Breaking News: The Apocalypse is Irrelevant

No one likes a good apocalypse as much as me. that's what I thought, anyway, until I found out someone wrote an entire thesis on post-apocalyptic fiction. Her article, up at the much beloved io9 blog, is a pretty good summary of what and why apocalyptic literature means so much even when we have no idea how or why the world ended in the first place.

Disaster porn is no longer the point of the apocalypse. It doesn't matter how the world ends, just that it does. Making it to the End doesn't mean the story's finished; much of the time, it's only just gotten started. Stories of the End have never been about ending – they're about the beginning that comes after.

The bit about disaster porn is debatable, at least in the all powerful realm of the feature film, where the image, enhanced by calorie-induced popcorn euphoria, reigns supreme. The chance to watch every familiar feature of our modern world be destroyed is, I think one of the major drawing points for some of the most popular Armageddon stories, from Dawn of the Dead to 2012. But the also arguably recent tendency for global calamities to not be explained is fascinating and something I also noticed.

A video of Ms. Chanda Phelan presenting her thesis can be found at Vimeo here, and more random thought by her can be found at her blog.