"Man" Will Gain Wings.................................

There's a repeated trope in apocalypsis and etcetera,

a prophetic re-doing of whatever nature watches the world turn

I find post-apocalypse as an aesthetic to have a lot of potential for newness and generative thinking. Stories that situate themselves in this genre are consistently framed in response to the end of the/a world, meaning there is something threatening 'normal' ways of living, being, and relating as interpreted by whoever is involved in influencing the story's narrative.

The time scales for this may vary; we may first be presented with the imminent threat of the end, we may be in the middle of the end, or the end may have passed long ago. Coupled with this framing is the unavoidable answer to the question of what may change and what may remain in response.

Since the threat is usually something catastrophic and all-encompassing, it follows that whatever remains unscathed or largely familiar (if anything) must be important, strong, worthy, holy, or natural, as in, inherent. When used in this way, post-apocalypse is not a tool for imagining a world beyond our own, but instead acts as a forge in which any ideas can be fortified and valorized based on this formula.

Put another way, the sort of post-apocalypse in which anything, from objects to behavior, can persist unchanged is likely making a case for the preservation of society, rather than its destruction. This is a lesson that we as viewers are being taught—that even when the aesthetics of the state may be destroyed, its ideology can still live on.