They all annoy me because they're always like "look how capitalism caused this" and then instead of actually saying that's what happened they go "oh actually it was because communists made them do it " or "actually it was because this one person nobody knew about pressed the big magic button that ruined society even though it was perfect before."

In my view it's cause many of them start after the fun and interesting bits are over, so all you're left with are vague implications and a depopulated world, which negates the stakes of "Apocalypse" and renders the story down into inter-personnel soap opera drama, but with dirty clothes

So many stories accidentally kill their own settings before the narrative even starts, they try to build a haunted house but end up with a monotone tomb

I'm always afraid to recommend it because I've never heard anyone talk about it- but I would recommend Station Eleven. Its post-apocalyptic after a covid-like disease. But unlike every other apocalyptic media it has so much love for people. It has some very sad moments but it's so wholesome. And I loved their little traveling commune.

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?”

Even Adventure Time?

We need more pre-apocalyptic media

They annoy me because, since all post-apocalypse fiction is developed under capitalism, it’s all basically the same. It’s just all American prepper fanfic. Cataclysmic event happens, and our lone hero is forced to defend himself (and maybe family) against the hordes. And usually insert some sort of authoritarian government that emerges that the hero must fight against. Government always bad, individualism good, beware the evil hordes. It’s honestly boring af.

Since I see others making recommendations, I’ll throw mine out there albeit reluctantly: Stephen King’s Dark Tower book series and graphic novels. It’s a bit like recommending LOST to someone (because King didn’t have some big plan so he goes down a bunch of roads that don’t go anywhere and the ending is kinda unsatisfying) but the post-apocalypse world building is really incredible. It’s set far in the future and while some things from our current world are still around, they are mostly just slowing breaking down and wearing out. The world has actually devolved into one that mixes the Old West with Arthurian legend - which sounds silly except King actually sells it really well.

The Stand (the book, not the miniseries) is honestly pretty great too. King might be a lib now but before he got sober the man could really write some good fiction.

Generally these films/stories don’t do a great job of world building in my experience. If there has been a global disaster that has killed off lots of people, the economic and materialist reality would be highly cooperative.

Humans are highly pro-social, and the ‘kill to survive’ foundation of the storytelling just seems overly grimdark. Competitive warlording is a terrible way to run a society.

There’s this impulse to make the stories conform to a feudalist to frontier continuum that seems to be pretty shallow. I guess it makes it easy to rely on dramatic tropes from legacy media though.

One exception to this might be On The Beach iirc. Most of the plot involves the characters venturing out into the apocalyptic world because there might be other survivors sending out signals. But the social structure of the enclave the characters live in seems mostly pretty chill from what I recall. Not really any major human conflict in the story.

I mostly agree but i'd recommend The Quiet Earth (1985) and Miracle Mile (1988) as a couple exceptions

It's an old one, but Roadside Picnic and its loose movie adaptation STALKER are both very good. Not quite a "true" post-apoc as it'd be today, in that The Zone is a small place in a "normal" world that the protagonists choose to enter, but they certainly confront the ending of "what came before" through an Event of sudden and total alienation.

The Earth Abides is also good, a very early story about the aftermath of a superplague. Life goes on, and humans remain human.

Is it the existential dread?

Nausicaa, both the movie and the manga are so good though. Though they're more post-post apocalypse.

Watch raised by wolves

Idk man, Warframe is pretty sick although it's not a movie/show but rather a game

I've also read some cool comments on the Fallout series

i took a class in college about exactly this, basically the thing most disaster movies get wrong is that humans everywhere generally stick together and cooperate during emergencies, with the exception of places with pre-existing racial/ethnic conflicts in which case the racists will start killing. in pretty much every scenario its better to have extra hands/more expertise/trading partners, if there is literally no supplies except what you can steal from bunkers you simply aren't going to last very long no matter what you do.

also like where tf do they get the food to feed everyone in mad max, its not like their desert apocalypse villages are surrounded by miles of lush irrigated farmland or anything. fiction in general just has no comprehension of how much space and resources and effort it takes to grow enough food to feed even small populations.

killing people won't magically make corn grow out of the blasted soot-covered radioactive nuclear apocalypse soil, but keeping them around to shit out free fertilizer will help at least.

So alot of imagined apocalypses are essentially power fantasies. The idea that some part of society is stopping you from actualizing some part of yourself. I occasionally imagine them too, the collapse of the state that wants to oppress me so that some other new non-oppressive state can emerge it's kinda a big part of revolutionary fantasy too.

It's just alot of writers want to actualize kinda crappy desires which honestly alienate me from the writers most of the time. Hence we get crappy apocalypse fantasies like zombie apocalypses. (A desire to indulge in righteous violence vindicating a gun fetishist while you consume as much as you can scavenge)

Dead Man's Letters wasn't too bad.

I still like some post-post Apocalypse like Shannara, Adventure Time, and Canticle of Leibowitz.

There should be a genre descriptor of Post Apocalypse Speculative Fiction and Post Apocalypse Fiction.

The Movies/TV that I've tried to watch lean too much into being, "Lord of the Flies" but after all the treats run out, and its mostly an unsatisfying watch.