Why I Love The Walking Dead — and My Favourite Post-Apocalyptic Settings
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| Image by AMC |
[7 min read]
Science fiction often asks what happens when humanity gets more powerful.
Post-apocalyptic stories ask what happens when we lose everything.
No government. No electricity. No supermarkets. Sometimes not even enough people left to keep civilisation going.
What I love about the genre is that the apocalypse itself is rarely the interesting part. It's what comes afterwards.
The best post-apocalyptic worlds take away the systems we normally depend on and ask a much more uncomfortable question: what would we do without them?
Would we cooperate? Fight? Rebuild? Take what we need? Try to impose our own rules?
I've always been drawn to stories that explore those questions. Here are three of my favourites — and, as usual, a few ways you can get lost in them yourself.
The Walking Dead
I came to The Walking Dead as an adult, after the TV series launched in 2010.
What hooked me wasn't really the zombies.
In fact, one of the things I loved about the series was gradually realising that the walkers were more like an environmental hazard than the main threat. They were always there, but eventually you learned how to deal with them.
The humans were much harder to predict.
Watching people try to rebuild some kind of society — and decide what rules should govern it — made the show much more interesting to me than a conventional zombie story. You see extraordinary courage and loyalty alongside some genuinely awful behaviour.
And because the world is recognisable, it feels uncomfortably plausible. These aren't people surviving on an alien planet. They're surviving in the places we know, just without the systems that normally make them safe.
How to jump in
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| Image by AMC |
Fallout
My first Fallout game was Fallout 3, and I still remember stepping out of the Vault.
After spending the opening section underground in the artificially lit safety of Vault 101, suddenly there was this enormous, bright and completely unexplored wasteland stretching out in front of me.
I had no idea where I was supposed to go.
That was the point.
Fallout combines one of my favourite things about games — exploration — with one of my favourite things about post-apocalyptic fiction: seeing what people build after everything falls apart.
But what really makes Fallout distinctive is the tone.
The world has been destroyed by nuclear war, yet you're wandering through it listening to cheerful 1950s rock and roll. There are abandoned diners, ruined suburbs, bizarre cults, mutated creatures and people still trying to make some kind of life.
It's bleak.
It's funny.
And occasionally it's very, very weird.
That combination is Fallout.
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| The iconic emergence scene from Fallout 3 Image by Bethesda Softworks |
How to jump in
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| One of my first miniatures experiences - Fallout: Wasteland Warfare Image courtesy of Fuzzy Llama Reviews |
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| Fallout TV series season 2 takes you to New Vegas, an iconic location in the games Image by Prime Video / Bethesda Softworks |
The Last of Us
The Last of Us is different.
The world is post-apocalyptic, there are infected monsters everywhere and civilisation has collapsed.
But that's not really what I remember.
I remember the story.
The original The Last of Us is one of the very few video games I would call a masterpiece in the artistic sense. No other game has had quite the same emotional effect on me.
Joel and Ellie are travelling through a ruined America, but the real story is about their relationship — and about what happens when survival collides with love.
That's what makes The Last of Us so powerful to me. The apocalypse isn't the story. It's the pressure cooker.
The Last of Us Part II takes that idea into much darker territory, exploring revenge, grief, violence and the consequences of our choices.
They're games that made me think differently about what video games can do as a storytelling medium.
Sometimes they feel less like games and more like films where I'm responsible for what happens next.
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| Image by HBO |
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| The original, and still the best Image by Naughty Dog |
What's next?
These three worlds all approach the apocalypse differently.
The Walking Dead is interested in society. What would we be like after the fall?
Fallout is interested in exploration. How would we survive in a wasteland?
The Last of Us is interested in relationships. How far would we go for the ones we love?
But all three have the same thing going for them: they take away the comfortable assumptions of modern life and give us a world where every decision matters a little more.
Maybe that's what keeps drawing me back to post-apocalyptic stories.
There's something oddly liberating about a world where the supermarket isn't open, the electricity isn't working and nobody knows what tomorrow looks like.
You just have to decide what you're going to do next.
Next up: the last in the 'why I love...' series - worlds based on history. I've loved history since I studied it in high school. Find out about the modern day media that takes me back to that love.
Yours in the apocalypse,
Dashmeister
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| Image courtesy of IGN |
This blog is written by me, with a little help from AI editing for clarity and tone. All ideas, feelings, and memories are mine.
