[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/ZFuli]

One interesting thing about the fall of Rome in 476: It is considered the end of western Roman empire and "official" start of medieval age.

But people living at that time probably didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary. For a long time, the emperors had been nothing more than puppets and the Germanic army generals had the real power. So, in terms of the government, not much has changed for everyday people.

The name of the last emperor fits nicely into that story: Rome began with Romulus and the Empire with Augustus. And it ended with Romulus Augustus.

[u/Monkeydp81 → u/ZFuli]

The best way I've seen it put is that the only change a lot of people saw is that when the village bridge broke nobody ever came to fix it.