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alt title(s): Cozy Catastrophe Heard a rumor that the end is near, but I just got comfortable here.
—Newsboys, "Lost the Plot"
"Cosy Catastrophe" is a term coined by Brian Aldiss to describe the work of fellow British Sci Fi icon John Wyndham. The End of the World As We Know It has arrived and... our heroes feel fine. Sure, it's a pity for all those billions who just perished at the hands of super-plague/aliens/nuclear war. But for our safe, middle-class, (usually) white heroes, it means a chance to quit their day job, steal expensive cars without feeling guilty, sleep in a five-star hotel for free, and relax while the world falls apart around them.
Maybe later they'll band together to recreate a humble yet sustainable pretechnological society. Maybe they'll just learn to accept the extinction of the human race with quiet dignity. Either way, the end of the world shouldn't be the... end of the world, so to speak.
Expect Arcadia since there's not as much pollution and construction.
Compare with Scavenger World.
Examples
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Anime
- Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou (Yokohama Shopping Trip) is one of the most laid-back depictions of the twilight of humanity ever; as seen through the eyes of an android coffee shop owner.
- In Ponyo On A Cliff By The Sea, sea levels rise by some 20 meters around the island where the story takes place, which would likely wipe out everything on it. Still, most anyone in the movie is shown to have fun and the focus stays on the relationship between Sosuke and Ponyo. It's strongly implied that there are no casualties at all (no human ones, anyway).
- Other then the obvious "this movie is for very young children," the lack of a catastrophe might have something to do with the fact that Ponyo is a bit of a Reality Warper: since she doesn't think anything bad could happen from using her dad's potions and making a tsumani, nothing does.
Comic Books
Film
- To some degree, 28 Days Later; although the survivors do have to pound and slash their way towards safety, they're all middle class, and they eventually make it to a calm, cozy little town in the middle of England.
- 28 Days Later owes a huge creative debt to Wyndham. The opening scene is a direct homage to the beginning of The Day of the Triffids.
- It could be argued that Delicatessen is a relatively cosy catastrophe, as the mail is still delivered, everyone's basically middle class, and while people are eaten (according to set rules), life goes on pretty a-ok.
- The Day After Tomorrow: Those who survive the climate shift by holing up in the library are a bunch of nerds who can discuss Nietzsche's shortcomings in the middle of the apocalypse. Well, there is the token hardscrabble homeless man with them.
- The Canadian zombie movie Fido is about a reconstructed '50s-esque suburb after a Zombie Apocalypse.
- Played as satire in Night of the Comet, where Earth's passage through a comet's tail turns most animal life into red powder. The only survivors in Los Angeles, aside from some Zombie Apocalypse cannibals, are a pair of Valley Girl sisters ... who immediately hit the mall and play dress-up.
- Played straight in the film version of The Postman with Kevin Costner, even moreso than the book. One minute people are holed up in fortresses, Mad Max-style; nobody remembers what the words "Ford Lincoln Mercury" stand for (oddly believable if you consider the declining rate of literacy and knowledge of recent history displayed by your average person nowadays). The next minute everything is back to normal thanks to one man delivering the mail!
- The next minute? That movie was three hours long.
- I Am Legend - Robert Neville lives in relative peace and luxury in his house, even playing golf and browsing through video stores. The psychological effects of living alone, however, aren't luxurious. There are also survivors living in a walled-off town in peace at the end.
- Dawn Of The Dead. The world is ending. Our heroes go figure skating and eat dinner.
- A mild example is David Cronenberg's Rabid. Oh, sure, there's a Zombie Apocalypse hitting Montreal, but martial law is quickly declared, and the government clean it up really well. That's Canada, for you.
- Had this movie been made after the AIDS crisis, it might have been less optimistic.
Literature
- The Postman, by David Brin, is a great example of this trope. The protagonist works to rebuild civilization by becoming ...a postman! He inspires small communities of farmers and scientists to stand up to survivalists. It's stated that the aggressive survivalists themselves were responsible for pushing civilization over the edge by hampering efforts at restoration after the bombs and plagues. And most of the types who just tried to hole up with food and ammo were killed quickly for their supplies.
- The Changes by Peter Dickinson (and BBC Children's Television spin-off). Funny noise/feeling causes all white people in England to reject all technology beyond the horse and cart.
- Arslan AKA The Wind from Bukhara by American author M.J. Engh. Weird Uzbek dictator conquers the world. Sets up headquarters in a nice, Christian town in Illinois.
- Pat Frank's Alas, Babylon brings a cosy World War III to a sleepy central Florida town.
- William R. Forstchen's One Second After is about what happens to a semi-rural North Carolina town after a terrorist EMP attack disrupts American society.
- On The Beach, a 1957 novel (written by Nevil Shute), a Film Of The Book (made in 1959, directed by Stanley Kramer and starring Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner, and Fred Astaire), and a made-for-television movie based on the book (made in 2000) each handle the story slightly differently, although the plot remains that of a Cozy Catastrophe. Nuclear war has devastated the whole world, except for Australia. The winds will bring the radioactivity soon enough, but until then, life goes on largely as normal.
- "On the Beach" is a special case. Depending on the reader, it may either be this trope played dead straight, or it may be a psychologically-horrifying subversion: it takes place in a world decimated from nuclear warfare. The northern hemisphere barely exists anymore, but in Southern Australia the book's protagonists are drinking tea and waiting calmly for the fallout to reach them, knowing that when it does, virtually all life on earth will be destroyed.
- The 1959 movie focuses on the captain of an American sub that was at sea in the Pacific during the war. The sub makes its way to Melbourne, and a romance ensues. With the sub commander played by Gregory Peck, an Australian Navy Liaison played by Fred Astaire, and Peck's Australian love interest played by Ava Gardner, how can their behavior be anything but civilized, gracious and dignified?
- The 2000 made for TV has a lot more conflict and angst than either the earlier movie or the book, but much of that is due to the trend toward Darker And Edgier that was in full swing when it was made. So the end is nearer, the American sub commander (Armand Assante) is more abrasive, the Australians in general are less welcoming, and the Australian Love Interest (Rachel Ward) and the liason officer( Bryan Brown) are ex-lovers.
- The works of John Wyndham, especially The Day Of The Triffids, The Kraken Wakes, Chocky and The Midwich Cuckoos (filmed twice as The Village of the Damned, and parodied on The Simpsons as The Bloodening) Averted, however, in The Chrysalids, which takes place After The End.
- SM Stirling's Emberverse series, in which the mysterious Change has killed off high-energy-density technology (electricity, gunpowder, steam engines...), is at least a partial example of this trope; while many of the successful survivors are unusual in some way—bush pilot, ex-SAS, member of the Society for Creative Anachronism, etc—the only "gangs" that do really well are the ones specifically recruited by a would-be warlord to serve as muscle. In general, having a sense of community and a willingness to work hard is more valuable than mere combat readiness. Sitting around waiting for the Army to show up and fix things is also explicitly noted as being generally fatal.
- All of this is true, but as the series progresses, the protagonists explicitly note they have either fallen into the luckiest string of fortunate coincidences ever or, far more likely, some powerful behind-the-scenes force is assisting and/or guiding them; by the end of the third book, they're receiving overt psychic visions. The chance that this is all somehow tied directly into the Change is very high.
- An American example would be ''The Girl Who Owned A City"; a piece of Anvilicious Objectivist propaganda
children's novel where The Plague wiped out every one on Earth over the age of twelve (in two weeks' time...). The novel's suburban children get on quite well in this curiously clean, decay-free world. Or at least they do once the novel's Ayn Rand stand-in heroine steps in and teaches them The Right Way.
- Lucifer's Hammer, written by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, has most of the surviving middle-class suburbanite types hooking up with the farmers and a Senator for survival. The military, gangsters, and general "badasses", along with an insane preacher and group of environmentalists become a cannibal army. Amazingly, this isn't nearly as anvilicious as it sounds.
- In Down To A Sunless Sea, the U.S. runs out of oil while Britain manages to keep its supply. Things are a little uncomfortable in the U.K., with gas rationing and such, but the U.S. has become the equivalent of a bankrupt third-world nation, sort of like Beirut or Afghanistan now. There's no electricity (although that doesn't make sense since most electricity is made from coal, not oil), exporting gasoline from Canada to the U.S. is a Capital Offense, food is rationed and used as bribes to get people on chain gangs, and there are talks of parts of the country seceeding, and the nation's first Black President may have to consider them. Then it gets worse.
- One of the ultimate examples may be George R. Stewart's timeless Earth Abides, which depicts most of humankind dying off due to a superplague, and the ones left to repopulate the earth are fairly ordinary people who aren't at all badasses or Well-Intentioned Extremists. The protagonist, Isherwood Williams, is a Wide Eyed Idealist who starts off with the intention of rebuilding civilization, but in his old age, settles into comfort with the idea that, although technology has been set back to the Stone Age, the spirit of humanity lives on.
- The 1632 series plays with this, as the premise of the series is that an entire middle class Appalachian mining town is transported to Germany during the Thirty Years War. The effects of this on a town of middle-class early 21st century Americans is dealt with and developed over the many books of the series.
- In 'The City, Not Long After' a plague has wiped out a pretty large percent of the world population, but never mind. The remainder is too poor and diffuse to fight and, with the leftovers of civilisation, they have plenty of support till they develop an agrarian society. The artists in the remains of San Francisco have pretty infinite art supplies.
- In Little Big, the protagonists are largely untouched on their large private estate by the chaos gripping the American continent.
- I Am Legend, as with its film version, has Neville living in luxury with scavenged and stolen items (most of LA is uninhabited... save for the vampires). He even considers moving to a hotel, but that would mean having to start all over again.
- Arto Paasilinna's Maailman paras kylä (non-translated) is about a quiet village where people till the fields, look after their own, and don't care overmuch about the goings-on in the wide world as don't concern them. Meanwhile the world's economy collapses, World War III starts, and a giant asteroid obliterates or floods two continents. The villagers send out a couple of folks to sell a crashed nuke, and have the children sing hymns to pass the time until the sun reappears. The thing doesn't have a plot as much as a saunter.
Live Action TV
- Jericho is a perfect example of this trope. The series focuses on the mostly middle-class inhabitants of a small town in Kansas (the titular Jericho).
- Survivors on the BBC. Biological Warfare lab lets a virus escape. A few people happen to be immune, but everyone else dies. Story focuses on small group of survivors in England, mostly white and middle class.
- The Day After deals with the effects of a large-scale nuclear exchange between the U.S. and Soviet Union and focuses on "normal" people in and around Lawrence, KS. Focus is given to people ranging from the medical staff at a local hospital, a bunch of students at the University of Kansas and their professor, and a rural family of farmers. The movie is famous for depicting a variety of horrors, from cities being destroyed by mushroom clouds to graphic depictions of dead people and animals to, most horrifying, Steve Guttenberg with his shirt off.
- The very short-lived ABC Family series Three Moons Over Milford was set in a small New England town shortly after an asteroid misses the Earth but hits the Moon, breaking it into three pieces which could theoretically fall at any time and finish the job, and even more shortly after the protagonist's local industrialist husband decided to abandon everything and go climb the world's highest mountains while he still could (that's gotta be a trope itself), focusing on her and the rest of the town's attempts to maintain some semblance of normality.
- Played straight in Power Rangers RPM. The planet has been nuked. Only once city remains, safe beneath its protected dome. The last bastion of humanity is only a few miles in radius, a few thousand feet in height. Life inside... is more or less exactly as it is in real life, except very few people travel much.
Music
- The Steely Dan song "King of the World" employs this trope in a fatalistic Late On The Beach fashion. The singer/protagonist invites anyone who hears him calling on an old ham radio to come visit and share "poison wine" and "cobalt cigarettes" and go joyriding around radioactive ruins since he doesn't have the temperament to be a savage or a highwayman. He ends transmission with the observation "If I stay inside / I might live til Saturday."
- Fairly obviously: "It's the End of the World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)" By REM. It doesn't make oodles of sense, but one can assume it's Exactly What It Says On The Tin
- "We Will Become Silhouettes".
Roleplaying Games
- Polish RPG Neuroshima among its many flaws has some fractions who do precisely that - some wander through the ruins, looking for old C Ds or books, others participate in car wars, and basically only one small fraction decides to do something with Robot Apocalypse attempting to attack US (as seen from Polish perspective)
- Have you ever read rulebook? Outpost is not just small but elite fraction (creating something big on their level of technology is impossible, almost everything what they have is stolen from robots), and not the only that doing something, because there is also New York and Federation that are also going to join forces and attack robots. And there are many fractions that try to protects others, survival, rebuild society or help mutants and humans to coexist. And we are talking about Crapsack World just 40-50 years after apocalypse, robots from the north are not the only problem in the verse, there is also mutated jungle on south. People from south didn’t even seen a single robot (until creation of Smart, robots merged with jungle) with communication that bad it is nearly impossible to communicate with near village it’s nothing surprising that they don’t help. It’s also hard to make people do something because of Tornado drug that allows to have a dream about living before apocalypse. Everybody is sick. And it’s even more complex because game allows you to chose one of four colors – what kind of world is after apocalypse. In steel it’s all about fighting robots and rebuilding society, rust is about being human in the world that is about to end, mercury is about dying in horrific world. Only in chrome this trope is followed.
Video Games
- Exmortis 2 features a small and peaceful community of farmers isolated from the apocalyptic carnage that the Exmortis demons are unleashing on the rest of the world. Of course, by the time the PC actually finds this place, the inhabitants have been slaughtered, but one of the farmers was considerate enough to leave a lengthly journal recording the disasters in the outside world, the measures put in place to defend themselves from approaching Exmortis, and the foraging expeditions to abandoned settlements. Of course, with supernatural entities roaming the Earth in search of humans to torture and murder, the cosy catastrophe lasts only until the first air-horn sounds.
Webcomics
- The Zombie Hunters splits the difference between this and Scavenger World — there is a central city of survivors, most of whom are white and (formerly) middle-class, and a vast swath of zombie-infested wasteland that's home to anyone tough enough to live there. Most of the main characters are former Wastelanders, thus upping the badass quotient considerably
Web Original
- "The Quiet Apocalypse" mentioned in Stefan "Twoflower" Gagne's "Unreal Estate" is one of these. All of those End-Of-The-World-As-We-Know-It scenarios came about (and at more or less the same time), but were far less catastrophic than expected and failed to finish off the human race. The story can be found here.
Film: Zombie Land - the apocalypse actually improves the main character's life.
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