Marie louise von franz catastrophe7/29/2023 Audiences for this undead franchise have been falling (though still high in comparison to rival shows), so maybe viewers are still more interested in violence and high-octane action than any notions of lasting peace and working together. The first episode of the ninth season of The Walking Dead was called A New Beginning, with trailers suggesting the new series will explore how or if those remaining can find a way to live together peacefully. Season 8 focused on a storyline of emancipation, where various communities banded together to break free from The Saviours, a group who demanded tithes of supplies with threats and extreme violence. Again, quite a shift from battling over the leftovers of civilisation that had marked the series up until that point. Halfway through season eight of The Walking Dead, a character called Georgie was introduced, who gave the Hilltop survivors community a book called A Key to the Future, which explained how to build medieval technology (such as windmills and aqueducts) to help the community become more self sufficient. The season four finale of spin-off show Fear the Walking Dead saw the survivors set off on a mission to help other people and foster a sense of community – a marked change of direction from the “survival at any cost” narrative up until that point. The Walking Dead dramas have been moving in that direction. If we accept that they are reflecting a concern with the end of the world as we know it, what should there be in its place? Isn’t it time we had some stories that show hints as to how we overcome, resist or even avoid such things? An occasional chink of light, or possibility of hope for an outcome that doesn’t feature survivors endlessly killing each other over dwindling resources would be welcome. They are adept at the first part of traditional apocalypse narratives detailing what is wrong, with accompanying visions of the old world being swept away, but what about the second part? What comes next? What else? Modern media, particularly television and film, occupy a role in our society analogous to religious narratives, art and drama in the pre-modern period… as a source of theatre for the collective imagination.īut writers of our contemporary apocalypse narratives seem to be suffering from a failure of that imagination. The real focus of apocalypse literature isn’t about the spectacle of collapse, but about what comes after.Īs religious studies academic Stephen O'Leary explains in his essay in the Encyclopedia of Apocalypticism: It is a revolutionary imagination designed to generate visions not of what is, but of what might be. Apocalypse scholar John J Collins points out that most apocalyptic writing entails a challenge to view the world in a radically different way. Most of these writings contain a degree of pessimism and a concern with the end of history and cosmic cataclysm, but they are really there to encourage the oppressed. There are Coptic, Syriac and even Islamic versions of apocalypse all arising in times of crisis and change. The biblical Book of Revelation is only one of a number of texts reaching back into pre-Christian times, coinciding with periods of great political and cultural upheaval, which continue to be written well into the medieval period. The Walking Dead is about a group of survivors struggling after the zombie apocalypse.
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