holy smokes

elbiotipo:

txttletale:

there is something deeply deeply misanthropic and reactionary in the way that a lot of post-apocalyptic fiction assumes that after the apocalypse a significant chunk of the population would just becoem Murder Sickos who Love Murder and go around Murdering for funsies

Very Usamerican thing to assume that everybody would just pick a 2nd Ammendment Self Defense Gun and start making their own microstate to defend against nameless raiders, too. If the Apocalypse happened tomorrow here*, I wouldn’t even know how where to get a gun, and it would probably be at the bottom of my priorities. For what? To get food or supplies? From whom, exactly? it’s the post apocalypse. To create my own warlord mini-state? It’s the post apocalypse!

I think the prevalence of post-apocalypse settings in the US comes from a “frontier mentality” that this Wouldn’t Be So Bad, Actually. It would be an opportunity for men to become men and civilize the wild west and you probably see what I’m going with this. The feeling of “adventure”, instead of the real horror that an apocalypse would bring (see, for example, Threads from the UK). I won’t go as far as to say post-apocalytic fiction is a purely Usamerican phenomenon (there is El Eternauta for one), but it as an almost positive phenomenon, as in an opportunity for adventure or rebuilding society from the ashes, is very Usamerican, and I have a feeling it’s from a society that hasn’t experienced societal collapse in the traumatic, incredibly damaging way that it happens in real life. I’m just saying that it feels less appealing to write about society collapsing and everybody dying when you live in a country where that happened in your parent’s lifetime.

(that being said, there is a lot of very good and thoughtful Usamerican post-apocalyptic ficion, like A Canticle For Leibowitz, Alas Babylon…)

*another common thing to post-apocalyptic settings is to assume with all major cities and things destroyed, people just will forget about technology, or sometimes, very balantly, with the First World gone, everybody else descends into the Dark Ages. Just here in my city in the middle of nowhere in a third world country, far away from any plausible military targets, there are at least 4 technical institutes full of bibliography and who knows how many engineers, technicians… once the basic needs of society are satisfied, any determined group could try to restore things as best as they can, no matter if the MIT or Oxford is destroyed. You just don’t “forget” plumbing or electricity, but you need people to maintain them.