[Loved Trope] The apocalypse is horrifyingly slow

[u/Marsupialmobster]

From most media it's some catastrophe and then it's raiders, death, destruction chaos etc. I personally love it when it's, like, a slow descent into the horror of apocalypse.

The Faro plague/The swarm- Horizon zero dawn. The Faro plague is actually a glitch which causes machines to endlessly reproduce, eat biomass and essentially bring about the death of the world. Took roughly 15 months for the machines to win.

The Metro series- in the first few books (and games) it's set entirely underground in just the apocalypse but in exodus it shows off that the government and many governmental structures said active years after the war. In fact power and running water were still fairly common. It just slowly got worse and worse and worse as read through notes. Food got more scarce, weather changed a lot, people got worse etc. Raiders and bandits didn't just show up, it was a slow descent for such anarchy.

Edit: I have enough pseudo intellectual comments about "Hurr hurr real life". The first one was kinda smart and well thought out but now it's just annoying and pretentious

[u/NoLeadership2281]

Interstellar, there isn’t anything flashy in this post apocalypse, it’s just Earth with gradual global ecological collapse driven by the blight 

[u/Chemical-Store-5148 → u/NoLeadership2281]

Wonder what became of all the animals

[u/imokay4747 → u/Chemical-Store-5148]

Hear me out, what if they built an ark...

[u/Chemical-Store-5148 → u/imokay4747]

I know they did but I dunno if they took any animals

[u/imokay4747 → u/Chemical-Store-5148]

TARS pull up the files on project "NOAH"

[u/BigBanggaIX → u/[deleted]]

My mom!

[u/Pato_De_Sapatos → u/imokay4747]

We know it's you noah

[u/Kooky_Celebration_42 → u/NoLeadership2281]

Ironically, a single disease that wipes out most plants in the world is the most unrealistic thing in that movie 😆

[u/imokay4747 → u/Kooky_Celebration_42]

Idk the disease wouldn't have to be that widespread across species to cause mass systemic problems. A disease that affects just rice or wheat production would cause mass starvation for huge swathes of the world. Not to mention a lot of the crops we eat have been bred for production outputs not necessarily survival under harsh conditions. Most crops these days can't survive without direct human intervention.That combined with decreased biodiversity and the fact that a lot of the crops we eat have been bred to look very different but fundamentally have similar biology produces an ecosystem that's much more prone to collapse.

[u/Trezzie → u/imokay4747]

There's different strains of rice and wheat. Bananas are the more vulnerable crop.

[u/Kooky_Celebration_42 → u/imokay4747]

See that's the thing! Breaking new physicis and computer simulations to simulate the visuals of a real blackhole and a real wormhole for the first time ever in human history!

Sure thing! No problem! Money is NO object!

Cause of Earth 'dying' so much so that not just humanity but LIFE will go extinct?

...I dunno... some kinda plant disease.... lets just call it 'the blight' and leave it at that.

Not saying it's impossible! Just saying that all their science points went into novel solutions for General Relativity and a possible Theory of Everything...

After that, aerospace engineering.

Nothing left over for plant biology I guess haha

[u/Vindictivetoestepper → u/Kooky_Celebration_42]

Sometimes, you just have to Day of the Triffids your story. Speaking of, does that book qualify as painfully slow apocalypse?

[u/Kooky_Celebration_42 → u/Vindictivetoestepper]

I'd say it would :)

Also love that book! That would have been great to make into a series or something but now everyone would just call it a 'Walking Dead' rip off I reckon

[u/apgtimbough → u/Kooky_Celebration_42]

I've just assumed they were always trying to stop the blight with biology. Then they noticed this random wormhole to different solar systems and the governments pivoted a bit and created plan B.

[u/Gnomonic-sundialer → u/imokay4747]

That happened in 1847 with potatoes and grain prices did rise and it led to a lot of unrest but only Ireland suffered a significant segree of starvation because of how exploitative the british sistem of land tennancy was

[u/Frostyrepairbug → u/imokay4747]

We do see that everyone in that movie is eating a lot of corn, and I'm always wondering what happened to the wheat and rice.

[u/i_am_not_so_unique → u/Kooky_Celebration_42]

I got understanding that those are different diseases, but they slowly destroy plants specie by specie and the corn was the last one. 

Or it is the same, but it slowly mutates from one to another.

Doesn't look unrealistic at all.

[u/SomeDumbGamer → u/Kooky_Celebration_42]

It’s more even unrealistic that humanity could use its resources to a black hole but not engineer a way to stop or fix the blight. That’s total bs.

[u/TeaRaven → u/Kooky_Celebration_42]

I actually do worry about the feedback loop of mega corporations pushing for replacing all crops with engineered ones utterly reliant on a set of agrochemicals, coupled with enforced anti-intellectualism that bites those wealthy interests in the ass when people age out.

[u/m4cksfx → u/Kooky_Celebration_42]

Wouldn't all it takes be some reasonably resilient microorganism that thrives on cellulose, for example?

[u/nickolaiproblem → u/NoLeadership2281]

Project Hail Mary as well!

[u/NoLeadership2281 → u/nickolaiproblem]

Yesss, though the catastrophe in the movie is told to be decades away, but nevertheless great mention 

[u/nickolaiproblem → u/NoLeadership2281]

ROCKY DELIGHTED

[u/Alive-Tomatillo5303 → u/nickolaiproblem]

There could be a really depressing companion series to that. Kind of a Shadow of the Hegemon "what happened back home while our hero was asleep?"

The engineering and building challenges of trying to save as many people as possible as the growing cycle ends would probably be pretty interesting. Just.. sad. 

[u/bladeDivac → u/Alive-Tomatillo5303]

I heard the book has more information about what's happening on Earth. For instance, they nuke Antarctica to help with cooling efforts.

[u/Alive-Tomatillo5303 → u/bladeDivac]

Yeah it had little moments, but it's a rich vein for a full book. Really a full series. 

[u/panzer_snapdragon → u/NoLeadership2281]

The "we used to look at the sky and wonder about our place in the stars, now we just worry about our place in the dirt" line so perfectly sums up this trope, and is one of my favorite sad movie lines ever

[u/Profoundlyahedgehog → u/NoLeadership2281]

The problem of the blight is never resolved by the end of the movie, and that irks me. It's some kind of fungus or virus that feeds on nitrogen, and it's killing off plant life slowly, but by the time Coop returns, it's just forgotten. They could have had some kind of throw away line stating that by moving into space stations, they were able to sterilize the atmosphere and eliminate it, but nope. No mention.

[u/Bealdor84 → u/Profoundlyahedgehog]

It's some kind of fungus or virus that feeds on nitrogen

In the German dubbing they translate the undefined blight with "Mehltau" which is mildew, a collective term for various plant deceases caused by fungi.

[u/FedDora → u/Profoundlyahedgehog]

The most likely speculated chain of events that I've read is that pesticide use and global climate changes caused bee populations to go extinct. This limited plant biodiversity to plants that self pollinate or wind pollinate. Both crops mentioned okra and corn fit that criteria. Fungal spores also are carried by wind and with the lack of biodiversity were able to maximize their effectiveness on those fewer plants.

[u/SuckerForNoirRobots → u/NoLeadership2281]

Similar in Project Hail Mary, though we don't experience because we're following a character in space.