Valhalla in flames, in an 1894 depiction by Max Brückner.
Fly home, ye ravens! tell your lord the tidings
that here on the Rhine ye have learned!
To Brünnhilde's rock first wing your flight!
there burneth Loge:
straight way bid him to Walhall!
For the end of godhood draweth now near.
So cast I the brand
on Walhall's glittering walls.
that here on the Rhine ye have learned!
To Brünnhilde's rock first wing your flight!
there burneth Loge:
straight way bid him to Walhall!
For the end of godhood draweth now near.
So cast I the brand
on Walhall's glittering walls.
— Brünnhilde in Act III, Scene 3 of Götterdämmerung (translation
)
)
This trope is when the gods (or equivalent beings like sufficiently advanced Precursors) all die, get Sealed In A Can or are otherwise removed from the setting in one fell swoop, usually in a large battle or some other sudden catastrophe. Frequently, this is the end result of a war between gods, or between the gods and some powerful enemy (with the enemy usually, but not always, sharing the god's fate).
Götterdämmerung is German for "twilight of the gods". The term was popularized by Richard Wagner in his Der Ring des Nibelungen opera cycle. This is a German translation of the Old Norse Ragnarökkr, which was itself a poetic alternate name for the Norse term Ragnarök.etymology. Ragnarök itself was the story of how most of the Aesirnote and the greatest Jotuns died in a battle against each other.
Contrast and compare Death of the Old Gods, (where the gods are slowly disappearing, essentially going out with a whimper instead of a bang), God Is Dead (the monotheistic equivalent of this trope) and Kill the God (which is killing individual gods rather then all of them, although a truly determined God Killer could cross into this trope). Also compare The Magic Goes Away, Here There Were Dragons and Twilight of the Supers for similar examples of the world losing its fantastical elements. See also End of an Age/Dawn of an Era, which this trope often leads to.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- Attack on Titan: The story contains many references to Norse mythology, and the Rumbling is no exception. In a final confrontation that heavily resembles the real mythological Götterdämmerung, Eren's gamble between two freedoms is resolved by his death, severing the Source of All Living Matter's connection to the bloodline of Ymir and thus the connection of all Eldians to the Paths, resulting in the destruction of the Titans, the gods and devils who haunted humanity for two thousand years.
- Digimon: In the ancient Digital World Lucemon descended from heaven and sealed Huanglongmon the leader of the Four Holy Beasts within the deepest place within the earth, making them lose their rule, bringing peace to the chaotic world, which quickly corrupted him with power, causing the emergence of the Warrior Ten (each one a Physical God) from same data that created the Digital World to end his tyrannical reign which ended with Lucemon sealed in the Dark Area and 8 of them dead, creating the Digi-Spirits to protect the Digital World in the future.
- Dragon Ball Super: It is eventually revealed that Zamasu and Goku Black killed off every other Supreme Kai in the future timeline multiversenote also causing their corresponding Gods of Destruction to die (as if either dies, the other does too), so Zamasu will be the only remaining universe level deity with no one to oppose their plans to wipe out all mortals.
- Macross: In the backstory of the franchise, the entire galaxy was part of a Golden Age under the Protoculture Stellar Republic before a civil war destroyed them, leaving only their giant humanoid armies to roam the galaxy and continue fighting.
- Yuki Yuna is a Hero: At the end of the “Hero Chapter”, the Shinju-sama is gone and the Heavenly Gods are either dead or otherwise won't be coming back for a long time, and humanity will have to face the future on their own.
Comic Books
- Last Days of the Justice Society: The Justice Society of America tried defying this; they were all ready to retire when they are called for one last mission: to prevent Adolf Hitler from linking the fate of the actual Norse gods' Ragnarok to that of the universe circa 1945. By merging with the Norse gods themselves, the Justice Society succeeded in changing the outcome... only to find themselves repeating the same battle over and over until Waverider around the time of Armageddon: Inferno swapped out the Justice Society for Abraxis' "daemen", allowing the heroes to return to Earth.
- New Gods: This is basically the premise of Jack Kirby's metaseries, which opens rather bluntly with the words: "There came a time when the Old Gods DIED!"
- The Twilight of the Superheroes: The story would've dealt with this, but in reference to heroes instead of actual gods. It was designed to give a sort of definitive end to all the heroes, as The Dark Knight Returns did for Batman. According to Alan Moore, who proposed the idea, the intent was to finally raise comic book stories to the status of legends, since without an ending it did not become a true legend:
"An essential quality of a legend is that the events in it are clearly defined in time; Robin Hood is driven to become an outlaw by the injustices of King John and his minions. That is his origin. He meets Little John, Friar Tuck and all the rest and forms the merry men. He wins the tournament in disguise, he falls in love with Maid Marian and thwarts the Sheriff of Nottingham. That is his career, including love interest, Major Villains and the formation of a superhero group that he is part of. He lives to see the return of Good King Richard and is finally killed by a woman, firing a last arrow to mark the place where he shall be buried. That is his resolution—you can apply the same paradigm to King Arthur, Davy Crockett or Sherlock Holmes with equal success. You cannot apply it to most comic book characters because, in order to meet the commercial demands of a continuing series, they can never have a resolution. Indeed, they find it difficult to embrace any of the changes in life that the passage of time brings about for these very same reasons, making them finally less than fully human as well as falling far short of true myth."
- Wanted: The story has a superhero version of this; once, superheroes walked the Earth, but a great battle between them and the supervillains destroyed them, allowing the villains to rewrite the world into their image and turn it into a bleaker, more cynical place closer to our world.
Fan Works
- Codex Equus: There are several instances where even entire divine pantheons have been wiped out, though it's usually because they acted like Jerkass Gods towards their worshipers and thus had karma bite them in the collective ass, sometimes fatally. It's also used by the Grand Primevals to punish pantheons whose crimes had gone beyond the pale.
- According to various entries and supplementary materials, the "Twilight of the Alicorns" was this for the ancient Alicorns of pre-"Known History". The ancient Alicorns established a divine civilization that spread into the Equusian galaxies, but their successes made them so complacent that they became corrupt, arrogant, and self-righteous. It culminated in the birth of Morning Star, whose quest to become the Ultimate Lifeform led to the Alicorn Civilization's destruction, killed off a huge chunk of the ancient Alicorns, and severely traumatized those who survived like Emperor Golden Scepter. Even Temnobog points out that someone like Morning Star was inevitable given the direction the ancient Alicorns were heading.
Temnobog: A divine utopia of complete benevolence and fairness, with nothing but success to truly motivate them? No wonder your people fell. They've been sitting on their laurels for so long that they eventually became blind to their own corruption... until one of them snapped, that is.
Golden Scepter: ..I suppose you are right, Dark One. Even I was blind to it, as hard as I tried... Perhaps... perhaps Morning Star's betrayal and the destruction of my home were the best things that ever happened to the Alicorns, and me as well. - The Tauren Peninsula (the Fourth Age's equivalent to Greece) went through this many times. The Othrysian Pantheon (Codex Equus's equivalent to the Titans) that once ruled the place was overthrown by their children, who became the Orosian/Olympian Pantheon. Sadly, the Orosians/Olympians became even worse than their predecessors, constantly abusing their mortal worshipers and punishing them for perceived slights when they weren't using them as Unwitting Pawns against their fellow gods. Eventually, the mortals rebelled, with even benevolent gods lending aid in the conflict. This was as the "Twilight of the Old Orosian/Olympan Pantheon", though it ended disastrously when Kratos, the Ghost of Sparta, killed the pantheon's leader Zeus in such a careless manner that millions died in the resulting backlash.
- According to various entries and supplementary materials, the "Twilight of the Alicorns" was this for the ancient Alicorns of pre-"Known History". The ancient Alicorns established a divine civilization that spread into the Equusian galaxies, but their successes made them so complacent that they became corrupt, arrogant, and self-righteous. It culminated in the birth of Morning Star, whose quest to become the Ultimate Lifeform led to the Alicorn Civilization's destruction, killed off a huge chunk of the ancient Alicorns, and severely traumatized those who survived like Emperor Golden Scepter. Even Temnobog points out that someone like Morning Star was inevitable given the direction the ancient Alicorns were heading.
- The Dear Sweetie Belle Continuity: This is specifically mentioned as "the Twilight of the Gods" as the end of Celestia and Luna's reign in Clover the Clever's dying prophecy. Needless to say, Twilight Sparkle is implied to have something to do with it. Word of God is that it's the name of Twilight's own Superpowered Evil Side.
- Harmony Theory: Celestia and Luna are now sealed in their respective celestial bodies.
- I Am Going To Save And/Or Destroy Equestria: Luna and Celestia ended up destroying one another in the final battle one thousand years ago, rather than Nightmare Moon being sealed away. In short, the two good "gods" died, and their passing has disastrous consequences... since there are still plenty of evil "gods" left. Due to how vital the princesses' existence was to Equestrian society (making the fiends go away and powering the seals that kept them in Tartarus, making the sun move up and down, etc.), their death causes the collapse of Equestrian civilization as well, since without the princesses, there's no one left to stop the fiends of Tartarus, or to stop an invasion by a foreign army... at least, not until the start of the story.
- The Last Great Time War: The story has been building up to this and will end with it and indeed ended with it.
- The Taste of Peaches: The story hints that this is a fairly regular thing, with the divinities all being killed after a certain period of time, so new gods can be born into the world.
- Twilight Then, Twilight Now Universe: The fanfic's backstory reveals this occurred in the G4 Ponyverse multiple times. When Princess Celestia makes a Heroic Sacrifice to kill Discord, and this results in a religious backlash against the Alicorns and all the values they espoused, and this is only the first thing to go wrong. The end result was a Darker and Edgier rendition of the G1 Ponyverse that is revealed to be a Bad Future of the G4 Ponyverse, with G1 Applejack being G4 Applejack, a survivor who was horrified by the rampant gender inequality (among other things) and tried to restore how things used to be.
Films — Live-Action
- DC Extended Universe:
- In Wonder Woman, Queen Hippolyta tells Diana about the story of how the god Ares killed the other gods of Olympus before being banished to the surface of Earth by a dying Zeus.
- When confronting Diana/Wonder Woman for the first time in Justice League, the New God Steppenwolf reprises the aforementioned Jack Kirby line word for word.
Steppenwolf: You have the blood of the Old Gods in you. The Old Gods died!
Literature
- Auteur: The Cosmic War was a massive Divine Conflict which ended in all but a few of the Archons being wiped from existence. Auteur was destroyed in its early stages, and is resurrected shortly after its end. In Marginalia, Auteur, unable to stomach the uncertainty over exactly what happened to destroy his own kind, nor the knowledge that it wasn't his doing, eventually uses his powers to retroactively assert that he was the one who brought an end to the conflict by erasing the Archons.
- Deeplight: If the gods of the Myriad come too close to one another, they are compelled to fight to the death. They kept to their own territories until an event known as the Cataclysm, in which they ripped each other apart (taking hundreds of islanders with them). It's revealed that a group of priests deliberately baited the gods towards each other in order to wipe them out.
- Discworld: Whilst it hasn't actually happened yet, the Discworld's name for this is "The Teatime of the Gods".
- Dragonlance: The first trilogy featured a variant of this; the gods of old are gone, and with them all their magic, but not because of any war. They devastated the world with a terrible Cataclysm, stole away all of their healing magic, and then turned their back on mortals because mortals would not accept that they themselves were to blame for all this. A lot of readers sympathize with the viewpoint that the gods can go screw themselves. The first trilogy ends with the gods coming back. Though actual Gotterdammerungs are the focus of later trilogies, as well.
- In the Deep Space Nine novel Fallen Heroes, Dax, the member of a species comprising a small symbiote inside a standard humanoid, thinks of the Trill version of Ragnarok where a race of dumb giants and a race of smaller intelligent beings fought a war that ended with a single member of each surviving and mating to create the Trill race. There is endless speculation as to which was which gender.
- The Gods Are Bastards: The setting's backstory featured this: the current gods overthrew the old ones by force several thousand years before the story is set.
- Known Space: The galaxy was once ruled by a foolish, simpleminded race of creatures whose only notable attribute was the ability to utterly dominate the minds of others. When the inevitable rebellion happened after thousands of years, their final, technologically amplified command was for everything advanced enough to receive their commands to commit suicide.
- The Lord of the Rings: This is in some sense the basis of the plot, which is not surprising since, while Tolkien was not inspired by Wagner's Ring Cycle, he was drawing on much the same source material. In any case, the story of the War of the Ring is that of the destruction or self-imposed exile of the supernatural beings who had dominated Middle-Earth for millennia, leaving mortal men in control. The legendarium also prophesies of a more literal end/renewal of the world, when Morgoth will finally escape the Great Void into which he was cast at the end of the First Age and destroy the Sun and the Moon, but Eärendil will cast him down to Earth, where the armies of Ar-Pharazôn the Golden will reawaken to do battle against one faction or another. Finally Túrin Turambar will slay him once and for all and the Children of Húrin will finally be avenged. In the tumult of battle the lost Silmarils will be cast out of the Earth and Water and Fëanor will return them to the Valar, who will use them to rekindle the Two Trees and the World will be recreated anew. Interestingly, the fate of Ar-Pharazôn and his forces is entirely uncertain; the published text says only that he will return at the end of time, with no real description of his loyalties or what state he will be in.
- Supernatural: Mythmaker: The story revolves around the "Apotheosis"; in response to many older gods dying, newer ones pop into existence from out of mankind's imagination, then begin to compete with each other by accruing worshippers and fighting to the death, either forming a new generation or ensuring they don't go out quietly. It's happened multiple times in history, with the Titanomachy and Ragnarok being name-dropped.
- That is All: The story's Central Theme is centered on the end days, the return of the elder gods, and ultimately the total destruction of the earth. It gets rather meta. The end of the book is a page-a-day calendar outlining the events of Ragnarok ("it will happen today in Ragnarok!").
- Whom Gods Would Destroy: the First World War is depicted as the violent destruction of the old supernatural order, including, and culminating in, the Battle of Armageddon.
Live-Action TV
- Babylon 5: A Myth Arc involved a cyclic conflict between the two oldest and greatest powers in the galaxy, the Vorlons and the Shadows, along with their younger proxies. Partway into the fourth season, this conflict is resolved, with the Vorlons and Shadows traveling Beyond the Rim to live with the First Ones, most of whom had previously done the same millions of years earlier. The remaining two seasons of the show center on the younger races' efforts to grow on their own and deal with their own issues. The producer, J. Michael Straczynski, likened it to a family having Parental Issues on a galactic level.
- Buffyverse: In the backstory of Angel and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the Old Ones were overthrown long ago and supplanted by humanity. It's really driven home when an Old One, Illyria, returns in Angel only to find her armies long dead and crumbling to dust while her own replacement body can't withstand her own power. The sight of a Lovecraftian horror beaten down by time, trapped in a human shell with only a fraction of her former power, and utterly alone without a purpose in life is rather sad.
- Doctor Who: Between the old and new series, an offscreen conflict called the Last Great Time War occurred between the Time Lords and the Daleks, with a horde of various Eldritch Abominations emerging from the crossfire. It ended with the Doctor somehow erasing both sides from the universe. It later turned out that several million Daleks survived in a prison ship called the Genesis Ark, but that's still a fraction of the ten million ship fleet that fought the Time Lords. Later, Rassilon and the Time Lords attempt to escape - in a way that would unleash the aforementioned abominations and eventually destroy the universe, forcing the Doctor to stop them all over again. The few surviving Daleks built mini-empires that were defeated one by one, until one small group actually won an encounter with The Doctor and rebuilt into a galactic power.
- "The Day of the Doctor" reveals Gallifrey wasn't destroyed but placed in a pocket dimension by the Doctor, though he forgets this due to Timey-Wimey Ball. They later wandered back on their own, and are currently hiding at the end of time.
- The Time Lords being wiped out had already been used multiple times. The Ancestor Cell has Gallifrey being destroyed by the Doctor. Death Comes to Time, a probably non-canon web-animation shows both a Death of the Old Gods and Gotterdammerung. Various Time Lords, who are here Reality Warper Gods of the Fourth die through the story, the Doctor pulling a Heroic Sacrifice to kill rogue Time Lord General Tannis. Though the Time Lords haven't been wiped out, apparently their era has passed as the Doctor is the last of the friendly Time Lords.
- Mystery Science Theater 3000: In the episode "Gamera vs. Gaos" the SOL gang try to do a sketch mixing the titular Kaiju with Wagner's opera, but movie sign cuts the bit off before they can even start.
Music
- Amon Amarth live on this trope. See their songs Twilight of the Thunder God, "Destroyer of the Universe," "The Last Stand of Frej," "Death in Fire," "...And Soon the World Will Cease to Be." Basically telling this tale from everybody's perspective throughout their discography. And there are still people left in the myth...
- The Blind Guardian album Beyond the Red Mirror has a song "Twilight of the gods," which is about the gods, if not dying, then at least going to a long sleep.
- Nile's album Ithyphallic has a song called "Even the Gods Must Die," which discusses the idea of this trope on a historical level; namely that all legends and myths fade with time, and with the decline of the worship of the Gods, so too go the Gods...
- The Trope Namer is Götterdämmerung, the final installment of Richard Wagner's Ring Cycle of operas. With Wotan's spear, upon which was inscribed all the bargains he had made for power, broken by his grandson Siegfried, and with Wotan's plot to get hold of the titular ring without invoking its curse having failed, Wotan orders the branches cut from the World-Tree Yggdrasil and piled around Valhalla. Then the gods retire to Valhalla and are consumed in flames at the end.
- The departure of Ireland's gods and lesser supernatural entities from the human world (see Mythology, below) is set to music by the Horslips on the LP The Book of Invasions, in the final track "Sideways To The Sun".
- Pepe Deluxé's album Queen of the Wave is an ode to the passing of Atlantis. There's a whirlwind tour of the spiritual enlightenment and Sufficiently Advanced Bamboo Technology the Atlanteans possessed—then they fall to moral decay, and the great city sinks into the ocean in the final song.
- The Flaming Lips have the song Pompeii am Götterdämmerung, which actually refers to the destruction of Pompeii by the volcano Vesuvius, but nevertheless uses the term.
- The song Prime Mover by the Swedish punk band The Leather Nun is about this, the second verse referring directly to events of Ragnarök.
- A composer by the name of Andrew Boysen composed a piece for wind ensemble called "Twilight of the Gods," which portrays this event. When premiered by the Cuesta College Wind Ensemble in May 12, 2010, and when performed by some other bands, it was done in sync to visuals designed by Erik Evensen that depicted the story on a screen.
Mythology and Religion
- Classical Mythology: The Titans are deposed by the Olympians, with most of them becoming Sealed Evil in a Can.
- This is after the Titans themselves depose the primordial deities before them.
- And the Trojan War can be seen as this, as it was considered the end of the Heroic Age and the start of history from the Greeks' point of view.
- Irish mythology has something of a variation in the Battle of Tailtiu. In it a battle between the gods and the Milesians (the ancestors of the modern Irish) ends with the Milesians victorious and many gods and goddesses slain. However this isn't a complete end to the gods, as most of the major ones survive, and ultimately reach a compromise with the humans. But it does end the time of the gods walking the earth among mortals, as they depart for the Otherworld and leave the mortal world to the mortals.
- Norse Mythology: Two people, Líf and Lífþrasir, will survive Ragnarök (the Norse version of the apocalypse, the final climactic battle of the gods with the giants and monsters which will end the world as we know it) and will presumably live on to create the next generation of humans after the fall of the gods...though some suspect this may have just been retrofitting Adam and Eve's concept to Norse myth. A number of gods of the new generation survive as well.
Tabletop Games
- Changeling: The Dreaming: The fact that the game is basically this under a coating of glitter is what led to its Audience-Alienating Premise. The plot of the game is that Imagination is fading from reality under the assault of "Banality", and with it all of the mystical and magical beings of fae are dying out. The present era is the time of Autumn... and Winter, the total destruction of the fae, is inevitable.
- Warhammer 40,000:
- The godlike Old Ones, who once ruled the galaxy, were destroyed in the a cataclysmic, star-sundering conflict with the Necrons and their C'tan masters, remembered in the lore of a few particularly ancient cultures as the War in Heaven.
- The Rhana Dandra, meaning "End of All Days" in the Aeldari lexicon, represents a prophesied end of the universe when the entire Aeldari race will come together for one last desperate battle against Chaos, and then will die alongside their remaining gods, but as a last jest made by Cegorach (the Aeldari Trickster God) it will save the Aeldari as their souls will give birth of Ynnead, the Aeldari God of the Dead, who will vanquish Slaanesh and end the foul Chaos god's reign over their souls forever.
Video Games
- .hack: The "Twilight of the New Gods" was a two-year period when internet access became unavailable to the general public due to the Pluto's Kiss virus attack on December 25, 2005. The "New Gods" refers to technology in general. It is also during this period that the prototype of the MMORPG known as "The World" was in development.
- Assassin's Creed: Those Who Came Before is a shadowy group mentioned in the first game that the Knights Templar claim all human technology is reverse-engineered from. The second game reveals that they are a powerful race that once existed on Earth and created humans in their own image. They were defeated when humans revolted against them and won because of their sheer advantage in numbers. Both factions were devastated, however, in an apocalyptic event. Gods and goddesses in world religions are distorted memories of these people.
- The Banner Saga: Considering how much the game borrows from Norse mythology, this should come off as no surprise. The gods are dead, the sun frozen in place in the sky, and a seemingly invincible army known as the Dredge is tearing a path through the North... in fear, as they're hysterically fleeing from an encroaching wall of radioactive darkness that mutates anyone it touches into violent, eldritch monsters. The player's goal is not safety, but survival.
- Cult of the Lamb: The lands of the Old Faith were once home to thousands of gods, but only five remain when the game starts. Relics of the Old Faith reveals that when Chemach went insane and ceased fulfilling her duty to select new gods who were worthy, heretic gods began appearing who waged war on the old pantheon until only the Bishops remained.
- Dark Souls: The series has a unique spin on this: The age of the Lords (gods) headed by Lord Gwyn is ending. The remaining gods are either dead, insane, or have been drained of their power (or a combination of the three). The closest thing to a true god still remaining is a humanoid abomination (Gwyn's son Gwyndolin) that has everyone worship a false god instead of letting them see the real him. Your job is hastening the twilight of the gods, so that a new age of the gods can begin or ending the age of the gods forever so that an age of man can begin.
- Dominions: Given that the premise is that several godly Pretenders are fighting for the right to become the Pantokrator, this is to be expected for those not strong enough to survive. It's even possible to present a formidable, physical defense against enemy gods, only for yours to vanish into nothingness because no one believes in them anymore.
- Elden Ring: The game takes place in the aftermath of a cataclysm known as the Shattering. It began with the theft of the Rune of Death from the titular Elden Ring, the metaphysical codification of the world's natural laws, and its use to murder several of the immortal demigods, starting with the beloved Godwyn the Golden. Then the Elden Ring itself was somehow shattered, simultaneous with the disappearance of the "one true god" Queen Marika the Eternal. This led to a power vacuum in which the surviving demigods fought a vicious civil war, mostly over the shards of the Elden Ring, which devastated the land and left nobody victorious. By the time the player character steps in, civilization is almost nonexistent, and the last demigods have diminished in power and sanity to the point that you alone can slay them and claim the shards of the Elden Ring they hold yourself. Depending on your choices, you may repair the Elden Ring and become the land's new ruler (with the option of adding an additional rune to codify new laws into the natural order), you can join the rogue demigod Ranni and usher in a brand new order under her rule, or you can inherit the power of the Frenzied Flame and burn everything to the ground.
- The Elder Scrolls: This is a cornerstone of the most fundamentalist religions of the races of Mer (Elves), particularly for the Altmer (High Elves). They hold that reality is a prison that souls are trapped in by the trickster Lorkhan when he bound some of his fellow et'Ada ("original spirits") to form the Mundus, the mortal plane, and was "killed" by them as a result. The religions of Men, on the other hand, hold that the pre-creation divinity state was the prison, and the Mundus is a proving ground in which to transcend beyond the original spirits, with Lorkhan deliberately failing to do so himself in order for all else to "know how not to fail."
- Final Fantasy:
- Final Fantasy XII sees the dominance (or at least the attempt to return to dominance) of the world's gods broken. Though in this case the gods are cast in something of a dictatorial mold, so this is regarded more as a cause for celebration than melancholy.
- While there are plenty of Fal'cie still around after Final Fantasy XIII, the events of that game put a definitive end to the all-controlling Cocoon Fal'cie. Final Fantasy XIII-2 has the death of Etro, which causes a Time Crash that leads to the world seen in the third game.
- Genshin Impact had the Archon War, set over 2600 years before the start of the story, in which the various gods and their forces fought for dominance over the land of Teyvat. In the end, out of an unknown but presumably large amount of gods, only seven remained victorious, becoming the Seven Archons who each ruled one of the seven nations of Teyvat.
- God of War:
- Starting with God of War I, the main protagonist Kratos starts a war against the Greek gods to fulfill his desire of vengeance. During his quest, aided by the titans, he kills almost every god or goddess in the Greek pantheon. In the series there are several clues suggesting that the destruction of the Greek pantheon will lead humanity towards Christianity.
- God of War (PS4) opens with Kratos and his son living in Midgard. As usual, the major players in Norse mythology are all aware of Ragnarök and how they'll die in it: Odin, in particular, will cross any line to prevent it coming to pass. However, Kratos killing Baldur at the end of the game (to prevent him killing his own mother; the guy had it coming) triggers Ragnarök a few hundred years early and catches everyone off guard. Cue God of War Ragnarök, where it turns out the prophecy of Ragnarök was a lie told to trick Odin; the real prophecy doesn't foretell the destruction of all the Nine Realms, but the destruction of Asgard alone against an alliance of the other realms. As such, there are plenty of survivors after the smoke clears, even among the Aesir, who end up making peace and moving in with the Vanir.
- Grandia II: A great war was fought between Good and Evil. Evil eventually won but needed a couple thousand years of rest. The remains of humanity thought good had won and built a whole religion around its technology and brainwashing control.
- Halo: The Halo universe had the highly advanced Forerunners, who were forced to activate their Halos and destroy themselves and all sentient life in the galaxy to starve out the Flood. Interestingly, the Forerunners themselves deliberately enacted one of these themselves, against the Starfish Aliens that preceded them, out of a combination of paranoia, racism, resentment, and envy. A quote in Halo 2 from one of the Halo A.I.s demonstrates the amount of time that passed between the extinction of the Forerunners and the Human-Covenant War:
2401 Penitent Tangent: This installation has a successful utilization record of 1.2 trillion simulated and 1 actual.
- Immortal Defense has this and Death of the Old Gods as a main theme of the game, although it's debatable if pathspace defenders can be actually considered gods. Fittingly enough, Götterdämmerung is actually a title of a level in one of the final campaigns, showcased at the peak of your insanity.
- Legacy of Kain: The era in which Blood Omen is set in. The Circle of Nine, a collective of Fisher King sorcerers who maintain the land and the Pillars of Nosgoth, have been stricken with a curse of insanity, causing the decay of their mental state and of the rest of the land. The protagonist Kain is a slain nobleman revived as a vampire and recruited by one member of the Circle to kill the rest, in order to purify the Pillars and make way for a new Circle, with the promise of a cure for his vampirism as his final reward. Kain realizes at the end of the game after seemingly killing all of the Circle and seeing the Pillar of Balance is still corrupted that he's the last corrupted Guardian, having been born shortly after the death of the previous Balance Guardian, Ariel, and infected by the same curse of insanity. The "cure" he sought was in fact his own final death in order to restore Nosgoth. Kain, being a selfish bastard and rather pissed at this manipulation, refuses to sacrifice himself and chooses to rule the dying land of Nosgoth, using his immortality to learn more about the forces that were behind the Pillars' corruption and how to fight them.
- The Legend of Zelda:
- The Legend of Zelda I is this for the Zelda timeline. The Hero of Time was slain, Ganon's hordes destroyed the world, the Triforce has long since been shattered. All that remains of Hyrule are a few old men and women cowering in caves. And then a wanderer appears, garbed in a familiar green tunic.
- The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker: Ganon, Hyrule, and the Master Sword are washed away, and the Triforce is no longer in the hands of anyone, and is forgotten by all but Link, Tetra, and Tingle anyway.
- The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword: Despite the game's ending being quite the opposite, the Lanayru region certainly elicits the feel. Derelict Magitek artifacts lay rusted everywhere, though they can be temporarily brought back to life with some time-flux hijinks.
- The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild takes place after Ganon is driven completely insane by magical power, and 'conquers' Hyrule by hurling cataclysm after cataclysm until 95% of the continent is ruins and bandit-infested wilds.
- Megadimension Neptunia VII: The opening movie for entering the Zero Dimension connects the place with Ragnarok, and the Story Arc is called "Twilight of the Desperate CPU", where CPU is basically another name for "Goddess", so something's gone wrong with the gods of the Zero Dimension.
- Metroid: This is played with in the setting's backstory. The Chozo are not gods, but a race of advanced bird-like beings who wield Lost Technology and left behind ruins that incorporated Organic Technology all over the galaxy. In fact, as stated in the Lore of the second two Prime games, each endangered/extinct civilization Samus visits (Tallon IV, Aether, Bryyo, Elysia) had some connections to the Chozo race, and they often left behind relics in the form of Power Suit Upgrades. Also mentioned in the Lore of the Prime series is the decline and/or extinction of the Chozo (hence the Gotterdammerung) at the hands of a mysterious "star-borne terror" revealed to be a Leviathan Seed, the source of all Phazon. All of the Malevolent/Foreboding Architecture and Lost Technology the Chozo left behind tend to be very important whenever Samus has a case of the Bag of Spilling.
- Nasuverse:
- In 12000 BC, the alien superweapon Sefar was deployed by the Velber to destroy and harvest all life on Earth, which at the time was teeming with gods. Sefar slaughtered most of the pantheons before being stopped by a human wielding Excalibur, but this resulted in most of the literal Physical Gods losing their bodies and becoming Divine Spirits now reliant on faith and worship, which was the first step in the end of the Age of Gods. The actual Ragnarok of Norse mythology meanwhile happened in 1000 BC, burned out the last of the remnants of the Norse Age of Gods, and resulted in the coming of the Age of Man in that part of the world.
- Fate/Grand Order: Cosmos in the Lostbelt:
- The protagonists run into an Alternate Timeline where this should've happened as per Norse mythology but it went horribly wrong halfway through and permanently stalled, resulting in its removal from history by the world. The key factor in the Point of Divergence was Surtr, incredibly angry that his sole purpose was to end the Norse Age of Gods and then simply die, deciding to embark on a Suicidal Cosmic Temper Tantrum and destroy everything instead. His consuming Fenrir before it could kill Odin allowed him to assimilate its ice power, making Surtr far too powerful for the Norse Pantheon to stop, with the end result being his killing all of the gods except for Skadi, who became the sole remaining goddess after Odin fused her with the Lostbelt version of Scathach, before sacrificing himself to seal Surtr away. The protagonists end up having to finish the job and wipe out the Norse pantheon for good so they can eliminate the timeline from its parasitic fixture on Earth, while the remaining Norse deities try their damnedest to stop them. The protagonists end up inadvertently unsealing Surtr, who intends to finish the job on this timeline and burn all the other ones to ash out of love for the Crypter Ophelia, forcing both sides to work together to put a stop to him because that would be even worse than the current situation before they go at it for the final clash between themselves.
- The Fifth Lostbelt is a subversion of this; In it, the Olympic Pantheon managed to defeat Sefar before she wiped them out, which led to them expanding their dominion over humanity and upgrading themselves to become even more powerful than they were in Proper Human History.
- The twist of the Sixth Lostbelt is that this is the point of divergence, as the fairies who were supposed to forge Excalibur got lazy and procrastinated on their duty. Sefar arrived and without Excalibur she succeeded in her goal of destroying everything on Earth, including the gods. The only god left on the endless ocean Earth became was the Celtic god Cernunnos.
- Odin Sphere: By the end just about all magic, dragons, and fairies disappear from the world. The Aesir fall against the armies of the Netherworld and the Vanir are scorched by the Inferno King's march. Humanity, however, still endures to repopulate the world thanks to the efforts of the five main heroes...in the True Ending. In the Bad Ending, the entire world dies without any hope of being restored.
- Panzer Dragoon: All highly advanced technology in the universe was created long ago in the Ancient Age, and the war-wracked world left in its wake is only alive thanks to climate control systems which are finally disabled in Saga in "The Great Fall". In a variation, the Ancients, themselves, realized that what they were doing was wrong, and so they created a fail-safe that was programmed to undo what they had wrought.
- Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire: This happens at the end, where Eothas destroys The Wheel, the ancient device that regulates reincarnation in the setting. This very act cuts off the Gods from their flow of power and will slowly but surely starve them. However, this is also just as bad for Mortals since without Reincarnation, Souls are now gone for good upon death and thus unless they figure something out (which Eothas believes they will) the Kith will be facing an extinction crisis.
- Ragnarok Online: This is featured as part of its backstory — the cataclysmic battle of Ragnarok divided gods, demons, and mortals from each other—owing to its origins as part of the overall story of the manhwa Ragnarok (1997). The published sequel, Ragnarok II: Legend of the Second, takes place long after the manhwa's story concluded with a second Ragnarok-like event called the Day of Despair.
- RuneScape:
- A significant element of the backstory. During the Second and Third Ages (thousands of years before the game takes place), gods ran roughshod over the world, forming kingdoms and empires and fighting wars. The Third Age was brought to an end when Zamorak let off a Fantastic Nuke, laying waste to a third of a continent, which woke up Guthix, a divine Nay-Theist who had been sleeping underground since the First Age. Angry at the destruction, Guthix cast a spell that created the Edicts of Guthix, expelling the gods and preventing them from directly interfering. A downplayed trope in a couple of ways: first, it wasn't exactly permanent, and fell when Guthix himself died (kicking off the Sixth Age and a long-running storyline dealing with all the gods suddenly showing up again); second, it wasn't quite absolute, with several quest series (the Cave Goblin series most notably) during the Fifth Age dealing with various gods coming close to circumvent the Edicts; finally, it didn't expel every god, with a few (notably Icthlarin and his family) being allowed to remain.
- The Sixth Age storyline concludes with the player character re-establishing the Edicts, expelling the Gods once again.
- Tree of Savior: This trope is heavily involved in its story and setting (which is not surprising given the game status as a Spiritual Successor to Ragnarok Online). At the start of the game (year 1095), all of the goddesses who used to interact with the mortal world have vanished. Several prior to Medis Diena, the rest shortly afterward. The player characters are on a quest to find out what happened to them, and how to fix the world.
- World of Warcraft: Cataclysm features this to a degree. After defeating Deathwing, the final boss of Cataclysm, a cutscene plays revealing that the remaining Dragon Aspects have lost nearly all of their power as a result of the battle, and are now mortal. Granted, the Dragon Aspects are FAR from the only god-like beings in Azeroth...
Visual Novels
- Kajiri Kamui Kagura: This happened as part of the world's backstory. Around 8000 years before the start of the story, Hajun rose to power as the next hegemonic God and proceeded to kill not only the ruling Top God Tasogare, but also her entire pantheon of Gods set to guard her. Only Tenma Yato and his immediate followers survived, becoming The Remnant and through his powers managed to seal Hajun, preventing him from finishing the job.
Web Animation
- The Five Gods (2018): In the end, all of the gods have their powers and memories erased, and live as high-school students, except for Fern and the demigod characters, who managed to escape this fate by Fern putting up a force-field. Those who remain ascend to their parent's roles as gods.
Webcomics
- Girl Genius:
- This is referenced when Klaus Wulfenbach uses "Göterdämmerung" as an expletive.
- Something pretty similar happened to a group of prehistoric God-Queens who ruled long ago. The majority of them were slaughtered save for a handful, at the hands of someone with incomprehensibly advanced technology (that somebody being Lucrezia, the Other).
- Sluggy Freelance: The sixty-fifth chapter recounts the fall of the gods of Mohkadun. Due to the Kudzu Plot, it's difficult to go into detail, but suffice to say it's not pretty.
Web Video
- Critical Role:
- The world of Exandria (the setting for campaigns 1-3) is still recovering from a Divine Conflict from 800 years prior known as "The Calamity", a 300 year war between the Prime Deities and the Betrayer Gods, which killed 2/3rds of the mortal population, destroyed a continent, and blasted the advanced magocratic societies of the Age of Arcanum back into the Iron Age. This culminated in an event known as "The Divergence", where the Prime Deities created the Divine Gate to seal themselves and the Betrayer Gods away from the Material Plane.
- The world of Araman (the setting for campaign 4) is still recovering from the Shapers War, where the entire mortal population launched a revolution against the Shapers (the setting's pantheon), and actually succeeded in killing them. This was 70 years ago, and a large chunk of the campaign is structured around dealing with the fallout of this event.
Western Animation
- The Transformers: The Movie: The movie can be seen as a variant, in that it represented the end of the original status quo of the series. It begins with a surprise invasion of Autobot City by the Decepticons and the mortal wounding of the Autobot leader, Optimus Prime. He passes the responsibilities of leadership, represented by the Matrix of Leadership, to Ultra Magnus, but he proves unworthy of it. Meanwhile, Megatron is abandoned by his power-hungry minions, then is resurrected into Galvatron by Eldritch Abomination Planet Eater Unicron. The price of Galvatron's new power is to seek out and destroy the Matrix, which is the only thing that can kill Unicron. The remaining heroes are scattered across worlds until finally converging in Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny between Hot Rod and Galvatron over the Matrix in the center of Unicron's head. This is when Hot Rod realizes his potential as Prime's true successor and defeats both of them, and leads the Autobots into a brighter future.