By the by, I loved the movie Road Warrior when I was a kid.I couldn't sit through the first minute as an adult, though, because that's when I realized that in all this gritty, post-apocalyptic nonsense, the roads we see are freshly painted and in remarkably good shape.
well, you have discovered the rule of 15 years. if you watched something less than 15 years and like it, DO NOT WATCH IT AGAIN. leave in your memory, a new experience can be very disappointing. Believe me, I watched He-man ...
[quote name='Heath' timestamp='1345084709' post='4970031']
By the by, I loved the movie Road Warrior when I was a kid.I couldn't sit through the first minute as an adult, though, because that's when I realized that in all this gritty, post-apocalyptic nonsense, the roads we see are freshly painted and in remarkably good shape.
well, you have discovered the rule of 15 years. if you watched something less than 15 years and like it, DO NOT WATCH IT AGAIN. leave in your memory, a new experience can be very disappointing. Believe me, I watched He-man ...
[/quote]Lol!
I'm a little confused by your subject heading. A Dystopian story is typically about a society in which something is horribly off. Think 1984, Fahrenheit 451, A Clockwork Orange, or Brave New World (The Time Machine is a mixture of the both Dystopian and Apocalyptic genres). I think the allure to these novels is driven by our own paranoia or pessimism. Our fear that if things are left unchanged our society could slide into becoming one of these worlds.
As far as post-apocalyptic I think the interest is a lot more complicated. As an artist it allows you to experiment, to tell your own legend about how the world will end. You can do almost anything and paint almost any picture. You can take real world buildings/cities and smash them however you like, or leave them standing hollow and haunted. It also allows a less restricted world. You want deserts to Road Warrior it up? Drop a few Nukes, have the Borg scoop up your cities, set the date several thousand years after most of the world has eroded away. It also allows the author the power of political commentary: what real world issues do you see as a likely cause for the end of the world? Resident Evil seems to think a corporation gone wild mixed with militaristic agendas will be part of the cause (even though I wouldn't classify RE as apocalyptic).
As an audience I think that we are frequently pondering the future, and for many people that includes wondering how and when the world will end. Sometimes our paranoia is piqued at an ominous news story (google Earth Moaning), and we look to literature and art to answer our curiosity on the subject. I'm sure the pool of people who think zombies will bring the end is small, but it's my opinion that the Zombie Meme is an entirely different beast than the Apocalyptic one; even if they operate within the same genre.
Dystopias are often exaggerations of fears we have about real life. An Apocalypse is an inversion, "The Other," a world where we're not living comfortably in suburbia every day.
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it gives the protagonist a lot to work towards, giving the game designer a wide pallet of challenges and dramatic stories to explore. If everything has gone wrong moral ambiguity is much more easily explored. Its like how medieval stories can get away with sexism. The apocalypse can be brutally violent and it makes sense. "Its the end of the world." This makes the protagonist appear much more noble and "right" against a backdrop of everything going wrong.
