Oh, god, not the apocalypse!

[msmcknittington]

As 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. I know what happens in it; I'm not a savage. I hear something, and I think, "Oh, god, the dog just died. Oh no! His family just got blown up!" I've had to walk out to the kitchen a few times, and I could feel my heart speed up just having to see those few seconds. (To be fair to myself, all the lights are off in the living room and dining room, so it was pretty dark. And the part I walked through involved The Creatures' appearance and another part involved some intense Creature howling. Not good.)

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!}

Comments

[isabelladangelo.livejournal.com]

I could write up a very very long comment in regards to the difference between modern Hollywood's take on humans being the brunt cause of end of the world disasters versus nature. Nature is far far scarier. And yet, they only ever show nature affecting small area... In the Day After Tomorrow it does affect a large area but it's all our fault because we are so evil. Let's ignore that mammoth we mention at the beginning from a previous ice age...or the data that shows the ice age ended in a matter of months...::much grumbling::

[msmcknittington.livejournal.com]

I know! Nature is so much scarier than nuclear war. People have absolutely no control over the weather or grizzly bears or whatever.

Another thing that annoyed me about "The Day After Tomorrow" was that the plan to escape the weather was to go to Mexico, and they didn't show Mexico saying, "You want your entire country's population to gate crash Los Estados Unidos de México? Jefe, no."

[troubleagain.livejournal.com]

I Am Legend...I watched The Whole Movie. I think I'm scarred for life.

[msmcknittington.livejournal.com]

I was uncomfortable being in a different room while it was playing. Those transformed people made scary noises. And the government blew up a bus full of people! Scary!

[rosewalker.livejournal.com]

OMG, me too! And ever since we got satellite TV and with it the Discovery channel, it's gotten SO much worse. I had no idea of all the different ways the world could end. I was really distracted at work one day and someone asked me what was going on, and I said, "Did you know there's actually a tiny possibility that the entire crust of the earth could slide and reverse the poles? And don't even get me started on gamma ray bursts..." I mean... who worries about this crap?

That said, I do love disaster/apocalypse movies. LOVE them. I guess as much as it scares me, I'm also deeply intrigued by how life would persevere and what it would be like. Every time something disconcerting happens in the world, I'm 95% worried/concerned and 5% excited. But that 5% is the same part of my brain that truly believes fictional characters are real, so I don't give it too much credit.

[troubleagain.livejournal.com]

Two fictional accounts of the end of the world/polar shift for you. One is a Clive Cussler--Atlantis Found--he has another called Polar Shift but I haven't read it. And the other is Down to a Sunless Sea by David Graham (wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Down_to_a_Sunless_Sea). I loved this one. I read it over and over.

[msmcknittington.livejournal.com]

I think I remember you writing about that before. Dude, why do people want to know the specifics of what happens after a cataclysmic event? I mean, we'll all be dead, so why scope out the deets?

If I had to list the ways the world ends that concern me the most, it would go:

1. Large scale natural disaster (Hurricane Katrina around the world!)
2. Nuclear war
3. Something from space crashing into the Earth
4. The sun exploding

Way down on the list is the possibility of alien lifeforms enslaving the inhabitants of Earth. I blame Anne McCaffrey for this. And I love those trashy books.

After I read apocalyptic fiction, I always spend some time thinking up contingency plans should the same thing happen for reals. Like, "Well, my family would probably be OK if aliens invaded, since we don't live near any major population centers, and we could feed ourselves for a while off the land, but my brothers are old enough to serve in the military and . . ." Who does that? I do that. Why do I do that?

[beraht.livejournal.com]

Dystopias are one of my favorite genres of movies and literature but I used to get that same sense of utter despair when watching programs about world killing asteroids.

[msmcknittington.livejournal.com]

I think what spawns that sense of terror in me is the realization that if the infrastructure in the US failed spontaneously, I'd have, at best, a month before major health problems started springing up.

Oh, diabetes, you just bring a whole boatload of issues with you.

[aikea-guinea.livejournal.com]

"That S.M. Stirling series..."

Me: "Mass death by bondage? O_o"

I'm beginning to question my reading abilities.

[msmcknittington.livejournal.com]

LOL Danielle, it's the little things that me glad to internet-know you. Like misreading acronyms and having the result be mass death by bondage.