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apocalyptic settings in media

we stick a knife into a nuke! over the years of human history it has become apparent that we tend to have a morbid curiosity if society deteriorated or if some external force wipes all of us out. what would that mayhem look like, the destruction of all our progress? i know that this stuff is not that niche because it has been done so many times. i would like to recount some instances that i am aware of before this idea for an article fizzles out.

act one: small scale disaster

stories have settings right? they usually should, if you have a story set in a blank space, you still have a setting. for most things i have seen regarding this type of story or other things, the setting usually needs to be centralized. a complex end of the world would be a nightmare to cover if you had to list the effects it would have on the entire world. that is simply too many countries and people and other things to even consider. the biggest example i can think of is the 1984 movie threads, which is an absolutely terrifying film about the aftermath of a nuclear warhead landing on a british city. if you need a good scare, watch this movie. anyways, the majority of the plot centers around characters introduced at the beginning of the film going through the first days after the bomb, then weeks, months, etc. people you are introduced to either live or die and any government and structure is reduced to nothing. where this film succeeds is how it holds nothing back in showing you just how harrowing the city has become after its destruction. the end is kind of a slap in the face telling you that nothing really gets better.

act 1.5: de-darkifying things

the previous stuff got extremely dark and i honestly couldn't figure out a good way to string that stuff together with the other stuff i was going to include, so im not going to put it together. the lighter stuff will go here into their own little sub sub article write up things.

what if everyone just disappeared?

shin megami tensei nocturne is a jrpg. despite the fact that the genre that it is in tends to grow mold due to how nasty some of the people can be, i wouldn't regard this as your typical jrpg. instead of a lively cast of characters fighting to save the world from mr. finger, you start at the end of the world with everybody dying while the world is put into a state of limbo. instead of people, the role is filled by "demons", who can be anything from deities to characters from folktales. there are also these clay people things but i wont talk about them. still, the general lack of humans leave the setting harrowingly empty, it is nowhere near devoid of life but walking around in the game just makes you feel kind of alone, which in this case might be a good thing.

what if everybody died off?

i have a gut feeling that i will just be talking about video games for the rest of this article. i dont think the portal series really needs an introduction, but in case if it does, here it is. the portal series takes place within the half-life universe (another video game) and revolves around a test subject for a portal device who then uses that portal device to escape her test lab. she escapes but gets dragged back in the lab and is promptly stored in a sort of cryostasis. thats portal 1 done. portal 2 takes place in that same lab but in an unspecified (but implied to be gargantuan) amount of years in the future. what we do know is that by this time people have died out (but birds still exist) and the once lavish and clean lab has now been turned into a deteriorating muddle of a place. this type of apocalypse, one i will call simply extinction, is one that i hear being talked about a lot but nothing else really in terms of media, so to see something like this (especially in a video game) is a bit thought provoking

act two: large scale disasters

here is where my knowledge of fiction regarding this topic ends here, so this article will end here. but i know plenty of examples of this in actual history (and other smaller scale stuff too), so maybe i might actually make a article regarding actual cases of apocalypse within the annals of time. that will have to be another day though as i am quite busy. needless to say, i will update this section in case anything pops up. until then, toodles.

ps: heres a list of stuff i would have put in here (not really)