Materials for “Wasteland Punk” in the Unreal Mall
We need to first understand what “Apocalypse” is in order to comprehend wasteland punk. The end of the world as we know it will result in a major catastrophe, according to the final chapter of the New Testament, Revelation. The term “Wasteland” refers to the world after the Apocalypse, and wasteland punk employs an exaggerated and artistic approach to illustrate how people would live after the end of the world.
Between the 1960s and the 1970s, wasteland punk emerged. All people are living in the shadow of nuclear war in the setting of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. People are forced to consider the world after civilization has been destroyed by the threat of a global nuclear war that could start at any moment. How will people survive if the world is wiped out? This difficulty gave birth to the concept of wasteland culture, and wasteland punk also came into being in the continual creation of artists.
The alternate vision that wasteland punk adheres to is actually predicated on the eradication of contemporary civilisation. Nuclear weapons have the potential to cause such destruction, but nuclear conflict is not the only scenario. Since the 1980s, there have been increasingly serious environmental issues, and the wasteland punk worldview has expanded from a simple nuclear winter to a wider ecological disaster — for instance, the world has turned into a vast desert as a result of global warming; as another example, the super virus brings the plague and zombies; another example is that after the earth’s resources are completely depleted, humans will have to return to the prehistoric era. In other words, all tragedies that have the potential to destroy contemporary civilization and the means by which humans manage to survive them might serve as inspiration for wasteland punk.
The visual representations of wasteland punk are typically associated with disaster and death, such as the devastation left in the wake of a nuclear explosion, the sewers where people are dying, the scorching desert wastelands, the towns overrun by zombies, the seriously polluted air and rivers, and so on. Wasteland punk must visually stress poverty, chaos, and destitution because modern society was destroyed, the existing order was destroyed, the majority of people in the wasteland lived in suffering, and gangsters and outlaws became the de facto rulers. Violence.
Normal conditions result in the wasteland punk world’s human technological tree being fractured and unfinished due to the collapse of civilization. Humans may have sophisticated computers, but they are unable to create reliable internal combustion engines and are limited to using old steam engines for propulsion. Thus, wasteland punk is often blended with steampunk and cyberpunk to generate a unique visual style.
The main themes of steampunk are the love of science and the pursuit of utopia. While wasteland punk places more of an emphasis on the game and struggle of human nature in harsh living conditions, cyberpunk places more of an emphasis on criticism of capitalism and meditation on science and technology. Wasteland punks are interested in talking about how humans manage to exist in the post-apocalyptic world, how to reconstruct civilization, and how to make decisions while juggling morality and survival.
The three films “Fallout,” “Subway,” and “Mad Max” are emblematic of wasteland punk. These three games (and related films) are classic examples of a nuclear war wasteland, and they essentially helped to develop our notion of “wasteland punk” cognition.
“Fallout”
In “Mad Max”
Subway: Leave
The subject of the film “Future Water World” concerns global warming. Every piece of land is inundated once the sea level rises. As only water can sustain human life, it is regarded as an ecological wasteland.
The premise of “Future Water World,” a wonderfully entertaining film with a fascinating location, but regrettably too conventional.
In Borderlands, people arrive to an uncharted planet in search of riches and establish civilisation in the middle of a wilderness. Although there are no natural calamities or nuclear weapons in this environment, it has a wasteland punk aesthetic that is similar to that of other wasteland punks.
Another iconic wasteland punk, even more so than many others, is “Borderlands.”