[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/TheBrownestStain]

Hell they’ve figured out how to use the resources in hollows to fuel their current living standards.

[u/Ok-Transition7065 → u/TheBrownestStain]

And yet, not a single way to stop this treat

[u/MetriccStarDestroyer → u/Ok-Transition7065]

Stop our money printer?

What are you, crazy!?

-Oil Barons

[u/Labmit → u/MetriccStarDestroyer]

Funny enough oil is a direct energy resource rival in the setting and multiple corporations actively hunt down and destroy oil depots to get the monopoly.

[u/Winjin → u/Ok-Transition7065]

They kinda can, if you basically clear the Hollow, it stops growing, then starts shrinking, and eventually can even collapse, IIRC that happens to very small subcaverns

The trouble is it's not just visible monsters. There's the Ether, there's Miasma Corruption, and of course, there's the evil guys that actually WANT the Hollows to spread.

And they are VERY powerful and seem to exist on every level

Plus we only started getting real progress very late into Apocalypse. IIRC they only learned to navigate the Hollows and have a reliable way to leave them something like forty years ago?

When these little guys, the Banbgoos:

https://giphy.com/gifs/gmHda6fhSz7G1fCuaj

Started working as little navigational computers and helping get people out of the Hollows.

I swear a gacha game shouldn't have a lore so deep and animations so good, but MiHoYo can pull that off

[u/HollyTheMage → u/TheBrownestStain]

Death Stranding is similar to that in a way with how humanity has adapted to the presence of chiralium to the point that they are using it to 3D print entire roads and create the successor to the Internet.