In the past I’ve raged against some cable exclusives distinguished (even if on occasion rightly) for being “good” TV like The Walking Dead and Game of Thrones because they endorse a really anti-social understanding of human relationships.1 These texts discuss an “inevitable” and desperate microsociety in the context of the world’s end (in the case of the former), or the … Continue reading A Garbage Wanderer’s Guide to the Apocalypse
Tropes are difficult to work with. They’re broadly useful to tease apart patterns but because they interact with one another, each individual instance of a trope will slightly escape perfect definition. Encountering this uniqueness is where we have to do the work of reading and figuring out just how texts co-mingle to communicate something greater than the … Continue reading Girl at the End of the World
Post-apocalyptic fiction continually attempts to project itself into the future by resisting endings; each ending becomes instead an opportunity for continuation. Storytelling is the main method by which post-apocalyptic fiction attempts to resist closure, and this method can be traced back to the roots of the genre itself. Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, published in … Continue reading “If you can read this, LEAVE!!!” Storytelling in Left 4 Dead and Zone One
Dennis Scimeca wrote an article for Unwinnable‘s fear theme week that I enjoyed reading and I encourage others to read it as well.1 Scimeca’s thesis is that, for all the horror and apocalypse fiction floating around (and there’s a lot), there’s an almost wistful longing for the end of all things because the world as … Continue reading And I Feel Fine
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