(no subject)

[camwyn]

I have a fondness for post-apocalyptic fiction of many kinds, and I acknowledge that most of it is grim as all hell. However, I have not had any particular interest in seeing The Road, and today I had it confirmed for me once and for all that this is not a movie I am going to see. Neither will I be reading the book. What made it plain was picking up a copy of the book at the drugstore and flipping it over to see if the movie tie-in edition mentioned anything about exactly what happened, and finding the words 'In a world with no hope'.

Yeah. That, there. That's where I stop.

I am not asking for a happy ending from everything I read or watch. I appreciate tragedies, even as I sit there sucking my breath through my teeth and going "Ooh, sucks to be you, Creon." I can appreciate ambiguous, unhappy endings; I liked The Departed, after all. I appreciated The Killer's ending, horrible as it was for all the characters involved. I was deeply impressed by Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade and cannot think of a more satisfying way to end that story. But what I do ask, of my story and my setting, is that there be some kind of hope- even if it's dangled in front of the characters and then horribly yanked away, as it was in The Killer. There has to be a chance, somewhere, or I am not interested.

It's why I never got into Wraith: The Whatever-It-Is, back in original World of Darkness gaming. Basically, you... were dead. And then things sucked more. And if you were lucky, you... vanished, maybe, or something, and nobody really knew what else there was. But regardless, you were dead and there was no way in hell you could change the system. It's why I couldn't really get into the Disney movie Dinosaur. Yes, very good, our hero has his girlfriend and now they have their hatchlings; did anyone miss the giant flaming meteors that were falling? They weren't the Chicxulub impact, but they were a very clear reminder that no matter what these two did or how happy they were, extinction's hammer was going to drop on them and that would be the end of that. Maybe if they'd been dinosaurs from earlier in the Mesozoic, so that they had millions of years for their descendants to grow in, but the lemur things in the movie made it clear just how little time there was left. No hope for them.

Everything I've heard about The Road indicates that the disaster that created that world destroyed virtually the entire biosphere. Humanity is living on whatever oxygen hasn't been breathed up or burned up, and eating whatever's been canned or dried. This is not a disaster from which there is any hope of coming back. This is not a disaster which offers anyone any hope of redemption through suffering. This is the grinding down and going out against which there is no fighting to improve. It's over. At least in Fallout, there's a chance of some kind of recovery- purely localized or maybe on a larger scale, I don't know. At least in Half-Life, there's a snowball's chance in Hell of pushing out the Combine and recovering, even if the world has to adjust to a much weirder equilibrium than before. I won't bring Reign of Fire into this, its setup is just too silly, but the idea remains the same. There's still life in all of them, and a tiny fraction of a chance, and even if that's cruelly kicked out from under the protagonists at least it was there to start with.

But from what I understand, there isn't even that in The Road, and I am not going to pay money or go to the effort of hitting the library to watch the flailings of humanity's pathetic still-moving corpse. No matter how powerful or well-written or well-directed it is.

*locates only real appropriate icon for this one*

Comments

[duane-kc.livejournal.com]

I had the same problem with the Call of Cthulhu role-playing game. No way to win, you just kept going until you lost your last Sanity point, thern rolled up a new character. And if the cultists ever did succeed in summoning up a Great Old One?

Game over. For the entire Human race.

[innerbrat]

I can't believe you're making me apply science to a Disney movie. KNOW THAT I RESENT YOU MAKING ME DO THIS. But you brought that genre into question and by extension ruined Land Before Time, so I already resent you.

But.

OK, the fossil record of lemurs isn't very well documented and post dates KT in any case, but mammals? Are older than dinosaurs. The presence of mammals in a dinosaur movie does not mean it's in the late Cretaceous. Actually, Iguandons themselves disappear from the fossil record 50-odd million years before the KT boundary. So I'm sure wotsisface and girlie had a long and happy dinosaur life. So there.

[camwyn]

All right, fair. You have my apologies for that.

I just couldn't get over the lemurs.

[leeshajoy.livejournal.com]

This. So very this. I like a good post-apoc story because it tells me that no matter how shitty things get, no matter how badly we screw up our world, we'll keep going, and we'll rebuild.

[cupenny.livejournal.com]

.... bah. The Road had tenatively gotten on the 'list of movies I actually want to go see'- at least, before this. And for the same reasons you have, since I feel the same way about actually giving the characters some hope throughout whatever story (movie, book, etc) they're going through. Otherwise- I LOVE post-apocaliptic books (old school scifi!) if only for the 'ok, we may have screwed up the world, but we get to start over, hurrah!' feel for the rebuilding/reclaiming society.

But 'plod on until you die'.... eh, no.

[firestrike.livejournal.com]

Because a bleak future with no hat material is obviously the result of a bad plan (http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/comic.php?date=20031017).

[batyatoon]

ANY plan in which you lose your hat is a bad plan!

*doesn't even have to click*

[lots42.livejournal.com]

Another aspect of the whole mess, is that even if humanity survives, there has to be enough for a diverse genetic base. If there isn't, what's the point? We eithe have nobody in two hundred years or hunchbacked freaks playing the banjo.

"You have four purty mouths."

[camwyn]

My bar for the genetic base's size is set rather lower than a lot of people's ever since I found out that a) the entire cheetah species appears to have been reduced to a genetic bottleneck of twelve animals sometime twenty-five thousand years ago or so, if modern DNA analysis is to be believed, and b) there is reasonable evidence to support the past genetic bottlenecking of humanity down to levels small enough to fit every human left alive into Tiger Stadium, Detroit.

[wakboth.livejournal.com]

Cheetahs are remarkably screwed by their genetics, though, IIRC.

[derien.livejournal.com]

I totally hear you on this one. I also probably won't see this movie.

[daniidebrabant.livejournal.com]

Word.

With you on this all the way.

[the_croupier]

The only post-apocalyptic world I've ever enjoyed was in the Mad Max movies. And then Mel had to ruin even those by turning out to be crazy.

Otherwise, the whole genre just depresses me too much. It's why I respected the new Battlestar Galactica, but couldn't watch it. (I consider it post-apoc because the human population had been so reduced.)

As for Wraith, that book was just beyond depressing. It finally broke me from the White Wolf books. I hear about Wraith campaigns sometimes, but I think that game is just unplayable.

Oddly enough, the only real exception to this is Lovecraft. But then, who can't end up rooting for the Great Old Ones just a little? =D

[camwyn]

I didn't find Wraith so much depressing as pointless. "Oh look. I'm dead. So is everyone else. And maybe I might change states of existence AGAIN and find heaven this time. But maybe not. I don't AUGH DON'T FORGE ME INTO AN ASH TRAY." About the only thing I really appreciated about Wraith was the fact that it broke White Wolf's pattern of arbitrarily appropriating figures from history and saying "so and so? TOTALLY one of these supernaturals we're writing about in this book, no WAY could they just be a normal human". Because, well, the only qualification for showing up in Wraith is: are you dead? There you go. It's perfectly legitimate for anyone in human history to be a Wraith or otherwise be among the characters of Wraith, so long as they're dead.

[the_croupier]

Ah, that historical figure thing was annoying.

So was the comment in Vampire that the clans had manipulated every significant development and event in human history--except, IIRC, Hiroshima/Nagasaki and the Holocaust. Because only humans could have been capable of those.

It's the sort of undergraduate dorm-room philosophizing that ought to have earned them a smack upside the head.

[camwyn]

The point when I wanted to put my fist through the wall most was Tribebook: Children of Gaia. In which they claimed that their camp devoted to sex as something sacred, the Houris, was largely responsible for early human conceptions of sexytime as a Good and Holy Thing, and that they were targeted by the Wyrm and their name was corrupted into the word 'whore' as part of a smear campaign... and in which their Anointed Ones camp of pacifist werewolves tried very hard to claim that Jesus of friggin' Nazareth got his philosophy from them.

I am not a believer in book burning, normally. But I seriously contemplated it for a moment with that thing, not because of the blasphemy factor, but because I wanted the book itself to feel pain. I wound up trading it to a friend in Canada for something else, but I warned her I felt uneasy sending it through the mail or across borders.

[lordq42.livejournal.com]

excepting of course, for Charon. Sits on the throne of murder. Quite likely the first murder victim, abel. makes a nice counterpoint to the first vampire, Cain.

[lordq42.livejournal.com]

Oh, Speaking of Post Apoc.. did you get a chance to look at the Zombie Larp? we'd love to see you come up and play, and its liable to be in southwest CT to start so not a horrible drive. would give you a chance to play in a fallout-esque world.

http://www.dystopiarisinglarp.com

[camwyn]

I've been considering that. It's been a dog's age since I LARP'ed, and I don't actually have a car, so it would be kind of dependent on the location and car rentals. I don't mind the driving, it's just getting the car to get there.

[lordq42.livejournal.com]

well, i know a bunch of people from the milford/new haven area are going, we can probably easily arrange a pickup at the new haven train station, etc. The next character generation/general game kibbutz is jan. 16th, let me know if you're interested.