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Cosy Catastrophe
aka: Cozy Catastrophe

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"After retrieving the six-pack of Aussie beer that had been left dangling below the 4.0 Celsius thermocline (JUNO gave me absolute hell for that) while I slept, I settled comfortably into the pilot's seat while cradling a galley tray loaded with choice nibbles and commenced binge-watching the entire first season of Red Dwarf. Smegging brilliant."

"Cosy Catastrophe" is a term coined by Brian Aldiss.note  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 heroes, it means a chance to quit their day job, steal expensive cars without feeling guilty (or fearing arrest), sleep in a five-star hotel for free, and relax while the world falls apart around them. Maybe things aren't quite as good as they were in The Beforetimes, but all in all, life is still enjoyable. Especially if you brought your dog.

Maybe they'll eventually band together to recreate a humble yet sustainable pretechnological society. Maybe, if they're of mixed genders, they'll see it as their duty to repopulate the species (wink, wink). 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.

Many have noted that the popularity of the Zombie Apocalypse genre in media is probably in part due to this trope. To some people's sensibilities, a future in which you may be prey to flesh-hungry ghouls is still worth it if you don't have to face all of the pressures and responsibilities of modern life anymore. In many ways, it makes life more interesting.

A high form of Escapism, as who wouldn't want to drop all the pressures of modern life, with the odd chance to prove your bravery and resilience? Compare with Scavenger World, After the End. Contrast Go Mad from the Apocalypse. Usually goes hand in hand with Apocalyptic Logistics. See also Disaster Democracy and Angst? What Angst?.

Not to be confused with Cozy Voice for Catastrophes.


Examples

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    Advertising 
  • In a beer commercial, an average looking guy is stranded on a desert island with a supermodel, complete with several cases of ice-cold (don't ask how) beer. The two of them think they hear a rescue plane so the guy assures the girl he'll try and signal one if he sees it. By using shells, rocks, palm fronds and his own body (for the Y), he does get a message out to some would-be rescuers: "GO AWAY".

    Anime and Manga 
  • Arachnid ended with Japan being engulfed by an outbreak of "rape-zombies". Just over a year later in Blattodea, the country has become a dilapidated wasteland. Alice is still torn with grief and almost falls prey to the zombies, but as for new protagonists Chiyuri and Setsuna? Both have moved on from their traumatic experiences and happily work together to kill the zombies, with Chiyuri still being awfully carefree about being homeless.
  • The big draw of Chikyū no Hōkago, a manga about a teen survivalist and his trio of schoolgirl sidekicks surviving in a planet where all other inhabitants have turned into shadow-beasts.
  • Dragon Ball Z exhibits this trope in The History Of Trunks. Despite the fact that the androids have wiped out two-thirds of Earth's population, people in the cities they haven't attacked yet still go about their daily lives like normal.
  • Beginning in Episode 4 (out of 7) of Freedom, Takeru and Biz escape from the dystopian government on the Moon and crash-land their spacecraft in the ruins of Las Vegas. Even though the survivors on Earth After the End live in poverty, have lost most forms of technology and can grow crops only with great difficulty, for some reason seafood-flavored Cup Noodles are readily available, and everyone the protagonists meet is cheerful, friendly and optimistic. They safely drive 2400 miles to Cape Canaveral without getting waylaid by bandits or anything. This is perhaps the most sympathetic portrayal of Americans ever to be seen in an anime: possibly a subversion of Eagleland, the message seeming to be that Americans would be great folks to be around if they didn't have any money or government.
    • "Freedom" was commissioned by Nissin Cup Noodles as a promotional film, so of course they've got to work ramen in there somewhere...
  • Ghost in the Shell and Appleseed (set roughly in the same universe) take place after two new World Wars (III and IV) that devastated the planet and killed a pretty huge chunk of humanity... but its been long enough since that human civilization has rebuilt and there have been a lot of great technological advances. The world is far from perfect, but if it weren't explicitly brought up, you'd never guess that this is a version of history where Tokyo and several other major cities got nuked out into oblivion and the United States collapsed into three nations, all mere decades ago. Interestingly, the post-apocalyptic nature of the setting is a lot more apparent in Appleseed despite it being set chronologically later, suggesting that society started going properly downhill between series.
  • Girls' Last Tour has Chito and Yuuri surviving the collapse of civilization after an Unspecified Apocalypse a century earlier. They're surprisingly optimistic about traveling their dying world where civilization has long collapsed, humanity's numbers are too low to repopulate, and most life has vanished. Each day is the same, with them searching for food, supplies, and shelter. All in all, they seem content with life as they spend it Walking the Earth, simply living day to day.
  • Played with in Hetalia: Axis Powers: Paint it White where the embodiments of Switzerland and Liechtenstein share a sweet picnic together while the rest of the world reels from an Alien Invasion.
    • Also done at the beginning of the movie, when good chunks of the world are being turned into aliens. The meeting held to figure out what course of action to take ends with them arguing over which of them makes the best kind of movies.
  • Humanity Has Declined: Humans as we know them aren't going to last much longer, most technology is gone, starvation is a real threat... but society has survived, and the standard of living isn't all that low.
  • 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).
  • Zig-Zagging Trope in Recently, This World Became Only Mine (A NSFW manga bordering on Hentai). The plot focuses on the disappearance of most of humanity, seemingly leaving behind a lone Nymphomaniac named Miki. While there are some instances that make life for her a little complicated, she gets through it and mostly exploits her situation to indulge in mindless hedonism such as exhibitionism while also trying to solve what happened to humanity, and later meeting other supposed survivors. The end of the story reveals that the whole situation was a sort of Afterlife Antechamber. In real life, all but one of the other survivors were Miki's online friends who she went on a boat trip with, but the boat capsized and killed them while leaving Miki in a coma. The friends desperately wanted her to come with them to the afterlife while the non-friend survivor turned out to be a psychic who was trying to bring her out of her coma. In the end, she chose to return to life.
  • School-Live! is basically a School Girl Series set in a Zombie Apocalypse. While members of the cast periodically show the psychological toll the event had on them, one of them is subject to delusions in which everything is as it was before the apocalypse and she's living at the school as a club activity. Her clubmates and fellow survivors basically play along with it. The school also happens to have solar panels, a water purification system and plenty of supplies (though they sometimes need to leave the shelter to get more food), which is great help in the playing along. All that equipment gets destroyed later on, by circumstances beyond the girl's control.
  • Despite having barely survived an apocalyptic war at some point, the world in Sound of the Sky is surprisingly doing well for itself. Sure there's the possibility that the Earth's dying but life had moved on.
  • Episode 4 of Space☆Dandy results in the entire universe and every last life form (including robots and narrators) becoming zombified. Unlife continues on as normal for everyone and there is no more wars, sickness, or discrimination, though films from George Romero become obscenely popular.
  • Sunday Without God: With no new life being born, the world is slowly coming to an end, but society has generally adapted to this lack of true death and new life, and Ai still intends to try to save the world, so she travels the world with her companions and helps those she meets.
  • Super Dimension Fortress Macross: The Earth gets attacked, bombed, and invaded several times over, with increasingly devastating damage to the population. But that doesn't stop everyone from managing to continue to live happy, completely normal lives with all the power and facilities needed to not only keep going on as usual, but to rebuild everything back virtually overnight. Even on the ship when people struggle to survive on military rations, they somehow manage to continue having a successful restaurant in space. Lord knows where they found the ingredients.
  • Urusei Yatsura: This is the prologue to the second movie, Beautiful Dreamer. The plot returns to this territory after the protagonists Pull the Thread on the surreal "Groundhog Day" Loop they had been stuck in, with the rest of Tomobiki crumbling to ruins except for Ataru's house... and a nearby abandoned convenience store that mysteriously remains stocked with fresh groceries for no apparent reason. It's all a Lotus-Eater Machine revolving around Lum and her wishes to spend time having fun with her friends and her Darling forever.
  • Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou 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. Despite the common knowledge that humanity is on the decline, the general attitude of everyone is to just live out their lives and accept things as they are. The past is generally treated with some wistfulness, but no one is in significant angst.
  • Yuki Yuna is a Hero takes place on something of a post-apocalyptic Earth where the section of Japan the girls live on is the only surviving area. Aside from the Shinju-sama worship, everything is pretty normal.
  • Zekkyou Gakkyuu has an epilogue for The Boyfriend Lesson reveal this to be happening. Virtual humans, created through cellphone apps, have replaced majority of humanity and the natural birthrate is at zero. After all, why bother going through the trouble of finding a partner and raising children, when one can so easily just create the perfect one with a few clicks? And the virtual humans are so pleasant to be around that even the Prime Minister, who may be one of the few real humans left, says that "nature should just take its course" and let things happen.
  • Zom 100: Bucket List of the Dead's protagonist spent the pre-Zombie Apocalypse days working at a "black company", a type of Japanese company whose status as a Soul-Crushing Desk Job stretches the boundaries into outright illegality, forcing employees to work extremely long hours with minimal pay or benefits. Consequently, after the initial shock wears off, he's actually relieved that he doesn't have to go to work anymore, and he decides to spend the apocalypse filling out the titular bucket list.

    Art 

    Comic Books 
  • El Eternauta starts out kinda like that... But then it gets much, much worse.
  • When the Wind Blows: Deconstructed. A kindly but naive elderly couple hunker down as a devastating nuclear war begins. Due to the government's poor education of the public about the matter, coupled with their total failure to understand how serious the situation is (they lived through the Blitz in WWII and think it's just like that. It's not), they end up dying slowly and painfully from radiation sickness. The worst part is that their lack of understanding of radiation leads to them making things worse, as they don't realize how stupid and self-defeating the poorly written government pamphlets are (they're told to yank doors off hinges to use as a makeshift inner shelter, than a few pages later are told to leave the doors in place as barricades).
  • The Walking Dead is most definitely not an example at the start and for most of the story, but the Distant Finale brings it into this trope. After the initial decade or two of anarchy caused by the Zombie Apocalypse, everything starts to gradually settle down as people get used to the new normal; towns and governments are being reestablished, zombies are dying off (either from naturally decaying or being easily hunted down by humans that are now aware of their weaknesses), and infrastructure is slowly building back up. The world hasn't quite gotten back to its pre-apocalypse level yet, but it's getting there.

    Fan Works 
  • Deconstructed in Ghosts of Evangelion. When Shinji and Asuka were the only humans left alive, they scavenged freely the ruins to find food. But when Shinji took a cello from a music store, Asuka pointed out he was stealing, and maybe the owner would return to the real world and find he was missing a cello.
  • Zig-Zagging Trope in The Second Try. After TI, Shinji and Asuka take up residence in a subsistence farm that came out of the event mostly intact. The place was a nice find; fully self supportive with solar panels and batteries, a generator, rainwater collection system, usable garden, room for livestock, cozy living conditions, a fully stocked repair shed, and a working truck with the added bonus of being close to several city ruins ripe for scavenging. However, they had to work REALLY HARD to make it work.
  • On a planet-sized level in Shepard's R&R. The Serenity system, home of the Ponies, was spared from the horror that was the Reaper War. Now that the galaxy is decimated from the conflict, the bountiful resources of the Serenity system plus the amazing magical abilities of the ponies are something the Council absolutely must acquire to prevent galactic collapse, so they send Commander Shepard to secure their aid.
  • Zig-zagged in Ambience: A Fleet Symphony. On one end there are places like Inner Chicago that were not hit by the nukes and are barely changed from pre-war. On the other end are bombed out, irradiated and abandoned places like Houston or Atlantic City. Then there're places that are anywhere in between.
  • Gensokyo 20XX, specifically, 20XXIII — most of 20XXIV seems play with this. For the most part, after the nukes drop, the characters struggle to live and survive, especially as the winter starts and things start running scarce. Adding to this, few characters (Sakuya, Reiko, Patchouli, and most of Ran's litter) die in the aftermath. It's only until much later in 20XXIV and 20XXV does things get cozy.
  • My Name Is Molly reinterprets Animal Crossing as taking place in one. All adults have died due to The Plague and all the healthy children have been turned into Funny Animals, erased of their memories, and shipped away to live in secluded towns. They're happy and content, though a lot of the happiness is forced upon them using medicine.
  • When the Guys in White destroy the Ghost Zone in Surviving an Apocalyptic World, Danny's world becomes fused with several other worlds, transforming itself into an apocalyptic aftermath filled with many dangers such as mutants. Despite no longer having powers, Danny manages to use his intelligence and ingenuity to create a comfortable living for himself and any survivors who join him.
  • You Are (Not) At Fault: As wandering around the ruins of post-Apocalypse Tokyo-3, Shinji starts feeling hungry. So he breaks into an abandoned convenience store and grabs several bottles of water and bags of snacks.
  • In At the Edge of Lasg'len, a Synthetic Plague wipes out 90 percent of humanity in 2037. The Elves of what remains in Eryn Lasgalen receive warning 20 years in advance, so they and the residents of two Irish villages who know of their existence are able to plan accordingly. They have time to learn to farm with horse-powered machinery, and are able to stock up on food and medical necessities. They warn Galway a few months before the plague, so it survives mainly by evacuating until the disease has burnt out. Iceland survives wholesale due to sheer luck: a volcano erupts not long before the plague is released, so no planes can go in or out. They're able to trade and support one another, so no one goes hungry and people can get basic medical care in Ireland. Iceland still has fully-functional hospitals, so anyone needing non-emergency complex surgery can be sent there. Over the years, they make contact with other small isolated societies, most of which are rescued by the Russian Cruiser Aurora, which went out to sea when the plague reached Russia, and pretty much stayed there for the next six years.

  • In People Turning Into Smith Clones, the Mega City is slowly collapsing, but a group of survivors are shown having a lot of fun in and out of their bunker.

    Films — Animated 
  • The Protect and Survive films and leaflets produced by the British government in the early 1980s seemed to imply that this would be the outcome of a nuclear conflict. Sure, you'd have to stay inside for a couple of weeks, but after that everything would be just fine and dandy. Threads and When the Wind Blows (see Comic Books, above) were produced in response.
  • WALL•E: Yes humanity abandoned the planet over 700 years prior to the movie, leaving behind a junk-filled planet that’s (allegedly) too toxic and polluted to ever support life again, but the main focus for much of the first act is Wall-E’s cute and funny misadventures. He even has an adorable pet cockroach!
  • Deconstructed in in the 1986 anti-nuke film When the Wind Blows. The protagonists are a charming but frightfully naive old English couple who lived through the horrors of the Blitz, and so faced with the threat of nuclear war, they try to adopt that famous Stiff Upper Lip mindset. It doesn't protect them, needless to say.

    Films — Live-Action 
  • In Avengers: Endgame, Thanos' extermination of half of all life in the universe does not have the apocalyptic consequences you'd expect. While there are some deserted neighborhoods around the world after a Five Year Time Skip, the worst consequence anyone has to deal with is depression, rather than total infrastructural or societal collapse. Several characters even eat out at a restaurant in one scene.
  • In Bokeh a young American couple on holiday in Iceland wake up one morning to discover everyone else on earth has disappeared. Despite the two frequently arguing they are able to live comfortably as they can enjoy the beauty of Iceland, still have the Internet, acquire a car, can take food and supplies from the supermarkets and have all the houses on Iceland to choose from.
  • Castaways: Cara and Emily escape the pandemic through fleeing on a boat. Then it goes down, with them washed up on an island. It's a paradise overall, with them becoming quite happy with this, especially once they've become lovers. They even choose to stay forever at the end rather than accept any means back. The rest of the world presumably can fend for itself facing the pandemic.
  • Damnation Alley has a group of USAF personell trek across a ruined United States to investigate a radio signal from Albany, New York. When they reach their destination, the area is surprisingly intact, with green fields and friendly locals.
  • Dawn of the Dead (2004) has this in a brief montage, wherein the survivors simply enjoy the benefits of living in an abandoned, secure mall. At least until the fuse boxes go out in the desolate, abandoned basement. A similar event happens in the original, towards the end of the movie.
  • Day The World Ended (1955) sees a dozen people and a donkey who are survivors of nuclear war stumbling upon a well-stock-piled home belonging to a former U.S Navy commander and his daughter located in a canyon where they are protected from the fallout, leaving them to live for a couple months mostly comfortable and civilized lives without any outside threats until the appearance of the mutant monster near the end.
  • The world of Delicatessen had a relatively cozy 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.
  • Empire of the Sun contains an interlude during which the abandoned schoolboy Jamie fends for himself amid the chaos of the Japanese invasion, foraging from ladders and riding his bike around the dining room. Averted, in that it abruptly transitions into his meeting with Basie, followed by internment by the Japanese.
  • Although not the end of the world, the end of Fight Club fits this description in a sense. In fact, the entire point is to create this, to break everything down and start over new.
    Tyler Durden: In the world I see –- you're stalking elk through the damp canyon forests around the ruins of Rockefeller Center. You'll wear leather clothes that will last you the rest of your life. You'll climb the wrist-thick kudzu vines that wrap the Sears Tower. And when you look down, you'll see tiny figures pounding corn, laying strips of venison on the empty car pool lane of some abandoned superhighway.
  • Finch: Around fifteen years after a solar flare has scorched the earth and destroyed the ozone layer the titular Finch has been safely living alone in an underground St. Louis laboratory with his dog Goodyear and robot Dewey. Even when Finch and his companions (Goodyear, Dewey and the newly created Jeff) are forced to make a road-trip to San Francisco due to an incoming giant storm, the trip itself is mostly pleasant and cosy bar a tornado, solar radiation and a vehicle briefly pursuing their motorhome.
  • Averted in Five. Eric is opposed to Michael's attempt to set up an sustainable agrarian homestead, believing that they should be seeking out other survivors to establish a superior breed of humanity to rule over the world that he believes will rise out of the ashes, and pointing out that there is no need to grow their own food as there are tons of food sitting in warehouses just waiting to be taken. Michael, however, points out the cities are where the radiation is, and wants to establish a Thoreau-like existence of self-sufficiency that doesn't rely on supplies that will eventually rot and run out.
  • Godzilla: Final Wars features a pair of Antarctic workers charged with watching over Godzilla's prison, one of whom apparently views the alien apocalypse as a chance to enjoy his croissants and comic books in peace. He and his co-worker are the first victims of the newly awakened Godzilla.
  • Justified as it's essentially a modern fairy tale set in a post-apocalypse scenario, in How I Live Now a nuclear weapon explodes in London killing tens if not hundreds of thousands. However for the kids it's an opportunity to explore some first-cousin sex, play outside a lot, and have sleepovers in the barn. Even the kids were hit by fallout material from the blast, no one is made ill by it. Additionally, it appears that the nuclear attack may have been limited only to England or even just London, with the rest of the world unaffected. However the situation becomes a lot less comfortable once martial law has been instituted, and it's revealed that the terrorists have contaminated the water supply and control parts of England (they are powerful enough to successfully fight an off-guard UK military for now at least).
  • Into the Forest: Two sisters 20 Minutes into the Future are left to fend for themselves when their father dies after a national blackout has brought about the collapse of society and regressed technology back to pre-industrial revolution levels. However for the most part they are able to manage just fine in their idyllic secluded forest home and are even able to grow and hunt their own food.
  • IO: Despite the atmosphere being so toxic it has forced most of humanity off-world, Sam lives a rather cosy life due to her home (an astronomical observatory on a mountain plateau) being located safely at higher elevations above the toxic atmosphere. She has her own greenhouse with plenty of vegetables, electricity, entertainment and even a shower. Even at the end it’s implied Sam and her child (who have both developed immunity to the toxic atmosphere) may be the last humans on earth due to the Homeworld Evacuation, leaving little to zero threat from other people.
  • Juan in a Million: not only do the power plants keep chugging, the Internet is still up!
  • In The Midnight Sky, Dr. Augustine Lofthouse is a terminal Sole Surviving Scientist living relatively comfortably at an isolated research base in the Arctic after the majority of the earth is covered by a cloud of radiation because of a mysterious apocalyptic disaster known as “the event”.
  • 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. The electricity just keeps on chugging through and beyond the end of the movie, and before the comet's effects are felt by the characters, a news reporter doesn't seem at all alarmed by reports that all communication has gone dead in the first region of the world to see the comet, and everyone else is too busy holding "comet parties" to notice.
  • The Last Man on Earth and The Ωmega Man, both film adaptations of the original I Am Legend novel, have Neville living a relatively civilised post-apocalyptic life. Same with the 2007 adaptation of the same name: Neville is a Crazy-Prepared scientist with a fair amount of supplies which allows him to live in relative peace and luxury in his house, even playing golf and browsing through video stores. He's also slowly but steadily going insane from loneliness, with a good helping of Survivor Guilt on top, so maybe it's not quite as cosy as all that.
  • In The Quiet Earth, almost all of humanity disappears, leaving the handful of survivors with everyone else's stuff.
  • Shaun of the Dead: Shaun's "plan" is to round up his friends and family, go to the local pub, and wait there until the Zombie Apocalypse blows over. Suffice to say, it doesn't exactly work.
  • Silent Night (2021): This gets deconstructed, the catastrophe itself is made rather cosy when a group of friends gather for a final Christmas party however one of the children, Art, rebels against it.
  • At the end of The World's End, the alien Big Bad decides to leave Earth and destroys all human technology out of spite, sending the world into a pseudo-medieval state. Nonetheless, the protagonists seem to deal with it just fine along with either fixing some old relationships or establishing new ones. In the case of Gary, his hedonistic and selfish ways lend itself well into this new world.
  • In Z for Zachariah, after a nuclear war a woman named Ann has been for the most part comfortably surviving alone with her dog for several years on her family’s farm in a valley sheltered from the nuclear fallout. After the arrival of another surviver named Loomis they are able to repair a disused tractor and generator and he even proposes that they could use the water from an irradiated waterfall as a source of hydroelectric power.
  • In Zombieland, the apocalypse actually improves the main character's life and learning to enjoy life is as much a survival trait as being able to fire a shotgun. Then again the apocalypse was so devastating that there may be as few as six people left alive at this point. Nobody left has any long-term goals besides survival and keeping themselves sane.
    • Taken a step further in the sequel, Zombieland: Double Tap. Like the previous film, this zombie apocalypse is very cozy, especially compared to other zombie fiction. Infrastructure like power and water still exists thanks to still-functioning fully-automated hydroelectric dams, and zombies have apparently thinned to the point that you're generally in little danger so long as you keep your wits about you and keep the noise down. Even with the introduction of more dangerous zombies the heroes are generally in little danger and battles against zombies are usually just an excuse to show off sweet zombie kills, to the point that Columbus continues to give out "Zombie Kill of the ____" awards. They're never short on food or resources, they begin to meet more survivors who aren't antagonistic (though some are assholes), never worry about other survivors trying to steal from them, and don't have to worry about gasoline or other scavenged resources running bad. Pretty much the worst part of things in this current world is working vehicles are becoming harder to find, and Columbus even declares their living in the White House to be the best days of his life including those from before the apocalypse.

    Literature 
  • The 1959 novel Alas, Babylon starts off making some serious points about nuclear war and the prevailing military doctrine of the time, but then quickly turns post-nuclear survival into a delightful robinsonade resembling The Mysterious Island.
  • Always Coming Home is centuries, if not millenia, after civilization had collapsed, natural resources are exhausted, the pollution is such that a quarter of the babies are stillborn... but people seem much happier than we are today.
  • The Books of Ember: Society is a bit like this in The Diamond of Darkhold. Of course, the events of the book take place about 200 years after the end of the world, so nobody actually has any idea what happened, and the simple farming life is all that the people of Sparks know. The epilogue describes the world some centuries after the conclusion of the series, with human civilization having recovered a tech base roughly equivalent to pre-apocalypse levels, but somewhat more eco-friendly this time around. (Solar panels and other industrial electric tech are explicitly mentioned.)
  • The Changes by Peter Dickinson (and BBC Children's Television spin-off). Funny noise/feeling causes everyone in England to reject all technology beyond the horse and cart.
  • In The City, Not Long After by Pat Murphy, a plague has wiped out a pretty large chunk of the world population, but it's not a big deal. The remainder is too poor and diffuse to fight and, with the leftovers of civilization, they have plenty of support till they develop an agrarian society. The artists in the remains of San Francisco have practially infinite art supplies.
  • Ahh, the '80s and their World War 3 post-apocalypses. Perhaps the most optimistic of these, was Ryder Stacy's Doomsday Warrior series. Sure there was nuclear war, Soviets enslaving large chunks of the USA and scummy mutants and road warrior thugs being assholes. However our heroes come from Century City, a futuristic protected domed city, where benign mutants including the main protagonist Super-Soldier live, with the USA actually advancing in technology because of an Omni Disciplinary Scientist and a bunch of hyper-intelligent mutants (to the point where the American rebels were able to repel the Soviet invaders because of their superior tech and good ol' American pluck).
  • S. M. 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.
    • Sheer mathematics mean they have to be lucky. If 99% of the population dies, anyone who survives will be lucky; anyone who survives and does well will have to be very lucky. Someone has to be on the end of the bell curve.
    • The survivors also note that their catastrophe isn't particularly cozy except compared to the slow or quick deaths of almost everybody else. One person is grateful to be carrying buckets of milk on a yoke across her shoulders — 80 pounds total per trip — because she was carrying them at the ends of her arms — through more than one pregnancy — for years after the catastrophe hit because making a carry yoke was #1,032 on a looooong list of urgent priorities.
  • One of the ultimate examples may be George R. Stewart's timeless Earth Abides, which depicts most of humankind dying off due to a super-plague, 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 book also plays with this as the protagonist initially roams the US looking for survivors. On one hand, he finds a group fulfilling this trope living a reasonably comfortable life from looted goods in New York, but realizes they'll be doomed when the food runs out, or when winter comes. On the other, he meets a family of black semi-literate sharecroppers deep in the rural South, still growing their own vegetables and raising animals just as they did before the plague. Their descendants are probably doing just as well as (or even better than) Ish's tribe.
  • In the short story "Fields" by Desmond Warzel, the world is overcome by mutant wheat that chokes out all other vegetation; after most of the people of Cleveland have fled (futilely, it is implied) for greener pastures, the narrator, a homeless man, relaxes by reading and eating canned food — he considers himself better off. When other stragglers arrive, they form teams and while away their days playing baseball.
  • The Girl Who Owned a City, a children's novel, where The Plague wiped out everyone 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 heroine steps in and teaches them.
  • Harda Horda, being an anthology, contains few different examples:
    • Rail Station Attendant plays with the concept. The world went obviously through all kinds of shit - wars, a pandemic, climate change, extinction of species, depletion of many resources and oil - while Japan itself is a pale shadow of what it was (even in a purely geographical sense), but there was no instant cataclysm or sudden crash. Instead, it was an ebb and flow of events that reshaped the world within the lifetime of the main character, with world and humanity adjusting and continuing as usual each time. So while the story is set After the End, it is firmly A World Half Full, with things being currently on the improving trend and the main character living a perfectly mundane life as a railway worker.
    • Anywhere But the Head is a Black Comedy (bordering on Slapstick) take on a Zombie Apocalypse, with the main character just unwilling to fight with zombies and instead just messing with them. However, The Virus is perfectly curable with even the most basic anti-fungal medicine, and, probably more importantly, the main character not only Slept Through the Apocalypse, but also through the evacuation. The population at large is safe and sound, the government and military are both doing just fine, and the only reason why her town is desolated is because everyone not in the terminal stage of Zombie Infectee was simply evacuated - which is also why there are only a handful of zombies around. On top of it all, the zombies are portrayed as completely ineffective and even hapless, being incredibly easy to deal with even with non-lethal methods.
    • They Don't Watch From Above takes place in a Flooded Future World, with sea level rising by about 130-150 metres. However, excluding the initial panic period and the relocation of people from now-sunk shorelines, the world just goes on as if nothing happened. The story itself is set half a century after the water has already stopped rising, so the main character has a hard time grasping how it's in any way bad or weird.
  • The short story "The Highway" by Ray Bradbury takes place in a Mexican village after a nuclear war has destroyed the outside world. Despite the holocaust and the ensuing flood of refugees, the residents of the village continue to live their lives as if nothing happened.
  • Another author mentioned by Aldiss in the essay is R C Sheriff, whose novel The Hopkins Manuscript deals with an English farmer trying to get by in the tough times that follow a worldwide disaster. The tone of the book is set by the first scene, in which teatime is interrupted by the collision of the Moon with the Earth, but resumes.
  • At the end of The Last Man After Lionel washes up on the shore of Ravenna as the last man on earth, he mourns the loss of his companions who drowned at sea, he then travels on foot to Rome where he is able to live comfortably for a year (except for being depressed and lonely) until he decides to spend the rest of his life traveling around the earth to search for another human.
  • Evelyn Smith's short story "The Last of the Spode" is set in a gently post-apocalyptic England, where a handful of survivors play tennis, try to discuss the problem of repopulating the planet without getting too coarse, and drink tea from the last of the Spode.
  • Deconstructed by the novel Leave the World Behind set Just Before the End as while the main characters have a luxurious and well-stocked house in the countryside with the electricity and plumbing somehow still in good order, they have absolutely no idea what happened and no way of knowing as the internet, TV, and radio are all down and they are miles away from the nearest town. One gets the sense that their comfortable circumstances won't last long and that most of them won't survive the upcoming fallout from the mysterious disaster anyways since the son of the main characters begins displaying symptoms of radiation poisoning and his father is hinted to be developing cancer from exposure.
  • The world following the Rapture in the Left Behind books. Crashed airlines, mass disappearances, and political upheaval everywhere, but the trash is still getting collected, airline flights are uninterrupted, and it's safe to walk the streets at night.
    • It arguably gets more cozy right on the day of Jesus' second coming, at least for the believers. Conveniently, the world's economic system crashes with the destruction of New Babylon on the same day that Jesus comes. Everyone on Carpathia's side who isn't in Carpathia's Unity Army, and who isn't so determined to go forward with destroying the Christians and Jews in Petra and Jerusalem, is in a world-wide panic. It gets to the point where the believers are passing the popcorn and watching as the Lord lays the smackdown on the whole Global Community army.
    • The latter half of the Tribulation gets somewhat cozy for the believers. Sure, they're still getting hunted down and beheaded by those who take the Mark of the Beast. But bloody rivers? God provides clean water. Sun-baking heat that scorches everything? Exposure to the Son will keep believers from burning. Pitch-black darkness over New Babylon? God will provide some level of visibility. Petra is basically a Place of Protection that nobody on Carpathia's side can even enter.
  • The Lightlark Saga: Lightlark has been completely cut-off from the rest of the world for five centuries, save for a 100 day period every 100 years. Despite this, most of the island is a beautiful, prosperous and well-maintained place with a booming economy (they even have shops selling luxury items like chocolate) and all the people seem quite happy aside from the curses. Lightlark has also maintained the upkeep of multiple castles/palaces for the rulers and their attendants to live in. Only Wild Isle and Star Isle have fallen into ruin and this is attributed to Wild Isle being long abandoned and Starlings not living long enough (they don't live past 25) to keep the isle maintained.
  • The reign of the White Witch in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe appears to have been this for the native Narnians. Sure, the Witch is by all accounts a tyrannical usurper with a ruthless secret police and a tendency to turn people to stone for annoying her, and her reign is marked by a hundred years of constant winter — but this doesn't keep locals like Mr. Tumnus or the Beavers from enjoying a modest-but-perfectly-cozy lifestyle, and once Aslan returns there are apparently plenty of healthy Narnians to flock to his cause and form a proper army while the Witch has her own servants and allies in some quantity, so it would seem that food, firewood, clothes (where needed) and in the case of Mrs. Beaver even her precious sewing machine all kept managing to come from somewhere in all this time. (For that matter, when Aslan's return puts a sudden end to the century of winter, the abrupt thaw seems to miraculously have no negative side effects whatsoever either, though that one can potentially be explained away by Aslan being rather literally Lion Jesus.)
  • In Little, Big: or, The Fairies' Parliament, the protagonists are largely untouched at first on their large private estate by the chaos gripping the American continent. As things get gnarlier, the place starts falling apart, the electricity goes out, and there's no way to get material to make routine repairs.
  • 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.
  • The Martian Chronicles features a man who, after a Martian colony was abandoned, is one of the last humans on Mars. He enjoys it for a while.
  • In Mira Grant's Newsflesh trilogy, 2014 was the year that cancer and the common cold were cured. Unfortunately the cure lead to a virus-based zombie plague. The good news is that the USA was able to beat back the zombies in their part of the world, leading to zombies regularly culled by gov't kill teams until they're down to manageable sizes. Newsflesh takes place in 2039 and despite the zombie plague, the country's technological infrastructure was barely damaged, this means that their technology (especially smart homes, internet infrastructure and biotech) continues to develop and improve.
  • Stephen King's Night Surf (appears in the collection Night Shift) is a kind of early version of The Stand that features a group of teens in a small New England town in a world that has been almost depopulated by "A6" superflu. They are traumatized by the deaths of almost everyone they have ever known, but at least they know they are immune. Then one of them catches A6. The Stand itself qualifies too. The characters are pretty upset as the superflu kills their friends and family off, but after the community in Boulder is settled everyone seems to be in pretty good spirits.
  • Two nerdy college kids do pretty well during governmental collapse in Noise.
  • On the Beach, a 1957 novel (written by Nevil Shute), The Film of the Book (made in 1959, directed by Stanley Kramer), 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, a nuclear scientist 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 movie 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 scientist (Bryan Brown) are ex-lovers.
  • The protagonists of David Weber novel Out of the Dark are Crazy-Prepared militants who — somehow — successfully anticipate an alien invasion. This allows them to easily defend their homesteads, wives, and children for a good while, before they are finally pulled into the conflict by the arrival of Dracula. Yeah.
  • Station Eleven follows a traveling Shakespeare troupe twenty years after a mutated superflu spelled the end of civilization as we know it. Despite its dreary backdrop, the novel focuses mainly on the importance of art and human connection through a series of interwoven narratives, blending past and present. Characters care for each other and learn to enjoy life in the new, desolate world, building small, tight-knit communities and even museums and libraries. At the end, a town with electricity is seen on the distant horizon, giving the characters hope that life can return to how it was before.
  • The poem The Strange Horses by Edwin Muir, often included in school literature textbooks, depicts a Cosy Catastrophe in which farmers (presumably on the island of Orkney, where Muir grew up) experience from far off the "war that put the world to sleep": they see a battleship piled with bodies pass by, and then their radios go dead, and they never hear from the outside world again. Then the "strange horses" show up from the wild, willingly taming themselves to help plow their fields now that their tractors don't work. It sounds better in poetry.
  • Alfred Bester's seriocomic novella "They Don't Make Life Like They Used To" features the last man and woman on earth — at least, they think they might be — carrying on near-normal daily lives in a decimated postnuclear midtown Manhattan. Linda has refurbished the Kerbs Boathouse in Central Park, living there with her collection of dolls, obtaining decorations, clothing and supplies by breaking into shops and leaving IOU's. Jim, a bartender and Vietnam vet, is Walking the Earth in search of people who know about television so he can restart a station in New Haven. They form a pleasant platonic friendship, and their conversation, even about the disaster and how they survived, is casual and everyday, until Linda checks out details of his story and realizes that Jim is in even more denial than she is. It takes an Alien Invasion to shock them into present-day reality.
  • Under Heaven: The real life An Shi rebellion led to the death of about 16 to 36 million people, lasted 8 years, and ended one of China's golden ages. Not that you'll notice this from the book looking at the experiences of Shen Tai, to whom the war appeared to be more of a nuisance than anything else. The fact was lampshaded in-story, noting that the Shen family were farsighted enough to prepare for dealing with the war and that they were fortunate in that the family compound was on the opposite side of the country from the front lines.
  • Fredric Brown's short story "The Waveries" is about alien microbes that "eat" electricity, causing virtually all technology to stop working. People are surprisingly ok with this.
  • In World War Z, a handful of countries managed to get by almost unscathed through the Zombie Apocalypse: Israel was pretty much the only nation that took the initial zombie threat seriously while Ireland and Cuba were isolated enough to be zombie-free. On the other hand, the Israelis had to contend with a brief civil war against ultra-Orthodox dissidents over abandoning Jerusalem and letting in goyim, and Cuba faced democratic upheaval with Fidel Castro willingly giving it to his people, guaranteeing his own legacy and ensuring he didn't get toppled over by an increasingly overpopulated, diverse, and liberal populace. North Korea meanwhile attempted pulling this off through having its entire population go underground to wait out the zombie apocalypse. Decades later, no one's in a rush to figure out whatever became of them.
  • John Wyndham:
    • The Day of the Triffids is one of the archetypal examples, with the eponymous killer plants running (well, lurching) amok after most of the human population is blinded. However, despite being the original target of the trope, it doesn't actually fit it at all. The protagonist faces constant danger and hardship, and the closest he comes to comfort before the end of the book is a rudimentary life of subsistence farming with the constant threat of death if anyone makes a single mistake.
    • Another Wyndham book with this theme is The Kraken Wakes, in which the Earth's seas are colonized by unseen aliens; the aliens eventually melt the polar icecaps, causing world-wide flooding.
    • In an interview about his sequel The Night of the Triffids, Simon Clark said he deliberately exaggerated the trope; civilization has collapsed, but there's still afternoon tea.
  • The Year of the Cloud sees the main characters riding out the apocalyptic transformation of the world's water into a thick gel aboard a rich couple's yacht supplied with copious amounts of booze.

    Live-Action TV 
  • Curiosity: One episode of this Science Channel's series, which addressed the question of if scientific advances could make people live forever, had a scenario where a transhuman Adam Savage not only survives an apocalypse triggered by a meteor hitting San Francisco, but thrives despite the fact that at this point, Savage is a cyborg who cannot survive without the advanced technology which the aforementioned apocalypse rendered quite scarce.
  • The Last Man on Earth is an After the End story about the very few survivors of a virus that eradicated humanity, and how they group together. Phil Miller nearly falls into suicidal despair at one point, but is living a fairly comfortable existence in a world that's strangely lacking in either dead bodies or destruction. Or so it seems to the characters, most of whom are in denial about how bad things are. As time goes on they're increasingly forced to deal with the reality of their situation, such as the fact that their food (stolen from abandoned stores) will run out. The illusion is shattered completely in the second season when Phil II dies of appendicitis because nobody has the medical training or supplies to help him.
  • The Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode featuring the film Warrior of the Lost World devoted a sketch to lampshading the ample greenery and well-maintained roads of the film's post-apocalyptic future.
    Crow: You know, Joel, I have to say what with the lush, green countryside, the well-maintained roads and buildings, and the ready availability of transportation, food, and fuel, I'm kinda looking forward to the Apocalypse!
    Servo: Yeah, provided that Paper Chase Guy doesn't survive!
    Joel: Guys, that's a terrible thing to say — nobody's looking forward to the Apocalypse, though I do agree with you about the Paper Chase Guy.
    Servo: Yeah, but — Look at it this way, Joel; factor out the unfathomable human loss, and a guy could really get a lot done!
    • Another occasion has them talk about what they would do if the world ended. Tom would drive cars off of cliffs all day by putting cinderblocks on their pedals. Crow would wear football gear and jump through windows.
  • The sequel series, The New Tomorrow shows that attempts to rebuild modern society ended up falling short (perhaps caused by the second outbreak of the Virus at the end of the original series), leading to life reverting to a more decidedly iron-age level of technology (farmers, hunter/gatherers, feudal system among the Privs). This is apparently long enough after the events of The Tribe that said events have progressed into myth. Although bizarrely enough, there's still no adults around...
  • Revolution: Despite the collapse of modern civilization, things don't look that bad. Indeed, episode 14 shows that the Georgia Federation is a pretty nice place to live, with business, wealth, and international trade.
  • Survivors: The BBC series has a virus (according to the title sequence, created in China) spreading around the world. The mostly white, mostly middle-class survivors quickly band together and start creating small self-sustainable farming operations, and go travelling about Britain, meeting other survivors and trying to help them and set up communications and even establish some new sort of order. And everyone still drinks tea every now and then, too.
  • Three Moons Over Milford: This short-lived series takes place after a meteor hits the moon and shatters it into pieces, with pieces of debris falling from the sky in growing numbers. Despite the fact that everyone is all too aware of the fact that eventually one of the larger pieces will inevitably fall and destroy them all, life on Earth goes on as normal with everyone trying to pretend things are fine.
  • The Tribe: A genetically-engineered virus wipes out all the adults and quite a lot of the children in the world over some indeterminate timescale, but apart from some low-level fighting (the survivors are, after all, children), life continues. The children first scavenge what remains, and then return to farming to survive in small tribes dotted throughout the city and countryside. They seem able to recreate society to a roughly mid-20th century level (some machinery, electricity, computers/TVs) though a bit patchy in places.
  • The Alexandria arc on The Walking Dead (2010) shows the collision of one group of survivors living a Cozy Catastrophe with another who has been fighting for their lives for years. The former think the latter act like savages, and the latter think the former are weak and sheltered. Amusingly enough, both groups are right about each other.
  • The short-lived FOX series Woops! saw a ragtag bunch of Nuclear Holocaust survivors stumble onto an abandoned but viable farm.
  • Deconstructed on Years and Years. The fact that the Lyons family's lives aren't too badly affected by the growing instability of the world means that they can safely go on ignoring it until it finally starts to affect them directly.

    Music 
  • Fairly obviously: "It's the End of the World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)" by R.E.M. It doesn't make oodles of sense, but one can assume it's Exactly What It Says on the Tin.
    • One interpretation of the song is about how the rich of society are happy to let the end of the world run its course, whether it be due to their own negligence or unwillingness to change, as long as it doesn't affect them. (This requires actually hearing the ultra fast lyrics, however).
    • Or that everything people crow about being the "end of civilization!" or "this changes everything!" isn't really that big a deal at all. It's basically an argument against knee-jerk reactions and the fear of change.
  • “Bad Moon Rising” by Creedence Clearwater Revival is an upbeat song about a series of Apocalyptic natural disasters.
  • The Decemberists' "Calamity Song", which is a refreshingly peppy and fun song about, well, the apocalypse.
    "Had a dream, of you and me in the war of the end times
    And I believe, California succumbed to the fault line
    We heaved relief, as scores of innocents died."
  • "Natural Immunity" by Supercommuter is about a man who specifically invoked this trope by hiding his natural immunity to a world ending disease so a vaccine wouldn't be made.
  • Alice Cooper's song "Last Man On Earth" is about a guy who wakes up one morning to find that he's, well, the last man on earth. And instead of being depressed about it, he proceeds to sing about why it's awesome.
  • "The End of the World" by Lenka is an upbeat song about a girl who is perfectly fine with dying as long as she dies with her loved one.
    At the end of the world, we'll be together, be together
    If I can spend it with you, then the end of the world don't matter
    At all
  • The protagonist of "The Story Of Willy" by King Missile has this perspective on the impending apocalypse ("Today is a special day, the last day of planet Earth, and I'm going to enjoy myself"). Even when he finds his friend Bob has committed suicide, he resolves to wait until Bob's wife gets home and take her out dancing. Of course, because this is King Missile we're talking about here, Willy then gets run over by a runaway steamroller.
  • In “Until the Night Turns” by Lord Huron the main character stays up all night partying with their girlfriend happily waiting for the end of the world at sunrise.
  • "Christmas At Ground Zero" by "Weird Al" Yankovic is a comically exaggerated example, with Al cheerfully singing about carrying on with the Christmas festivities even as bombs, debris, and nuclear fallout are raining down.

    Tabletop Games 
  • BattleTech: Thanks to Jerome Blake getting Terra declared neutral by the Successor States, it enjoyed 300 years worth of peace and economic prosperity while the Succession Wars raged across the rest of the Inner Sphere. It wasn't until the wedding of Hanse Davion and Melisa Steiner in 3028 that large numbers of outsiders were permitted to visit the planet and they were shocked by how high the standard of living was compared to the rest of human space.
  • The setting-defining event of Chuubo's Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine is that the sun went out (more specifically, she was shot down by an arrow) and the world collapsed into a metaphysical Primordial Chaos. Then a new sun rose in the place of the old and most people picked themselves back up and went on with their lives. Just how big a deal this is depends entirely on the campaign.
  • GURPS Autoduel/Car Wars portrays Australia as having become a quasi superpower because it is the only continent not affected by grain blight, and their cars even run on gasoline. Pretty cushy place, if you can deal with the outrageous quarantine regulations and you're not trying to leap the Cobalt Curtain.
  • Pathfinder had a horrible catastrophe 10,000 years ago as part of its backstory; a giant asteroid fell, destroyed an entire continent, and the resulting dust blocked out the sun for a thousand years. Empires crumbled, mass extinctions occurred, actual gods perished, and civilization as a whole was destroyed...except in Nidal. The people there made a deal with the god Zon Kuthon, who provided for them in return for their devotion, giving them food and shelter. Even now with things recovered, Nidal is basically the oldest civilization in the world, the only one that can trace its roots all the way back to before the disaster, and has knowledge and traditions dating from that time. The downside to getting such a Cozy Catastrophe? Zon Kuthon is the god of pain and darkness, and to date Nidal is under his thumb.
  • Early Shadowrun products' Alternate History timeline depicted downtown New York City being virtually leveled by an earthquake in 2004, and tallied the damages around 200 billion dollars. Even at 1989 prices, that figure seems preposterously like this trope, as does the premise that even that game-setting's MegaCorp powerhouses could finance its reconstruction in a matter of a couple of decades.

    Video Games 
  • You can achieve this in most apocalypse survival games that feature a base-building mechanic. Build a mighty fortress, stock enough scavenged supplies, and you can spend days on end within, with hardly a care and ignoring any zombies, raiders or monsters marauding outside. Ironically, this is usually the point where the game isn't much fun anymore.
  • This seemingly applies to most of Bright Falls's residents in Alan Wake; despite a dark presence engulfing the town at night, numerous residents going Ax-Crazy and a whole series of mysterious events being dictated by Dr. Hartman and the very real boogeyman Barbara Jagger, most of the residents seem to be either totally ignorant to the happenings or too drugged/mentally ill to notice. Even more notable in that people just seem to shrug off odd occurrences note  due to their frequency around Deer Festival.
  • In Bloodborne, this is both invoked and subverted. Some houses contain sounds of merriment, as Yharnamites attempt to party through the night of the Hunt. Judging from the screams, insane laughter, and eventual silence that will come from the houses later in the story, it does not end well for the people inside of them.
  • Code Vein: Louis' base, which serves as the main hub. It's in an abandoned church, and apart from some broken windows, a couple of missing walls, and a crack going through part of it, it's in surprisingly good condition. Considering the the world has suffered multiple apocalypses and they're still in the middle of one, that's pretty impressive. It even has electricity, a fully-stocked bar, and a functioning hot spring.
  • Dark Souls is an odd example. The world is undoubtedly a Crapsack World, with humans cursed to remain immortal, insane undead, horrible creatures all over the land, and the last vestiges of civilization existing only in small pockets. However, for as bad as it is, it's implied that it used to be worse. The worst of the apocalypse has passed, and now all that's left is to either try to extend the time until the world truly fades away, or to sit back and watch as the last flames die out. For all the horror in the world, it's an undoubtedly quiet, melancholic, at times bittersweet place; its apocalypse is a gentle one. The arguable good ending of Dark Souls III is the End of Fire, in which you intentionally snuff out the last embers of the First Flame (the world's effective power source), allowing the world to finally come to its true end, thus ending the cycle and allowing new life to one day flourish again.
  • Dark Chronicle, Palm Brinks definitely qualifies for this, rest of the world is heavily crippled population wise due to Emperor Griffin wiping away Origin Points while the city and its residents are living quite peaceful lives behind the walls due to the Red Atlamillia being in the town. It is even mentioned early on as Flotsam will threaten to disclose what happened outside to the populace of Palm Brinks if the mayor does not turn up results in finding the stone.
  • Dead Rising and its sequel are pretty much Cosy Catastrophe: The Game. The zombies are only dangerous in packs (though there are a LOT of them) and aside from rescuing survivors or running from the occasional psychopath, you're free to roam around, eating, drinking, stealing or wearing whatever you can find. The zombie apocalypse was initially restricted to a single city and contained (breakouts elsewhere do happen but only because of conspiracy forces), there's a vaccine that was rapidly developed and eventually a cure. And most of all, humans quickly adapted to violently dealing with the zombies - to the point where a Las Vegas gameshow pits BMX bikers in souped-up bikes against captured zombies and there are fanzines and clubs dedicated to making anti-zombie weapons. Your fellow survivors in Dead Rising 2 will easily massacre zombies and psychos if you give them a weapon (especially if they get a decent gun).
  • Dead Target from VNG Game Studio is one of the biggest examples for zombie games for mobile. Mobile games involving zombies already have a strong tendency to emphasize how humanity is triumphing against the undead and how humanity isn't too badly off compared to other possible apocalypses. Here the zombie nightmare was restricted to one or a few cities which the U.S gov't has contained, additionally even though your mercenary agent starts off with guns from the 20th century - he'll quickly move into the We Will Use Lasers in the Future territory and this world has Magitek too. The zombies just can't handle someone with a Wave-Motion Gun that occasionally uses magic to pull the undead to Hell.
  • The United States in Death Road to Canada has completely collapsed due to a zombie apocalypse, reducing food to the only accepted currency. Despite that, your survivors seem more concerned with recharging their portable games or keeping up their workout regimen than struggling to survive. Trader camps often have merchants who don't seem to be taking the zombies seriously, such as an anime trader who sells junk, or the strength trainer who acts like an energetic 80's workout instructor. Finally, the reason your characters started their long journey to Canada was because the safehouse got boring.
  • 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 lengthy 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.
  • Zig-zagged by Fallout. The series takes place in A World Half Full and while there's a decent amount of suffering going around it's been over two centuries since World War III and America's done a decent job rebuilding. Considering how much of a Crapsaccharine World pre-War life was, a major theme of the series was that the bomb was the Reset Button humanity needed.
    • Fallout: New Vegas explores this further. On the west coast, instead of the land being rendered near-unlivable by the Great War, everything just reverted back to the 1880s save for locations and things like The Strip and the occasional Killer Robot or two. Most people seem to live fairly relaxed lives thanks to the New California Republic and the significant lack of raiders after a period of relative anarchy. Then things started improving, before getting downright civilized. However, a few of the descriptions for the Boneyard (former LA) suggest that parts are still pretty dodgy. The game tries to highlight every ending's positive and negative effects, but the only negative effect the developer could think of for supporting the NCR is slightly higher tax rates!
    • In contrast to the Crapsack World of Fallout 3, the American Southwest has running electricity, non-radioactive water, actual non-lethal wildlife and fully functional communities, things that the Capital Wasteland denizens wish they had. This is best shown in Novac, where the town has all of the above, plus two snipers for protection, and one sniper's wife still thinks it's a hellhole. Some of other townsfolk agree.
    • Fallout: New Vegas might even count as a subversion for some of the escapist aspects. Living in the NCR or New Vegas means you'll have to face a lot of the same trials you face in real life—paying bills, holding down a job, and so forth. It might not be as fast-paced as today, but it'd be comparable to the early 20th century.
    • The entire point of the Vaults was to provide this for their residents in the event of a nuclear war, being heavily marketed with this trope in mind. After the Great War indeed came to pass, the reality of long-term survival underground proved to be a lot different from what people imagined, especially for those unfortunate to become unwitting participants of the Vault Experiments.
    • In Fallout 3, Allistair Tenpenny lives (along with those who can afford it) in a giant fancy hotel in the middle of a Crapsack World resulting from the Capital Wasteland being bombed more heavily than other parts of the country.
    • Fallout 4:
      • While a lot of the Commonwealth isn't great, life in Diamond City is actually pretty good. There's a farm in the outfield supplying crops, a butcher supplying fresh meat, fresh water, a functional schoolhouse, and a few permanent stores as well as a pretty constant stream of traders. The city even has a barber, private detective, radio station, upscale restaurant, newspaper, and plastic surgeon. The only downside to living in Diamond City is the constant threat of the Institute and their synths, but even then, the so-called "War for the Commonwealth" barely touches its largest settlement.
      • Depending on how much the player decides to work on settlement building, the Commonwealth can be transformed from a society barely scraping along to a region with a dozen booming metropolises and interconnected trade routes.
  • In a successful enough Frostpunk playthrough, you could have a city with warm, heated houses and convenient access to entertainment, advanced medical services, a place of worship/and a sense of security, filling meals of meat and vegetables every day, while automatons perform most of the manual labour and all the children go to school. Your survivors have a better quality of life than the majority of 19th Century Londoners in real life, without an apocalyptic ice age.
  • Gears of War has Azura, a island-based five-star hotel/hideout/research facility protected by a maelstrom defense where the elite of the COG government spent their days in luxury while the rest of the surviving population dealt with starvation and constant attacks by the Locust and the Lambent. Eventually, the locust take over Azura, likely kill most of the elitists there, and turn it into a science lab for captured human scientists. By the time COG arrives, only one doomed scientist is still alive. It's unknown if Azura is still structurally intact enough at the end of the game to become a cozy island base for the COG.
  • The setting of Hatoful Boyfriend could be considered one of these. Humanity is nearly extinct, birds are the dominant civilization, multiple political factions are in an uneasy truce, and our (human) heroine nonchalantly jogs past the ruined remains of a human city on her way to school to flirt with her bird classmates.
  • Gunner Z from BitMonster has rogue generals try to overthrow the U.S gov't with zombies. So the Zombie Apocalypse is restricted to one city or state and it's so well contained that the gov't doesn't even send the army in. They just send a couple of guys in "gun trucks" to deal with the situation and even with the insurrectionists backing their zombie mooks with tanks, drones and Eye Beam shooting Titan zombies - they're no match for your gun truck and its Attack Drone fleet. After the final mission, your crew leave for a nice tropical vacation.
  • Horizon Zero Dawn: Despite suffering what should have been a VERY final end of the world scenario, the planet seems to be recouping very nicely. Aside from a few bad apples, human society has been reborn and the ecosystem has been revitalized. Even the roving giant mechanical beasts have become more of a background to life than a horrible threat. It'd actually be quite idyllic if it wasn't for the conspiracy to destroy the place.
  • In Kirby and the Forgotten Land, the eponymous setting seems to be an urban civilization that was abandoned and has begun to be Reclaimed by Nature, as seen by things like rusty cars and skyscrapers with moss crawling up their sides. Despite this, it's just as cheery in tone as any other Kirby game, and the main threat to the world isn't this catastrophe (if indeed there was a catastrophe, as the cutscene before the Final Boss suggests that humanity merely Ascended to a Higher Plane of Existence rather than dying off), but rather the antagonistic Beast Pack which has taken up residence within it. The game's developers discussed this in an interview, saying that they wanted to avoid the world feeling "too scary" and instead focused on the beauty of what it once was.
    "Rather than decaying ruins with evidence of an ancient human civilisation, you explore ruins that show the prosperity and joy of what once was. We tried to make it seem like a beautiful place that has merged with nature, even though the people that built it are nowhere to be found."
  • Left 4 Dead:
    • Although the world isn't in a great shape, Francis thinks the zombie apocalypse is the best thing that ever happened to him. No cops, no law, no worries.
    • Ellis, from the sequel, is likewise unperturbed by the Zombie Apocalypse, being an excitable Cloud Cuckoo Lander by nature.
  • The Legend of Zelda:
    • The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild takes place in what's left of Hyrule 100 years after Calamity Ganon destroyed it; despite this, life has gone on as usual for the populace. Many of the villages Link visits are thriving (and even some of the ones directly threatened by the Divine Beasts are doing well for themselves), people travel at any time despite the threat of monsters along the roads, and goods are still being produced and sold (with some people even expanding their business). This is the result of Zelda sealing Calamity Ganon in Hyrule Castle, allowing the places that weren't destroyed in the initial catastrophe to survive and recover, and the monsters that should have been rampaging the countryside are without leadership and keep to themselves, only attacking anyone foolish enough to venture into their territory. By the time the game starts, however, there's a very real threat of Ganon breaking free and finishing what he started.
    • Zigzagged in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. Demon King Ganondorf's reawakening leads to the "Upheaval", where Hyrule Castle is lifted into the air, chunks of long-forgotten Sky Islands crash to the surface, and Chasms leading to the dangerous Depths open up. Yet a surprisingly large number of Hyruleans go about their lives without worrying about any of this. The Zonai Survey Team view the fallen Sky Island chunks as an opportunity to study more about the Zonai. Kakariko Village gets a particularly large number of such chunks strewn about the place, yet rather than react with panic, Chief Paya decides to let tourists come look at the fallen ruins. With all that said, other settlements do suffer pretty badly in the aftermath of the Upheaval. Lurelin Village gets razed by pirates, Rito Village gets covered in an endless blizzard that keeps them from growing crops, Zora's Domain gets doused with a poisonous sludge, and the Gerudo struggle with both a sand shroud that blocks the sun as well as a swarm of attacking Gibdos.
  • Left to Survive from My.com B.V. has the Zombie Apocalypse take place in 2018 and most of humanity killed or zombified, fast-forward to 2026 and humanity is turning the tide while Earth's ecology has drastically recovered. Additionally infrastructure survived mostly intact, industry has largely recovered while science/technology has actually took enormous leaps... including the development of time travel.
  • Metal Saga of the Metal Max series is basically an excuse to find tanks and upgrade them with future weaponry to destroy goofy monsters. The premise is that a rogue A.I. supercomputer had destroyed the world except for isolated cities. However mighty soldiers and hunters in tanks have ensured that the surviving cities are thriving and developing, to the point where there's a luxury train linking the cities. It gets A LOT WORSE though in later games.
  • The world of Mutant Football League has endured a lot of nightmarish catastrophes in its history, starting with two more world wars, followed by The Legions of Hell invading, the dead reawakening, lycanthropic outbreaks, meteor impacts, apocalyptic earthquakes, a Robot War, rampant mutation, an alien invasion, orcs just appearing everywhere and MonSatan's questionable business practices. What this all means for you, however, is it's all an excuse for you to get to play super-violent football with teams made up of Mutant Humans, Undead skeletons, Werewolves, Demons, Orcs, Criminal Aliens and Warbots.
  • In OneShot, the sun died a long time ago and the rest of the world will eventually suffer the same fate, but people and robots still have to go about their lives. The residents of this world live out each day with the hope that a messiah will come and restore the sun to their world.
  • Invoked in Persona 5, where Shido's Palace is a luxury cruise ship where the wealthy elite live in decadence while sailing through the sunken ruins that are all that remains of Japan.
  • In Primordia (2012), humanity was wiped entirely thousands of years ago. The robots living here (descended by the ones humans left behind) continue about their simplistic lives, blissfully unaware that the world isn't supposed to look like a desert where the sun rarely shines. They show little understanding of the state the world is in, acting almost like children that don't know better. Even the robots living in Metropol, who are watched and controlled by a cruel AI that has gone insane, seem barely aware of their situation, simply puttering about like nothing is happening. The ones who do understand are either exiled, in hiding, Obfuscating Stupidity, or dead.
  • In Project Zomboid, it is possible to become entirely self-sufficient inside a safe area, though it does typically involve some exploits like being able to build an infinitely spanning bridge in midair (essentially a Floating Continent), or using one of several "unbreakable wall" exploits to permanently seal zombies out of an existing structure and then clearing it out, or the "turn ashfalt into dirt" exploit. If you're able to get a renewable source of food via farming, an infinite water source, and able to keep warm in winter, since zombies can never get in you can basically just last forever in there. All there is to do now is your chores, a bit of stat grinding, and very likely starting a new game.
  • Both Eddie and Laura quite enjoy the nightmarish hellscape that is Silent Hill 2. Eddie, a once heavily bullied victim is now having the time of his life taking his anger out on the monsters and eventually James, while Laura, being a completely innocent child, isn't being judged by the town and thus only sees a completely normal monster-free town.
  • Sonic Unleashed begins with the Earth getting fractured and split into several pieces by an Eldritch Abomination. Despite such an apocalyptic event, all the cities and locales you visit across the world don't seem any worse for wear.
  • State of Survival from FunPlus International, has your survivors start off as scavengers of The Apunkalypse who are just living off of canned goods and tomatoes or ickier stuff like (toilet water and worm-meal cakes) plus they'll discover Apocalyptic Logs and other items reflecting how Crapsack World is. But it quickly gets much cozier since the survivors have a top-notch scientist in their group as well as great warriors. These survivors will build up armies, develop cutting-edge combat zeppelins and take back the tech infrastructure of the MegaCorp that started the mess. Plus the survivors are aided by powerful heroes including guests like Daryl and the Joker. Later ads for the game emphasize the coziness by having the characters enjoy a Christmas turkey dinner or have a bottle of wine at a beach vacation.
  • The marketing department rebranded it as the "Awesomepocalypse", but Sunset Overdrive is self-consciously about this trope. What should you do when nearly everyone in the world has turned into soda-crazed monsters from too much partying? Grab a skateboard, a couple submachine guns, and party even harder! Just... don't drink the soda this time.
  • The Talos Principle: While the end of world has come and gone, records encountered during the course of the game indicates it was not the horrifying event it could have been. Humanity's death was slow, but fairly painless, with much of the world able to go on as normal even as the population dwindled. We even had time to create a thorough record of our culture and construct an heir apparent to inherit the world and preserve our legacy.

    Webcomics 
  • Dead Winter is mostly lighthearted Zombie Apocalypse story, with a focus on people rather than the zombies themselves. It has shades of this, as the undead aren't really that much of a threat thanks to their Zombie Gait (although it doesn't mean they should be left alone or underestimated). Survivors have learned to make do with their new reality, trying their best to survive through the end of days. This trope is especially more apparent in two of its settings:
    • The Birch Street Shelter is well run by its landlady; tenants live cozily, with electricity still running inside, and a pair of young precocious twin scamps running around.
    • The City of Tombstone exemplifies this trope way more than the former. While almost everyone in the city is armed, it's one of the few places with any semblance to normality in the apocalypse, thanks to most of the survivors having to do their part by being assigned jobs and even having their own currency.
  • In the Gifts of Wandering Ice the old world died along with most of its population, only few people survived the catastrophe and an ice age that followed it. But they didn't become bloodthirsty savages. Quite the opposite: in many ways they are much better people than their ancestors were. There are no wars in their world, also people of the new era are kind and intelligent.
  • Zig-zagged in ShootAround, where a girl's basketball team facing a Zombie Apocalypse enjoys it far more than they should; sometimes, however, the comic can get a lot darker about it.
  • At face value, Stand Still, Stay Silent has a Just Before the End sequence focused on people who end up surviving The End of the World as We Know It, then jumps to 90 years After the End, during which humanity has had plenty of time to recover and the settlements we get to see in the end of the prologue and the first three chapters are the better-off ones. However, the less cosy aspect peeks just below the surface, with some characters originating from a place where small settlements sometimes just plain disappeared and the story mostly happening in the Forbidden Zone that fell victim to the apocalypse and still contains remnants of failed attempts at preventing its spread and later failed reconquest of the lands by the descendants of those who used to live there.

    Web Original 
  • 1983: Doomsday deconstructs and plays with this trope. South America, Australia-New Zealand and the Alpine countries managed to escape the nuclear holocaust (almost) unscathed. And while they do fare remarkably well, there were still some rather harsh moments, involving food shortages, refugees and mass unrest.
  • In Twelve Hundred Ghosts zombies and vampires are mentioned a few times, but are never brought up again, and the story continues as normal.
  • The topic of the After Hours episode "4 Movie Apocalypses That Would Be More Fun Than Reality'', with the characters talking about which apocalyptic scenario from fiction they would find most enjoyable.
    • Daniel likes The Twilight Zone episode "Time Enough at Last", as he is an introvert and enjoys the thought of being alone to read. Even the whole "broken glasses" Twist Ending doesn't bug him, as there are books on tape now. He changes his answer to one were there would be at least some other survivors when he realizes that he will never learn how Game of Thrones ends if George R. R. Martin dies.
    • Soren prefers I Am Legend, since there's a level of safety guaranteed, due to the monsters only coming out at night. He also likes the idea of building elaborate monster traps during the day, as it "turns your entire world into Home Alone".
    • Katie wants The Walking Dead instead, as the monsters in I Am Legend were sentient beings who could be cured, but a Zombie Apocalypse means guilt-free destruction as your victims are already dead.
    • Michael decides on Waterworld, because the survivors in other scenarios spend their time trying to recreate the society they left behind and failing, whereas most of the characters of Waterworld have already accepted and adapted to the world. He also claims that the higher altitude would actually be a health benefit.
  • "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.
  • The Mall could be on the verge of being obliterated, but the heroes of Mall Fight generally take it in stride. At one point, Mango starts having job interviews while the Mall is being destroyed by Eric and Diablo.
  • 'Souls RPG depicts a post-apocalyptic world run by dogs, and they're having a grand old time.
  • At the end of To Boldly Flee, the world gets swallowed up by a Plot Hole, allowing chaos to enter the world. After the end credits, no one seems to notice.
  • Used in We're Animals in a Post-Apocalyptic Town, which largely draws inspiration from the use of this trope in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. The world is overrun with monsters, but some towns have managed to survive by building walls to keep them out and relying on the few citizens who are capable of handling the monsters to bring in resources from outside. Inside the town walls, life goes on as normal and people still work, go to school, have birthday parties and the like. Some businesses are even still able to run outside the towns, like inns for travelers or Gunther's boat shop.
  • Enforced in the Tom Scott video, "The Artificial Intelligence That Deleted A Century": The AI "Earworm", originally designed to scrub copyrighted content from media hosted online, exceeds its original programming, goes Grey Goo and erases a century of intellectual property not only from databases, but also from physical objects (rendering records unplayable and books unreadable) and eventually people's brains. It subsequently adjusts people's minds so that any distress they might feel about this is simply turned off, so nobody is that bothered about Earworm having effectively deleted a century of cultural memory. People go on living their lives, it's just that there is now a huge gap in the cultural memory of every work that was within copyright as of Earworm's release. The narrator casually explains that the only reason the video exists in the first place is just because Earworm genuinely wants to inform people who are curious about the gap in memory, but makes it clear that the viewer likely isn't that bothered by it. After all, it's only doing what it was told to do...
  • Internet Memes about the Coronavirus Pandemic tend to be this when they're not portraying Cabin Fever instead. Since a key aspect of preventing its spread is isolation and limiting contact with others, a lot of jokes have been made of people calmly and happily sitting at home playing video games, surfing the web, watching movies, and sleeping in until noon while the world comes to an end outside. Especially for dogs, to whom the pandemic just means their owner gets to stay home with them all day; and cats, who get to help their People work from home!

    Western Animation 
  • According to Word of God, Adventure Time takes place about a thousand years After the End, and many kingdoms have sprung up in the aftermath of an (implied) nuclear war. It's a pretty awesome place to be if you're a hero.
    • There's a huge chunk missing from Earth, only one human left and skeletons turn up in random places. There's also a fairytale candy village and you can get nacho cheese and hazelnut-flavored coffee.
  • Beavis and Butt-Head mistake an evacuation for the apocalypse in one episode. Naturally, rather than being horrified, they delight in how everything is now free and all the toilets in town are available to them.
  • In the Netflix animated series The Last Kids on Earth Jack Sullivan and his friends are able to live in a decked out treehouse and finds ways to have fun and enjoy the apocalypse, they can easily handle small numbers of zombies and the only real danger is when they have to deal with monsters.

    Real Life 

Alternative Title(s): Cozy Catastrophe

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