Apocalyptic fantasy and other things you should stop doing

I love the post-apocalyptic fantasy trope and I refuse to let it retire. The idea of seeing remnants of the modern world through the eyes of medieval-level civilization is really cool and there are so many more ways to explore it.

This trope really works best when it's making a commentary on something. The best example of it in pop culture is, of course, the twist from the ending of Planet of the Apes, but that didn't come out of nowhere. Captain Taylor is explicitly a character who looks down on humanity and joined the space mission in the hopes of looking for someone better out in the cosmos, and instead he finds this civilization of apes that share many of the attributes he despised about mankind and he really starts to miss Earth and wants to be with people again while he's being treated like an animal. The big twist at the end is that the apes have been intentionally holding back their societal development because they have the ruins of humanity all around them, and the smartest among them are keeping it subdued because they're terrified that they might make the same mistakes. The final famous rant at the Statue of Liberty about how "You maniacs! You blew it up!" isn't just him railing against the governments of his time for destroying the world, but because, now that he really truly wanted to go home, he realizes that he never left and the worst impulses of mankind that he wanted to escape won over. It being Earth all along is meant to be both a commentary on how we treat ourselves, other animals and our world, and a warning about how we need to be better

Last time I was this early, Crete was still the pinnacle of civilization.

Apocalyptic fantasy is great, the problem I have is when it somehow recreates a stereotypical medieval Europe setting perfectly. And frankly it’s not only fantasy that does that, a lot of people seem to use the apocalypse as an excuse to reset society to their historical culture of choice without thinking about whether that would make sense.

my biggest problem with the trope has always been that it doesn't mean anything to the characters. like why would some fantasy guy give a shit that he's living in our world in the future, it doesn't change anything about how he views his world. it's just for us

I really like the way Horizon did it. They revealed that trope really early on, but then the actual twist was something no one expected that changed the way I viewed the setting

I think this is an instance where the stale trope is fine since the average person is probably not reading enough fantasy media to ever notice the frequency.

I will say that I rarely see them incorporate the fact that this was our world into the world-building or story. Like, what if the Foresaken started arming Darkfriends with Glocks? The whole parking garage and AI thing actually has me rather interested in the Broken Empire

This just in: James Tullos discovers the entire Dying Earth genre

I cannot agree. This is not a trope, it's a whole genre he's talking about. It's like saying "enough fantasy, we are sick of fake worlds." It may sometimes be used as a lazy plot point, but the dying world setup is usually fascinating and provides lots of possibilities.

I really like this trope tbh, even though it’s executed poorly most of the time. Idk there’s just something about the ancient remains of a hyper advanced civilization in a now more primitive world that is very alluring and intriguing to me, as well as the idea of magic actually just being technology from the distant past that is so advanced that the present people cannot separate it from magic

To me, one the best recent examples of execution of this trope is Adventure Time. The subtle hints and gradual revelations keep the viewer intrigued, and once it's confirmed, the setting starts to have a great effect on the story. Most of the core characters have actually lived through the apocalypse, and created their relations in that period. It changes how you view the them. It makes Ice King not be a villain anymore, and towards the end you're rooting for the guy. The greatest character change in the finale is IK turning back into Simon. In the later seasons it even starts to feel like Finn and Jake are the odd ones out, like Marceline, PB and IK have known each other and interacted for hundreds of years in their immortal lives, and Finn and Jake are just there for a little while. This is getting rambly, I just want to say I like how it's not just there, it's not just a twist. It's central to the story and it made the characters who they are.

This trope is a lot more interesting in more 'alternative' fantasy/ sci-fi like Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun, Jack Vance's Dying Earth, and Michael Moorcock's Dancers at the end of Time. His Hawkmoon series is also set in a post-nuclear disaster Europe and is from the early 70s. It probably goes back to The Time Machine by HG Wells.

Honestly, I loved the part of Prince of Thorns when you thought you were in a medieval or fantastic setting, then find out its actually our world. I became so much more interested in the book when the skyscraper/garage was mentioned and that the sword of the king was made from the steel rods in the concrete walls (if I remember correctly). Then the author decided to make his teen protagonist a rapist, make every man in the story the scum of the earth and every woman a sex object. Feel free to tell me I am wrong though, I never even finished the first book, because this world felt like vastly wasted potential.

A Canticle for Leibowitz and Foundation were the OGs of this genre. Both are awesome.

Drakengard/Nier did something like this right. The games are set in a multiverse and all the games are set on a different Earth. Drakengard 1 is set in Midgard a timeline where a mysterious abandoned city appeared one day in the middle of Europe in medieval times, unleashing monster and magic unto the world. This city is at the end shown to be a pale modern city. Then the characters go fight the final enemy, an angel, supossedly on their home dimension, but instead they fight over modern-day Tokyo. The remains of both the final boss and the protagonist change the world so that magic exists and the city turns into something that looks like the cathedral city. This twist reframes the whole story. The events are kind of like a cycle or an infection. Midgard was "infected" by a modern city that very likely had itself been infected by a world like Midgard.

My favorite use of this particular twist has to be in the original Planet of the Apes movie for a lot of the reasons you touched up on. The astronauts in that movie are entirely motivated on trying to find a way back to Earth and figure out just how long they had been cryogenically frozen. When you add in the fact that it came out during the height of not just the Great Space Race but the Cold war, the twist, not only bring up questions of how this affects the protagonists, but adds to the themes the movie presents.

About your point on plot twists: I think it was a tumblr post I got this from. The reaction to a good plot twist is not confusion, it is awe. best example for me is definitely the ending of way of kings. In the last chapter my brain raced through the entire story, recontextualizing almost every scene. So you could also say a good plot twists doesn't change the events of the story, but their context

I think Iron Widow did a really cool take on this trope, because it really informs a lot of the plot. Plus, there’s a twist that gets foreshadowed a few chapters before the end that really recontextualizes the whole thing.

One of my pet peeves is the twist for the sake of having a twist.