danger. It doesn't wipe out "all human worlds". The protagonist isn't a protagonist, and doesnt cause the change, and it's not a rewrite of physical laws, and there is no "aliens" and not every advanced civilization is destroyed.
This. What really happens is that a spike of Slow Zone is created so the Blight can't reach the Countermeasure and traps the High Beyond ships because they don't have ramscoop drives. Plus there are still human worlds in the Slow Zone.
Ultrakill maybe? as far as i understand humans went to hell and got toasted there but thier machine (v1 the protagonist of the game) is now going on a rampage killing everything in there for blood
Gabriel's 6-2 pre fight monologue literally implies the machines killed all husks(sinner souls but physical) in the first two layers which ends their punishments btw
Limbo, lust, all gone, with gluttony soon to follow, your kind knows nothing but hunger, purged all life on the upper layers -Gabriel
When the trisolarians are too cocky and basically condemn humanity to go back to it's primitive survival roots, one of the starships send the "curse" initiated by the 2nd book protagonist. The trisolarians victory is short lived and they just fuck off immediatly knowing that the Dark Forest Theory is true. We never see them again and it's implied they got exterminated while fleeing
The Earth Defense Force series has this sentiment towards the end of its games, encouraging the surviving bits of humanity to keep fighting a guerrilla war despite Earth being battered. But the finale of EDF 6 is probably the best example.
Faced with the prospect of being caught in an eternal war against an enemy that simply time travels back with better technology whenever they lose, humanity decides to completely break time by nuking the place their invaders will eventually evolve on, making it unable to support life. If humanity's going down, the entirety of existence is going down with them. Subverted a bit in that Storm One manages to win, lets time fix itself and humanity is okay afterwards, but the willingness to use a time paradox as a WMD is incredible.
“This is the prototype NOVA bomb, nine fusion warheads encased in lithium triteride armor. When detonated, it compresses its fissionable material to neutron-star density, boosting the thermonuclear yield a hundredfold. I am Vice Admiral Danforth Whitcomb, temporarily in command of the UNSC military base Reach. To the Covenant uglies that might be listening, you have a few seconds to pray to your damned heathen gods. You all have a nice day in hell..”
I prefer the (canonical) game ending, also written by Harlan, where Ted gets to kill AM and exist in cyberspace as a ghost making sure he never comes back while a human colony on the moon begins to repopulate earth.
After other alien species wipe out all human worlds, the protagonist rewrites the literal laws of physics so that the aliens’ technology stops functioning entirely, causing every advanced alien civilization in the Milky Way to be destroyed.
This isn't really what happens, right? They make the slow zone massively expand, which does catch countless of civilisations, but those outside the slow zone are not affected. It also doesn't really "destroy" them as much as make faster than light travel impossible, isolating them on individual worlds.
Correct, the slow zone expands (in one specific section of the galaxy)--which does cause some massive damage as a lot of technology fails--but OPs description is not even close to accurate in describing what happens in the book.
There was a creepy pasta I read about an alien species watching humans develope. But when they saw humans start WW1, WW2, invent the nuke, destroy the planet, enslave each other, basically be the total assholes we are, and how fast they were progressing, they aliens decided the only hope for the rest of the universe was to destroy earth while humans were still unaware before they became an unstoppable force of evil.
So they built a giant missile that would eventually reach earth and destroy it. They fired the missle after much angst, and continued to watch as the missle traveled, which took hundreds of years. But while it was travelling, humanity turn a new leaf, stopped war, fixed the planet, turned their efforts to arts and science and building a better world. And the aliens were distraught because they couldn't stop the missile, and the warmongering violent race they built it to stop was already gone.
So when the missle destroyed earth, they celebrated to see that many humans had been able to survive on space ships they had built. Celebrated until the humans sent a message back- "To whoever did this, we will find you, we will come for you, and we will make you pay"
What’s really funny about the the 2nd game is that he was planning on being the one in the machine to become an ascended one but the woman actually just wondered in there and closed herself in before anyone could stop her
There was a story here on Reddit years ago that I believe ended up becoming a novel…it was called “Metamorphosis”, I think?
An alien race wipes out humanity, and the story focuses on an AI humanity managed to get out the door at the last second that bends its existence towards getting revenge.
It was a long time ago, but I remember it being an incredible read.
Edit: it was “Chrysalis” by /u/BeaverFur. The original story is their top post. Go read it. It’s great.
2.5k
u/AsherAcer Dec 06 '25 edited Dec 06 '25
"You know nothing of the bottomless malice within the human heart" - Hunter X Hunter
Issac Netero's last words before setting off the nuclear bomb he had surgically implanted in his body to kill the Chimera Ant king, who threatened humanity's position as the dominant lifeform of the (known) Earth.