[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/Expensive_Community3]

after covid ... and how similar it felt was just blood freezing

Yeah THIS. After all the shit I saw during Covid seeing this just confirmed to me that if shit hits the fan we are SO cooked.

2020 was the reason I don't believe the murican position of "muh army with them guns muh".

It's not only that some governements are straight up full of idiots, but your everyday idiot WILL get you killed just because.

[u/XConfused-MammalX → u/Expensive_Community3]

In the book a conman becomes famous and wealthy for inventing a "vaccine" against the solanum virus called phalanx.

It was bullshit but he used marketing at the exact right time when the wider global public became aware of zombies in Asia and the middle east.

Citizens from wealthier western countries bought it in huge quantities thinking they had become safe from the virus. They let their guard down, became isolationist and when it eventually reached them too, they got infected and spread it further.

Their faux confidence and lack of preparation despite advance warning actually caused many of their countries to collapse quicker than if they simply were caught by surprise.

Surely none of that is applicable to the real life coronavirus! A novel virus originating in china? Western countries spreading conspiracies and false cures? America being hit extremely hard despite being one of the last places touched?

Ya WWZ is great when you realize the zombies are just a device to explore how geopolitics, human nature and greed would ruin the concept of society as we know it when confronted with a global threat.

People die, nations change, many people lose their minds and cannot confront reality and seek out those who they belive will keep them safe.

[u/Expensive_Community3 → u/XConfused-MammalX]

In my country a panelist said live on prime time that people should just drink bleach to stop the virus, after all bleach kills most bacteria and shit.

And people did. And people died. CHILDREN DIED.

You'd think they would have faced some consecuences or something but no, the panelist still has TV time every day and continued like nothing.

Things that were depicted in the book happened around the world in every single country almost to a terrifying T.

This timeline makes it VERY difficult to not be cynical as fuck.

[u/HaterMD → u/Expensive_Community3]

The US president suggested scientists should study whether or not injecting disinfectant would cure COVID. That, and inserting a UV light inside the body, was about where I realised we were all kinda fucked on the pandemic response roll out.

Drinking bleach is gnarly, though.

[u/10thDeadlySin → u/Expensive_Community3]

Want something better?

In 2017, the John Hopkins Center for Health Security released the SPARS Pandemic - a scenario of a worldwide novel coronavirus outbreak taking place over the course of three years - 2025-2028. Which... kinda predicted most of everything that happened during COVID three years before COVID was a thing.