“Apocalypse stories enduring appeal as a genre is in the thought experiment undertaken by the viewer or reader: if this actually happened, what kind of person would I be?”
“In this world civilization might have fallen, but so have all your debts. Your very existence might be threatened in your every waking moment, but you are made new. No trees may ever grow again, but who cares, you can prove your mettle against the world with nothing but a golf club at your disposal and see how far you get. This is the end of the world as escape fantasy.”
“You can become so used to the ways of thinking which allow you to strategically progress through the game that spending time in the post-apocalypse becomes not frightening, but deeply, viscerally pleasant. And therein lies the problem: not in the frittering away of leisure hours enmeshed in a richly realised fantasy world, but in getting comfortable with the idea that if the real world did end, and we had ended it, it might not actually be that bad.”
“All of these stories are at their core about scarcity and what will happen if new ways are not found to protect, produce and defend new resources (hint: it’s death). These are our anxieties of overconsumption and overpopulation and their resulting emissions and depletions writ large.”
“These fictional visions of End Times—zombies, an irradiated techno-dystopia, encroaching frozen wastes—are all spaces in which to achieve catharsis by safely exploring the anxieties of a post-social world without having to meaningfully engage with any of our current behaviours which are contributing to bringing it about in the real world—our rapidly dwindling resources and rising seas. Instead we are placated.”
“Our real world inability to drastically curb our consumptions mirrors the character’s loop in which they are stuck, perpetually moving in the same pattern, repeating the same behaviours, trying to escape the same threats by employing the same measures, their numbers thinning all the way. Nothing is changing and yet we keep watching, hoping that magically, someday, something will, just as long as we don’t have to do anything about it.”