{"id":1586,"date":"2017-04-25T00:35:43","date_gmt":"2017-04-25T04:35:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/dig215\/?p=1586"},"modified":"2017-04-25T00:35:43","modified_gmt":"2017-04-25T04:35:43","slug":"after-the-end","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/dig215\/2017\/04\/25\/after-the-end\/","title":{"rendered":"After The End"},"content":{"rendered":"

Luke already talked about this a little in his post, but I was wondering what is it about post-apocalyptic narratives that makes them so popular. It’s an odd trend, when you take a step back and really look at it. Why do we enjoy reading and watching stories that describe a world where society has collapsed, millions (possibly billions) of people are dead, and the way of life we know has forever disappeared? It’s rather macabre, in a way, the imagining of a “post-human” world.\u00a0Station Eleven<\/em> does a great job of creating just such a world, giving us just enough details to flesh it out, but not too much as to leave our imagination out of the process. In a strange way, the novel relies on our previous encounters with post-apocalyptic narratives. When we read about the “Georgia Flu:, we don’t need a bunch of chapters detailing how society collapsed. We know how those stories go. We’ve read them, we’ve seen them, they’re almost everywhere these days. So, what’s the reason for the popularity of this type of story? What draws us to them?<\/p>\n

tvtropes.org\/pmwiki\/pmwiki.php\/Main\/AfterTheEnd,<\/a> accessed 4\/24\/17<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

One possibility is what I mentioned before, the vaguely thrilling sense of macabre. There’s something in us that wants to read stories of destruction, of death and ruin, of something so terrible it has the potential to wipe out the most successful species in Earth’s history. It’s like a penny dreadful or the murder scene in a mystery novel, just on a global scale. We’re\u00a0drawn<\/em> to death, however much we hate to admit it. \u00a0Any sort of apocalypse would be a tragedy, by any and every measure, something tragic, awful, and ruinous. And yet…wouldn’t you almost want to watch it happen? Not to you of course, maybe to some other planet as you sit on the moon and watch, but the feeling is there. It’s odd, this fascination with what happens after the end. We sit in our air-conditioned houses, staring at smart phones, watching tv, playing video games, boarding flights to far-off countries, secure in the knowledge that there has never been a better time to be alive than right now. But then our minds begin to wander, and we almost start to wish it would all come crashing down around us.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Luke already talked about this a little in his post, but I was wondering what is it about post-apocalyptic narratives that makes them so popular. It’s an odd trend, when you take a step back and really look at it. Why do we enjoy reading and watching stories that describe a world where society has … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “After The End”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":103,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1586","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-group-c"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/dig215\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1586","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/dig215\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/dig215\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/dig215\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/103"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/dig215\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1586"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/dig215\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1586\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1587,"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/dig215\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1586\/revisions\/1587"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/dig215\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1586"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/dig215\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1586"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/dig215\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1586"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}