Cosmic Horror Reveal

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"The Reapers are cunning in their deception. Allowing life to flourish, century upon century, letting us believe ourselves the masters of the cosmos...Then the truth becomes known: there are monsters hiding in the dark spaces. And we are their prey."

— Javik, Mass Effect 3

The plot that seemed to be going one way has been abruptly overshadowed by the revelation that the setting is merely an infinitesimal fraction of a universe, one that teems with overwhelming otherworldly menace that make all normal problems look grotesquely unimportant.

The threat this reveals is likely to virtually overshadow all the more mundane players you already knew about; at the very least, it substantially alters both the reader's and the characters' understanding of their world. The rebellious factions in The Federation are actually being controlled by an unusual artifact, just shipped back from recent excavations in a fringe system. The Corrupt Corporate Executive and Professional Killer are its cultists. The Evil Overlord you just defeated was the Cosmic Keystone keeping it out, or the whole point of his brutal tyranny was to harden everyone for the terrors to come, or his Evil Plan was to unleash the Sealed Evil in a Can, or he himself is the eldritch horror. The reveal of the Cosmic Horror angle may be accompanied by The End of the World as We Know It, or a revelation that the story is truly getting started.

The plot probably didn't completely Genre Shift into Cosmic Horror Story, but at the very least, it just received a very noticeable transfusion — it could almost be seen as the Cosmic Horror Story genre itself invading the more traditional settings we know, parasitising them, and altering their realities to one that suits it better.

This can be either a very cheap or very shocking way for things to get worse. It may also lead to what was once a more grounded story slowly becoming less so for the rest of the series.

Subtrope of Outside-Context Problem, and sometimes The Man Behind the Man. Compare Genre Shift, Genre Blending, and Going Cosmic. Contrast Giant Space Flea from Nowhere and Diabolus ex Nihilo, wherein the unexpected threat is not necessarily a thing from beyond, and whatever it is is completely unrelated to the extended plot. Can be Lovecraft Lite when the Cosmic Horror reveal is basically similar to a new narrative boss fight or background detail rather than a major revelation.

Warning: This is a Spoilered Rotten trope, which means that EVERY SINGLE EXAMPLE on this list is a spoiler by default and most of them will be unmarked. This is your last warning; only proceed if you really believe you can handle this list.

Examples:

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Anime & Manga

Berserk inverts this. It starts off being very upfront about the Cosmic Horror elements with Guts' battles against the Baron and the Count, and depicting how the Mark of Sacrifice has made his life a living hell. Then, the story flashes back to the Golden Age arc, which largely focuses on courtly intrigue and battles between medieval armies up until the Eclipse. The inversion goes twofold if one takes into account the omitted chapter, where it is revealed that instead of an Eldritch Abomination in your standard Cosmic Horror Story, the Idea of Evil is borne out of humanity's shared desire for a reason behind their suffering, making it both Earth-borne and human-ish in its wants (but not its methods).
Chainsaw Man:
- Devils initially seem like dangerous but ultimately manageable creatures, with even the scariest, the Gun Devil, being equivalent to a Weapon of Mass Destruction at worst. But starting with the assassins arc, it becomes clear that the truly powerful Devils like Hell and Darkness are Eldritch Abominations whose powers even the readers can't entirely comprehend, with them appearing as Frame Break and Non Sequitur images. The true scope of the Chainsaw Devil's abilities only makes it worse as he can Ret-Gone entire concepts from history and reality with no one aware of it, and further has actively carved up reality many, many times over, deleting other Eldritch Abominations like a star whose light broke children's minds, diseases like AIDS, technology like nuclear weapons, major historical events like World War II, and ways life could end besides death.
- In the same arc which introduces the Darkness Devil, we also appropriately meet the Cosmos Fiend, who is only capable of saying HaLLoWeeN… unless she traps you in her Mental World, wherein Cosmo is eloquent, intellectual, and privy to a staggering volume of the universe's most horrifying truths. When she pours all of her knowledge into someone's head, they also find themselves mindlessly repeating "HaLLoWeeN." Even disregarding the most powerful Devils, Cosmo's abilities point to a fundamental wrongness in the setting's "mundane" universe, which later story arcs eventually explore.
Digimon Tamers: The series starts with the previous series' premise of kids and their monster partners battling various foes, but slowly reveals the D-Reaper, a terrifying Digital Abomination with Mind Screw powers, as the true antagonist. Although the numerous Shout Outs to the Cthulhu Mythos (and the man behind the shout-outs) may serve as Foreshadowing to savvy viewers.
Dragon Ball is ultimately this. It starts out whimsical, and by the time Z rolls out, they're punching out ever more powerful enemies. But no problem, the heroes still win, right? But come Dragon Ball Super and it drops straight into this trope, where it's revealed that there are bonafide gods, more powerful gods, even more powerful gods, and so on, until Zeno himself, the single most powerful entity in the series. Every other god shakes in fear at Zeno's presence, his whims are law, and if he wants a multiversal fighting tournament, you'd better provide a multiversal fighting tournament... and if you do something to displease him, you can/will be erased from existence. Goku himself is too pure-hearted to let Zeno's status get to him, which thankfully amuses Zeno who would rather be friends.
Fullmetal Alchemist has a slow yet eerily casual start — our two heroes wrestle with the military authority they work under and with assorted villains of the smaller kind on their quest to find a way to heal themselves... and then it kicks off. It's not just about all characters in the story, the nation, the conspiracy or even the God of their world — it's about the very concept the story is based on, Equivalent Exchange. All people are a part of the plot, and it has been going on over hundreds of years, and is dominated by a near Semi-Divine Humanoid Abomination. The Elrics have their work cut out for them.
With the introduction of Advanced Ancient Acropolis and Sentient Cosmic Force, Helck stops being a normal fantasy story and it becomes clear that the ongoing conflict is a part of a very large picture.
Hoshin Engi: The manga starts off as a fantasy series set in ancient China, with gods, supernatural beings, yokai, and spirit animals. It's not until after the halfway point where it's revealed that an ancient being from space named Joka has been secretly manipulating the course of history for millennia in the hopes of turning Earth into a replica of her destroyed home world.
In Hunter × Hunter, an interesting variation is The Reveal that the human-inhabited world we'd seen so far (which seems the size of our own, with continents of similar shape and size), which already has copious amounts of incredibly dangerous locations and species (for example, Swindler's Swamp, where the whole ecosystem is geared towards attracting, entrapping and feeding on humans) is only a tiny fraction of the whole planet, and that what little information there is about the rest of the world, called the Dark Continent, paints it as a gung-ho Death World of incomprehensibly dangerous horrors that dwarf any threat encountered so far by the Shonen protagonists. As a point of comparison, let's take the Chimera Ants, the most powerful menace in the series previously, which were an existential threat to humanity in a world where the potential to be a Person of Mass Destruction is relatively common. Part of why they are called "ants" is because they are considered the least dangerous of the known species originating from the Dark Continent. The survival rate of expeditions there, which tend to be extremely well-organized and funded and include many said powerful individuals, is about 1 in every 2,500 people. It's rather obvious that humanity survived this long only because the monstrosities from the Dark Continent barely pay attention to it for some reason.
Kill la Kill starts off with Ryuko Matoi fighting the Absurdly Powerful Student Council, led by the dictatorial Satsuki Kiryuin. It turns out that Satsuki was trying to rebel against her mother Ragyo, the Life Fibers that make up the Goku Uniforms that give their wearers superpowers are actually alien parasites that have shaped the course of human evolution, and Ragyo wants to accelerate their ultimate goal: consume every human on Earth and use their energy to explode the planet, sending new Life Fibers hurtling towards other worlds.
Psyren starts as a story focused on psychic powers and time travel, with the heroes trying to figure out the mystery behind the titular Psyren. The first hint comes later on, when we learn that the mysterious asteroid Ouroborus, (who will fall in Hokkaido between the present and the future world of Psyren, causing the dreadful state of the world) is apparently sending messages to the planet and moves erratically through space. Finally confirmed for good by the true villain, Mithra, who reveals that Ouroborus was actually the shell for a planet-eating Eldritch Abomination called "Quat Nevas", who took advantage of Amagi Miroku's life-manipulating Psi-Power to gather enough energy to revive itself and consume the planet.
Puella Magi Madoka Magica: It starts as a typical Magical Girl anime, though with a particularly trippy version of The Heartless. About halfway through the series, it's shown that the Weasel Mascot Kyubey is ripping out people's souls in exchange for wishes. The trope comes in when it's revealed that Kyubey isn't a demon like you'd expect. He's actually closer to an Eldritch Abomination who actually cares very little for mankind and Earth and follows his own Blue-and-Orange Morality and his own goals. Those goals consist of pushing magical girls past the Despair Event Horizon until they become Witches, then using other magical girls to kill them and extract their energy to harvest. Lather, rinse, repeat. Kyubey claims the energy is necessary to stave off the Heat Death of the Universe and that his kind has been doing this since humanity lived in caves. Since they're the ones who allowed us to become an advanced species and it's a part of a plan to save the universe, he sees the deaths of countless girls as a fair exchange. The events of the anime are only the latest in a long series of time loops that Homura has been going through to try and save everyone, only for things to always end in tragedy. Every one of them seems to end worse than the last, with Madoka either dying or becoming the most powerful Witch of all time.
Towards the end of Romeo × Juliet, it becomes clear that the true cause of events isn't the murderous Lord Montague, who is slowly descending into cackling, city-burning madness, but rather Ophelia and the death of the Great Tree Escalus, which is what's holding Neo Verona in the sky: the earthquakes that become much more frequent and ruinous towards the series' climax are the result of Escalus slowly perishing because Ophelia is being deprived of sacrifices, which Montague has been trying to fix.
The first half of Space Runaway Ideon focuses on an interstellar war between humanity and the Buff Clan over the right to control the titular mecha who, over the course of the series, delves further into Super Robot territory ... until it starts single-handedly destroying planets. It's then revealed that the Ide, the main consciousness driving the mech, has decided neither the human race nor the Buff Clan deserve to live (and it turns out both races are far from the first the Ideon has smited for being unworthy) and has been launching bombs at both sides to goad each into ramping up the war effort. In fact, the Ideon has been manipulating its "pilots" into thinking they could actually control it when it's been in charge the whole time. By the time both species have buried the hatchet after realizing the Ideon's master agenda, things have gone so bleak that the series ends on at the very least the complete destruction of the star system.
In Tegami Bachi the world of Amberground is trapped in perpetual darkness and only dimly lit by an artificial sun. A flashback shows a catastrophic event in the past called the Day of the Flicker, when the sun briefly went out. During this event, it’s revealed to a select few that the artificial sun is actually a giant embryo, and the fetus inside feeds on human memories. What’s more, the creature needs to do this to be kept dormant, because if it hatched it would devour all human life on the planet in an instant.
The first half of Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann is spent around Team Dai-Gurren defeating Lordgenome the Spiral King, only to reveal in the second part that he was protecting humanity from being wiped out by the eldritch Anti-Spiral, a nigh-omnipotent alien that can manipulate probability, trap people that use Spiral Power into a series of endless multiverses, and create literal Big Bangs. It gets revealed that they're doing all this to protect the Universe from the Spiral Nemesis, which is where too much Spiral Power would cause the universe to end by creating ultra-large galaxies, turning them into black holes that would consume everything. The epilogue has Team Dai-Gurren seemingly trying to stop the Spiral Nemesis from happening, but with no resolution.
Toriko has a reveal very similar to and most likely the primary inspiration for the Hunter × Hunter example above — the world is split into two parts, the 30% that makes up the Human World where people live but is still full of extremely deadly biomes and fauna, and then the remaining 70% that constitutes the Gourmet World, full of monsters and hazards that make the highest-caliber threats found in the Human World look like measly hors d'oeurves at best. Toriko takes one step in and is practically torn to shreds in minutes. On top of that, Coco theorizes the Gourmet World was formed by a meteor from another dimension colliding with Earth, expanding mass around it and corrupting the ecology. Not to mention a race of interdimensional aliens using the planet as a prison for a nigh-unstoppable and extremely hungry monster they were using to sweep other dimensions clean.

Comic Books

In American Vampire, the conflict between Vampires and Vassals of the Morningstar and the Cold War both become overshadowed by reveal of an Outside-Context Problem in form of the Gray Trader's true master, the Beast, an ancient Eldritch Abomination beyond human or vampire understanding that the Vassals were originally founded to defeat but after spending centuries fighting an all-out war with Carpathian Vampires, they've completely forgotten the means to stop it.
The Call of C'Russo is a parody of the Lovecraft mythos involving Donald Duck winning in a singing contest before it's revealed that he's actually been recruited to wake up an Eldritch Abomination with his voice. The world disappears because it only exists when the monster is dreaming about it, and Donald and his nephews grow octopoid arms and legs as reality is reshaped in its image.
Memetic starts as seemingly a down-to-earth Zombie Apocalypse tale about an internet meme that causes anyone who sees it to experience a hit of euphoria and a desperate urge to share it with the world. However, 12 hours after one is exposed to it, they start bleeding from the eyes and screaming uncontrollably. The "screamers" will attack anyone not in a similar state and continue their frenzied attempts to expose people to the meme, even after a global internet blackout. Further, once enough screamers gather in one place, their screams combine to create music that is the audio version of the meme, so even blind people are no longer immune. In the final chapter, the screamers go eerily silent and begin gathering in groups of millions in major cities. They start forming spires of human bodies taller than skyscrapers, their flesh melting and fusing as they do so. The artist who created the meme reveals that he was commanded to do so by telepathic voices in his head before killing himself. Even Aaron, the protagonist, who is color-blind and partially deaf and thus one of the few people completely immune to the meme, willingly fuses with the mass, as he'd rather fit in and join the rest of humanity than be left all alone. It's only on the last page that the reader finally sees what the point of this all is — hundreds of giant creatures appear from space to harvest the spires, with the heavy implication that this was the entire point of the human race's existence — to feed these creatures when the time came.
Sonic the Hedgehog (Archie Comics) leaned into this territory from time to time. Of particular note is Sonic Adventure 2.5, which revealed Mobius to be Earth All Along as the aliens that originally killed the humans - and inadvertedly created the Mobians - through "gene-bombs" returned to finish the job. This was further hammered home by the immediate next arc, Tossed In Space, which saw Sonic traveling across the Galaxy to get back to Mobius.
The Ultimates (2015): Initially, the series is about a team dealing with high concepts. Come issue 5, they encounter the Anti-Man, who reveals all existence has been encaged by something, only identified as "the One Who is One", capable of imprisoning the living personification of Eternity. Once the second series starts, the cosmic horror starts ramping up further, as it starts directly attacking existence itself.

Fan Works

Amazing Fantasy: The Omake tale "As Above, So Below" revolves around a scientist researching some of Deku Midoriya's blood^note and receiving a vision of the One Below All wishing to enter the MHA world and smash everything. She makes sure he never will by destroying all of her research and committing suicide.
Belated Battleships starts, like most KanColle fanfic, as a story about magical anthropomorphised warships defending mankind from demon ships bent on killing us all. It turns out that there are higher powers orchestrating the whole thing for reasons we can only guess at.
The Games We Play: The Grimm are revealed to be the creations and minions of a godlike entity who has taken an interest in Jaune. And then Jaune, or rather his soul, is revealed to be a brother-of-sorts to said entity and probably the only one who can stop him.
Pacific: World War II U.S. Navy Shipgirls: The more is revealed about the local version of the Abyssals, the more it looks like this universe is going down this path. Abyssals are otherworldly beings, alien in appearance and mindset, so wrong they drive normal humans insane from being nearby, so powerful that lone scouts cut through conventional navies with ease, and yet these are but a tiny part of a giant conquering war machine that has already crushed who knows how many other worlds, including some with their own shipgirls, before.
Star Wars: Paranormalities: In the first few chapters of Episode I, the Valkoran seem to just be a terrorist organization reminiscent of the many Sith Empires intent on toppling the Galactic Alliance. While there are a few signs throughout these chapters that not everything is as it seems, it's revealed in Chapter 6 that the Valkoran Empire is really a cult for an extragalactic group known as the Forceless Collective, an army of body-possessing beings that somehow defy the Jedi's understanding of the Force by being completely devoid of it, and what Jedi sense from them feels off compared to even the Dark Side. Episode II would reveal that the Forceless symbiotes aren't strictly a species from another galaxy, but a recurring anomaly born from wounds in the Force, and given that the Star Wars galaxy has had many mass-death disasters throughout its history, there are many more symbiotes that have been born in that galaxy. What keeps it from going into full-blown Cosmic Horror Story is that Zolph and the Jedi give these other symbiotes the benefit of the doubt and presume they are innocent until proven otherwise, with Valkor's Collective being the most immediately threatening to the galaxy at the moment.
Super Mario 64: Beyond the Cursed Mirror initially appears to be the simple, usual story of Mario traveling to a foreign land to stop yet another one of Bowser's evil plans, with the backdrop of a game show in which Mario is the star. Then it turns out Bowser was given the Cosmic Seed that empowered him by the Showrunner, who is manipulating everything in service of the Parasite Moon, Agamemnon, an entity hovering over everything that must be appeased or she will initiate "phagocytosis" on the Earth and its inhabitants, as she has done to other worlds. Thus Mario's quest becomes one of fighting the moon itself and freeing the worlds from her grasp.

Films — Animation

Puss in Boots: The Last Wish: The reveal that the Wolf bounty hunter is really Death makes the movie take on a much darker tone. Puss is being pursued by an entity that's as old as time, and cannot be evaded or defeated, with any attempts only successful if the Wolf allows them to be. The only reason the movie gets a happy ending is because the Wolf witnessed Puss' change from an arrogant loner legend to a brave loving hero; if they hadn't, there's literally nothing Puss could have done to avoid the premature loss of his final life. Even when the day is won, the Wolf reminds him (and Puss accepts) that one day they will meet again... for the last time.
Puss: Hasta la muerte.

Films — Live-Action

The Cabin in the Woods begins as a run-off-the-mill horror/slasher story, which is revealed as a set up; the entire thing is part of a sacrificial ritual meant to please the Ancient Ones slumbering below us. Failure to complete this ritual correctly at least once a year will result in The End of the World as We Know It.
The Empty Man seems like a typical supernatural slasher movie akin to Slender Man or Candyman, but it veers hard into this after detective Lasombra starts investigating the Pontifex Society. It turns out the titular Empty Man is actually the human vessel for a non-corporeal, metaphysical entity of pure chaos known as The Other or The Between One. The Pontifex are a nihilistic doomsday cult who believe all but The Other is arbitrary, and are dedicated to the worship of this entity, who grants them The Power of Creation in return. Lasombra discovers he's not even a real person, but a tulpa created by the organization to be the next vessel for the entity.
The Matrix has human rebels fighting against the machines in both the simulation and the real world. The first movie shows how the protagonist awakens his powers as The Chosen One and can defy the system, giving the rebels hope to win. The second movie explains that the entire rebellion is part of the machines' plan, a place where anomalies are dumped to be eliminated later. The third movie shows how humans have no hope to win against the machines in the first place, and that the machines have crushed Zion repeatedly before without fail.
The Midnight Meat Train begins as a Slasher-esque story about a musclebound maniac who murders people on a midnight subway train. The protagonist eventually defeats him, only to discover that the killer was part of a city-wide conspiracy to deliver human sacrifices to the indescribable terrors that live underground. He's forced to become the new Butcher and continue the cycle.
Necronomicon: Not unexpected for a film loosely based on the works of H. P. Lovecraft, but one of the segments starts out as an urban crime story with a cop in pursuit of a Serial Killer who hides out in the sewers to save her kidnapped partner. Then she's dumped inside an ancient cavern and it's revealed to all be an elaborate trap by two giant alien bats disguised as humans, and she's impregnated with their kin.
Underwater at first seems just about surviving in and then leaving the abyssal zone. Then some monsters appear... and ultimately their humongous patriarch, which the director has stated to be Cthulhu himself.

Literature

Animorphs: The first books of the series focus on the titular characters trying to save the world from mass assimilation by the mind-controlling Yeerks. As the story progresses, the Animorphs meet the mysterious Ellimist, a Reality Warper who hints that there's something bigger behind the invasion plot, but remains cagey about it. It isn't until the end of the series that readers learn the truth: the Animorphs and Yeerks are just the latest players in an almost-literal Cosmic Chess Game played between the Ellimist and Crayak, an Eldritch Abomination that seeks the end of nearly all life in the universe. Since the Ellimist and Crayak are both ageless and can't fight each other directly at the risk of outright annihilating creation, they have to settle for an eternal proxy war, with each entity choosing "pieces" to advance their own goals. The Yeerk Empire is Crayak's newest set of pawns, with the Andalites and Animorphs serving as the Ellimist's, meaning that every character in the series is unknowingly part of a gigantic cosmic horror story.
In both The Angaran Chronicles novellas The Ritual and A False Legacy are revealed to be around this. The Ritual with the mysterious, huge, eldritch abomination, Chos'Choloth living in 'the red sea' and the cult which worships it shown from Alathis' memories and his visions within the titular Ritual. And A False Legacy with The Obelisk which mind controls the town Arken is investigating and the mysterious Hunter Garron who erases Arken's memory and replaces it with others to keep the Obelisk a secret.
The Brightest Shadow: The series is about a horrifying system of morality being right on a fundamental level of reality. The Hero's actions appear to be backed up by the world itself, leading to a twisted version of Right Makes Might. Killing the Hero is irrelevant, because reality will simply create another one.
The Elric Saga starts off as an atypical fantasy given the protagonist's people being capable of wide-scale great cruelty but one that still follows enough conventions to stay within the high fantasy genre, then Elric learns that he's but one incarnation of the Eternal Champion, a being that exists throughout time and space who's doomed to be forever fighting the forces of Law and Chaos as well as incursions from alien dimensions so that "humanity" can survive in a largely hostile cosmos.
Halo: Silentium solidifies the story of the Halo series as a Cosmic Horror Story with what the Precursors really are. Let alone the fact that they are older than the universe and are implied to have created it. Not to mention that they became the Flood.
The Horus Heresy series is all about the secular Imperium of Mankind's discovery of the Gods of Chaos and the devastating civil war that ensues, as a prologue to the Crapsack World that is Warhammer 40,000.
Journey to Chaos starts out with Eric being tossed through dimensions by a trickster god to grow a spine and provide amusement. Then it turns out that said trickster god is molding him through his adventures into a vessel for its mother, Lady Chaos, so that she may better wage war against another one of The Powers That Be, Order. This shifts the focus of the story away from worldly mercenary missions and towards more philosophical confrontations and stabbing the other guy's clerics, along with bouts of Willing Channeler that have a possibility of damaging reality.
In the original story of The Midnight Meat Train, if the whole "killing humans to be fed to deformed humans underground that are the true fathers of the city" shtick isn't bad enough, well, it's all for immortality granted by pleasing an Eldritch Abomination. It's strongly implied that every major human city has such a deal in place.
Mistborn: The Original Trilogy: The protagonists spend book one struggling to overthrow the Evil Overlord, only to slowly realize over the course of book two that said overlord had been holding back a nasty Eldritch Abomination from destroying the world.
Revival (2014): The book focuses on James Morton, a budding musician turned heroin junkie and his life from childhood to early old age, with most of the drama and horror coming from the Descent into Addiction plot and some low-key Religious Horror involving Charles Jacobs, Mortons childhood minister. While hints of something darker are sprinkled throughout the novel, the climax hits the reader over the head with one of the darkest endings in Stephen King's entire body of work; the mysterious "special electricity" Charles Jacobs had been using for his revival shows and apparent healing abilities is actually being drawn from The Null, a horrific Dark World where all human souls go upon death, ruled over by malevolent, eldritch horrors that enslave and feed on them - and Jacobs experiments has drawn the attention of a particularly cruel, sadistic entity known only as "Mother". While Morton survives the novel, he's left a clinically depressed old man, knowing that no matter what he does with the time he has left, he's doomed to die and join the rest of humanity in The Null.
A Series of Unfortunate Events mostly sticks to Realism-Induced Horror via the cruelty or sheer incompetence of the adults surrounding the Baudelaire orphans. Which makes it all the more surprising that the 11th book suddenly takes a turn into cosmic horror with the introduction of an unspeakable leviathan representing, perhaps literally, the unknown itself.
In The Sister Verse and the Talons of Ruin, the true scope of a greater, cosmic war is revealed as soon as the real villain shows up, and reality starts disintegrating.
The final novel of The Spirit Thief drops the bombshell revealing that the world in which the entire series has taken place is a tiny remnant of a much larger universe, and this remnant is surrounded by thousands of hungry, starving demons trying to break in and eat everything. The plot then shifts to the heroes trying to prevent the barrier between the remnant and the great nothingness from breaking.
At first, the conflicts of Star Wars: The High Republic seem fairly grounded compared to those of the films, with the Jedi and Republic's main antagonists - the Nihil - being a well-equipped organization of chaotic space pirates instead of the Sith and their proxies. While they are initially dealing with the Drengir - a species of sentient, Dark Side-adjacent plants that even the Sith feared enough to seal away - and their threat to spread across the galaxy and consume all non-botanical life at the same time, it's a threat the Jedi overcome halfway through Phase I. However, the Nihil also get their hands on and weaponize the Nameless, creatures that not only prey on the Force, but psychologically overwhelm with Jedi with their presence alone. While very eldritch and a serious threat in their own right, the Nameless can at least be killed. Come the second wave of Phase III, a mysterious Force-based Blight that deteriorates everything it touches slowly spreads across the galaxy and threatens all life. Trials of the Jedi - the last novel of the publishing initiative - reveals that the Blight predates recorded galactic history, and not only was Planet X made to contain the Blight, the Nameless are an important part of the planet's ecosystem by keeping the Force in balance there. Without the Nameless present as a result of their frequent displacements and deaths throughout the Nihil conflict, the Force fell out of balance and the Blight was able to seep out across the galaxy. As the Blight cannot truly be destroyed and Marchion Ro decided to accelerate its spread by committing genocide on the Nameless, this necessitates Avar Kriss and Elzar Mann spending the rest of their lives away from galactic civilization containing the Blight until the Nameless repopulate to continue their role.
In The Sun Eater, the first two books are generally standard if rather baroque sci-fi. Then comes the 3rd book which reveals the Watchers, a malevolent race of Not Quite Dead gods and the Quiet is not a species but a Cosmic Entity which opposes them.
The first three books of Venus Prime are about a young female detective who solves mysteries in space while trying to discover The Conspiracy that caused her to lose three years' worth of memories. In the fourth book, she pretty much wipes out the conspiracy. And then, suddenly, the Starfish Aliens start to show up, and the rest of the series is about her and her allies trying to prevent one faction of the aliens from attempting to re-write history so that Earth becomes more like their homeworld — which would make it uninhabitable to humans.
In Sophie's World, the cosmic horror is revealed to be the author of the story - which is revealed to be a framed story in the novel as whole.
"When the Storm Came": It's initially assumed that the titular storm is naturally ferocious, but it stays over the town for days, using sandstorms and lightning to ruin buildings and stop the small groups of people trying to mobilise through it to obtain resources. Cementing "the Storm"'s otherworldliness is the protagonist being stared down by its Glowing Eyes of Doom.
In Worm, it is revealed late into the story that the thing giving all of the superheroes and supervillains in the setting their powers is an Eldritch Abomination, part of a whole species of them that ranges throughout the universe giving sapient species some of their own powers to get ideas for what they are capable of before destroying every incarnation of the host planet in the multiverse and moving on to the next sapient species to do it all again.

Live-Action TV

Kamen Rider:
- Kamen Rider Gaim starts off fairly light-hearted, centering on street-dancing teenagers who've recently gotten into a Mons-like battle game to settle disputes; even when the titular armored heroes are introduced, it's generally Played for Laughs because they're literally fruit samurai. And then we learn that the Mons come from another realm dominated by Alien Kudzu that's devoured entire civilizations in the past...and Earth is its next target. The guy who looked like the Big Bad is actually trying to save humanity, there are intelligent beings ruling the Forest (who generally want to destroy Earth), and in the end the hero has to give up his humanity and become one of the monsters in order to protect the people he cares about. Of course, considering the series was helmed by Gen Urobuchi (see Puella Magi Madoka Magica above), plenty of fans were expecting a twist like this from the very beginning.
- At the start of Kamen Rider Build, the plot seems to be about trying to stop an evil syndicate in a Balkanized Japan following an apocalyptic disaster. While definitely a sci-fi story, the villains are humans doing rotten things who create monsters with experiments, and even the second arc is a War Arc with the same base ideas... and then it's revealed that everything is being orchestrated by a planet-destroying Ancient Evil who wiped out life on Mars and is planning to do the same to Earth next.
Metal Heroes:
- Sekai Ninja Sen Jiraiya is, for most of its run, a show about ninjas fighting each other. In the finale though it turns out that the MacGuffin they're all battling over is actually the vanguard of a race of Starfish Aliens, who are now coming to destroy the Earth, and the story takes a very dramatic turn.
- For most of its run Tokusou Exceedraft seems like a Rescue show with some grounded Sci-Fi elements, until it starts to introduce more fantastical elements like aliens. Then it turns out that the entire show has been one big Cosmic Chess Game between God and the Devil, and that the Devil is planning on ending the world to achieve a final victory over God.
Raised by Wolves (2020): Voices and visions are appearing to Caleb, Paul and Campion. Humans are devolving. Mother (an android) becomes pregnant with a flying snake parasite. Something seriously wrong is happening on Kepler-22b.
Star Trek: Picard reveals that behind the Standard Sci-Fi Setting lurks an alliance of Mechanical Abominations ready to wipe out all organic life if summoned.
Super Sentai:
- Gosei Sentai Dairanger is mostly centered around the conflict between the Dairangers and the Gorma, continuing the millennia-long Forever War between their tribes. While the series is generally Darker and Edgier than the preceding and succeeding series, things really take a turn with the arrival of Daijinryu, a towering Draconic Abomination whose task is maintaining peace and order in the universe. The problem is that he goes about this task with an Above Good and Evil mentality, as the reasons for the Dai/Gorma conflict mean nothing to him, and he is perfectly willing to wipe out an entire quadrant of Tokyo and engage in Mass Hypnosis to cause mass suicides among civilians if it means the conflict is brought to a halt. Daijinryu's size and powers are so great that neither side can hope to stand up to him, and the only way to make him back off is for both sides to cut a deal to stop their war. His presence hangs over the remainder of the series, as the Dairangers and Gorma both realize he could reappear at any moment, which indeed happens when the truce is broken.
- While it's definitely one of the most Lighter and Softer seasons in the franchise, the final episodes of Ninpuu Sentai Hurricaneger take a dark turn when it's revealed the villains are in league with a Sentient Cosmic Force which seeks to destroy and remake the universe, which they plan to unseal in exchange for being made the rulers of the new universe.
- Kishiryu Sentai Ryusoulger is another light-hearted season that becomes much darker later on. As it turns out, the villains were created by the God stand-in of the setting to exterminate Earth's civilizations. Once said god is unsealed, she puts in motion a plan to wipe them out too and remake the Earth.
- Ohsama Sentai King-Ohger: In the initial segment of the show, the narrative delves into the intricacies of a grounded conflict between the King-Ohgers and the Bognaarok, prioritizing sociopolitical nuances over its more fantastical elements. As the storyline progresses into the second part, a profound shift occurs, reshaping the audience's understanding of the conflict; the introduction of the Galactinsects serves as a catalyst, exposing the meticulous orchestration of the entire conflict by the true overarching villain, Dagded Dujardin, who emerges as the puppet master behind the scenes. This revelation adds a layer of complexity to the narrative, transforming what initially appeared as a local struggle into a cosmic-scale manipulation, revealing that the conflict at the center of Part I was just one instance among countless of others he has orchestrated on other planets. Astonishingly, these interplanetary machinations serve a whimsical purpose for Dadged – a form of cosmic tidying to "clean up" his metaphorical "bedroom." The gravity of this revelation intensifies when it becomes apparent that Dadged's "bedroom" is not a confined space but, in fact, the entire universe.

Music

The Mechanisms' concept album "The Bifrost Incident" initially appears to be Norse Mythology in space, with an investigator trying to figure out who sabotaged The Ratatosk Express. The Bifrost wormhole the train went through is a gateway to Yog-Sothoth's realm, and the sabotage was a last-ditch effort to stop it breaking through.

Tabletop Games

In Magic: The Gathering, the Eldrazi pull this in both the Zendikar block and the Shadows over Innistrad block. In Zendikar, most of the focus is on the "adventure world" with Dungeons & Dragons-style adventurers, until the Eldrazi are unleashed at the end of the second set and things get messy from there. In Shadows, the Gothic Horror plane is dealing with an epidemic of madness and mutation, and even most of the angels have fallen into darkness; "Eldritch Moon" has Emrakul, the last of the Eldrazi Titans, turn up, weld the angels together, and everything goes to hell.
A well-known contentious point among RPG fanbase is handling this trope in regards to various games inspired by Cthulhu Mythos. The idea of running a game of Cyberpunk only to suddenly confront the players with something eldritch and switch to GURPS spinoff Cthulhupunk, or a game of Top Secret where covert ops take an unexpected turn after which player characters are reassigned to Delta Green, are, depending on who you ask, either the best ways to introduce the players to these games in an immersive "fish out of water" way or the betrayal of trust that will likely turn them away from ever playing with you again.
Lovecraftian Inspirations From The Real Life is all about this. It takes real life events, scientific facts or folkflore/legends and explains why they can be interpreted as a Cosmic Horror Stories.

Theatre

Little Shop of Horrors has The Reveal that the Man-Eating Plant is from outer space and planning to overrun the world with its offspring. And it succeeds in the end—at least in the play and the director's cut of the movie.

Video Games

ANNO: Mutationem starts off as a colorful but still cynical, dark Post-Cyberpunk mystery, but the story quickly becomes a Lovecraft Lite story once The Consortium is revealed to be an Expy of the SCP Foundation studying and containing Variants, strange anomalies from the alternate dimension Hinterland, and the Artifact of Doom that Dr. C is attempting to get that will cause The End of the World as We Know It by releasing the powerful Amok from her prison.
The setting of Arknights is a world beset by Originium, Applied Phlebotinum that powers much of Terra's advancement and its greatest curse, as Originium exposure can infect people with Oripathy. The initial story arc is how The Reunion Movement demands better rights for The Infected, using violent methods. But it is later revealed that there is an encroaching threat of The Seaborn worshipped by the Church of the Deep, which seeks to evolve and assimilate all life on Terra and bring and end to all life as they know it. That's already very bad, but further storyline reveals that Terra is beset by Collapsals, otherwordly beings that can warp both physical and abstract concepts where they appear, and they are merely vanguards of The Observers, the overarching threat that doomed The Predecessor race.
Assassin's Creed is a perfectly normal game about an evil organization forcing Desmond to relive the genetic memories of his ancestors, tied in to an ancient-evil-conspiracy plot. After Assassin's Creed II, suddenly, Abusive Precursors arrive, and the world's about to be destroyed by some sort of horrible thing. However, this is subverted: the Precursors are simply human-like animals with more senses, longer lives, and better tech. The world-ending threat is not some inscrutable alien intelligence, but a mundane solar flare. Then it is double-subverted. Juno, one of the Precursors, has transcended physical existence and successfully manipulates generations of humans to free herself. She can possess humans and drive them mad. She also has a cult dedicated to her. Origins takes it deeper, with the strong implication that Precursor technology may be advanced enough to alter the fabric of reality.
At first the main campaign of Azur Lane just looks like a Cute 'em Up retelling of the Pacific Theatre of World War II, but the event stories quickly turn this way. Mankind is but a gnat against the threats it's facing. It was getting soundly beaten by the Sirens prior to their leaking access to Wisdom Cube technology, with the strongest Sirens being in-story fleet or country killers, and even then every victory is for naught because the Sirens can just discard the timeline while keeping what they've learnt. Communications from the Sirens are arrogant and mocking at best, enigmatic and inscrutable at worst. Yet despite all these advantages, Siren perspectives imply there's something out there even they can't beat, hence all this tomfoolery to both improve themselves and force mankind to accelerate its technological development rather than simply crushing mankind like a bug.
Bloodborne starts off steeped in straightforward Gothic Horror: You're a Hunter somehow implicitly empowered by the moon, trapped in a Victorian Gothic city obsessed with blood, fighting a lycanthropy plague, plus various other stock Gothic monsters like Frankenstein-esque mad science experiments, witches, werebeasts, and vampires. Then it turns out the city is made up of conflicting bands of cultists in contact with ancient, powerful alien entities whom they regard as gods. And the blood they're obsessed with is the nearest thing to a physical form one of those gods has. And the plague may well be somehow caused by the gods' attempt to spawn a half-human child. And you're probably actually trapped in another dimension dreamed into existence by those gods for the purpose of cradling that child. And the moon that empowers you is actually another Eldritch Abomination with which a contract was made to give humanity a fighting chance against the gods. And so on.
Borderlands:
- Borderlands 1 tried to pull this by dropping the main characters into a fight with an Eldritch Abomination. It didn't go over well, and the sequel and interquel proved willing to reference the event (often sarcastically) but focused back on the human dimension, with the Big Bad of Borderlands 2 being a perfectly mundane if staggeringly assholish human^note, and Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel! being more about his rise to power than anything else. Borderlands 3 is something of a darker take on Lovecraft Lite, as there is a new Siren who can eat the remaining Eldritch Abominations right after they escape, but is also a sadistic cult leader with dreams of godhood.
- And then 3's second DLC campaign, Guns, Love, and Tentacles: The Marriage of Wainwright & Hammerlock, turns up the Lovecraftian elements with a dead vault monster so vast its corpse is visible from miles away, robe-wearing cultists who worship it, villagers suffering from madness and curses, an occult detective who has lost his mind from exposure to too much horror, and of course, people sprouting tentacles.
Bravely Default is steeped in traditional fantasy tropes for most of the game, until the Greater-Scope Villain Ouroboros is revealed to be a world-devouring entity from beyond the cosmos.
Cassette Beasts starts out as a fantasy adventure at a magical island populated by both humans and monsters and located in a different dimension from Earth. Then the opening quest concludes with your encounter with Morgante, revealing the existence of the powerful and incomprehensible eldritch entities known by the local human residents as Archangels. This starts the game's main quest of finding more Archangels across the island to gather more clues for you to find a way to return home. Eventually, it is revealed that Archangels are embodiments of various concepts birthed from humanity, with the final boss being an incarnation of conquest whom you need to stop from causing destruction across reality. A post-game quest also reveals that the island's entire railway system, which you most likely have used to travel across the island on numerous occasions, is not only an Archangel themself, but also responsible for the island's very existence, as well as you and everyone else being stranded on it.
Chrono Trigger's plot originally concerns itself with accidental Time Travel and the possible problems thereof, but then quickly morphs into trying to stop an Evil Sorcerer from summoning a world-destroying Eldritch Abomination, only to find out The Reveal that the sorcerer was actually trying to destroy the abomination, which is much older and much more powerful than anyone anticipated and has been manipulating the course of evolution for its benefit for over 65 million years.
The Chzo Mythos does this at the midway point: The first two games were standard Slasher Movie ghost stories focusing on a wooden idol containing the soul of a Jason Voorhees Expy who would possess anyone that touched the idol with their bare hands and go on a rampage. Then the third game introduced Chzo, an Eldritch Abomination from Another Dimension and the elemental god of pain, as well as his Dragon, who is revealed to have been the one who bound the aforementioned Jason expy's soul to the idol in the first place. The fourth game then introduced an entire cult devoted to Chzo. Apparently this can all be chalked up to Yahtzee making up the story as he went along.
Cruelty Squad starts off as a visceral Bio Punk corporate hellscape, where human life has been debased and devalued to the point of meaninglessness. As the game goes on, it's clear this is meant a lot quite literally: the player character's ability to come back from death is an in-universe feature of the setting, and this combined with the explotative nature of corporations in the setting has created a world that is broken on a fundamental level, with the game's sequential endings depicting the protagonist stumbling their way through disrupting and eventually undoing the status quo.
A sci-fi example is found in Crysis 3. Throughout the series, it's hinted that the Ceph, the aliens that humanity is in conflict with, aren't truly invading the planet. Rather than an army, they're compared to a tribe of cavemen with clubs or even simple automated tools designed to harvest or clean up the Earth, mopping the floor with most forces sent against them despite lacking any real intelligence or tactics. Fighting them is akin to an ant fighting a set of rusty hedge-clippers or a Roomba. Indeed, the third game reveals that the true Ceph are over half a billion years old and have colonized millions of planets across multiple spiral arms of the Milky Way alone, with technology so far beyond humanity that they might as well be thought of as gods. Appropriately enough, when the Ceph send one of their ships through a wormhole from the M33 galaxy, it looks like a massive, mechanical Cthulhu-eqsue monster bigger than the moon. One shot is all it needs to wipe out humanity. And even though Prophet is able to destroy it, what it really amounts to is a single gardener dying in a 'freak accident.' It's made clear many times that any victory humanity has against them is because the Ceph hardly notice or care that we even exist. We're not an opposing force to them, we're pests in an old family house they can barely be bothered to deal with.
Digimon Survive starts off as a darker take on Digimon Adventure, until the creepy Fog of Doom shows up. Things escalate from there, with the Big Bad revealed to be an Eldritch Abomination forcing the group to Save Both Worlds. Actually subverted; as the Eldritch Abomination is (or was) a Fanglongmon, something that still belongs to this world but only corrupted by human hate, and the monsters are actually spirits worshipped by people in ancient Japan.
Downplayed in Disco Elysium. For the most part, the game is coy, with many surreal Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane elements. Even if these are treated as magic, the game is essentially a Magic Realism story about a Defective Detective in a city where the most important matters remain economics, politics, and very human passions and ambitions. Then there's what Joyce reveals about the Pale, and what the player character discovers in the Church. Neither impacts the main plot directly, but the long-term implications are very, very bad for humanity, and both are unambiguously and powerfully supernatural.
In Discworld Noir, the first part of the game seems like a normal mystery story, with a detective, a murder, suspects... The final part, however, involves a plan to release an Eldritch Abomination, and once it's released, finding a way to kill it.
EarthBound (1994) tells you vaguely about the evil alien leader Giygas throughout, but it takes the entire game to find out that he's a galaxy-spanning elder god in the vein of Azathoth. Notably, he wasn't this in the original game, but became so upon losing his sanity after his defeat.
Zigzagged in Elden Ring: what begins like a somewhat bleak High Fantasy story about gods, demigods, great wars, magic and dragons is shaken up in the relatively early game by the presence of Fantasy Aliens and the mysterious amber of the stars spreading as Alien Kudzu. Over time, mounting revalations about the Primeval Current studied by the astrologers and sorcerers of the Land Between come to a head when the Tarnished is exposed to the present states of the exiled Azur and Lusat and the lengths to which Sorceress Sellen was willing to go to restore its research betray smatterings of Cosmic Horror. This shift seems to be fully cemented when a few passing mentions betray the existence of the Outer Gods, vast and mysterious beings that have been meddling in the affairs of the Lands Between for untold eons. However, any absolute shift towards Cosmic Horror is precluded by hints that the Outer Gods are both responsive to and potentially are born from desperation and the distorted perception of divine things, ultimately tying back to anthropocentric themes of ideology, corruption, and ambition. Only the Primeval Current seems far removed from mortal affairs, and even the Greater Will that spawned it may have some investment in what goes on in the Lands Between. In the end, the shift is towards Lovecraft Lite at best.
Final Fantasy:
- Final Fantasy III starts off as a rather loose story of four youths stopping a Demon King, Xande, from flooding the world with darkness, as it had been flooded with light in the past. Right at the Very Definitely Final Dungeon, the true consequences of Xande's actions are revealed: A flood of light or darkness triggers the appearance of the Cloud of Darkness which brings both the World of Light and the World of Darkness to The Void. While later games' cosmology and appearance of it would differ, The Void would become a recurring element of later Final Fantasy games, most notably Final Fantasy V.
- Final Fantasy V keeps Exdeath's true plan vague for most of the game, focusing on his efforts to shatter the crystals and the Warriors of Light's attempts to stop him. In the game's third act, his true intentions are revealed: Shattering the crystals on both Bartz's and Galuf's worlds remerges them into one, opening the way to the Interdimensional Rift, and allowing Exdeath to take control of The Void which was sealed there; After getting it, he proceeds to wantonly erase entire towns off of the map. Notably, while most of the early games would describe the Warp spell's offensive capabilities as sending the target to another dimension, the description here specifically states that they are sent to the rift; During the storyline, Exdeath casts the spell on Gilgamesh and not only does he appear in the Rift later, but he appears in other games usually implied, if not outright stated to be the same Gilgamesh - further implying that the other Final Fantasy games exist in the Rift.
- Final Fantasy XIV plays out like your standard fantasy story of heroes embarking on quests to save the realm, but Endwalker throws a massive curveball with the Final Days, and the source of the coming apocalypse: Meteion, an empathetic familiar created by an Ancient scientist, was created, along with her identical sisters, to search the cosmos for life. What they found was only civilizations either in decline or already destroyed, leading to the conclusion that life is meaningless and that the merciful thing to do would be to give everyone, everywhere, oblivion. To that end, they built a "nest" on a dead sun at the farthest reaches of the universe and used their empathic powers to orchestrate the Final Days. While it ends up being Lovecraft Lite as the Warrior of Light ultimately defeats Meteion and ends the Final Days, the nature of the universe that drove her mad still exists, and it is unknown how many planets remain in the universe besides the Warrior of Light's homeworld that still contain life.
- Final Fantasy XVI uses this as part of a Halfway Plot Switch - up until that point, XVI has been the most grounded entry in series history since the very first game, being a Game of Thrones-esque Dark Fantasy that was Bloodier and Gorier than previous installments, and where magic was shown to be sapping the life of those who possessed it and used it. Then at Drake's Head, the Big Bad Ultima makes their first appearance and is very distinctly both non-human and the most powerful figure seen in the setting at that point, meaning he's very obviously not from Valisthea. As the story goes on, Ultima is shown to be a Genre Refugee that's more in-line with previous antagonists in the series, being a God-like figure of indeterminate and alien origin who predates human civilization, coming off as a combination of Chaos and JENOVA (or if you want to go back a bit further, Lavos).
- Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin appears on the surface to be a Darker and Edgier take on the first Final Fantasy, only for it to be discovered that the Lufenians of this continuity gained interdimensional powers and have been treating the entire world as an expendable experiment, with their mysterious backer having a similar M.O. to Shinryu as portrayed in the Dissidia Final Fantasy games. The DLCs take this even further as it turns out that a Moogle from a particular future is manipulating Jack into making himself and his Warrior of Light into the new gods of Discord and Harmony respectively.
Most of the plot for Freelancer is fairly mundane in nature. Although a conspiracy about alien artefacts is present, much of the plot focuses on political intrigue and the criminal world ^note. The reveal of who are behind the conspiracy, however, kicks this trope into gear. Afterwards, the story becomes entirely focused on the Nomads, the Dom'Kovash that created them and the Eldritch Location they reside in, including a Dyson Sphere that seems utterly incomprehensibly huge compared to everything else the player encountered up until that point.
The Transcend mod for Freespace 2 is based on this trope. It starts off with you joining a secret undercover organization of fighter pilots to investigate a mystery... only for it to be revealed that the entire universe is being destroyed by the subconscious mind of a being known as the Transcendant, who was apparently once a human who somehow become a reality-warping, insane abomination trying to recreate his own past, and who ultimately wants the protagonist to put him out of his misery.
Halo: In the original Halo: Combat Evolved, the Covenant are initially the sole antagonists, until the appearance of the Flood shifted the focus from a war with Scary Dogmatic Aliens to something more akin to Survival Horror. We also find out that they're the ones responsible for the disappearance of the Forerunners 100,000 years ago. Halo 2 revealed that the Flood aren't just semi-sapient zombies, but are being controlled by their Gravemind, aka when a Body Horror Zombie Apocalypse acquires sentience and becomes a hyper-intelligent Eldritch Abomination Hive Mind, putting them into a good position to overrun their local galaxy and begins spreading to others nearby. The Gravemind is also able to do things like make Cortana, an AI, feel real pain, all without having to use a computer itself. As noted in "Literature", Halo: Silentium reveals that the Flood are merely the current form of a race of Eldritch Abominations older than the universe itself.
Home Safety Hotline: The base game has the player help clients deal with Things That Go "Bump" in the Night, the dangers of which are generally limited to a single household at worst, and failing too much will result in you being turned into a mouse as punishment. The Seasonal Worker DLC is much of the same, but the stakes are much, much higher. It's revealed that once a year, from December 21st to 25th, a vast cosmic entity that feeds on despair known as The Twilight arrives above Earth. Should it be sated on enough fear and suffering, The Twilight will devour the entire planet, so it's up to the player to keep "cheer" levels elevated until the entity leaves.
A long-standing tradition in the Kirby series is for 99% of the game to be cutesy, goofy fun, only for the last 1% to throw in a terrifying Eldritch Abomination as the Final Boss.
- Kirby's Adventure: The game, at first, seems to be a cutesy followup to Kirby's Dream Land... right up until the climax, when it's revealed the Star Rod you were reassembling is actually the only thing keeping the Nightmare Wizard, a living personification of nightmares, trapped in the Fountain of Dreams (which was King Dedede's true goal this entire time). Notably, ever since that game, the Kirby franchise has had an Eldritch Abomination as the final boss, usually (but not always) as a plot twist, whereas King Dedede only remains a central antagonist in spinoffs and even there, it's more about Dedede trying to settle his grudge with Kirby.
- Kirby's Dream Land 2 has Kirby dealing with a possessed King Dedede, and if you collected all the Rainbow Drops, it's revealed that Dedede was possessed by Dark Matter, a sentient alien cloud. In Kirby's Dream Land 3, they take this even further with the reveal of 0, a powerful monstrosity and the progenitor of all Dark Matter. After defeating him (by ripping out its eye, no less), it is seemingly destroyed, but Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards features a similar entity known as 02, serving as the true antagonist of the game. Upon being defeated this time, it appears to be gone for good, however, the true scope of its power is not well understood as even Star Dream cannot properly replicate dark matter in its entirety. That may not be the end of it, though. In Kirby's Return to Dream Land, the crown for which Kirby's been searching takes over Magolor, and late in the battle, his mouth happens to house a very familiar eye...
  - The Dark Matter serve as an interesting case as, aside from their leaders, their involvement is much less hidden than the traditional Kirby monsters. ^note
- Dark Meta Knight is initially revealed as The Dragon to Dark Mind, the true antagonist of Kirby & The Amazing Mirror. A vicious killer and shadow from another realm, he tries to kill the Kirbys and Meta Knight, but is ultimately defeated. Following his defeat, Queen Sectonia manages to get ahold of the Dimension Mirror that Kirby and Meta Knight initially entered, and it drives her to madness and power as she becomes excessively vain and malevolent, thus starting the conflict of Kirby: Triple Deluxe. This detail is only revealed in Dededetour!, meaning the mirror is still likely in Sectonia's quarters in her old kingdom, as is Dark Meta Knight hiding inside. As for Dark Mind, a variant of him reappears in Team Kirby Clash Deluxe as King D-Mind. While this may be a different character as it heavily resembles King Dedede, he uses attacks and forms greatly reminiscent of Dark Mind himself. This character would also reappear in Super Kirby Clash under similar circumstances. Both times Team Kirby would defeat him.
- Galactic Nova is an entity revealed in Kirby Super Star as a wish-granting mechanical object known as a clockwork star. Its power would be poorly understood in its initial appearances as it would seemingly grant Marx power, and then be summarily defeated in combat by Kirby before being destroyed. Kirby Super Star Ultra would have Meta Knight revive it to face down Galacta Knight, showing it could fix itself and seemingly reappear back into existence. The full power of a clockwork star would be demonstrated in Kirby: Planet Robobot by Star Dream, revealing clockwork stars aren't just wish-granting stars, but rather a race of reality bending Mechanical Abominations capable of altering the people and planets they come into contact with (for Star Dream, this was mechanizing everything on Popstar as trees instantly became metal posts) and even merging with the consciousness of others. Meta Knight and Kirby barely manage to destroy Star Dream in combat, however, given Galactic Nova revived so easily, Star Dream could likely come back if it ever needed.
- In Kirby Star Allies, Hyness revives Void Termina, a powerful being that seems to base its power and appearance on the desire of those who summon it, meaning its evil and its power demonstrated in the final boss may not entirely be its fault. Void Termina is never fully explained, but the boss lore in the pause screen implies it is the creator of everything in the universe, including dark matter, and wishes to die to be reborn again in a new world as a friend and not an enemy.
Every game in the Little Tail Bronx series is rife with this, as each adventure usually starts with "local hero in a mecha is tasked with stopping an egotistical villain from trying to Take Over the World", before suddenly throwing everything out of scale and ramping up the stakes with the introduction of the warped Titano-Machina, which are presented as Always Chaotic Evil with legends and stories about how they bring about great calamity every time they are awakened. What makes it interesting is that the Titano-Machina are all man-made, using the gifts bestowed upon humanity by the godly Juno. Solatorobo: Red the Hunter initially subverts this by introducing Lares early on, with most of the plot involving Red and Elh running around trying to stop it and Bruno... only to end up double subverted thanks to the second half of the game, with Baion using Lares and Lemures to open Tartaros, which sits firmly within another dimension, to enact total genocide through the CODA command.
Halo owes this theme to its spiritual predecessor, Marathon. The game starts as a fairly straightforward alien conflict aside from a few esoteric themes. The first two games have you fighting a conventional war against alien slavers. It is hinted that there is some greater chaos towards the end of Marathon 2, but only in the context of what appears to be a mere creation myth on part of the aliens' slaves that misinterpreted a historic alien war that took place on their homeworld as being the work of the gods. Come Marathon Infinity, and the stakes of the first two games become positively trivial as you sacrifice entire timelines in a battle against this all-consuming monstrosity that is heavily implied to be a W'rkn'cacnter, as in Pathways into Darkness.
Mass Effect: In the first game in the series, Commander Shepard's main objective is to hunt down a rogue agent known as Saren whose been attacking human colonies in the galaxy with an army of Geth. Later, we learn that Saren is in possession of a massive starship that is far more powerful than any ever seen in the galaxy, and it has the horrible ability to warp people's minds until they become willing slaves; which Shepard theorizes is connected to the mysterious disappearance/extinction of the Protheans 50,000 years prior. And finally we learn the full truth: Saren working for the Reapers, an ancient race of Mechanical Abominations who have wiped out not only the Protheans but all galactic civilizations who came before them as well, and have done so again and again for millions of years. Also, Saren starship itself is actually one of the Reapers.
Sovereign: Rudimentary creatures of blood and flesh. You touch my mind, fumbling in ignorance, incapable of understanding.
- Later games would dial back on the eldritch elements of the Reapers to give a more clear explanation of their intentions, morality and even how they function, but they remain intimidating through the sheer scale of their invasion and how much manpower is needed to destroy even one.
The first hour of Moons of Madness is spent running around a Martian colony fixing solar panels and irrigation systems. While the short nightmare sequence that serves as the prologue should be a pretty big clue, the humdrum opening act can make the later plot quite a shock. Then again, in this case the surprise depends on how closely you read the advertising before you started the game, specifically the parts that establish it as being set in the same universe as The Secret World (which is far more up front about it).
Not the main plot, but Oracle of Tao has a bounty hunting sidequest that is relatively calm and relaxing, until you get to about the last monster, who turns out to be an Eldritch Abomination. Losing the battle against this last bounty results in a Mind Rape ending. For a Side Quest, this is still pretty heavy... and there are actually a number of these practically immortal destructive beings roaming about.
Persona, being a spin-off of the Shin Megami Tensei series which openly features the protagonists fighting gods and god-like entities, tends to have more of an Urban Fantasy bent for most of the game only to reveal a god-like entity as the final boss:
- In Persona 2, the real mastermind behind everything that's happening in Sumaru City is Nyarlathotep, an omnipotent god who embodies the dark side of the collective unconscious.
- In Persona 4, the Investigation Team has finally revealed the identity of the Serial Killer they've been chasing for most of the plot, just in time for the fog from the TV world to become a permanent fixture in the real world and the townspeople to start babbling about the end of days. When the killer is cornered and defeated, a mountain-sized mechanical eyeball emerges from his body and declares its intent to dissolve humanity into Shadows.
- In Persona 5, it's your Mission Control Igor who turns out to be the God of Control, The Demiurge/Yaldabaoth. Up until this point, the game had been pretty strictly Urban Fantasy.
Pokémon:
- Pokémon Ruby and Sapphire start off as your standard Pokémon games (battle trainers, catch Pokémon, etc.) until it's revealed Team Aqua and Team Magma want to awaken an ancient god-like Pokémon (Kyogre or Groudon, depending on which version you're playing). As can be expected, it goes far beyond expectations, resulting in either cataclysmic floods or drought that threatens to destroy all life on the planet. Naturally, it's up to the player character to save the world.
- Cyrus, the Big Bad in Pokémon Diamond and Pearl, attempts to destroy and re-create the entire universe as he sees fit. He does this by imprisoning three legendary Pokémon (Azelf, Uxie, and Mesprit) in order to create an object called the "Red Chain" which he then uses to summon Dialga/Palkia (who happen to be the God of Time and God of Space respectively). Cyrus then attempts to use their power to bend reality and reshape the universe in his image. In Pokémon Platinum, this causes Giratina (a ghostly dragon-god living in an alternate dimension) to become enraged and drag Cyrus into its world (a bizarre reality where the laws of physics and so forth are far beyond human understanding. Appropriately, it's called the "Distortion World"). Once again, it's up to the player to save the day.
- Then we have the post-game quest in Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire, the Updated Re-release of Pokémon Ruby and Sapphire, mentioned above. The Delta Episode revolves around an asteroid on a collision course with the Hoenn region. Hoenn's Space Center intends to stop it by using some old thing called the "Link Cable" to warp it to another dimension, where hopefully it will cause no damage. However, a girl called Zinnia shows up and steals vital parts of the device explicitly to stop the Center from using it. Her reasoning is that the proper way to dispose of the asteroid is by making Rayquaza Mega Evolve to destroy it, since it's been done successfully in the past. She argues that if the scientists at the center had their way and warped the asteroid, they would save this version of the region, but would very probably send it instead to another iteration of the universe. One she explicitly says would most definitely have another Hoenn in the collision course, one where Mega Evolution never existed and would thus be defenseless against the asteroid. Yes, this is a pretty clear reference to the Hoenn from the original Ruby and Sapphire (Mega Evolution was not introduced until Pokémon X and Y, which came out right before Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire), and has every implication that that world would be destroyed if the Link Cable plan is executed. Long story short: The Pokémon games, as a whole, are very casually confirmed to be set all within the same multiverse. All older games that got updated, newer generation remakes, are now not simply retconned by their remakes, they exist simultaneously as different iterations of the Pokémon multiverse. There's more: It's funny that the dimension-warping device is called a "Link Cable". Way back in the days before wireless, the only way to play Pokémon with other players was with a wire called a Link Cable. Yup, it seems that now, every single copy of any single Pokémon game is, in canon, an iteration of the Pokémon universe. You've been casually leaping between universes to get that one version exclusive you needed to fill your Pokédex and totally own your cousin in a battle all these years.
- Pokémon Sun and Moon begins as another one of those stories with a young person in a new land setting out to become the champion with a villainous team... only it turns out the villainous team is highly ineffectual. Then, things really get down when a wormhole opens up in front of the protagonist, and a horrific extradimensional creature, known as an Ultra Beast, appears from it. Lusamine, the leader of the Aether Foundation, intends to open up more wormholes to bring over more of these Ultra Beasts, which eventually dominates the story. By the time the protagonist becomes the champion, Ultra Beasts are running amok on every island in Alola, and the protagonist is tasked with containing them to prevent their cataclysmic powers from destroying the world. Being the champion of Alola is small beans compared to the threat the region finds itself in.
- Pokémon Sword and Shield once again starts as a typical adventure, with the protagonist and some rivals competing to become the Pokémon League Champion. Then during the finals, Chairman Rose, in an attempt to solve the region's coming energy crisis, unleashes Eternatus, the being that created Dynamax Energy and caused the Darkest Day. It's so powerful that it could only be taken down by two of the region's strongest trainers (you and your main rival, natch) fighting alongside two Legendary Pokémon. Not to mention it looks like it could be Giratina's skeleton, and its Eternamax form resembles Yami.
Puyo Puyo 7 starts as an Urban Fantasy, where local schoolgirl Ringo Ando has to travel the world to stop a renegade Arle from disrupting space time, only for her to suddenly be abducted to the empty void between worlds by the incomprehensible cosmic entity Ecolo, who wants to flood all worlds with Puyo just because he was bored.
RuneScape was released in 2001 with a typical medieval fantasy setting, with the gods having left the world thousands of years ago after the God Wars, until 2013, when the gods began to return and reshape the world to their will. References to Elder Gods have been scattered in the game, but it wasn't until 2016 when Jas physically appeared in-game. It was revealed Elder Gods created universes and fed on them to sustain themselves in an Eternal Recurrence and now the current revision of the universe is under the same threat.
Senran Kagura primarily revolves around the Forever War between Good Shinobi and Evil Shinobi (titles that really have little to do with morality), where Child Soldiers are drafted into a world where death is a constant possibility. Despite this dark setup, the games are primarily a goofy fanservice-fest where the worst that happens is the loser gets their clothes destroyed. Until we are introduced to the byproduct of this conflict, giant monstrous creatures called Yoma, which both sides will drop everything to defeat. And then Shinovi Versus reveals this whole war is actually a ploy. The Yoma aren't byproducts of the war, but the reason it began in the first place. There exists an ancient creature called Shin, progenitor of the Yoma and the one responsible for all large-scale calamities in the world, which will continue to claim lives until it's defeated. In order to draw it and the other Yoma out of their pocket dimension, enough blood must be spilled in conflict. The secondary purpose of the Shinobi war is to train fighters capable of defeating Shin. These can be Good, Evil, or Renegade Shinobi, so long as they're strong enough.
Sonic the Hedgehog:
- It has repeatedly happened that Eggman suddenly finds himself out of his league when his schemes provoke godlike horrors, such as Perfect Chaos, Solaris, and Dark Gaia and Sonic has to go Super to bail Earth and Eggman out of the mess the doctor had caused.
- Of special note is Sonic Frontiers, which uses this reveal for the entire franchise. The series' classic MacGuffin, the Chaos Emeralds, were originally from an alien world occupied by the Ancients. Said Emeralds were taken to Earth to protect them from The End, an Eldritch Abomination who destroyed the Ancients' home world and was subsequently sealed away within Cyberspace. So everything the series' villains aimed to do with the Emeralds — Chaos achieving perfect form, Iblis and Mephiles becoming Solaris, even just Doctor Eggman using them to fuel his machines — were all consequences indirectly caused by The End's actions.
Vampire Survivors has an Excuse Plot about vampires that only exists in the manual and is virtually never referenced in the game itself, relying entirely on the player making assumptions based on the game being heavily based on Castlevania. In fact, the game conspicuously lacks vampires altogether without the Ode to Castlevania DLC. After unlocking the Moongolow stage, something resembling a plot does begin to emerge, but it more closely resembles The King in Yellow, featuring an eldritch entity represented by a pair of giant yellow hands.
Tales of Arise starts out as a Deconstructor Fleet of the Dystopia & Rebellion genre Much later on? It's revealed that Rena is literally siphoning the life force from Dahna - and it literally bred the "Renans" to be used as its agents to help keep an oppressive system going. If our heroes didn't stop it? Dahna would eventually become just lifeless like Rena was. So much of Rena was consumed that it looks more akin to an apple core than an actual spheroid.
WarCraft: The series was originally about orcs and the demons they consorted with, with the demons being expanded to have been the true force behind their invasion. In WarCraft III: Reign of Chaos, a "Forgotten One" was found in an underground city and fit the description of an Eldritch Abomination, but its exact place in the universe was ambiguous. In World of Warcraft, occasional appearances of the Old Gods teased the possibility that they were ultimately more of a threat than the traditional demonic Big Bad, especially since they were revealed to have been responsible for the evil of many minor villains. Finally, the World of Warcraft: Chronicle revealed that the force behind the Old Gods, the Void, is truly the ultimate threat. It is a timeless element of the universe, and fear of it is what drove the demons to band into a united force to begin with.
Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine opens with the focus on Captain Titus and his Ultramarines beating back an Ork WAAAGH!!! Then it turns out Titus was being manipulated by the agents of a Chaos Sorcerer, who were working to help their master ascend to daemonhood and unleash Hell on Earth.
We Need to go Deeper: The deeper the submarine goes, the more bizarre the enemies become and the darker the tone gets until you reach the Ancient One, and awakening it triggers The End of the World as We Know It.
Xenogears starts off with Fei just living his normal life in a quiet village, devoid of conflict. Then The Empire of Solaris invades and razes the town to the ground, forcing him to defend himself in the heat of the moment and rise up against their tyranny. This eventually leads to him and his party fighting against the theocratic empire's machine god, Deus, who created the humans living on the planet and wants to assimilate them so it can become a true god.

Visual Novels

As with a lot of other tropes, Doki Doki Literature Club! does this in a weird way. You already know there's a much larger world outside the game's world — you're living in it. But you don't really think of it that way, except here when a character is revealed to have Gone Mad from the Revelation about being Trapped in TV Land. The horror? It has already shifted to that before the revelation.
I peer inside for a clue.
No! I can't see. I reel, blind, like a film left out in the sun.
But it's too late. My retinas.
Already scorched with a permanent copy of the meaningless image.
It's just a little hole. It wasn't too bright.
It was too deep.
Stretching forever into everything.
A hole of infinite choices.
I realize now, that I wasn't looking in.
I was looking out.
And he, on the other side, was looking in.

Web Animation

While being set in Horror Kitchen-Sink that is World of Darkness, initially Hunter: The Parenting seems to focus on more down-to-earth threats of the setting. That is until we discover that members of the Family are still traumatized after loss of one of Big D's sons due to an encounter with an Eldritch Abomination, implied to be aspect of the Wyrm itself, that made them too well-aware that the Vampires, Werewolves and the Fae they've been dealing with are merely tip of the iceberg and they are not ready for what lies at its bottom.
The Pilot for Murder Drones sets the show up as a goofy Sci-Fi Horror Comedy on a distant planet where an angsty teenage drone girl named Uzi fights robot vampires sent by their corporate overlords on Earth. From there, the show's Jigsaw Puzzle Plot gradually reveals the vampires are actually pawns of a Mechanical and/or Digital Abomination called the Absolute Solver, which has already destroyed Earth and spread to other human colonies with drones just like Uzi, whose carcasses it's using in a plan to consume the universe.
SMG4: A meme-themed series of wacky adventures turns out to be under threat from an Eldritch Abomination which has left entire other universes in ruin, which itself was empowered by a sentient container of broken worlds. And this is all a byproduct of these events being dictated by beings far more powerful - the creators of the series themselves.
Velma Meets the Original Velma does this for both Velma and the Scooby-Doo franchise as a whole — "Scooby" is an Animalistic Abomination pretending to be a dog, who attached himself to the Mystery Gang in their original incarnation back in Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!, only to brutally murder them all when Velma began to question why he could talk. The various reboots and retellings of the series are the result of "Scooby" trying to recreate that original world, with increasingly flawed results, the world of Velma just being his latest attempt. Making matters worse, Velma herself always starts to remember the fate of the original eventually, leading to the cycle starting over again.

Web Comics

Captain SNES pretty much starts off with Alex Williams being sucked into Videoland by Lucca's machine and first time readers would initially think that him exploring this strange world and meeting new people and helping them is the entire plot. However, it soon becomes apparent that Videoland is being forever changed by a prescient, reality-warping entity known as the Sovereign of Sorrow who possesses the ability to show video game characters the true nature of their world, something that they, with the exception of Kefka who sees it as validation of his nihilistic worldview, can't handle. Even more shocking is the revelation that Alex is unwittingly her champion.
Homestuck (surprise!) becomes Hijacked By Cthulhu by [S] Jade: Wake with the revelation that the Horrorterrors do, in fact, exist... and the true main villain, Lord English, is killing them.
- English himself is no slouch in the Cosmic Horror department, destroying the afterlife and double-killing the ghosts within, all just to find and kill his sister.
Housepets!: Downplayed in that most of it is Played for Laughs, but still keeps a bit of Fridge Horror. The comic initially presents it's only deviation from reality being that animals are now bipedal and intelligent, as expected from a furry comic. Over time, however, the Earth itself is revealed to be home to a Cosmic Chess Game between gods, and at constant risk of being invaded by Hell itself if its protectors should fail.
The Order of the Stick: The first arc of the story concerns the titular Order on a dungeon crawl to stop Xykon, an evil lich and his undead and goblin minions. Then it turns out that within the lich's old lair, there was a portal to a dimension where an Eldritch Abomination with world-destroying power is imprisoned, and the rest of the story becomes a quest to stop the abomination from being released, while the lich and his minions (and several other evil forces) try to use the abomination for their own purposes. The stakes get raised to literally cosmic proportions when it's revealed the cycle of creation and destruction between the gods and the eldritch Snarl has gone on for literal eons. This one world? Acceptable collateral damage.
I Stole the First Ranker's Soul and its webcomic adaptation has the original conflict between the Dungeon monsters and the drama surrounding the politic of the Hunter world. However by the end of Season 1, it is revealed that the Dungeon system exists because of an Eldritch Abomination being called the Predator that will soon approach Earth and devour everything.

Web Original

The Adventure Zone: Balance starts out as a fairly typical Science Fantasy: long ago, a cabal of mad sorcerers created the Grand Relics, a bunch of Artifacts of Doom that grant superpowers at the cost of madness, and it's the protagonists' job to recollect and destroy said artifacts. As the plot progresses, it is revealed that the Relics were created to split up and neutralize the massive power source they were created from, which contains enough energy to act as a homing beacon for otherworldly entities — specifically the Hunger, an Eldritch Abomination (physically incomprehensible sans its millions of eyes and tendrils of viscous black fluid) that seeks to assimilate all worlds of the Multiverse into itself. By collecting the Relics, our heroes have recombined the original power source and unwittingly let the Hunger loose upon the world of Faerun...
The Magnus Archives begins as accounts of encounters with the supernatural being collected by the Magnus Institute, a private foundation which gathers evidence of such occurrences in Europe. As it goes on, it becomes increasingly clear that not only are the events connected, but the Magnus Institute itself is a known quantity to these creatures. After all, it's the seat of the Lidless Eye, the embodiment of the fear of being watched. We eventually learn about the rest of the Powers, all born of primal fears, all with their own Lovecraftian rituals, and all are only opposed by one another in their rush to complete their grand ritual first.
Reasoning: The story starts off as a typical slasher, with a young woman named Beverly fleeing from a seemingly hostile foe. But then it's revealed said foe is a rat-like monster. Then Beverly comes across a giant Eldritch Abomination and a talking skull-headed deity. By chapter 7, the story shifts into cosmic horror when it's revealed that monsters from a realm called Aevum are being unleashed upon humanity. Chapter 11 takes this even further by revealing that Aevum's surrogate god, EYE, is trying to exterminate all of humanity by sending monsters through portals to feast on human beings.
RWBY: All Myths Are True applies to this series in terms of fairy tales, up to and including the story of how humanity was created by two gods of Light and Darkness. Why? As an experiment to see what would happen if they made a species which could choose between good and evil. Naturally, their creations are completely helpless against them and it takes just one god the slightest bit of effort to wipe them all out. This possibility became a reality when they cursed a young woman, Salem, to teach her the importance of the life and death system they created, eventually leaving her behind on the depopulated planet after deeming their experimentation in sentience a failure. Whilst the God of Light can't quite detach himself from his creation, the way he leaves a way back is less than comforting; if he and his brother are summoned back to Remnant with the use of Relics when humanity is still at odds, they will wipe them out once and for all.
SCP Foundation: So, SCP-2317. Fairly average for a scip. A mystical door that leads to a pocket universe. Then, it turns out that the pocket universe contains an Eldritch Abomination just barely contained. Then it turns out that the thing isn't contained at all, and that it's only a matter of time before it destroys humanity. Then it turns out that the thing may or may not be the Scarlet King, its offspring, or something worse.
Worm: After spending much of the story as street-level superhero fare, with an occasional Kaiju attack, Scion is revealed to be the avatar of a Sufficiently Advanced Alien that is using Earth as a giant petri dish, with mankind as the specimens.

Web Video

Atop the Fourth Wall: This series starts as a comedic comic book review show. The host at first fought a Monster of the Week or Arc Villain related to the comic he had reviewed, to symbolically defeat the bad story. After the show's second anniversary, he fought a Multiversal Conqueror that was chasing an omnicidal Outer God. After that, the Outer God itself finally showed up and nearly destroyed the entire universe. Later, it's revealed that there's an entire family of such beings.

Western Animation

The Amazing World of Gumball initially seems to be a relatively lighthearted mix of The Simpsons and Spongebob despite having a lot of dark humor. In the third season, Elmore is revealed to have a Void dimension where it dumps anything or anyone it considers a mistake. Said Void is quickly established as the single greatest threat in the entire show.
Gravity Falls starts out with two siblings exploring the weird little town they're visiting and encountering things like ghosts, gnomes, and mermen. Then the Myth Arc gets going, and Bill Cipher takes over as not just the Big Bad but the number one threat to humanity.
Love, Death & Robots: The episode, "Beyond the Aquila Rift", starts off very standard for a sci-fi story: a spaceship breaks down and its crew must wait aboard a remote space station until the ship is repaired. But as time goes on, the main character, Thom, grows suspicious of the circumstances and starts investigating, and eventually starts wishing that he hadn't. Everyone of Thom's crewmates turns out to have been Dead All Along and everything Thom thought was real was actually an illusion; in reality, he is lost in space alongside an alien being who trapped him in said illusion to keep him from going insane.
The main concept of the short, Pibby, is that various otherwise cheery and optimistic cartoon worlds, including many beloved classics (or expies of said classics) are being corrupted and devoured one by one by a horrific, nigh-unstoppable Glitch Entity that no one knows the origin of.
Primal (2019): Originally, this series seemed to be prehistoric fiction about a caveman and dinosaur struggling to survive against predators and giant animals. But then we're introduced to a zombie plague, a coven of witches and possibly the Devil himself, all of which our mortal protagonists don't stand a chance against.
Samurai Jack: Downplayed. Anyone even remotely familiar with the series will know that Aku is an ancient evil, but he doesn't necessarily seem like anything scarier than some powerful evil Yōkai. "The Birth of Evil" shows that not only is he ancient from even the viewpoint of the dinosaurs, he is in reality only a tiny piece of a much bigger Eldritch Abomination (thankfully, the rest of it seems to have been killed by the gods at the dawn of time).
Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated appears to be a Darker and Edgier version of the classic series, only to reveal an overarching story about a cursed treasure that has destroyed several previous mystery solving teams who had all turned on each other in their greed for the treasure. Season 2 reveals that it's in reality a Sealed Evil in a Can and Eldritch Abomination known as The Evil Entity, and that the various talking animal sidekicks that have appeared throughout the Hanna-Barberaverse partially share The Evil Entity's extraterrestrial origin.
South Park: The episode "Pinewood Derby" begins with Stan competing for the derby and his father Randy cheating to win, which catches the attention of cosmic beings who subject humanity to a morality test.
Steven Universe features The Cluster. While the show up until that point had been raising the stakes with the looming threat of the Diamond Authority, as well as the background presence of Malachite the toxic fusion, it still had a copious amount of more relaxed breather episodes. Once the audience and the Crystal Gems are informed about this threat, it becomes the key focus for the remainder of the show's second season, tying into Peridot's redemption arc. However, it's ultimately subverted as Steven manages to communicate and reason with it come the season three premiere, ending things peacefully.

Cosmic Horror Reveal
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Warning: This is a Spoilered Rotten trope, which means that EVERY SINGLE EXAMPLE on this list is a spoiler by default and most of them will be unmarked. This is your last warning; only proceed if you really believe you can handle this list.

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Greta shows the truth

Alternative Title(s): Hijacked By Cthulhu

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Greta shows the truth

Cosmic Horror Reveal 18 Following

Warning: This is a Spoilered Rotten trope, which means that EVERY SINGLE EXAMPLE on this list is a spoiler by default and most of them will be unmarked. This is your last warning; only proceed if you really believe you can handle this list.

Examples:

Video Example(s):

Greta shows the truth

Alternative Title(s): Hijacked By Cthulhu

Previous

Index

Next

Greta shows the truth

Cosmic Horror Reveal
18 Following