In post-apocalyptic fiction there’s always a reason for how the wastelands came to be. These reasons aren’t always obvious for the characters and maybe even the audience won’t know for sure what actually happened. Sometimes it might even make the scenario more threatening when the audience doesn’t know what exactly caused the apocalypse. The creators of these stories, however, have to know who or what is responsible, otherwise their vision might be inconsistent.
In the following I will present 5 theories about who or what caused the apocalypse, complete with the associated characteristics (it is important to keep in mind that this ‘apocalypse’ I will be talking about, is always a human apocalypse, the definition of ‘post-apocalyptic’ here means ‘after the destruction of human civilization’):
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| Source: imdb |
- examples: most of the zombie apocalypses, 28 Days Later, Planet of the Apes, Maze Runner, Oryx and Crake
- characteristics: The apocalypse didn’t come suddenly and instead was accompanied by a continuous demise of civilization that the characters suffered through. There were and still are efforts to find a cure. Remnants of the civilization breakdown are everywhere as well as the infected. The infected typically are a grave danger and represent some form of corrupted humanity.
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| Source: filmstarts.de |
- examples: Hell, 2012
- characteristics: This genre could also be called ‘nature strikes back’. Movies like this often - though not always - have ecological backgrounds. Fact is, a natural disaster destroyed the world as we know it, be it solar flares (like in Hell), or the turning of poles (like in 2012 - even though this is an apocalyptic movie and does not deal with the ‘post’). The world has now become hostile to humans but not to nature per se. In fact, the longer this ‘post’ continues, the more nature can be seen thriving. This is, often, to show - drastically - humanity’s influence on the planet.
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| Source: filmstarts.de |
3. humans/war
- examples: The 100, Fallout, Mad Max
- characteristics: Humans are a very popular trigger of the apocalypse due to the genre’s preoccupation with criticizing current societal developments. Technically ‘a virus’ as well as ‘machines’ are often subclasses of ‘humans’ since humans often were the ones to design the virus and machines in question (technically even nature-apocalypses are sometimes facilitated by human negligence and/or direct influence like in Snowpiercer). What I mean here, however, is the destruction of the world through human war, often nuclear war. Nature is either dead, dying or hostile. There are bunkers and similar where people survived. Everybody not lucky enough to be in a bunker either evolved to live with the aftermath of the destruction or mutated.
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| Source: imdb |
- examples: Terminator, Matrix
- characteristics: In contrast to other post-apocalyptic wastelands that mostly lack electricity and anything that would need electricity due to the lack of power plants and the like, the wasteland of the machine-apocalypse is littered with active and working technology. Machines here are the enemy. There is a strict distinction between organic and artificial with organic being linked with good. Nature, here, is generally dead or dying as well. The possible thematic undercurrent is a criticism of humanity’s overreliance on technology.
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| Source: amazon |
5. aliens
- examples: Falling Skies, The 5th Wave, A Quiet Place
- characteristics: Humans never had a chance. The extraterrestrials were more advanced and stronger and they won. Somehow, however, humans managed to survive like the cockroaches we are. For the future there are two options: either the humans succeed in their desperate attempt to turn this lost fight around or the earth is destroyed once and for all. This apocalypse, too, features more technology than others, brought by the alien invaders. Basically the only sub-genre of the post-apocalyptic movie where humans are completely free of blame.
I’m posting this now since it has been in my draft for so long that I don’t quite remember where I was going with this. So, now it is simply an enumeration of possible causes of apocalypses in media. If you have any additions, write me a message.
Satori over and out
