The video games:
Entries with their own pages:
- Postal 2
- Postal III
- Postal (2007)
- Postal 4: No Regerts
- Postal: Brain Damaged
- Alternative Character Interpretation:
- While the manual of the first game hints that the townsfolk of Paradise are under the effect of The Virus and that the Postal Dude is trying to get to the bottom of it all, the presence of a moving truck outside your house in the first level has led some to conclude that he's gone insane because he was foreclosed upon. The intro to Postal III confirmed this, though given the events of that game are now just a bad dream the Dude had during an eleven-year coma, it's hard to say for sure if that's still the case.
- Really, who's to say that Postal 2 isn't just a psychosis that the Postal Dude is experiencing (in other words, his version of Pyrovision)? Considering he was tossed into a mental institution for killing dozens of people in the first game, this actually makes more sense than a killer with a huge body count simply being free with no repercussions a few years later. That is however assuming the first Postal has it's continuity connected with Postal 2, which is to say unlikely because The Dude is almost nobody in Paradise instead of a wanted mass murderer.
- That said, Postal Redux retconned the first game to be set in 2017, he's out of Paradise with military grade guns and experience, and he's seen fucked up things thanks to his brain damage after his failed attempted suicide, which clearly worsens. BUT then again, Paradise was destroyed again after Paradise Lost and Postal 4 reveals that The Postal Dude went to Edensin.
- Anvilicious: In a case of Tropes Are Tools: the disclaimer that the events depicted should NOT be reenacted in real life makes sense as Postal is not meant to be taken seriously. The characters are meant to be seen as fictional more or less and the setting is a parody of a highly dysfunctional society where even a simple errand can turn into a life-or-death battle.
- Awesome Music: Postal Redux's Rampage mode has absolute kick-ass music. Sure, it's still horrifying to commit mass murder, but now you're committing mass murder with badass grindcore
in the background and much more!- While the menu theme from the original game was creepy as hell, the menu theme in Redux is pretty much the epitome of Creepy Awesome.
- Broken Base: The movie adaptation. Some think it's hilarious and Uwe Boll's best Video Game-Movie yet. Others find it to be a dull, unfunny In Name Only adaptation of the games. And then there's the third group who find it entertaining for all the wrong reasons.
- Catharsis Factor: To varying degrees. Postal 1's atmosphere may repulse or disturb players. Otherwise, the sequels play this straight.
- Postal III features Uwe Boll, kill-able in the same way you could kill Gary Coleman in Postal 2.
- Crazy Is Cool: The Postal Dude is possibly this trope given form. A trailer-dwelling, deep-voiced, incredibly psychotic Lower-Class Lout with a total bitch of a wife who can, among many other things, throw a machete like a boomerang, carry around an absurd amount of stuff, use dolls as grenades, weaponize anthrax-ridden cow heads, withstand explosions to the face, use cats as silencers for his weapons, and heal himself by smoking crack. And that's not even counting the stuff he does in the actual story, such as nuking the entirety of Paradise for a publicity stunt.
- Crosses the Line Twice:
- When the over-the-top gore whips back around and becomes funny again.
- The same can be said for the use of offensive stereotypes. The immigrant running the local grocery store turns out to be a secret Taliban supporter with several heavily armed veil-wearing wives at the back of his house. This would be disgustingly racist if other groups were portrayed as idealized or even just neutral. But next to that you have the cops being gun-toting thugs who gleefully abuse their authority, the military are thugs with even bigger guns, rednecks are inbred gun-toting sexual predators, political activists are hypocritical idiots who turn violent at the drop of a hat... Even seemingly normal civilians walking down the street can suddenly pull out a gun and start shooting for no reason. What you end up with is "I'm not a racist, I hate everyone equally: The Game".notePostal Dude even says almost exactly that, particularly when he kills a black person
- Diagnosed by the Audience: There is clearly something wrong with The Dude, but the games never specify what. In Postal 1, he could be suffering from some sort of schizophrenia, what with his paranoia, (possible) voices in his head and hallucinations.
- Franchise Original Sin: A major complaint fans have with Postal 3 and Postal 4: No Regerts is the amount of bugs the two games have, with the former being a complete mess of a game while the latter didn't take advantage of its early access phase to fix issues as well as having horrible optimization, even on stronger computers. Thing is, this can also apply to Postal 2, as the game launched with a lot of glitches and loading times, not to mention Unreal 2 crashing. However, this was all the way back in 2003, where Running With Scissors was not as well-known and the game offered features not seen before such as a combination of open world gameplay and FPS gameplay, as well as surprisingly good liquid (blood and vomit) and limb dismemberment. What helps is that the Steam release would be much more optimized and fixed up, with even the Apocalypse Weekend expansion being more stable. The issue with the successors is that Postal 3 was on the Source engine and thus should've allowed for more stable gameplay, which didn't happen. Postal 4: No Regerts continued to have bugs and bad optimization even after multiple updates while in early access, and many felt like it left early access way too early due to bugs and crashes still being plenty.
- Germans Love David Hasselhoff: Russia loves Postal. So much so that they even got their own exclusive expansion, and Akella, the Russian publisher for the games, developed Postal III and the Russia-and-Japan-exclusive Postal 2 expansion Corkscrew Rules!, unfortunately with little involvement from Running With Scissors. To this day, the Postal games are very popular in Russia, and many of the game's most prolific modders and content creators are from Russia.
- While relatively obscure in Japan due to being considered pornographic over there, the game does have a small but devoted underground cult following in Japan. This has gone to the point that the aforementioned Russian-developed Corkscrew Rules! saw a release in Japan but not America.
- Harsher in Hindsight: According to the developers, the final level of the first Postal where the Postal Dude tries to shoot up an elementary school (but to no avail) was meant to shock the audience by showing the title character attempting something so unthinkably evil that it would leave players stunned. (Note that this game was released was two years before the Columbine massacre.) However, its impact is lessened due to tragic real-life circumstances in the wake of the several school shootings since its release — meaning that the shock value, initially meant to be so transgressive to drive the point of the ending home, horrifyingly isn't so shocking anymore. Running With Scissors cited this trope as the reason why Postal Redux didn't have this scene (it was instead replaced with a different, although equally-surreal, "Church" level), as school shootings had become a lot more common and less shocking in the nineteen years since the release of the original game. It doesn't help that the Postal Dude's black trench coat bears similarities to the ones Columbine shooters Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold frequently wore.
- Hilarious in Hindsight: As for "The Ghetto" loading screen from the original game, the skinny, skeleton-like hallucination seen in the alley isn't that hard to remind of Junji Ito's The Enigma of Amigara Fault (as the latter came five years after the 1997 installment's release).
- Memetic Mutation: It's not uncommon to find videos about The Dude asking random people to sign his petition. These people will usually be anime characters (usually women), or some kind of ASMR video that involves someone talking to the viewer, in this case The Dude.
- Nausea Fuel: Tons of it.
- So Okay, It's Average: The general consensus of Apocalypse Weekend seems to be that it misunderstood what made Postal 2 fun and made a game based around it. The linear structure of the levels ironically removed almost all of the ability to go postal (even when you can kill masses of people in quick succession, it's usually because they're shooting you on-sight), and were seen as not very interesting and occasionally repetitive regardless. The tasks were very non-mundane, from cutting down elephants to make wastebaskets out of their feet, fighting off waves of zombies, and "relocating" mad cow-infested cattle, to invading a terrorist training camp in search of a nuclear weapon, breaking out of a National Guard base, and placing the nuke at the heart of a competing game developer's offices, where part of the base game's charm came from performing everyday tasks (like cashing a paycheck and returning a library book) that would go spectacularly wrong (like getting caught in a bank robbery or the library being set on fire). The weapons and engine additions, as well as the plot, are seen as positives, however.
- Postal III is considered "The Average Joe" of the series to some, being not worth the wait, but not worth the ire either.
- Spiritual Adaptation:
- The series as a whole, with its basic premise of a man snapping over everyday stresses, is about as good of an adaptation of Falling Down as you could hope for in a video game. 2, 3 and 4 in particular are Played for Laughsnote A notable difference is that the Postal Dude in the second game is implied to be a Henpecked Husband, with some of his errands being things that his wife wants him to do, while in Falling Down, D-FENS is not only doing everything under his own volition, but is strongly implied to have an endgame of murdering his ex-wife., while 1 and Redux play it for all the Nightmare Fuel it's worth.
- And in turn, Hatred can be seen as the true Postal III. Running With Scissors even included that game's Villain Protagonist as a bonus character in Postal Redux, complete with voice acting, while the options menu includes a Deliberately Monochrome effect that's called "Just Like That Other Game".
- Given its vulgar, deliberately offensive, satirical view of... well, everything, Postal 2 was probably the best South Park game before South Park: The Stick of Truth came out.
- Likewise, the sheer amount of Comedic Sociopathy found in the game's world and characters isn't too far off from the post-Flanderization Family Guy.
- Surprisingly Improved Sequel:
- Much like the later Hatred, the first Postal seemed to be more of an exercise in riling up Moral Guardians than a fun experience for the player. Postal 2 took the same basic idea, changed from a top-down shooter to an FPS, and mined the dark premise for loads of Black Comedy rather than being a straight-faced Murder Simulator. The result, while not a smash hit, went over a lot better with critics and gamers alike.
- And then came Postal: Brain Damaged, which is a fun classic-style ("boomer-shooter") FPS game with enjoyable gameplay in its own right behind the Postal trademark crude humor, pop culture references, memes, and characters.
- Video Game Movies Suck: If nothing else, The Movie is generally agreed to be nowhere near as bad as Uwe Boll's earlier efforts at adapting games to the cinema screen. Aside from that however, people are sharply divided as to whether it's still a poor movie regardless, or so absurdly stupid that it actually manages to be hilarious.
- Vindicated by History: For the longest time, the series had dwindled in popularity due to the bane of the movie and third game hovering over the series (that's on top of all the controversy the first two games got upon release, which is considered "tasteless" and having low production value). The series was rejuvenated however thanks to how it's one of the early examples of combining Wide-Open Sandbox with First-Person Shooter, also the Steam release of the first two games and the fact that the game's violent content is pretty tame ("Remember, it's only as violent as you are!") compared to many contemporary games. The series is now hailed as a Cult Classic, with the second game continuing to receive official updates and fan mods to this day.
The comic books:
