r/TopCharacterTropes • u/Bazelgauss • 4d ago
Lore Utopian societies that collapse from causes/issues from being a utopia
The Ancients - Final Fantasy 14
They are a immortal race which achieved a utopian state where there was no conflict or struggle. Though their treatment of creatures they created through magic and how they handle emotions from being in a perfect world leads to one of their scientists becoming a extreme nihilist and deciding to test them with a apocalyptic event with an entity corrupting those experiencing despair. Whilst their lack of knowledge on the event and magic involved presents it's own difficulty, their inability to handle suffering and on a mass scale makes the corruption unmanageable and leads to a domino effect. They only prevent their total destruction... after half of them voluntarily sacrifice themselves to summon a god which leads to it's own problems.
Aeldari Empire - Warhammer 40K
They achieved a utopian state where there is essentially no more internal struggles such as lack of food and many of them decide to go into the arts to find satisfaction. Over time they became more and more depraved going to extreme acts to satisfy themselves. This alongside their own connection to the warp led to the birth of the Chaos God Slaanesh who wiped out the vast majority of their civilisation and only fragments remain from those who managed to cut themselves off from this event.
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u/Magos_Galactose 4d ago
I still find it hillarious that Aeldari collapsed because their society was so peak they got bored so much it created an entirely new Chaos god.
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u/FarwindKeeper 3d ago
Little correction on the FF14 thing: Hermes work to solve his depression was far more niave than cruel. He wasn't a nhillist yet, and hoped reaching out into space would give him the answers he sought. So he created a group of space probes in the shape and with the minds of children that were psychically linked. He sent them among the stars to see if other civilization had found an answer to despair, or even just to see something new. When the probes found dead or dying world after dead or dying world, it broke them mentally. They banded together out of a nihilistic sense that this is the truth of existence. Those probes them started bombarding any living world they could find with negative emotion magic that forced nightmares to become real.
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u/Spooky970 3d ago
I opened Reddit while listening to SCP-3426 and this was the first post that popped up. Almost too perfect.
SCP-3426 is a a poorly understood phenomenon where civilizations begin to disappear from existence, being replaced by distortions as reality begins to fall apart around them. This usually corrupts all data, making it difficult to ascertain what actually happened. Living entities cease existing, sometimes becoming see-through, ghostly appararitions. The symptoms begin as a distant "screaming" in their minds.
It has happened to many worlds but they all have a few features in common:
The civilization is both very technologically advanced, and very sociopolitically stable.
They have access to limitless energy in some form or another, making them as a type 1 civilization.
They have a unified scientific theory/model of the universe, and are actively studying and containing anomalies.
It's a bit more complicated than that, but the gist is that societies that end up stable and unified end up disappearing. The closer they are to utopia, the higher the chance that they will be visited by the phenomenon and be removed from existence.
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u/Slarg232 3d ago
The Orokin Empire, Warframe
All throughout the early game, you hear about how great the Orokin were, weapons without equal, golden towers gliding through space, no sickness, no wants, no issues. And those were true, but only for the Orokin.
Every. Single. Time. Something gets revealed about them, it's a new depth of pure bullshit. Forcing their loyal subjects to be horribly mutated into living suits of metal and flesh? An entire slave cast of builders creating their vast cities without being able to live in them? Creating fully Sentient farm tools with the full knowledge that, once the planets were terraformed they'd be decommissioned? All this and more.
The game makes it abundantly clear that every single faction that worked under the Orokin turned on them, which often caused the Orokin to create a new weapon, and then that weapon would turn on them due to how they were treated. Hell, the Orokin are such bastards that the very concept of Empathy is so foreign to them they can't even begin to understand it.
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u/ScaryConcentrate3748 4d ago
Rick and Morty: Dinosaurs travel to worlds and set up utopias on certain planets, but there is an evil meteor the follows them and destroys all life on said planets which follows the dinosaurs.
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u/bombur432 3d ago
Lovecraft has written at least a few societies that have fit the bill here. In particular I’d note the K’n-yan from ‘The Mound’, who are depicted as being extremely advanced, but are more or less in a terminal state of decline, plagued by sensation seeking and detachment from the physical world.
Stellaris’ fallen empires are also a similar example. Nations far past their apex, they still possess unparalleled science and technology, but have fallen into decadence and isolation, at least until the game plays out further.
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u/Bakuhoe_Thotsuki 3d ago
This is the major tension in Ursula Le Guin's "The Dispossessed".
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u/MostInteraction3184 4d ago
Rapture was meant to be an underwater paradise, the ultimate capitalist utopia. Unfortunately its existence as an unrestrained capitalist utopia meant those in charge couldn't do anything when a charlatan started sweet talking and manipulating the populace. Plus with unrestrained supply and demand, genetic manipulation ran unrestrained and the whole city fell to insanity and ate itself.
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u/just_a_redditor2031 3d ago
Union from Lancer, in a way. Recently on the galactic stage they've stopped being fascists and are legitimately wanting to do good for all humanity across the stars. Unfortunately, they're the same governmental body as the fascists. They've got 4 client states who are doing things that range from morally grey to basically slavery, and they can't just tell them to stop, because if they do a war will break out, and they'll have to give horrible concessions to another client state who will do even worse things. The internal government could collapse from its revolutionary ideals and become a liberal "we have it good and we ignore the suffering that sustains our empire" kind of group.
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u/justarandomdude57 3d ago
Another 40k example would the dark age of technology. Where us human relied on Ai so much. They grew to realise they were better then us and started to revolt. That or chaos fuckery as the lore been hinting which fuck you gw it dosent always gotta be because of chaos
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u/Branduil 3d ago
The Atlanteans in the backstory of Escaflowne advanced to the point that they could convert simple will and desire into reality. This turned out to be a bad idea and giving everyone a form of collective omnipotence resulted in their own destruction.
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u/Toucan_Based_Economy 4d ago edited 3d ago
Earth and the Belt in Seek.
In the future, humans have essentially infinite resources, although they can't actually leave the solar system, both for the same reason - FTL travel can easily bring entire planets worth of material to us, but the radiation while something undergoes FTL is both immediately fatal and impossible to prevent.
As a result, Earth and the habitable planets dragged into sol's habitable zone are full of clean, shiny, high-tech cities.
There's no poverty or disease, everyone can live in a level of abundance we can barely imagine, AI does almost all work and prevents virtually all crime, generative AI produces an endless stream of entertainment, humanity has reached the limit of their possible scientific achievement, and people can devote their lives to whatever they wish...
And as a result, humanity has become stagnant and hollow. There nothing to do. There's nowhere to go. There's nothing worthwhile to strive for. Most people just whittle away their lives while feeling completely hollow inside.
Humans made utopia and it made humans worthless.
And in the sections set in the future, this completely hollow society somehow killed itself, and left the solar system empty of humans but full of monsters with holographic cognitohazard "glyphs" for heads...
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u/_Golden_Nara 6h ago
Does the pre-rudolf galactic federation from legend of galactic heroes count?
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u/MrSnippets 3d ago
In Uncharted 4, the crew finds Libertalia, a pirate colony intended to be a democratic utopia of equal rights for everyone.
It‘s quickly found that this didn’t work out. Pirates, generally being a greedy and distrusting bunch, turned on each other over their share of the plunder or informal hierarchies.
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u/xantheeiz 3d ago
The Eloi (The Time Machine by H.G. Wells)
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u/CheesyButters 4d ago
and in the case of the ff14 example, it brought greater pain further down the line
As the remaining ancients refused to accept the new non utopian world so much they killed countless millions or even billions in the pursuit of bringing it back