Malachy Jackson Site

Post Apocalypses! I like em. Don’t like em as much as hell but they’re close to hell on Earth enough so I might as well talk about them. There’s two specific visions of the Post Apocalypse I’m most interested, a dry kind and a wet kind.

Wet Apocalypse: I ain’t talking Waterworld. My idea of a wet apocalypse is one where the sky is grey, rain is constant, everything is muck and cold swampland. Maybe it never stops raining, like the snow in Little Inferno. The ruins of civilisation would have to be concrete, as brutalist as Babbdi or Soviet architecture. The intent is a thoroughly grey colour scheme. Inspirations for this aesthetic: Hard to be a God (the movie), The Road, the Eternal War scenario from Civilisation 2, aesthetics of the First World War, general life in Britain.

Dry Apocalypse: The desert wasteland, following a nuclear war is a very common aesthetic for the post apocalypse. I think it can be done better. Think lonely houses on flat, barren desert plains like Salad Fingers or Courage the Cowardly Dog. Think no tribes of raiders or dangerous monsters, just people, maybe with birth defects, maybe mentally degraded, living in at most, small, isolated communities just trying to get by. Think the realistic effects of radiation poisoning. A world devoid mostly of plant or animal life, populated by a handful of humans just clinging on. A world on its way to return to the way it looked before the primordial soup. A quiet nuclear post apocalypse. There’s a lot of older British films with this sort of outlook, one even showing the destruction of my hometown, although they tended to show more the immediate after effects than the end. What I envision is the last flickers of life when the dust settles.

Fun fact about the nuclear wasteland aesthetic, the settings that are the poster children for it, Mad Max and Fallout, never really implied the desert was there due to the nuclear war, at least not at first. The world in Mad Max looks like that because it’s set in the Australian desert. The world in Fallout looks like that because it’s set in the California desert. However, over time, nuclear war became associated with deserts and now people believe that’s what the world would look like after one.