I’ve watched and enjoyed so many of them but they really are just like a fascist fantasy. “Man if all the poors turned into zombies and tried to kill us we’d fucking OWN them, right?”
I don’t think it’s exactly fascist, but it is certainly spiritually adjacent. It’s important to recognize that Apocalypticism is a way older phenomenon than fascism or even capitalism. The feeling that the world is hopelessly broken, that everyone around you is alien and hostile, that no future can be imagined where things are better, and if one did imagine such then it would be impossible - those are all old friends to humanity.
The reason doomerism swings towards fascism today is because we live in capitalist societies, and that’s what those do in the face of crisis.
What’s interesting to me is how neo-liberalism and hyper-consumerism has stripped even explicitly fascist narratives of their optimism. Most apocalypse media has no Hyperborea, no Pre-lapsarian ideal to look back on. There is no Millenarian promise of the coming kingdom of god or a thousand year reich. So it ends up as this bleak nihilistic murder fest. In games it’s a hedonic treadmill of murder-loot-gearup-repeat. In shows it’s a stylized celebration of directionless violence. It’s 's zen fascism, forever stuck in an an endless, pointless now.
In conclusion. apocalypse media sucks, but maybe I should check out CDDA again, it’s been a few years
Most of the time it’s the poors surviving though lol. The elites are either irrelevant dirty people like everyone else, or they continue to rule and become targets by every survivor. I enjoyed the first season of Telltale’s Walking Dead because there are a lot of nuanced characters and motives
I’ve watched and enjoyed so many of them but they really are just like a fascist fantasy. “Man if all the poors turned into zombies and tried to kill us we’d fucking OWN them, right?”
I don’t think it’s exactly fascist, but it is certainly spiritually adjacent. It’s important to recognize that Apocalypticism is a way older phenomenon than fascism or even capitalism. The feeling that the world is hopelessly broken, that everyone around you is alien and hostile, that no future can be imagined where things are better, and if one did imagine such then it would be impossible - those are all old friends to humanity.
The reason doomerism swings towards fascism today is because we live in capitalist societies, and that’s what those do in the face of crisis.
What’s interesting to me is how neo-liberalism and hyper-consumerism has stripped even explicitly fascist narratives of their optimism. Most apocalypse media has no Hyperborea, no Pre-lapsarian ideal to look back on. There is no Millenarian promise of the coming kingdom of god or a thousand year reich. So it ends up as this bleak nihilistic murder fest. In games it’s a hedonic treadmill of murder-loot-gearup-repeat. In shows it’s a stylized celebration of directionless violence. It’s
's zen fascism, forever stuck in an an endless, pointless now.
In conclusion. apocalypse media sucks, but maybe I should check out CDDA again, it’s been a few years
Most of the time it’s the poors surviving though lol. The elites are either irrelevant dirty people like everyone else, or they continue to rule and become targets by every survivor. I enjoyed the first season of Telltale’s Walking Dead because there are a lot of nuanced characters and motives