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To begin with, you probably need to highlight the main properties of the post-apocalypse:
Death of a large / overwhelming part of the population of a certain location/Land as a whole;
Destruction of most of the material values;
Degradation of social institutions and relationships;
Extremely high level of danger for each survivor (compared to the world before X-hour).
The main character / characters survive in the mode of constant danger and, in most books / films of the genre, the meaning of their life is either to survive, in fact, or to restore at least part of what was lost during the apocalypse.
IMHO, there are a number of different reasons why the post-apocalyptic world can be particularly attractive to humans.
“The world is too complicated.” The civilization around us has changed more in the last century than perhaps in the previous thousand years – and not all people can keep up with these changes. The modern world seems too complex, too largely inaccessible to understanding at all – and therefore there is a desire for some simplification. Heroes of books/films in the post-apocalyptic genre, being (most often) our contemporaries, find themselves in a situation where their “personal world” is dramatically simplified, and their needs are reduced to “good old” security, food and dominance, without loans, mortgages and TV. By the way, for exactly the same reason, the so-called “popadancheskaya literature”is popular.
“Goal loss”. Post-apocalyptic heroes have an absolutely vital motivation – the desire to SURVIVE themselves and help others survive, to ensure the safety of themselves and their loved ones (family/group/clan/enclave) for a long time. And it is extremely rare that it is satisfied even at the end of the book, because there are always higher-level threats. This is in stark contrast to the reality we are used to, where many people find it pointless to exist. In this, perhaps, post-apocalyptic is similar to romantic and chivalrous literature.
“One more chance.” Often, the apocalypse is seen as an opportunity to create something new and more perfect on the ruins of a civilization. And this attracts those who believe that our civilization has reached a dead end and less radical methods will not get it out of it. Somewhere here, the post-apocalypse regularly crosses paths with dystopia (and sometimes with utopia).
So far, I have everything. This is my first more or less detailed answer, so I will be glad to hear any tips and comments.
Postapok allows you to visually realize the situation of post-everything, in which we all equally found ourselves since the eighties. This is a world in which values and social structures must be rebuilt. It is no coincidence that the most important works of the genre are filled with references, nostalgia, and often borrow the visual code of the fifties for processing.
Despite the fact that the first works in the genre of post-apocalypse appear in the fifties and sixties and are actively produced throughout the cold War (for obvious reasons), the genre gains maximum popularity only after the nineties, when, it would seem, the danger of a nuclear holocaust finally disappears.
However, it is then that it turns out that the plots developed over the 50-80 years turn out to be the most convenient for modeling the current situation of total skepticism, disunity of culture (or rather, dismemberment into many small “cultures”, each of which is quite globally widespread).
When the post-apocalypse ceases to be a real threat, a warning, almost a futurology (a vivid example is “Letters of a Dead Man”, “Stalker” – especially considering what is now sold under this “brand”), it turns into a convenient, or rather even comfortable form for trying to understand modernity and its problems: xenophobia and dehumanization of people in the masses in general (zombies! mutants! these are not people!), environmental threats, and each individual's own place in society.
We all live in a post-apocalyptic society, spend half our lives in catacombs and the dusty interior of cars, and are forced to build a narrative about ourselves from scratch (I am a #businessman #scientist #artist #woman #patriot) in a situation where any such social categories have been repeatedly deconstructed, reinterpreted (almost ridiculed) and require constant reflection, and what served as a way to transmit such social constructions from generation to generation-tradition-itself mutated into some kind of frightening monster.
The wildest example of such total reflection (although invisible at first glance) is the post-apocalyptic animated series Adventure time, where the” children's ” cartoon creeps in the themes of stigma, physicality, sexuality, gender, power relations and international politics, social structure, violence, preventive wars, scientific ethics, vegetarianism…
There is a very tricky point here. It's not the post-apocalypse that's popular. Various works dedicated to him are popular. First, the end of the world and its consequences are fertile ground for creativity. If the creator is cramped in our world, then the apocalypse scenario allows him to set the rules himself. Secondly, everyone is interested in a little glimpse into the future, even a very dark one. After all, you don't have to go through all these horrors yourself. Third, Fallout had a huge impact on the generation of the 90s. This game has given the genre a huge development, though the company. which issued it, in the end, still went bankrupt. But, again, it is not the post-apocalypse that is popular, but only some of its interpretations. If people were presented with it in its purest form, there would be no such effect. I assure you, very few people will like the prospect of being enslaved by aliens, reduced to radioactive ash, or dying from a pandemic of some unknown disease.