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Oh, god, not the apocalypse!
Mar. 18th, 2008 11:23 pmAs I might have mentioned here and again on my journal, my biggest fear is the apocalypse. Not brimstone and hellfire raining down from the skies, but a dreadful and unalterable change to human life as we know it. Whether that's a nuclear war, as in On the Beach by Neville Shute, or something more biological, like that one Stephen King novel with the super-flu, or something weather based, like in The Day After Tomorrow, it upsets me unduly.
I realize this is a pretty ridiculous thing to trigger the sort of fear where your heart pounds, you get queasy, and just want to be not there. Despite that fear, I love, love, love post-apocalyptic fiction. Parable of the Sower? Bring it! That S.M. Stirling series that had me confined to my bedroom for three straight weekends last spring? Ooh, baby, I can't wait for the most recent book to come out in paperback. The guilty pleasure of The Tribe? My teenage years involved way too many hours of watching that show. (I'd watch it now if it was still on air.) And Lord of the Flies? That's a damn fine book.
What brings on this confession is that my dad is currently watching I Am Legend in the living room and I can hear things happening in it and it's freaking me out. ( Spoilers beneath cut )
In general, I don't like movies/literature where people's entire families are killed or people are massacred or there are plagues or whatever. I can study it academically -- I wrote a couple papers on the Black Plague in high school -- but the moment a human element enters the story, I lose it. With the example of The Day After Tomorrow*, there's this one point where they show the spread sub-zero temperatures/blizzard across North America, and they say something to the effect that all the humans and animals north of like central Illinois had perished, because they couldn't evacuated in time. OH MY GOD, the tears I wept. That would be everyone I know or have ever known. I was really upset at the idea of all our cows being summarily wiped out like that. While they are occasionally pains in the ass and can be dangerous, for the most part they're sweet and stupid and don't deserve that.
I think it's an understatement to say that I don't like harm being done to either man nor beast. I'm a big pussy, people, and while I like to temper that with being a realist (id est, I know world peace isn't going to happen any time soon), I'd really prefer it if people in general hadn't been outrageous bastards to each other pretty much throughout history. I don't really see how violence serves anyone's purpose. I have a hell of a temper, and while I understand how tempting the urge to bash someone in the head is, I do try to avoid it.
To layer a little hypocrisy on this, I'm totally cool with verbal threats, as long as you don't carry them out. Yell and scream at each other all you want, just don't go looking for your machete.
This is a large part of why I don't like "scary" movies like Saw or Hostel or pretty much any variety of zombie movie. That sort of casual violence really doesn't please me. I'm empathetic to the point where something psychological like The Others is scary enough for me.
*This isn't a great movie, so I feel no compunctions about spoiling it. Sorry, guys!
I realize this is a pretty ridiculous thing to trigger the sort of fear where your heart pounds, you get queasy, and just want to be not there. Despite that fear, I love, love, love post-apocalyptic fiction. Parable of the Sower? Bring it! That S.M. Stirling series that had me confined to my bedroom for three straight weekends last spring? Ooh, baby, I can't wait for the most recent book to come out in paperback. The guilty pleasure of The Tribe? My teenage years involved way too many hours of watching that show. (I'd watch it now if it was still on air.) And Lord of the Flies? That's a damn fine book.
What brings on this confession is that my dad is currently watching I Am Legend in the living room and I can hear things happening in it and it's freaking me out. ( Spoilers beneath cut )
In general, I don't like movies/literature where people's entire families are killed or people are massacred or there are plagues or whatever. I can study it academically -- I wrote a couple papers on the Black Plague in high school -- but the moment a human element enters the story, I lose it. With the example of The Day After Tomorrow*, there's this one point where they show the spread sub-zero temperatures/blizzard across North America, and they say something to the effect that all the humans and animals north of like central Illinois had perished, because they couldn't evacuated in time. OH MY GOD, the tears I wept. That would be everyone I know or have ever known. I was really upset at the idea of all our cows being summarily wiped out like that. While they are occasionally pains in the ass and can be dangerous, for the most part they're sweet and stupid and don't deserve that.
I think it's an understatement to say that I don't like harm being done to either man nor beast. I'm a big pussy, people, and while I like to temper that with being a realist (id est, I know world peace isn't going to happen any time soon), I'd really prefer it if people in general hadn't been outrageous bastards to each other pretty much throughout history. I don't really see how violence serves anyone's purpose. I have a hell of a temper, and while I understand how tempting the urge to bash someone in the head is, I do try to avoid it.
To layer a little hypocrisy on this, I'm totally cool with verbal threats, as long as you don't carry them out. Yell and scream at each other all you want, just don't go looking for your machete.
This is a large part of why I don't like "scary" movies like Saw or Hostel or pretty much any variety of zombie movie. That sort of casual violence really doesn't please me. I'm empathetic to the point where something psychological like The Others is scary enough for me.
*This isn't a great movie, so I feel no compunctions about spoiling it. Sorry, guys!