Dunno how to explain why but they all annoy me.
They all annoy me because they’re always like “look how capitalism caused this” and then instead of actually saying that’s what happened they go "oh actually it was because communists made them do it " or “actually it was because this one person nobody knew about pressed the big magic button that ruined society even though it was perfect before.”
That’s literally the progression of the canon of Fallout over the past ten years, and it drives me absolutely insane
Turning the Enclave from what was simply the escaped remnants of the fascistic US government into a seeeecret illuminati cabal group that conspired with Vault Tec to start the war because they’re eeeeevil is…so fucking lame
My god, don’t even get me started. You have to fuck up in a pretty big way to make me dislike “it was all capitalism and the fascist government’s fault” as a premise.
In my view it’s cause many of them start after the fun and interesting bits are over, so all you’re left with are vague implications and a depopulated world, which negates the stakes of “Apocalypse” and renders the story down into inter-personnel soap opera drama, but with dirty clothes
So many stories accidentally kill their own settings before the narrative even starts, they try to build a haunted house but end up with a monotone tomb
I’ve watched and enjoyed so many of them but they really are just like a fascist fantasy. “Man if all the poors turned into zombies and tried to kill us we’d fucking OWN them, right?”
I don’t think it’s exactly fascist, but it is certainly spiritually adjacent. It’s important to recognize that Apocalypticism is a way older phenomenon than fascism or even capitalism. The feeling that the world is hopelessly broken, that everyone around you is alien and hostile, that no future can be imagined where things are better, and if one did imagine such then it would be impossible - those are all old friends to humanity.
The reason doomerism swings towards fascism today is because we live in capitalist societies, and that’s what those do in the face of crisis.
What’s interesting to me is how neo-liberalism and hyper-consumerism has stripped even explicitly fascist narratives of their optimism. Most apocalypse media has no Hyperborea, no Pre-lapsarian ideal to look back on. There is no Millenarian promise of the coming kingdom of god or a thousand year reich. So it ends up as this bleak nihilistic murder fest. In games it’s a hedonic treadmill of murder-loot-gearup-repeat. In shows it’s a stylized celebration of directionless violence. It’s
's zen fascism, forever stuck in an an endless, pointless now.In conclusion. apocalypse media sucks, but maybe I should check out CDDA again, it’s been a few years
Most of the time it’s the poors surviving though lol. The elites are either irrelevant dirty people like everyone else, or they continue to rule and become targets by every survivor. I enjoyed the first season of Telltale’s Walking Dead because there are a lot of nuanced characters and motives
I’m always afraid to recommend it because I’ve never heard anyone talk about it- but I would recommend Station Eleven. Its post-apocalyptic after a covid-like disease. But unlike every other apocalyptic media it has so much love for people. It has some very sad moments but it’s so wholesome. And I loved their little traveling commune.
Yeah, Station Eleven is good. Just the backdrop of “traveling storyteller caravan that has a regular circuit of villages who support them” being a thing that can exist is such a dramatically optimistic (realistic, even) view of humanity compared to the norm.
It gets a lot of hate cause it’s pacing is very much like a novel (as it’s based on one), so it isn’t cliff hanger, binge-eligible trash like most TV.
It is one of the best shows I’ve ever seen, love it!
Even Adventure Time?
Adventure Time is post apocalyptic the same way humanity is the post apocalypse to the reign of dinosaurs.
We need more pre-apocalyptic media
Just right about before shit hits the fan.
I actually really like that vibe, the beginnings of Dawn and Shaun of the dead have such a great “quiet sagging apocalypse” feeling before things really fall apart.
The OG Dawn is fantastic for that. One of the main charactersays it outright. “We’re blowing it ourselves…”
They annoy me because, since all post-apocalypse fiction is developed under capitalism, it’s all basically the same. It’s just all American prepper fanfic. Cataclysmic event happens, and our lone hero is forced to defend himself (and maybe family) against the hordes. And usually insert some sort of authoritarian government that emerges that the hero must fight against. Government always bad, individualism good, beware the evil hordes. It’s honestly boring af.
Since I see others making recommendations, I’ll throw mine out there albeit reluctantly: Stephen King’s Dark Tower book series and graphic novels. It’s a bit like recommending LOST to someone (because King didn’t have some big plan so he goes down a bunch of roads that don’t go anywhere and the ending is kinda unsatisfying) but the post-apocalypse world building is really incredible. It’s set far in the future and while some things from our current world are still around, they are mostly just slowing breaking down and wearing out. The world has actually devolved into one that mixes the Old West with Arthurian legend - which sounds silly except King actually sells it really well.
The Stand (the book, not the miniseries) is honestly pretty great too. King might be a lib now but before he got sober the man could really write some good fiction.
Generally these films/stories don’t do a great job of world building in my experience. If there has been a global disaster that has killed off lots of people, the economic and materialist reality would be highly cooperative.
Humans are highly pro-social, and the ‘kill to survive’ foundation of the storytelling just seems overly grimdark. Competitive warlording is a terrible way to run a society.
There’s this impulse to make the stories conform to a feudalist to frontier continuum that seems to be pretty shallow. I guess it makes it easy to rely on dramatic tropes from legacy media though.
One exception to this might be On The Beach iirc. Most of the plot involves the characters venturing out into the apocalyptic world because there might be other survivors sending out signals. But the social structure of the enclave the characters live in seems mostly pretty chill from what I recall. Not really any major human conflict in the story.
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It’s an old one, but Roadside Picnic and its loose movie adaptation STALKER are both very good. Not quite a “true” post-apoc as it’d be today, in that The Zone is a small place in a “normal” world that the protagonists choose to enter, but they certainly confront the ending of “what came before” through an Event of sudden and total alienation.
The Earth Abides is also good, a very early story about the aftermath of a superplague. Life goes on, and humans remain human.
I mostly agree but i’d recommend The Quiet Earth (1985) and Miracle Mile (1988) as a couple exceptions
Is it the existential dread?
Nah. I think it’s more the nihilistic “human nature” bullshit that inevitably permeates the genre that annoys me. It also hinges on the presumption that current society is the only thing stopping people from acting like “savages”.
Give me real “Without god, what stops you from doing insert horrible thing no reasonable human would ordinarily do?” vibes.
hmmmmm yeah, I can definitely see that.
They all wanna be Romero so bad, well guess what assholes: it got old even when he did it, and you’re not him
Watch raised by wolves
Nausicaa, both the movie and the manga are so good though. Though they’re more post-post apocalypse.
i took a class in college about exactly this, basically the thing most disaster movies get wrong is that humans everywhere generally stick together and cooperate during emergencies, with the exception of places with pre-existing racial/ethnic conflicts in which case the racists will start killing. in pretty much every scenario its better to have extra hands/more expertise/trading partners, if there is literally no supplies except what you can steal from bunkers you simply aren’t going to last very long no matter what you do.
also like where tf do they get the food to feed everyone in mad max, its not like their desert apocalypse villages are surrounded by miles of lush irrigated farmland or anything. fiction in general just has no comprehension of how much space and resources and effort it takes to grow enough food to feed even small populations.
killing people won’t magically make corn grow out of the blasted soot-covered radioactive nuclear apocalypse soil, but keeping them around to shit out free fertilizer will help at least.
Idk man, Warframe is pretty sick although it’s not a movie/show but rather a game
I’ve also read some cool comments on the Fallout series
