Rawle Nyanzi

A while back, I wrote a post about why I disliked the post-apocalyptic genre. In short, I find the genre bleak and hopeless in spite of its promise of social rebirth and its destruction of social complexity.

But friend of the blog Misha Burnett pointed out another aspect of the genre, one I think is very important:

Over on Twitter you described the genre as “misery porn”, but the kind of thing I am talking about is more of “guilt porn”. There is an assumption–often stately flatly, but sometimes only implied–that the cataclysm was deserved. A nuclear war caused by imperialist warmongers or an ecological disaster caused by greedy corporations, for example.

Those kinds of stories are anti-civilization. The villains are usually the ones trying to rebuild some kind of structure, usually military or religious (or both) in nature. The good guys (such as they are) tend to be parasitic scavengers fulfilling some version of a “all the bad rich people are dead and we get their stuff” fantasy.

Even if the “good guys” win, there is no sense that they intend to do anything other than root through the trash of the old world until all the canned beans are gone. It’s the juvenile nihilism of trust fund brats who can’t think past their next drink or their next screw.

The main idea is that the post-apocalypse is meant to put humanity in its place and punish it for its so-called arrogance.

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