 So, the post-apocalyptic genre is obviously pretty huge, like it's huge to the point where it's not even really a genre anymore, so much as just a thing that often happens in all sorts of stories. Humans have been imagining end-of-the-world scenarios basically forever. Like you go back to ancient Sumeria and Babylon and stuff, they had old myths about the end of the world. And the reason for this is probably because there's been so many big disasters for as long as humans have been around. At some point, a comet hit the earth and killed all of humanity, except for 10,000 people. Or at other points there have been massive floods and earthquakes and storms and droughts and just things that made people think that the gods were angry with them for whatever reason and so they just told stories about it. And that's been going on forever and it's been popularized and refined in the modern day and I don't know, I kind of just wanted to talk about it, so here's all the different types of apocalypses. This is the introduction song. It's not very good but it's not too long. Now when I say apocalypse here, I mean just the end of civilization. I don't necessarily mean like the end of planet earth or the end of all of humanity. I just mean the end of human civilization as we know it and the death of a whole bunch of people. And so it brings us back to a more primitive state, let's say. And this sort of thing has happened in real life. After the plague wiped out most of the American Indians, they were left kind of like that. Bunch of their civilizations fell and those left were basically just nomadic hunter-gatherers and then they got conquered and shit. The bronze age collapse, another pretty good example, they did eventually get back on their feet but everything fell apart for a couple hundred years. The fall of the western Roman Empire, these sorts of things have happened before. So when I say apocalypse, that's basically what I'm talking about. Only in stories it's usually most of the world, if not the entire world, falls into disrepair like that. So you can broadly split these into three categories. Category one is natural. Some sort of natural cause to the apocalypse. And basically that just means humans didn't cause it and in many cases humans may try to stop it but they're unable to do anything about it. So there's a couple different types of this. A pretty popular one for a while was asteroids. You know like we had Deep Impact and Armageddon were both movies about astronauts trying to redirect a big asteroid before it hit the earth and killed most everybody. And then Remnants is a book series about people leaving the earth to go colonize somewhere else before the asteroid comes and kills everybody. You know that's something that maybe hasn't happened in like recent memory, in recent history. But the possibility is there. Like every few years there's some sensationalist news story about how, oh there's a big asteroid that NASA just found and it might come and hit the earth at some point. Who knows? Like that happens every couple of years. So I guess it's just a thing that people default to when they don't really know a better cause for the apocalypse. Volcanoes is another one which is less common unfortunately because I think it introduces some interesting possibilities but you know it's not very common. And it's almost always the Yellowstone Supervolcano too. This would be stuff like Ashfall which I did a review of the first book of a long time ago or Supervolcano which I also did a review of the first book in that series a long time ago. And yeah this one also is just a thing that is in the back of a lot of people's minds but you don't see it used very often. And then there's of course just something happens that makes life on earth impossible or at least human life on earth impossible like Interstellar for good or ill. I really like that movie a lot of people don't. That one is about a blight that is killing off most of the world's plant life particularly the crops that people eat you know. So soon enough humanity will not only starve to death but the blight is also apparently sucking the oxygen out of the air and so there will be none left for people to breathe they'll all suffocate. So basically what I'm getting at is natural apocalypses that's usually just like yeah shit happens bro you know there's sometimes life just fucks you and you got to deal with it. Like a lot of these ones are about preventing the apocalypse or at least escaping the apocalypse maybe but very few of them take place afterwards. I'm not sure why that is but you know that's that's just what they're like. The second type of apocalypse would be man made you know this one would be it's the fault of humans and this this category has a lot more variety usually because there's a bunch of different types there is war and nuclear war is the most common one you know people finally launch the missiles they kill most humans in the initial blast and then radiation kills a bunch more and then the dust and fallout causes a global cooling trend and there's nuclear winter which kills off a bunch of people and just life sucks for a long time. Sometimes if you want to be more cartoony with it then you might have like mutated animals and stuff as well which are also a threat after the bombs dropped but not always. But then there's other types of war that are sometimes used as well which is why I lump them together like occasionally you'll see biological war which is where something goes out and like you know chemicals or whatever just poisons the earth makes it so that plants and animals can't live and then the humans usually die out not long after. So stuff that does this would be like the fallout games Metro 2033 or the Blade Runner series both the book and the movies which are fairly different from one another and then there is a plague you know just some sort of plague comes out usually a super flu for whatever reason and it just spreads around and it kills the vast majority of the human population before anyone can really figure out what to do with it and usually usually in this one there are people who survive but it's because they're immune you know it never shows people who survive because they hold themselves up on an island and didn't let the infection through it never shows people who survive because someone managed to make a vaccine before everything fell apart but they were only able to distribute it to a certain number of people beforehand like that never happens for whatever reason it's always just a small number of people won the lottery I'm not I'm not sure why but you know examples of this would be stuff like the Stan 12 monkeys or the last man and when I say the last man I mean the Mary Shelley story the last man I'm not talking about the comic series why the last man now the plague can be natural but it pretty much never is like usually it's a man-made virus which gets out and you know it's always a virus to it's never like bacteria or anything for whatever reason but yeah that it's pretty much always man-made and it gets out and kills everybody somehow and honestly I'm really interested to see how this one will change in the coming years because obviously we're kind of in the midst of a giant pandemic at the moment which has killed millions of people and even beyond that has left a bunch of other people with like damage to their lungs and such and I don't know that's a separate discussion but I am interested in seeing how this will change in the future because I mean now we've seen how people will react to this sort of thing so there's probably going to have to be in future stories about this there's going to have to be a large group of people who will just actively do the stupidest shit they possibly can and I don't know I'm just I'm curious to see how this will change because I don't have any great ideas for where to take this after you know people have already lived through it and they might not find the fictional version interesting but I don't know I'm I'm curious then of course there's zombies don't think I need to explain this one in the slightest you know something causes humans to become mindless undead killing machines which just want to go out and eat other humans or sometimes specifically just eat their brains and if you get bitten or sometimes there's other ways of transmitting the infection as well you become one of them so this would be stuff like rotten ruin the last of us 28 days later the walking dead dead rising there's a lot of zombie stuff okay and this one has some variety and depending on how a patreon poll goes I might do a video just about all the different types of zombies and how that works so I'm not going to go into too much detail here but you know there's fast zombies and slow zombies there's the undead ones where you have to get them in the head versus the technically alive ones where you don't have to get them in the head there you know you can shoot them in the heart and they'll still die there's the virus which is the most common way of spreading it but in other cases like the last of us it's a fungus or back for blood which I haven't played but I believe in that one it's a parasite like you know there's there's some variety here and this one is very very similar to the plague in that you know it kills off most of the population and there may or may not be a small number of people who are immune but you know it kills most everybody and then everything breaks down from there but the main difference is that you get to be a badass you know when when a plague victim dies it that's just kind of sad and you have to bury their body or something but when a zombie victim dies they will come and try to kill you so you have to kill them and so obviously the only people who are survived would be the crazy badasses who can fight real good I mean that's not how it would work in real life but that's how it's treated a lot of the time and you don't even have to feel bad about killing them because again they're undead machines you know they don't feel pain or anything and if you don't put them down then they're gonna kill some people then there's climate change this is gonna be controversial so this is stuff like the day after tomorrow brink or to an extent 2012 which is a an underrated movie I'm not gonna get into detail but I think it's underrated and this one is basically you know the world humans pump too much CO2 into the atmosphere it gets hotter on average but then that also causes like the occasional cold snap in some areas it causes storms to get much bigger it causes drought starvation wildfires you know just crazy things like that and eventually that leads to the breakdown of civilization and this one I think this one is starting to become much more common just because even though we've been getting warned for decades that this sort of thing will happen it's starting its effects are becoming much more visible now so yeah I don't have much else to add there but that is a type now unlike with natural apocalypses which I think are just the ones people throw in when they feel like having an apocalypse story and don't want to think about it too much man-made ones seem to become more or less popular based on the fears of the time you know like back in the 50s and 60s people were super afraid of nuclear war and it's taken several generations of living with that sort of Damocles over our heads before we just decided eh maybe I'll burn a nuclear fire tomorrow I don't know it's yeah whatever like we just don't care anymore and then the plague and climate change stuff are what people are worried about now which is why those are becoming a bit more common than they used to and I think again climate change is going to pick up a lot in the coming years I mean stories about the climate change apocalypse when I say that is going to pick up a lot in the coming years and hell maybe as people become more afraid of being replaced by automation we might start getting more like robot uprising stories you know like the Terminator or something it maybe that'll become more popular as more people lose their jobs I I don't know we'll see and the final category of apocalypse is supernatural apocalypse and I'm defining this as basically just the world is ended by anything that is just not real so you know we have aliens is a big one so this would be stuff like falling skies independence day battlefield earth you know and that's pretty simple a race from another planet usually another planet occasionally they'll do something weird like another dimension but whatever the case another race comes in way more technologically advanced than humanity and kills everyone now this one is rarely done as an apocalypse it's pretty much always done as an invasion story like again independence day and falling skies it's just the aliens come in and they start killing people but it's about how awesome the humans are for fighting back as opposed to something like battlefield earth which is a terrible book you can watch me talk about it if you want but that that one at least was more realistic in that everyone fucking died except for a very small number of humans and their civilization was just gone and well see what you will about that book it is it has an interesting setup then you know that's at least an apocalypse about aliens then we have an apocalypse caused by God or multiple gods this would be stuff like Angel Fall the South Park movie just pretty much every old myth like I was saying at the beginning like a bunch of old myths were about the world getting destroyed and it was pretty much always by God or gods you know like the biblical flood or Ragnarok just things like that it was pretty much always people saying well God hates us it's it's our own fault I guess and this one this one's not as common anymore I think it's just because the modern world is a lot less religious than it used to be and even for people who are somewhat religious they tend to live in countries with secular institutions so I don't know it's just not that common anymore but it does exist you know sometimes you will have stories about like the legions of hell marching out onto earth and taking everything over which now that I'm thinking about it I don't see that very often it is it is interesting occasionally you'll just have magic in the world you know like met something will happen which either brings magic into the world or brings it back into the world and then everything falls apart or is turned on its head like shadow run I know is more about it being turned on its head then the world ending in an apocalypse but either way it's about magic coming out and destroying a bunch of stuff and then the Shinora Chronicles I believe is also like that like magic just came and I guess that ended the world I don't know I I never read the books I I did see the TV show which okay it's not a great show but it did have this scene so that's wherever custom to jump into bed with every guy you meet honestly it's not just guys so that's what Ophelia has been up to ever since her dad killed her okay that that makes sense now okay but the point is sometimes magic just ends the world and those are usually more of when people want to do a post-apocalyptic story but they also want it to be a fantasy story and they decided to combine the two for whatever reason I'm not I'm it seems a little weird now that I'm thinking about it but whatever I have no issues with it and finally there's just the unexplained apocalypse you know like something happened which destroyed everything wrecked civilization and we never really find out what it was or we never really find out the cause of it so this would be stuff like why the last man you know we never find out exactly what killed all the men but it's that's what happened then that's what changed the world around there's the Hunger Games which they give some vague hints about like there was some sort of warfare and there's climate change and stuff but at the end of the day we just never learned that much about what happened all we know is that the world ended and this is the remnants of it and this civilization sucks now and then there's like the road which is where nature basically just died like all of it and we have no idea why or what happened all we know is that humanity is probably going to go extinct soon the thing about apocalypse stories is that they're too broad you know I can't really draw any sort of overall message from them maybe someone else can but I'm not going to I don't really feel like it none of them really seem to be about the apocalypse though like a lot of them are about stopping it you know like oh we have to stop the villain from launching the missile otherwise other missiles are gonna launch and then the whole world ends like that sort of thing or they're about like the world adapting to it you know the walking dead ends with society adapting to zombies you know like that's basically how the comic ends is zombies are still around and they're still a danger but for the most part humans have learned how to deal with them and they're starting to rebuild you know they're building cities and infrastructure settlements all that sort of stuff the day after tomorrow ends with like okay well the climate is changed now and a bunch of people died in the first like real outbreak of this weird storm which doesn't make any sense because Roland Emmerich is a fucking hack but let's let's not let's not get into that it a bunch of people died in that but a lot of people are still left and it's like okay what now like the world has changed how are we gonna work with this moving forward and then this is also partially why so many apocalypse stories happen like generations or centuries after the events themselves you know it's more about the way society changed and the new civilizations that emerged after this one died and that's what it's about which is kind of fascinating to think about I'll admit like you know Rome collapsed I brought that up earlier and it brought up medieval Western Europe which was its own unique society and pretty interesting in its own right so when our civilization collapses who knows what'll come out of it but you know it is interesting to think about and speculate I will say though that apocalyptic stuff post apocalyptic stuff it's a it is pretty wish fulfillment II wish fulfillment II that's a that's a term now I'm just making that up it we we all kind of wonder what we would do if the government collapsed and if civilization was gone like we pretty much all wondered that sometimes you know and in fact some people specifically think that they're being held back by society and that they would actually get to be the winners and they get to rule everything if it weren't for whatever the hell we have now which is stupid but you know a lot of us have wondered like okay if a zombie outbreak happened in my city how would I survive like hell that's why the zombie survival guide was a best selling book because one it was funny and two people just want to think about that sort of thing and they want to fantasize about it or what if I was in the stand and I was one of the few immune people left like how would I deal with that would I just try and strike it out of my own when I try and start a community like you know people want to think about this people want to fantasize about it and pretty much always they're going to fantasize about being one of the good ones you know one of the good survivors who is not only a decent person but is also successful and at the end of the day you just you never really know how you'd react and I don't think I have anything else to add to that I like I said I didn't want to draw any major big conclusions about this genre genre I don't know if you could really call it that but I didn't want to draw any major big conclusions about it I kind of just want it to talk about it and talk about the different types so that's all I'll see you later a huge thanks to everyone who bothered to watch this far for whatever reason I don't know who would want to listen to me talk for half an hour but especially a huge thanks to all my patrons whose names are on here including the $10 and up patrons oppo Savilainen Olivia Ray and brother Santotis Buffy Valentine Carolina Clay Christopher Quinton Dan and Celio Vitch Echo Joel Carcat Kitsune Liza Rudikova Lord Tiebreaker Madison Lewis Bennett Marilyn Roxy microphone sad martigan tobacco crow Tom beanie and of course as always they victims y'all are the best really let me let me tell you that like if you were here I I'd kiss you I wouldn't actually kiss you but you know you're you're all pretty cool anyways so just don't don't take my just um okay yeah goodbye