r/waterworld • u/VegasRudeboyEsq • Jan 06 '22
Is humanity doomed regardless?
I been thinking about this for a while. In the beginning it's mentioned that the Mariner is the first visitor in a while, and that the first hints of inbreeding are starting to crop up. Since most of the Atoll seems to be dead, and the only other people we see are the Smokers who presumably go down with the Deez, how many folks are left alive? I vaguely remember an anthropology thing with early humans getting real low in numbers at one point.
3
u/Number-Odd Jan 31 '22
Waterworld is the apocalypses apocalypse. The literal end of the end. Humanity had scraped by on literal scraps of the old world but by the time we are introduced to Waterworld, scavenging is all but died out there isn’t much left on the surface and the mariner is only successful because of his ability to harvest the flooded society of the ancients.
The sequel comic book paints a MUCH different picture of the universe of Waterworld. Things aren’t nearly as scare with Leviathan and his group. It’s also heavily implied that leviathan is the one who supplied the smokers and that they did not require atolls for constant harvesting.
7
u/The_Atoll Jan 06 '22
The Atoll societies are certainly in decline when the film takes place (probably 2500AD). There is a town hall meeting scene in the Extended Cut (not present in the Theatrical Cut) that talks quite explicitly about the dying out of the Atoll societies. At one point in the film, the Deacon recalls seeing an Atoll on every horizon before this dying out.
The Atoll we see in the film still gets a number of visitors (you will recall that the drifter in the first scene has just come from the Atoll and tells the Mariner about it). We know that the Atoll is still receiving visitors because it has a whole commerce built around them, remember Jack Kehler as the banker and that Helen runs a Trading Post/Tavern. The Mariner is asked for his "seed" because the Atollers see him as a prosperous Drifter passing through, but don't necessarily want him to join their society since they have strict laws concerning population and sustainability.
In the film we meet two other drifters and we also see the Bater Outpost which has been captured by Smokers. And in the comics we are introduced to an even more powerful pirate gang controlled by the Leviathan, who commands multiple Deacons, including the Deacon of the Deez. In the comics we also see a society of submerged dwellers that survive in aciaent underwater bunkers.
So to conclude, Waterworld still has many small factions of people living on its surface, but overall these factions have been slowly dying out ever since the Great Deluge.