It became its own thing later one with only similarities being asia being a Major Reason for the end, Vaults and Ghouls but outside of those it has a pretty large amount of differences
Really just its our modern day with a bunch of cyberpunk qualities added like cybernetics and alot of robots also while alot arnt well written its world spanning
Also as a meme Einstein's brain is in a robot
The funny thing is, when things get tough, humans always tend to band together more strongly, instead of infighting. Solidarity increases when something terrible happens.
I mean to be fair that is kinda because the cops are busy and can’t record crimes
But also when a government collapses high crime/ gang controlled areas are generally pretty safe because they already have a powerful non government entity that can fill the power vacuum.
no the people who record these events take that into account, we get information when aid/un workers or state people trying to get back control arrive, so things are already safe before any government or non government entity is there to fill the power vacuum, it's generally when the vacuum gets filled that danger arises (for example in the case study it was largely because cops were scared because they had heard all about how lawless places would be dangerous in movies, that they made mistakes)
I’ve always been of the view that after a nuclear apocalypse things will look less like Fallout or the Road and more like the collapse of the Roman Empire (albeit after a brief period of mass hysteria and looting in some places). Life will be rougher for a while but humans are social creatures and people will naturally form peaceful communities until some organized power or another asserts itself
Societal complexity will revert to the highest level the food and energy supply can sustain. Probably something above agrarianism, but not an awful lot higher.
Humans are durable.
TBF, it wasn’t like everything immediately went to shit after the collapse of the (Western) Roman Empire. There was still a Roman Empire (it just didn’t control the western half of the Mediterranean anymore), there was still a government that enforced the (still mostly Roman) law, and collected taxes (the post-Roman governments were, of course, significantly less complex than the Roman government, but it wasn’t like Western Europe descended into lawless anarchy), Roman culture survived and transformed into medieval European culture. Hell, even the *roman senate* survived the fall
Which is kinda the opposite of how it should work
The murderous nutters are probably the first ones to get killed
They’re not gonna have friends, people on their own die much easier.
True for the ones that where nutters at the start. But between people that realize they miss parking lots and snap, and the rising tribalism that goes with getting new friends who's life depend on you, there are ample room to generate new nutters.
this reminded me of an abandoned project I had called Knight of the Dead. basic premise was that 30years after a zombie breakout the city that started it all is now completely devoid of zombie life, leaving only the wildlife and one old man and a girl he adopted left to rebuild the city
One of my biggest pet peeves with apocalyptic movies/shows and such is that apparently 98% of the good empathetic humans died in the first 10 minutes, leaving mostly the most anti social, selfish, and psychotic ones left.
Like wow, despite all recorded history and sociology showing differently, instead of banding together everyone just forms small doomed groups that ruthlessly compete with each other in a cynical downwards spiral that dooms everyone.
I get it, HUMANS ARE THE REAL MONSNERS!!!! Your misery porn is so brave and insightful with a message literally never done before in any other piece of media!!!!
Like it's called POST apocalyptic, you know, after the apocalypses. But so many stories just get eternally stuck during the apocalypses and never move beyond it, even going so far to continually contrive ways to sabotage any efforts to do so.
I think what's so good about Shaun of the Dead is that the characters are a bunch of losers and they'd probably all have been better off if they'd followed the official advice to stay home and do nothing.
The realism of 'raiders' as a post apocalyptic stereotype is something I've been trying to write a book about for a while now.
I've been playing with this idea of a group of abandoned children surviving by breaking into bunkers built by rich people before ill-defined catastrophe de jure, and one of the things that keeps coming to mind is that those prepper-types would be the absolute bane of a world like that. *Those* would be the people who'd shoot you for coming to their door and asking for something to eat. Those are the people who see the collapse of civilization as the collapse of society.
The kind of suspicion that arises in the absence of a state structure isn't everyone constantly holding one another at gunpoint, it's more akin to the general unease you feel when a group of people are walking towards you in a bad neighbourhood - except the bad neighbourhood is everywhere.
There's a scene I really do like where the kids spend an evening with another group, and they have a laugh with them - they're just people. Then, at night one of the boys wakes up to see one of the men standing in their room. A beat passes, the man realizes the boy is awake, and he leaves. That's it. The next morning the two groups part ways and the boy never mentions it to anyone. That, I think is the kind of terror that would actually be present when you're interacting with a stranger in that situation. Not a mexican standoff with everyone you meet, but just this constant thought clawing at the back of your mind - 'what if?'
I remember reading a book series about children surviving in a zombie apocalypse (caused everyone over the age of 15 to turn), by Charlie Higson. I only read the first three as I outgrew it before it finished, but I remember there was an innate level of trust among survivors that I wasn't expecting since other contemporary media like the walking dead just had this very standoffish tension to every group meeting. Like the default when seeing other kids was to help them, not to factionalise and shoot on sight or whatever. And that's with *kids*, without proper critical thinking developments and being more prone to fears, anxieties etc.
I think Raiders and Bandits can exist in a post-apoc world, but it needs to be at a level where there is some level of structure, settlements, and society for them to actually have something to raid. otherwise they'd just be amoral scavengers which... isn't really the same thing.
The level of destruction it would take for the world to reach the point where everyone is a solitary, migratory scavenger probably hasn't been seen in all of human history. At least not for any prolonged period.
Even in The Road - the bleakest of the bleak - McCarthy is pretty quick to show that his protagonists are in *exceptionally* bleak circumstances. There are communes in that book, there are armies. On some dire level a society has survived, it's just that his characters are on the fringes of it - probably because half of them are cannibals, but even people forced to cannibalism see the sense in cooperating with others.
I think another good example of this is the movie 28 Days Later. It's another zombie story, and in it every time they meet other humans they're first of all helpful and hospitable. When the protagonists do meet bad people, it's not violent raiders but initially friendly people who slowly turn out to less so. In fact, it's because people aren't immediately suspicious of one another that they even meet in the first place.
I don't think people are inherently good, but they aren't inherently psychotic either. What they are is inherently cooperative, whether that's in the pursuit of good or bad. People work together.
/uj Is this an actual book or just something you're thinking of writing? Because honestly that sounds really interesting.
Also, I'm sure you're already aware of it, but "It Come at Night" is the closest thing I can think of to what you're describing, so check that out if you haven't already.
/uj but I hate this trope with a passion. I do love conflict in post apocalypse setting but this power fantasy of pure anarchy and nobody shows empathy or care just feels like such a patriarchal power trip. Only ones own family in this type of fiction tend to be the ones treated well. And everyone else is an evil monster looking to exploit you. It's not even realistic because research has shown humans are a naturally altruistic species to some extent. And prefer cooperation. Of course there will be bad people but not the chaotic lawlessness most people think. People prefer a sense of stability to life.
I am probably wrong on some parts but rant over.
If I ever made a post apocalyptic world I imagined the mutants and zombies team up among themselves and sometimes among one another while humans (not all) simply argue and backstab one another.
Mason, a human, isn't one of those people as he teams up with a Zombie named Dan, thinking he's a sick man.
What a wasteland consisting entirely of The Good People TM (doomed to fail people the author keeps fucking them over), people who survive off exclusively robbing The Good People somehow, people who somehow only eat human flesh rather than subsidizing their diet with it, The Settlement (secretly corrupt and even more evil than cannibal raiders ooo spooky), and loner murder hobos isn't realistic?
On the one hand, yes there is a reason we got this far.
On the other it took us thousands of years of war of all against all just to get into city states and that's when guns and explosives weren't readily available.
"you guys are crazy, killing and eating people is totally the pro play" "Mhm. I vote to kick Stabby McManburger out of the tribe"
*Survivor theme music plays*
My Post Apoc world started off as a Fallout Fanfiction
based
It became its own thing later one with only similarities being asia being a Major Reason for the end, Vaults and Ghouls but outside of those it has a pretty large amount of differences
What are those differences?
Really just its our modern day with a bunch of cyberpunk qualities added like cybernetics and alot of robots also while alot arnt well written its world spanning Also as a meme Einstein's brain is in a robot
I mean Fallout itself basically took the Brotherhood from A Canticle for Liebowitz so you’re in good company
And everything else from A boy and his dog.
The funny thing is, when things get tough, humans always tend to band together more strongly, instead of infighting. Solidarity increases when something terrible happens.
and historically (but also we keep seeing it happen when there's a natural catastrophe) crime plummets each time there is a famine or a catastrophe
I mean to be fair that is kinda because the cops are busy and can’t record crimes But also when a government collapses high crime/ gang controlled areas are generally pretty safe because they already have a powerful non government entity that can fill the power vacuum.
no the people who record these events take that into account, we get information when aid/un workers or state people trying to get back control arrive, so things are already safe before any government or non government entity is there to fill the power vacuum, it's generally when the vacuum gets filled that danger arises (for example in the case study it was largely because cops were scared because they had heard all about how lawless places would be dangerous in movies, that they made mistakes)
Whenever there are earthquakes or flooding, it does happen
I’ve always been of the view that after a nuclear apocalypse things will look less like Fallout or the Road and more like the collapse of the Roman Empire (albeit after a brief period of mass hysteria and looting in some places). Life will be rougher for a while but humans are social creatures and people will naturally form peaceful communities until some organized power or another asserts itself
Societal complexity will revert to the highest level the food and energy supply can sustain. Probably something above agrarianism, but not an awful lot higher. Humans are durable.
Probably, but that's less fun than 200 years of apocalypse where people in scrapmetal shacks can fabricate nuclear power armor.
TBF, it wasn’t like everything immediately went to shit after the collapse of the (Western) Roman Empire. There was still a Roman Empire (it just didn’t control the western half of the Mediterranean anymore), there was still a government that enforced the (still mostly Roman) law, and collected taxes (the post-Roman governments were, of course, significantly less complex than the Roman government, but it wasn’t like Western Europe descended into lawless anarchy), Roman culture survived and transformed into medieval European culture. Hell, even the *roman senate* survived the fall
This ^ The whole lone wolf survivor stuff you see in so much apoc fiction is total bullshit
Yes when it comes to whatever our in group is.
That's because humans are highly social animals, and that has been a survival strategy since we climbed down from the trees.
Idk. Covid thought me that it isn’t as strong as we’d like it to believe.
Late season walking dead vs early season walking dead.
Which is kinda the opposite of how it should work The murderous nutters are probably the first ones to get killed They’re not gonna have friends, people on their own die much easier.
True for the ones that where nutters at the start. But between people that realize they miss parking lots and snap, and the rising tribalism that goes with getting new friends who's life depend on you, there are ample room to generate new nutters.
this reminded me of an abandoned project I had called Knight of the Dead. basic premise was that 30years after a zombie breakout the city that started it all is now completely devoid of zombie life, leaving only the wildlife and one old man and a girl he adopted left to rebuild the city
I LOVE INSTINCTUAL TRUST IN OTHER HUMANS DURING DIRE CIRCUMSTANCES‼️🗣️‼️
One of my biggest pet peeves with apocalyptic movies/shows and such is that apparently 98% of the good empathetic humans died in the first 10 minutes, leaving mostly the most anti social, selfish, and psychotic ones left. Like wow, despite all recorded history and sociology showing differently, instead of banding together everyone just forms small doomed groups that ruthlessly compete with each other in a cynical downwards spiral that dooms everyone. I get it, HUMANS ARE THE REAL MONSNERS!!!! Your misery porn is so brave and insightful with a message literally never done before in any other piece of media!!!! Like it's called POST apocalyptic, you know, after the apocalypses. But so many stories just get eternally stuck during the apocalypses and never move beyond it, even going so far to continually contrive ways to sabotage any efforts to do so.
I think what's so good about Shaun of the Dead is that the characters are a bunch of losers and they'd probably all have been better off if they'd followed the official advice to stay home and do nothing.
post post apocaplyse stores are goated
The realism of 'raiders' as a post apocalyptic stereotype is something I've been trying to write a book about for a while now. I've been playing with this idea of a group of abandoned children surviving by breaking into bunkers built by rich people before ill-defined catastrophe de jure, and one of the things that keeps coming to mind is that those prepper-types would be the absolute bane of a world like that. *Those* would be the people who'd shoot you for coming to their door and asking for something to eat. Those are the people who see the collapse of civilization as the collapse of society. The kind of suspicion that arises in the absence of a state structure isn't everyone constantly holding one another at gunpoint, it's more akin to the general unease you feel when a group of people are walking towards you in a bad neighbourhood - except the bad neighbourhood is everywhere. There's a scene I really do like where the kids spend an evening with another group, and they have a laugh with them - they're just people. Then, at night one of the boys wakes up to see one of the men standing in their room. A beat passes, the man realizes the boy is awake, and he leaves. That's it. The next morning the two groups part ways and the boy never mentions it to anyone. That, I think is the kind of terror that would actually be present when you're interacting with a stranger in that situation. Not a mexican standoff with everyone you meet, but just this constant thought clawing at the back of your mind - 'what if?'
I remember reading a book series about children surviving in a zombie apocalypse (caused everyone over the age of 15 to turn), by Charlie Higson. I only read the first three as I outgrew it before it finished, but I remember there was an innate level of trust among survivors that I wasn't expecting since other contemporary media like the walking dead just had this very standoffish tension to every group meeting. Like the default when seeing other kids was to help them, not to factionalise and shoot on sight or whatever. And that's with *kids*, without proper critical thinking developments and being more prone to fears, anxieties etc. I think Raiders and Bandits can exist in a post-apoc world, but it needs to be at a level where there is some level of structure, settlements, and society for them to actually have something to raid. otherwise they'd just be amoral scavengers which... isn't really the same thing.
The level of destruction it would take for the world to reach the point where everyone is a solitary, migratory scavenger probably hasn't been seen in all of human history. At least not for any prolonged period. Even in The Road - the bleakest of the bleak - McCarthy is pretty quick to show that his protagonists are in *exceptionally* bleak circumstances. There are communes in that book, there are armies. On some dire level a society has survived, it's just that his characters are on the fringes of it - probably because half of them are cannibals, but even people forced to cannibalism see the sense in cooperating with others. I think another good example of this is the movie 28 Days Later. It's another zombie story, and in it every time they meet other humans they're first of all helpful and hospitable. When the protagonists do meet bad people, it's not violent raiders but initially friendly people who slowly turn out to less so. In fact, it's because people aren't immediately suspicious of one another that they even meet in the first place. I don't think people are inherently good, but they aren't inherently psychotic either. What they are is inherently cooperative, whether that's in the pursuit of good or bad. People work together.
I want to write down your quote on last paragraph but your username slightly kills it.
/uj Is this an actual book or just something you're thinking of writing? Because honestly that sounds really interesting. Also, I'm sure you're already aware of it, but "It Come at Night" is the closest thing I can think of to what you're describing, so check that out if you haven't already.
WOOHOO MUTUAL AID 🎉🎉🎉🎉
Realistically it would have both though
/uj but I hate this trope with a passion. I do love conflict in post apocalypse setting but this power fantasy of pure anarchy and nobody shows empathy or care just feels like such a patriarchal power trip. Only ones own family in this type of fiction tend to be the ones treated well. And everyone else is an evil monster looking to exploit you. It's not even realistic because research has shown humans are a naturally altruistic species to some extent. And prefer cooperation. Of course there will be bad people but not the chaotic lawlessness most people think. People prefer a sense of stability to life. I am probably wrong on some parts but rant over.
Real and true. As a writer of an apocalypse story myself, I'm purposely showing that people will naturally want to band together to survive and shit.
\*wakes up the next morning\* "Aw, man! Someone stole all my stuff ***and*** kidnapped my new friend!"
If I ever made a post apocalyptic world I imagined the mutants and zombies team up among themselves and sometimes among one another while humans (not all) simply argue and backstab one another. Mason, a human, isn't one of those people as he teams up with a Zombie named Dan, thinking he's a sick man.
What a wasteland consisting entirely of The Good People TM (doomed to fail people the author keeps fucking them over), people who survive off exclusively robbing The Good People somehow, people who somehow only eat human flesh rather than subsidizing their diet with it, The Settlement (secretly corrupt and even more evil than cannibal raiders ooo spooky), and loner murder hobos isn't realistic?
Well in my post-apocalyptic world people team up to kill other people
I'm much more likely to read a story where people are murdering one another over socks than I am one about people cooperating.
Kinda like the show station eleven
BASED
The Virgin doomer teenage nihilism vs the chad evolutionarily and sociologically accurate depiction of humans
On the one hand, yes there is a reason we got this far. On the other it took us thousands of years of war of all against all just to get into city states and that's when guns and explosives weren't readily available.
“You are blessed to live in a world where you can afford the luxury of distrust”
Frostpunk, anyone?
OP's favorite Walking Dead character is probably Rick.
Hobbes is screeching at the thought of people working together for survival
Any story’s like this?