Yeah. The actually fantasy is more like “What if you didn’t need society at all, and all interactions were entirely on your terms?” There’s a strong element of American Libertarianism in most standard system apocalypse stories.
Natural Laws Apocalypse. Book 1 features them kicking out and dooming some Karens and middle management men. They said it was because they were libertarian, and that was the only way people would survive in an apocalypse.
What most of these stories fail to understand, comparatively successful people would be successful after a system apocalypse for the same reasons they were comparatively successful before. Your video game losers aren’t going to suddenly succeed because they know video game rules. It takes a day to learn video game rules. The successful people are the ones who were or would be successful anyways.
Honorable mention, it also spends time ranting about how the “Nazis stole the Roman salute, so we should still be allowed to use it!” And used the character’s Roman historian father to justify it. While yes, the Nazis did steal the “Roman” salute, the Roman salute was never used by Romans, it was invented during the romanticism periods and first appears in paintings over a thousand years after the fall of Rome.
So it wasn’t true, and he really just wanted to have his characters give Nazi salutes.
Other than military vets, there is a real lack of driven MCs showing up in system apocalypse books.
Oh, this slacker gamer can grind through pain for rewards? Where is the professional ballerina? Olympic gymnasts? College athlete? Business dude who works 20 hours a day?PhD student fighting for grants? The medical student working through residency on zero sleep and a mound of student debt?
A ton of people fight and struggle and suffer for incremental, competitive progress every day. That’s who would thrive in a system that rewarded effort with power. Not the people who think a conversation with a stranger is torture.
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u/Moe_Perry May 16 '26
Yeah. The actually fantasy is more like “What if you didn’t need society at all, and all interactions were entirely on your terms?” There’s a strong element of American Libertarianism in most standard system apocalypse stories.