any universe that started out 'grounded' then veers to fantastic

[Masonicon]

is there's any universe that started out (close to) mundane, then become more fantastic in this sliding scale as time goes on?

I started with these examples: Scooby Doo(got this treatment in either Early 80s season of Scooby Doo and Scrappy Doo as well Scooby Doo Direct to Video ones since Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island) and Metal Slug game series(Metal Slug 2/X introduces Sci-fi and Fantastic elements to the series following it's grounded prequel)

 

[Drathnoxis]

I'm sure there are plenty. I've only played the second game but that's pretty much how people describe the Saint's Row series. The Zero Escape games are another that come to mind that become more fantastical with each game.

 

[BrawlMan]

Streets of Rage and Street Fighter/Final Fight (somewhat for the former) started out as grounded, but went into fantasy martial arts territory within both of their second installments. Final Fight characters didn't start getting more fantastical until Street Fighter Alpha and Final Fight 3.

The Metal Gear franchise. MG1 and MG2 are fairly grounded. MGS1 is mostly grounded, but by the time of MGS2, Twin Snakes, and some of MGS3, there was no going back.

Denser and Wackier - TV Tropes

 

[Thaluikhain]

Apparently, Dr Who was going to be more educational than it turned out, they'd end up in some random time period in the Earth's past, and interact with the culture with no aliens or whatever. Up until early into the 2nd Dr's run they still did that every so often.

But then the second story they made was by Terry Nation, about the aftermath of a nuclear war on some alien planet, and some monsters he called Daleks, the design of which was done by Raymond Cusack, and they were massively popular. If it wasn't for that as the second ever story, Dr Who would likely have been more grounded and likely have not got a second series.

 

[Absent]

Not sure if it's "turns into" more than "reveals itself as" but both The Incal and The Expanse start up as somewhat grounded detective stories.

Then there's the Alien franchise. Starts with somewhat realistic space truckers encountering one parasitic lifeforms, ends with sentient AIs, DNA memories, telepathy of sorts, and if you include crossovers, other fantastic extraterrestrials from other franchises.

And if you multiply authors, you have a lot of post-Conan Doyle Holmes stories with supernatural elements such as Dracula or Cthulhu, which, like Scooby-Doo, utterly shatters the very point of the initial stories. Now, within Conan Doyle's work, you could agree there is some fantasy elements, but they were included as genuine pseudo-scientific beliefs by Conan Doyle (graphology, regression by simian blood transfusion, etc). Even the Challenger stories, while daringly speculative (surviving dinosaurs, living planet Earth, toxic space aether) included spiritualism because Doyle saw it as the science of the future, soon to be proven and normalised like electricity. Which is different from later authors adding knowingly irrational, unbelieved elements to Holmes' "exclude the impossible" materialism.

 

[Masonicon]

DC comics' Arrowverse and Marvel's MCU are good examples of this

 

[Baffle]

Riverdale

 

[Hawki]

This is pretty subjective, but okay (to be clear, such a shift isn't inherently a bad thing ,a setting will usually get more complex over time):

-Aliens/Predator (the original Alien is very self-contained, as is the original Predator - since then, it's become a sprawling mythology that, if you factor in the EU, spans at least 2000 years, not even including pre-history of the setting)

-Command and Conquer (Tiberian Dawn is set in the modern day, (for when it was produced) by the end, we have alien invasions, mutants, prophecies, the complete reshaping of Earth, etc.)

-Doom (you could make the argument that there's a gulf between Doom OS and Doom Eternal, but then, Doom was always kinda bonkers - there's nothing in Eternal that feels out of place)

-Dragon Ball (started out as Journey to the West, went to planet-scale threats, to gods fighting over the multiverse)

-Enderverse (this is more minor, but at the start, humanity's confined to the Sol system, whereas by the end, FTL travel is cracked, numerous alien species have popped up, etc. However, definitely a case where this shift works contextually)

-The Expanse (...actually, just read the above, you get the idea)

-Final Fantasy (starts as "fantasy setting of not!Europe with airships, has since gone down the route of "anything goes, just stick a chocobo in there")

-James Bond (the level of seriousness is cyclical, but take the Bronsan run - GoldenEye is grounded, DAD ends with gene therapy, space lasers, and invisible cars)

-Jurassic Park (started out on one island, ended with dinosaurs roam the Earth)

-Lord of the Rings (started off with The Hobbit, then got a continent-spanning story with LotR, then The Silmarillion deals with literal gods fighting each other)

-Metal Gear (explained early in the thread)

-Mortal Kombat (starts with an island tournament, then an extra-dimensional tournament, then that dimension invades Earth, then there's multiple dimensions, then there's the One Being, then Armageddon threatening everything, then a reboot, then time manipulation, and then another reboot)

-Pirates of the Caribbean (starts with a simple pirate story, ends with pirate lore and whatnot, then gets more sedate again)

-Resident Evil (the entire span of RE1 to RE6, before things were dialed back again)

-Shannara (starts with bog standard fantasy, ends with...well, still kinda bog standard fantasy, but it's fantasy with airships and laser guns god damn it!)

-Terminator (there's a trend that began in T2 to keep beefing up Terminators to the point where the T-1000000000 is a thing that exists, plus what started out as a last ditch attempt at time travel became, in some cases, a setting where time travel is done on a whim and a dime)

-Warcraft (started as one war in one kingdom between two races, since then...well, demons, Void Lords, other planets, oh my!)

 

[Thaluikhain]

-Command and Conquer (Tiberian Dawn is set in the modern day, (for when it was produced) by the end, we have alien invasions, mutants, prophecies, the complete reshaping of Earth, etc.

Well, modern day with an alien plant that was reshaping the Earth and mutating things. And dinosaurs. Possibly some prophecies that were just Nod religious ramblings, but nothing "real".

-Warcraft (started as one war in one kingdom between two races, since then...well, demons, Void Lords, other planets, oh my!)

Hey? It's explicitly stated that the orcs were from another planet, and there were demons as well, in the first game. Not, in the process of fleshing things out it did get more fantastic, bit it started out a bit odd.

 

[Absent]

The Bob Morane novels span over 60 years. They started as grounded exotic adventures, then they embraced every contempary literary trend, from space opera to time travel to interdimensional voyages.

Strangely, it's the opposite with Tintin comics. They started very zany (Tintin is locked in a prison cell middle in the USSR, but notices a diving suit forgotten in a corner which gives him the idea to wear it, remove the wall's bricks and flee through the river) with epic scopes and prevailing justice, and, apart from an unfortunate incursion of UFOs which are kept as mysterious and abstract as possible, they ended in grounded "anti-heroic" "anti-adventures", where everything romantic is revealed an illusion : a whole album is set in their mansion, where all oddities turn out to be fake mysteries with no real baddies, another album features the series' old threatening big bads but completely deflates and ridiculizes them, another album reluctantly propels Tintin in a political conspiracy where he spends the whole story barely understanding the stakes and the plot, and ends up betrayed by the cliché old-faithful-friend-whose-life-he-had-formerly-saved. So, in a way, it starts with fanciful, whimsical epics, and ends up in a disillusioned, deconstructive tone. Even the UFO, just like the political plot, give this feeling that Tintin is not in charge, that he is just a wisp of straw carried away by more important forces he can't grasp. Realism catches up with fantasy and wish fulfillment.

The next project (after Alph'art) was supposed to be a Tintin adventure entirely contained in an airport. I really wish Hergé would have been able to complete it.

 

[Hawki]

Guess I can add:

-Fire Emblem: This has really gone back and forth, but I'd argue Fire Emblem as an IP has got more fantastical over time, since at this point in the timeline, a full-fledged multiverse is apparently par for the course.

-Game of Thrones: You can pull a "technically" with the White Walkers becoming more prominent as time goes on, along with other fantasy elements.

Well, modern day with an alien plant that was reshaping the Earth and mutating things. And dinosaurs. Possibly some prophecies that were just Nod religious ramblings, but nothing "real".

In Tiberian Dawn, tiberium's only just starting to have an impact - that's a far cry from even its sequel, where entire portions of Earth have been transformed. As for the dinosaurs, they were an Easter egg.

Also, if we're factoring in authoratorial intent, TW1 took inspiration from the Gulf War, and was based on the idea that war in the future wouldn't be fought between centralized states. The first game is grounded in a way its sequels aren't.

Come to think of it, the same also applies to Red Alert - look at the transition from RA1 to RA3.

Hey? It's explicitly stated that the orcs were from another planet, and there were demons as well, in the first game. Not, in the process of fleshing things out it did get more fantastic, bit it started out a bit odd.

Yes, that was stated, but WC1 is still very low key compared to everything that came after. WC1 confines its entire game to a single kingdom. Even WC2 escalates things to including Draenor by its expansion pack.

I mean, compare this:


To this:

 

[Thaluikhain]

-Game of Thrones: You can pull a "technically" with the White Walkers becoming more prominent as time goes on, along with other fantasy elements.

The TV series started off with them, then forgot about them to focus on the rape and incest for a few series, before teasing the White Walkers might actually turn up in a few episodes time for far too long, but really focusing on rape and incest, so not a straightforwards example.

In Tiberian Dawn, tiberium's only just starting to have an impact - that's a far cry from even its sequel, where entire portions of Earth have been transformed. As for the dinosaurs, they were an Easter egg.

Also, if we're factoring in authoratorial intent, TW1 took inspiration from the Gulf War, and was based on the idea that war in the future wouldn't be fought between centralized states. The first game is grounded in a way its sequels aren't.

Well, the first game is more grounded, but it's still a bit out there, but that's semantics.

Yes, that was stated, but WC1 is still very low key compared to everything that came after. WC1 confines its entire game to a single kingdom. Even WC2 escalates things to including Draenor by its expansion pack.

True, though I might argue confining the game to a single kingdom helps in that regard. The orcs leave those borders and there's more weird stuff, but the groundwork for having weird stuff is already mostly in place.

Though going from humans/orcs/ogre and some magic monsters and then sticking elves and dwarfs and trolls and everything else as well in to make it really D&D was going a bit far, IMHO.

 

[Drathnoxis]

This is pretty subjective, but okay (to be clear, such a shift isn't inherently a bad thing ,a setting will usually get more complex over time):

-Aliens/Predator (the original Alien is very self-contained, as is the original Predator - since then, it's become a sprawling mythology that, if you factor in the EU, spans at least 2000 years, not even including pre-history of the setting)

-Command and Conquer (Tiberian Dawn is set in the modern day, (for when it was produced) by the end, we have alien invasions, mutants, prophecies, the complete reshaping of Earth, etc.)

-Doom (you could make the argument that there's a gulf between Doom OS and Doom Eternal, but then, Doom was always kinda bonkers - there's nothing in Eternal that feels out of place)

-Dragon Ball (started out as Journey to the West, went to planet-scale threats, to gods fighting over the multiverse)

-Enderverse (this is more minor, but at the start, humanity's confined to the Sol system, whereas by the end, FTL travel is cracked, numerous alien species have popped up, etc. However, definitely a case where this shift works contextually)

-The Expanse (...actually, just read the above, you get the idea)

-Final Fantasy (starts as "fantasy setting of not!Europe with airships, has since gone down the route of "anything goes, just stick a chocobo in there")

-James Bond (the level of seriousness is cyclical, but take the Bronsan run - GoldenEye is grounded, DAD ends with gene therapy, space lasers, and invisible cars)

-Jurassic Park (started out on one island, ended with dinosaurs roam the Earth)

-Lord of the Rings (started off with The Hobbit, then got a continent-spanning story with LotR, then The Silmarillion deals with literal gods fighting each other)

-Metal Gear (explained early in the thread)

-Mortal Kombat (starts with an island tournament, then an extra-dimensional tournament, then that dimension invades Earth, then there's multiple dimensions, then there's the One Being, then Armageddon threatening everything, then a reboot, then time manipulation, and then another reboot)

-Pirates of the Caribbean (starts with a simple pirate story, ends with pirate lore and whatnot, then gets more sedate again)

-Resident Evil (the entire span of RE1 to RE6, before things were dialed back again)

-Shannara (starts with bog standard fantasy, ends with...well, still kinda bog standard fantasy, but it's fantasy with airships and laser guns god damn it!)

-Terminator (there's a trend that began in T2 to keep beefing up Terminators to the point where the T-1000000000 is a thing that exists, plus what started out as a last ditch attempt at time travel became, in some cases, a setting where time travel is done on a whim and a dime)

-Warcraft (started as one war in one kingdom between two races, since then...well, demons, Void Lords, other planets, oh my!)

I fail to see how almost anything on your list started out as "(close to) mundane" or, in other words, close to reality.

 

[Asita]

Berserk, technically. But it does start In Media Res, with the first arc (The Black Swordsman Arc) occurring some time after the world becomes fantastical, but then spends the entire Golden Age Arc in a seemingly much less fantastical setting, culminating in the Eclipse making the world into the much more obviously spooky setting we saw in the prelude chapters.

 

[Absent]

I fail to see how almost anything on your list started out as "(close to) mundane" or, in other words, close to reality.

It's relative, but there's a difference between suspending disbelief on one premise (and watch reality unfold logically from it), and throwing all the possible fantasy premises at it.

And old peeve of mine about videogames is that you can't have, like in horror stories, the intrusion of one fantastic monster in our reality, without having all the others follow. You can have Dracula, a story about a vampire being real in "modern" times, in a book or in a movie. But as soon as it hits video games, it had so coexist with ghosts and werewolves and giant spiders and gnomes and banshees and zombie ghosts werewolf spider banshees.

So, it doesn't exactly start from mundane. But it's still fast fantasy inflation.

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

The Bob Morane novels span over 60 years. They started as grounded exotic adventures, then they embraced every contempary literary trend, from space opera to time travel to interdimensional voyages.

Strangely, it's the opposite with Tintin comics. They started very zany (Tintin is locked in a prison cell middle in the USSR, but notices a diving suit forgotten in a corner which gives him the idea to wear it, remove the wall's bricks and flee through the river) with epic scopes and prevailing justice, and, apart from an unfortunate incursion of UFOs which are kept as mysterious and abstract as possible, they ended in grounded "anti-heroic" "anti-adventures", where everything romantic is revealed an illusion : a whole album is set in their mansion, where all oddities turn out to be fake mysteries with no real baddies, another album features the series' old threatening big bads but completely deflates and ridiculizes them, another album reluctantly propels Tintin in a political conspiracy where he spends the whole story barely understanding the stakes and the plot, and ends up betrayed by the cliché old-faithful-friend-whose-life-he-had-formerly-saved. So, in a way, it starts with fanciful, whimsical epics, and ends up in a disillusioned, deconstructive tone. Even the UFO, just like the political plot, give this feeling that Tintin is not in charge, that he is just a wisp of straw carried away by more important forces he can't grasp. Realism catches up with fantasy and wish fulfillment.

The next project (after Alph'art) was supposed to be a Tintin adventure entirely contained in an airport. I really wish Hergé would have been able to complete it.

On a similar note, Asterix. The comics are rife with anachronisms, either as background gags or plot points. Asterix is obviously a work of humor but the only fantastic element in the early comics is the magic potion (and by extension Obelix). The average plotline has Romans trying to break a stalemate with the village they're trying to invade. But because there's no brute forcing the situation they start trying more outlandish, modern strategies like gentrifying the community or tanking their economy with capitalistic tactics. The whole thing never quite gets to Monkey Island levels of "50 BC as a theme park" but it definitely grows in that direction.

One of the latter post-Goscinny comics has UFOs and aliens (Asterix becomes entangled in a galactic American cartoons vs manga war, which also somehow serves as a critique of Bush-era politics). I haven't read it but that's when most people figured Asterix had ran its course.

 

[Absent]

I haven't read it but that's when most people figured Asterix had ran its course.

Yeah. It's atrociously bad. But all the post-goscinny ones are. One has Asterix almost drown but being saved by a helpful dolphin who pulls him to the shore, and Asterix greets it goodbye with a "thanks, friend" while the dolphin happily claps or something. Pure mickey mouse.

Uderzo was a genius graphic artist (in my eyes not even Gotlib reaches this perfection of realism/caricature balance, and very few reach his expressivity), but he's just incapable of writing Asterix. And of noticing it. It's heartbreaking in a way, because he keeps pointing out that Asterix was co-created by him and Goscinny, when people mention only Goscinny. It's a valid frustration (Asterix would not function without the wit of his art). But all the solo albums where he tried to prove himself as a scenarist are absolutely cringeworthy failures.

See also : Morris. The pre-Goscinny Lucky Luke are cool. The Goscinny ones are absolutely brilliant. The post-Goscinny ones are just unbearably bad.

Anyway, I digress.

 

[Thaluikhain]

And old peeve of mine about videogames is that you can't have, like in horror stories, the intrusion of one fantastic monster in our reality, without having all the others follow. You can have Dracula, a story about a vampire being real in "modern" times, in a book or in a movie. But as soon as it hits video games, it had so coexist with ghosts and werewolves and giant spiders and gnomes and banshees and zombie ghosts werewolf spider banshees.

It seems most vampire books have to do this as well.

Particularly annoying in that way back when, there wasn't a strict delineation between vampires and werewolves. Supernatural monster that looks like a person, but has animal tendencies and feeds on normal people? That wasn't a species, that was a one-off weird thing you didn't classify.

I've read it argued that games are responsible (at least in part) for this, once you give numbers to everything you end up with generic names for monsters given specific statlines that can be compared to others.

 

[Absent]

It seems most vampire books have to do this as well.

Particularly annoying in that way back when, there wasn't a strict delineation between vampires and werewolves. Supernatural monster that looks like a person, but has animal tendencies and feeds on normal people? That wasn't a species, that was a one-off weird thing you didn't classify.

I've read it argued that games are responsible (at least in part) for this, once you give numbers to everything you end up with generic names for monsters given specific statlines that can be compared to others.

Ah. I just blame modern thinking, enlightenment and the boom of biological taxonomy. A rational way of classifying the world. Medieval folklore was much more dreamlike and undefined, with giants/dwarves who would be indifferently gigantic or tiny, with breath/fat/health-stealing ghosts (or night mares) who would prolong a dead person's greed, with witches and shamans who'd leave their skin/clothes/body behind to roam as wolf doubles, etc. And indeed no clear distinction between monsters, phantoms, and their shifting traits. In fact, all these entities seemed deliciously abstract, undefined and difficult to visualize (like animal characters in native cosmological myths - they tell you for ages about serpents and at the very end of the story they reveal that's how they lost their legs.. and they've never told you how they looked like before).

And sometimes I just blame cinema. The development of visual arts, which imposes a fixed, defined image. The thing has to look like something. Like a collapsed quantum superposition. Before that requirement to "print" an image (without which we're frustrated nowadays), an entity had many more ways of being.

And sometimes I blame Bram Stoker, for his modernist, codifying take on vampires, which became a reference. Still, his Dracula could shapeshift into a wolf or a mist, if I remember well...

Gender identity is all fine and well. But we must restore the right to be monster-fluid.

 

[BrawlMan]

The later Tenchi series in the franchise are sort of an inversion of this. Don't get me wrong, the franchise is fantastical, but the later entries are nowhere near as fantastical as the original OVA. Tenchi Muyo! has the involvement of cosmic deities (Washu is one of the three goddesses), Ryoko is a homunculus, and more magic was involved. Tenchi Universe by comparison is much more mundane. Magic and sci-fi are still involved, but Washu is just a mad scientist. Ryoko is just a space pirate that is naturally strong with some of her own tech enchancements, but nowhere near the power level of her original counterpart. Yosho is not immortal and has no old man form. He actually aged to an old man and will pass away at some point. No cosmic beings are involved in the background.

The first In Love movie sorta makes up for this with the time travel and the main villain, but it does its own thing. In Love 2 (Tenchi Forever, and the final entry in the Universe series) grounds the series even further by keeping most of the magic to the minimum and turning the movie into a serious romance drama that surprisingly works. There is even an art shift where all the characters are drawn a bit more realisticly, but without the uncanny valley effect. Props to artists and animators on that.

Tenchi in Tokyo does a similar thing, but much worse in every category.