Dunno how to explain why but they all annoy me.
So alot of imagined apocalypses are essentially power fantasies. The idea that some part of society is stopping you from actualizing some part of yourself. I occasionally imagine them too, the collapse of the state that wants to oppress me so that some other new non-oppressive state can emerge it’s kinda a big part of revolutionary fantasy too.
It’s just alot of writers want to actualize kinda crappy desires which honestly alienate me from the writers most of the time. Hence we get crappy apocalypse fantasies like zombie apocalypses. (A desire to indulge in righteous violence vindicating a gun fetishist while you consume as much as you can scavenge)
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?”
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 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
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
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.
