After the End - TV Tropes

The book of humanity closes and the words "The End" are given upon us all, yet the story continues in a new location: Hell on Earth.

"But it was not, as some had predicted, the end of the world. Instead, the apocalypse was simply the prologue to another bloody chapter of human history. For man had succeeded in destroying the world. But war... War never changes."

— Fallout 3 Opening Monologue

Something hugely nasty has happened to humanity. Be it nuclear war (which was once very popular but has gone out of vogue, in part due to the end of the Cold War), The Plague (which currently seems to be the most popular), natural disaster (which some view as the most likely to happen in the near future in Real Life despite nuclear war being far deadlier and still very possible), supernatural disaster (usually the case with a Sealed Evil in a Can or missing Cosmic Keystone), devastating environmental changes (which, in this kind of fiction, happen too quickly for civilisation to adapt), a Zombie Apocalypse (also hugely popular these days), or an Alien Invasion (God help us if that one happens)—most (if not all) of humanity is gone.

The result is generally that you have the remnants of humanity fighting to survive in a hellish and devastated Crapsack World full of Scenery Gorn, Ghost Cities and a lot of nastiness in every corner of whatever remains of past civilization. This environment is perhaps also a Scavenger World which may have pieces of Schizo Tech and Lost Technology (or even Weird Science) here and there, but also where people inevitably degrade down to Disaster Scavengers and Crazy Survivalists, for whom staying alive may well mean being Reduced to Ratburgers or worse, especially if they're Too Desperate to Be Picky. The world often becomes a Points of Light Setting, with enclaves of survivors separated by long stretches of wastelands and dangerous wilderness and connected by fragmentary and unreliable roads. If enough time has passed, those Born After the End may hear stories of The Beforetimes from those few who survived the catastrophe, trying to impress upon the children what humanity was and still is capable of. Expect a Fish out of Temporal Water who Slept Through the Apocalypse to wake up to see their world changed. At any point in the setting an Apocalyptic Log may be found to explain exactly why the world was devastated in the first place, and/or an Archaeological Arms Race might break out to reclaim the old world's technology.

Large civilizations that were able to recover or at least preserved can include a Divided States of America and multiple interwarring states fighting each other for the corpses of a former superpower, a Dystopia struggling to survive, or a Days of Future Past with a Future Imperfect attempt to recreate happier times.

In any post-apocalyptic story created after the release of Mad Max 1, it is almost assured that the obvious and natural way for the world to look after a civilisation-destroying cataclysm is "the Australian Outback". There is no need to explain this. Global catastrophe turns the world into a gangster-infested anarchist Wretched Hive Australia. It just follows logically. However, in any After the End story created around the 1950s, expect to see plenty of Nuclear Mutants due to Rule of Cool. Additionally, if civilisation is depicted after a Bizarro Apocalypse, expect things to be really strange.

Has been a perennial favorite setting for low-budget action and sci-fi stories ever since Mad Max first hit the scene, both to cash in on that franchise's success and because it helps keeps the production costs nice and low. Sound stages and location shoots in populated areas can run up a good nickel, but if you can find a few stretches of desert highway and a partially-demolished building or two, you already have most of your post-apocalyptic set design all ready to go.

Related, if not quite the same, is the period immediately after the fall of Rome; most Film and TV set in this time tend to depict it as a time of post-apocalyptic anarchist savagery populated by interwarring warlords; medieval Europeans also tended to perceive themselves as a diminished people living among the ruins of a greater, fallen world. Thus, After the End stories will reference historical parallels about humanity's decay into Medieval Morons wallowing in filth and superstition, fighting for survival, and exterminating any "mutants" with fire. In fact, while there was a significant increase in banditry and piracy, most areas were peaceful most of the time. Fantasy series (especially JRPGs) are chock full of ancient, highly advanced civilizations that met their end and pitted humanity into a long Dark Age in a similar manner.

If you're really lucky, you may get a Cosy Catastrophe, in which case it's best to be friendly and humane, but also adaptable and brave. Of course, that's not a bad personality in Real Life. If you're really unlucky, the only ones left to mourn at Humanity's Wake will be robots, mutants and aliens. Or dogs — you just better hope you brought yours along for the ride, and it stays faithful...

While this is a legitimate trope, like Luke, I Am Your Father, it's also a very popular fan theory for shows that don't seem to take place in our world.

Compare Just Before the End, End of an Age, From Cataclysm to Myth. Not to be confused with The Stinger, an after the end credits scene. See also Soiled City on a Hill and Depopulation Bomb. The people who lived before the end will often come to be seen as Precursors of some stripe or another.

Not to Be Confused with Post-End Game Content, which allows you to keep on playing after the end of a game.

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Animation

Flow (2024): There are no human characters, and several ruins suggest that they existed in this universe, and have disappeared.

Art

Archetypes Storytelling Cards: The Brute’s card artwork seems to take place in a post-apocalyptic setting. The central character is firing a Fallout-esque high-tech gun with his robotic arm in front of some crumbling buildings.

Asian Animation

Ling Long Incarnation: The world is a barren wasteland, covered in the ruins of once advanced cities. It's also a setting rarely explored in Chinese works of fiction, as noted here.

Audioplay

The Cartographer's Handbook: Humanity has been all but wiped out by a plague that turns people into savage monsters called Wendigos.

Blogs

Bosun's Journal: The broken era comes in the wake of the corpocaste culture destroying itself in a devastating war. One of the four habitat cylinders is left entirely shattered and open to the void; the Bosun is forced to halt the rotation of another to prevent the now-uneven rotational stresses from tearing the ship apart, which has the side effect of collapsing its society by suddenly forcing it into zero gravity; and the outmost cylinder, cut off from the rest by the destruction of habitat two, is left without access to water supplies and slowly turns into a desert. What follows are a few million years of steady decay as society breaks down into increasingly small groups of scavengers, hunter-gatherers and decadent enclaves of the descendants of former elites, all of which steadily decline in technology and social complexity until they either die out or become simple animals. In the end, after the last sapient human dies, history transitions into a period of tens of millions of years where only animals inhabit the Nebukadnezar until, eventually, new sapient species emerge.
Tales of Ubernorden is set some time after a golden age is destroyed.

Comic Strips

Near the end of Johnny Hart's life, he revealed B.C. to take place in a post-apocalyptic world by having new character Anno Domini have copies of, among other things, phone books and The Bible in his cave. So it was Earth All Along sorta.
The infamous Halloween 1989 Garfield storyline (Oct 23-28) has the title character finding himself in a seemingly post-apocalyptic world (or at least living in a long-abandoned house). This has led fans to wonder if this is the true setting of the strip.

Magazine

Analog: The March 1941 cover has the Statue of Liberty overgrown and being visited by two people on a raft wearing skimpy leather clothing, indicating that some disaster has happened many years ago.

Music

The Aquabats!: "Radiation Song!" from Myths, Legends, and Other Amazing Adventures is a tongue-in-cheek show tune about life in a post-nuclear wasteland.
''Razor-blade boomerangs and iron hands
Crossbows and hockey pads are in demand
The toxic waste in synthetic place
Can add an eyeball to your face'
The song "Wasteland" by Atargatis describes how, after having reduced Earth to a dry wasteland, humans become wretched, naked, creatures of knotty limbs looking in vain for fertile land. Overlaps with Gaia's Vengeance, as Mother Nature itself wants them to give up and leave Nature to heal itself.
BLACKPINK's "Stay" video has a post-apocalyptic feel, with the members being alone in a city with ashes and debris everywhere and some blasts of colored gases. A large group of people dressed in white appears near the end, but they don’t move.
Black Sabbath's song "Electric Funeral" from Paranoid portrays a struggle for survival on a post-nuclear Earth.
Boards of Canada's Tomorrow's Harvest is (probably) about this and the events that will directly precede it.
David Bowie has stated the world that The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars takes place in is this.
The Kate Bush song "Breathing", the closing track of Never for Ever, is either this or an ongoing nuclear war that may well end in this. A spiritual foetus-like being usually occupying a womb implied to belong to mother nature, has seen the outside world multiple times before. The foetus entity remains one of the last living lifeforms on Earth, or the very last one, after a giant nuclear explosion has wiped all or most life off of it, and now perhaps even the aforementioned womb isn't safe enough anymore.
We've lost our chance
We're the first and last, ooh
After the blast
Chips of plutonium are twinkling in every lung.
"Come Away Melinda", perhaps this trope's most understated yet touching example.
Maybe overlapping with Gaia's Vengeance, we have "Scavengers Feast" by Cormorant
The Decemberists song "After the Bombs" follows two lovers in such a world.
Deltron 3030's self-titled concept album focuses on a post-apocalyptic world.
The song and accompanying video for Disturbed's "Another Way to Die" alternates between this and Just Before the End.
Played for increasingly dark humour in Bob Dylan's "Talkin' World War III Blues".
I called up the operator of time, just to hear a voice of some kind
She said "When you hear the beep, it'll be three o'clock."
She said that for over an hour, then I hung up.
Edge of Sanity's one-song album Crimson takes place in a post-apocalyptic Earth where humans can no longer breed.
Electric Wizard has a song called "The Sun Has Turned to Black" which describes the very end of humanity by unknown means.
The setting of Emerson, Lake & Palmer's "Karn Evil 9" suite is a bleak future in which humanity was largely wiped out, with the narrator holding out for someone to save what's left of it. Some surviving artifacts of humanity's past are preserved in a carnival exhibition.
Masaki Yamada's EZO song "Fire Fire" describes the world after a nuclear holocaust.
Bobby Goldsboro's "The World Beyond".
Gotye's music video for "Eyes Wide Open" shows a band of strange, thin limbed creatures wandering Earth, starting with the aftermath of a nuclear war and going back in time to the beginning of life on Earth.
Hawkwind: "Who's Gonna Win the War" and "Damnation Alley" (the latter based on the Roger Zelazny novel).
- Then there's Hawkwind soundalikes Underground Zero, whose song "Atomchild" seems to be set in a post-apocalyptic future (though it's really hard to make out the words and there's no lyric sheet).
Jimi Hendrix's "1983...A Merman I Should Turn to Be" from Electric Ladyland has the protagonist and his lover turn into merfolk and dive to the bottom of the ocean to escape a nuclear holocaust.
The Imagine Dragons song "Radioactive" alludes to a nuclear apocalypse. The music video for "It's Time" shows the band traversing a desolate wasteland (which somewhat resembles San Francisco).
- This forms the setting for Lindsey Stirling and Pentatonix's collaborative cover of "Radioactive". The video is filmed around some old graffitied buildings and junk in the middle of a desert, and the desolate feeling is enhanced by the heightened contrast in the video.
"Wooden Ships" (written by Jefferson Airplane guitarist and SF Fan Paul Kanter, in collaboration with members of Crosby, Stills & Nash, and a hit for both groups) depicts ocean-dwelling survivors of an unspecified apocalyptic event.
Jhariah's The Great Tale of How I Ruined It All surrounds the one man standing in an apocalyptic city. Having lost their faith, everyone turned to a brainwashing cult and all the buildings are destroyed.
The world has turned itself on it’s head
The trees don’t grow they kill instead
Where hope once was the light’s turned black
We find find faith in the strangest places
Billy Joel, of all people, dabbled in this trope with the song "Miami 2017 (I've Seen the Lights Go Out on Broadway)". It describes a New York lost to what seems to be civil unrest, a mass flight and botched military intervention. The survivors apparently settled in Florida and the narration mentions that the mafia now openly rule Mexico.
Judas Priest's "Cathedral Spires" from Jugulator is about mankind in post-apocalyptic world waiting to die in the titular structure.
Metallica also had to get in on the action. Ladies and gentlemen, Blackened.
Smouldering decay
Take her breath away
Millions of our years
In minutes disappears
Moby said his "South Side" song is about a post-apoc world:
Here we are now going to the south side
I pick up my friends and we hope we won't die
Ride at night, ride through heaven and hell
Come back and feel so well
Michael Moorcock's album The New World's Fair (featuring members of Hawkwind) seems to be based on this trope. Its cover depicts a funfair in the distance with a "Danger - Radiation" sign in the foreground.
Muse's music video for "Sing for Absolution" features a spaceflight to retrieve a massive capsule containing thousands of cryogenically frozen people and take them to Earth. Problem is, when they get there, Earth is an unrecognisable, let alone uninhabitable wasteland akin to the surface of Mars, and it looks like it has been that way for some time. The only things that let the viewer know it is Earth are Big Ben and what remains of a bridge.
The last verse of "99 Luftballons" by Nena describes a survivor exploring a ruined city after "ninety-nine years of war". The English version, "99 Red Balloons", ends on a similar note.
''It's all over, and I'm standing pretty
In this dust that was a city
If I could find a souvenir
Just to prove the world was here
And here it is, a red balloon
I think of you and let it go'
I Nomadi and Francesco Guccini, "Noi non ci saremo" ("We Won't Be There"), spends only the first verse on the presumably thermonuclear extinction of mankind; the rest of the song is bleakly optimistic (life recov*ers, and Earth will be better without us). A far cry from the juvenile destruction porn of some heavy metal bands.
Klaus Nomi's music follows a plot: "Total Eclipse" from Klaus Nomi warns of nuclear annihilation, and the aptly titled "After the Fall" from Simple Man is this.
The video for ''You're Gonna Go Far Kid'' by The Offspring.
The video for Tom Petty's "You Got Lucky."
The Police's song "When the World Is Running Down, You Make the Best of What's Still Around" describes life in a bomb shelter after a nuclear war.
Porcupine Tree's "A Smart Kid" is an incredibly depressing song set after the end, stated to have been some sort of war.
There was a war, but I must have won
The Postal Service's song "We Will Become Silhouettes" seems to be set in the aftermath of nuclear destruction. The titular silhouettes are a reference to the ghostly images of people that were left behind on walls after the nuclear bomb drops on Hiroshima and Nagasaki◊. In a classic example of Lyrical Dissonance, the song sounds like a normal peppy, Postal Service electro-pop love song.
German heavy metal group Rage have a song named "Take Me to the Water", which deals with a lone survivor in an already dried-out Earth looking for a mythical source of water.
Running Wild's song "Straight to Hell" is about bunch of survivors trying survive in post-apocalyptic world and "Land of Ice" is about Time Travel to a future where the world is caught on nuclear winter.
Akiko Shikata's song Replicare is about someone wandering in a destroyed world, condemned to relive eternally the fall of mankind in his mind and be tormented by the cries of despair of the dead. The Apocalypse itself is narrated between the verses in Ominous Italian Chanting.
Unable to catch any of the lamentations that pour down
I stand there, petrified
The smashed up world scatters in the middle of silence
As blue flames overwhelm it
Darkness is filled by an inescapable nightmare
Disturbing and distorting my lost mind
How long will I continue to dream, now that the future is gone?
Steely Dan's "King of the World", not very clear, but can be interpreted as such.
Stereolab's "One Small Step"
From the sky would fall an incessant rain of bombs
We had nowhere to go but retreat underground
Our ground had been peppered with loads of mines
Growing our food was a risk at any time
The Talking Heads song "(Nothing but) Flowers" takes place years after humanity has given up technology and now lives as hunter-gatherers while the surrounding architecture rots away. The singer becomes increasingly irritated by the lack of modern conveniences and reminisces about life before the end.
The 1994 anime "Rusty Nail" PV for X Japan combines this trope with an Alien Invasion - the band members' animated avatars all play important roles in it - Toshi's character (armed with the phallic Lance of Longinus no less) and Pata's are part of La Résistance, hide's is The Quisling / Slave Mook with the invading aliens due to a Hypno Trinket he wears, and Yoshiki's is Crystal Dragon Jesus and the only one who can overcome the Hypno Trinket controlling hide's - by throwing roses at it.
The video for Alan Walker's "Faded"
The XTC "This World Over" is about parents doing mundane things after a nuclear holocaust, such as bathing babies with extra limbs from mutations and going on hikes to ruined cities.
The second and third verse of Neil Young's song "After the Gold Rush" describes the physical world and humanity's attempt to rebuild respectively after the end.
Look at Mother Nature on the run in the 20th century
We got Mother Nature on the run in the 20th century.

Podcasts

The Adventure Zone: Ethersea takes place in the underwater city of Founders' Wake. Twenty-five years before the start of the campaign, a magical storm wiped out the entire surface world, forcing humanity to move under the sea in order to survive.
Life in the World to Come is about giving advice on how to survive the approaching apocalypse after the bombs drop.
Two variations show up during the Gemini arc of Sequinox.
- The first is set in a world where Sequinox accepts the offer to join the Sky Queen and end up taking over the world.
- The second is in a world where the Stars decided to stop Monster of the Week plans and invade as soon as Scorpius is defeated, forcing the surviving humans to hide in underground bunkers while Sequinox struggles to fight off their endless army.

Roleplay

Battle Action Harem Highschool Side Character Quest is set 58 years after the Antagonists have invaded Earth.
The Darwin's Soldiers tie-in story Card of Ten takes place on a post-apocalyptic Antimatter Earth.
Dino Attack RPG takes place in the aftermath of an apocalypse at the hands of mutant dinosaurs, though its not entirely objecting to the possibility of reconstruction. The alternate ending December 21, 2010, on the other hand, takes this up so high it makes The Road look optimistic in comparison.
In The Gamer's Alliance, all the stories have been set some time after the most recent catastrophic event that has taken place in the world. The most recent story arc takes place over a decade after the Cataclysm which shattered continents, gave rise to the terrifying Godslayer and allowed demon hordes to invade the world en masse.
A Geek's Guide: DeathWorld Earth is set 7 years after the accidental release of an alien Bioweapon on Earth that mutated all Fauna, and 5 years after an ancient self-replicating weapon crash landed on it.
The SOT Fastest AU in Survival of the Fittest Mini is set in a world that ended in the 1990s. Things got so bad that tracking the date wasn't a priority for a long time—while it's currently 2013, the strong implications is that the "1990s" lasted decades, during which North America was almost wholly destroyed. Now it's run by a combination of warlords, mutants, crazed cyborgs, and the remnants of mega-corporations.
In We're Animals in a Post-Apocalyptic Town, most of the world became infested with monsters many generations before the main characters were born, making it difficult for most people to venture outside the town walls and largely isolating the towns and settlements from the outside world.

Scripts

C0DA is an "obscure text" written by former The Elder Scrolls series writer (and occasional freelance contributor) Michael Kirkbride (with support from current Bethesda writer Kurt Kuhlmann). Numidium has made Landfall. The Thalmor won, time is unbound, Nirn is uninhabitable, and the survivors eke out a living under the surface of the moon. Humans are ambiguously extinct, as the only races seen in the comic outside of flashbacks are Dunmer, Khajiit, and Hist. In the Morrowind expansion for The Elder Scrolls Online, the URL for the C0DA website is referenced (in code), making it something of a Canon Immigrant Easter Egg.
"Go here: world without wheel, charting zero deaths, and echoes singing," Seht said, until all of it was done, and in the center was anything whatever.

Theatre

The misanthropic recluse, Hamm, his servant Clov, and Hamm's parents Nagg and Nell appear to be among the last survivors of humanity in Samuel Beckett's Endgame.
The Last Breakfast Club is a musical sequel to The Breakfast Club, in which the film took place on the day of nuclear holocaust, with the seven main characters being the sole survivors. The musical takes place years later, as they survive in the school building and contemplate leaving to attempt at restarting society.
The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh and the Maiden Fevroniya: Dmitry Tcherniakov's production gives the opera a Setting Update from an alternate version of the 13th century to a grim post-apocalyptic society where people struggle to survive.
Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play, by Anne Washburn, takes place after a catastrophic event that seems to combine post-nuke and Post-Peak Oil. In the first act it's established that humans are keeping alive distorted memories of their old culture - notably The Simpsons — through oral tradition. The second act takes place decades later after another apocalypse.

Toys

The Bara Magna setting in BIONICLE, the Desert Punk remains of a larger planet after an Earth-Shattering Kaboom. Also, the Alternate Universe known as The Kingdom, where Matoro failed to save Mata Nui, and so those who escaped the ensuing collapse migrated en masse to the surface, creating a new society on the Island of Mata Nui.
- On a slightly smaller scale, Big Bad Makuta Teridax's actions caused the Great Cataclysm, which crashed a planet-sized spacegoing Giant Mecha into the ocean of the planet Aqua Magna and caused absolutely catastrophic damage to the world of Mechanical Lifeforms inside the machine. The next thousand years were pretty terrible for all of them, and the setting for more than half of the storyline.

Web Animation

Apocalypse Lane: The setting, due to a nuclear war. It's a comedy series, so everything is Played for Laughs.
Brawl Universe takes place after the events of Subspace Emissary in Smash Bros. Brawl, and has the characters dealing with the aftermath and impact that those events left on the world.
Dinosauria: The final episode, The Last Tyrant, is set at the very end of both the Cretaceous Period and the Mesozoic Era, where the once thriving world of the dinosaurs has been reduced to a barren wasteland full of starving, injured, dead, and dying dinosaurs after the asteroid impact. Prehistoric Monster is averted in an extremely heartbreaking way, as it shows that the dinosaurs were majestic creatures that ended up falling victim to a tragedy beyond comprehension.
This is the setting of The Gaslight District, a single city on top of a Flooded Future World. In the pilot's prologue, the narrator whispers of how the world as we know it ended long ago. The exact details of how this came to pass are currently unknown, though the narrator implies they were corrupted by their own hubris, and an artwork depicting the prophecy does feature nuclear weapons...
Me at the zoo 1½: It is stated in the description.
"After visiting the zoo in the first video, and after surviving the apocalypse and rescuing the elephant in the 1¼ video"
Murder Drones: The first episode starts with Uzi expositing about how humanity did a little whoopsie and caused a planetary core collapse, which justifies why the series stars the surviving Worker Drones and mostly takes place in a bunker in a post-apocalyptic eternal-winter wasteland covered with the remains of human civilization and the remains of civilized humans. Somewhat downplayed, however, in that the series takes place on Copper-9, one of humanity's exoplanets, and the titular Murder Drones were sent by the Worker Drones' parent company to wipe out the autonomous WDs, indicating that humanity prosper back on Earth and in other regions of space... Up until Episode 6 reveals that Earth was wiped out a long time ago and the Murder Drones were not even sent to Copper-9 by the parent company, but actually by the Big Bad, leaving J.D. Jensen Technician Tessa Elliot as the only named surviving human in the series. Except that Tessa actually died back on Earth, too; the aforementioned Big Bad has reduced her remains to a fashion statement and Borrowed Biometric Bypass, and the BB might've already wiped out all other human exoplanet collonies, too.
The main premise of the Halo based machinima "Shadows of the Past" is a nuclear war took place in the time frame of 1970-2020. Based on the fact the characters are always referencing pop culture of this time period. This could also be Rule of Funny This is Played for Laughs since it's a comedy series.

Web Original

Creepypasta Cookoff: The "Brothers in Rust" series takes place after humanity spent years nuking their world into nothing.

Websites

Several stories on Everything2, including (but not limited to):
- Electrocuted crows hung the wrong way up on the power lines, smoking feathers falling like leaves, which follows Caramia as she scrounges for something to drink.
- If I'm right, you'll be here to read this any day now. An Apocalyptic Log as the world is being destroyed in a sci-fi-ish Ragnarok
In Goodbye Strangers
- Walltown and Infrared take place after humanity was devastated by a Mystical Plague that only affected non-sensitives and shortly afterwards the earth was affected by a flood of red water that wiped out all strangers and prevented new strangers from appearing, leading to the dystopic VHZ era.
- Dead Cities takes place in a more distant future after the VHZ era where all the inert strangers brought into reality through extrusion suddenly came to life all at once and wiped out most of humanity, including sensitives and non-sensitives.
- The possibly canceled Module 3 would have taken place in an even more distant future where humanity has abandoned the earth, which has become completely overrun with strangers.
The premise of the Neocene Project is about how life will evolve 25 millions years in the future after humans have disappeared and a mass extinction event caused by them that wiped out most life on Earth with the survivors evolving to refill the vacant niches.
SCP Foundation:
- SCP-093 ("Red Sea Object"), if attached to a mirror, opens a portal to a universe where humanity was wiped out in 1954 by 60-foot-tall monsters known as "the Unclean".
- SCP-419 ("Window to the World"). SCP-419 is a window to another reality that looks upon a cityscape. At some point a war occurred and the city was devastated, with buildings burning and reduced to rubble.
- S. D. Locke's proposal ("When Day Breaks"). The premise of this SCP-001 proposal is the Sun becoming anomalous. Any sunlight that comes into contact with organic matter effectively turns it into invincible, living goo with an urge to infect others, quickly turning most of the world's population into puddles. The tale itself chronicles the researchers and agents holding out for as long as they can, and ends with a horrific poem that evokes a mental image of Body Horror.
The Springhole article So You Want An Apocalypse/Cataclysm In Your Plot? addresses the different apocalyptic scenarios and the problems apparent with them, as well as recommendations for developing these kinds of scenarios well.
Taerel Setting: Due to the outbreak of the vampire kin'toni in the year 3E 3000, the Xerea zu'aan Empire and the other major powers of the world of Taerel where shattered. This lead to a world slowly regressing in technology and population.

Web Videos

adef: The gag at the end of "How Long Would it Take to Find the Perfect Spinda?" runs with the idea that, the shiny hunt taking about two thousand years at best, human civilization would be wiped out anyway. Now everyone is playing Super Brilliant Diamond on a the Nintendo Switch 2, which costs "at least 10 irradiated meal tokens", assuming the vendor is willing to part with one of their scalped consoles. But it doesn't matter, because "nuclear wasteland warlord Brynnithax" won't appreciate you spending all your time shiny hunting a Spinda of all things. While discussing this, the background turns into a desert wasteland full of swirling quicksand pools and no life in sight.
Critical Role: The main three campaigns are set in a world called Exandria over 800 years after the conclusion of the Calamity, a century-long war between the Good- and Neutral-aligned Prime Deities and the Evil-aligned Betrayer Gods, and the resulting cataclysms wiped out two-thirds of Exandria's population. The Calamity eventually ended with all of the gods being sealed away beyond the Divine Gate in what is known as the Divergence, and Exandria's dates are abbreviated PD ("Post-Divergence") to reflect this.
End Times begins three months after a messy virus (that somehow involved gross swelling) wipes out most of the population past their mid-twenties.
The Final Minutes: Zombie Plague takes place years after the world was ravaged by the XMNV virus, and the resulting nuclear apocalypse that rose from attempting to sterilize and destroy it.
ROSA: The titular Rosa is set after humans left cyborgs to fix the ecosystem they destroyed by causing all natural life to disappear.
Stampy's Lovely World: One of the scary movies watched in the 2017 Halloween Episode, "Block of the Dead", takes place in a ruined version of the Lovely World with all its current residents missing, inhabited by a couple of people trying to survive the Zombie Apocalypse.
URealms Live: Every Campaign (save for the 2nd quarter of Senate of Deadlantis) takes place after a catastrophic event known as the Birth of Magic: The Sun Dragon Phanto died and turned into the moon, removing the immortality of the Elves who then proceeded to slaughter each other. 90% of the original Elves died. On top of that, Phanto's death corrupted his 6 Children (Ouro'ras, Quintara Lotus, Yvander, Vlarunga, Rokesh and Golestandt) into being the bearers of the 6 major schools of Magic, and these Magics allowed the Dragons to be able to create new races, which they did. Also, Gnomes appeared out of no where, and no one to this day knows why.

Western Animation

Surprisingly common in Saturday morning adventure series intended for children:
- Sonic the Hedgehog (SatAM): At the start of the series, ten years after the conquest of Mobitropolis by Julian Robotnik,^notewho renamed the place Robotropolis Planet Mobius is not in a good place, what with civilization all but broken down and 90% of the entire planet's population enslaved as robots. The few survivors either moved underground or fled into the wilderness before forming scattered pockets of resistance.
- Thundarr the Barbarian: The catastrophe happens in the far future year of 1994!
Adventure Time is set in a rather bright post-apocalyptic world, where an event called the Great Mushroom War (which was a global thermonuclear war, in other words, World War III) wiped out humanity (and took a sizable chunk out of the planet itself) but brought magic back into the world, bringing all kind of crazy lifeforms with it. Finn is apparently the last human boy on Earth (or what's left of it)... apparently. Though earlier episodes merely implied this (and Word of God confirmed it), there have since been a number of episodes about the event itself.
- A Flash Forward in one episode shows that History Repeats in this regard, unfortunately. The Grand Finale, however, softens it up quite a bit and shows that, in spite of later conflicts, life on Ooo still goes on and adventures are still to be had.
The Flintstones is debated whether the characters are truly prehistoric or post-apocalyptic, trying to mimick past modern conveniences.
- It has been established that The Jetsons is set in the future of The Flintstones. Then again, this could simply mean that the population in Flintstones eventually rebuilt themselves to their former glory. The fact that the ground is a wasteland in The Jetsons seems to support the idea of an apocalypse.
  - An oddly common Internet joke is that the people in The Flintstones are some sort of low-caste part of The Jetsons society...This joke originated on 4chan, and is usually done with someone asking what planet the Jetsons' buildings are standing on, which someone else replies with an angry image of Fred Flintstone yelling "Fuck those rich assholes and their magic sky castles!" as seen here.◊
  - To wit, the Flintstones celebrate Christmas. Take that as you will.
Parodied in Futurama, in which Fry, believing that he has somehow been frozen for another thousand years, finds himself in a post-apocalyptic world; as it turns out, it's just contemporary Los Angeles. In Fry's first millennium freeze, aliens in flying saucers came and leveled civilization on Earth (or, at the very least, New York (and excluding the cryonics building), from which it rose again. Twice! One of which was apparently time-traveling Bender's fault.
- In the season 6 episode "The Late Philip J. Fry," Fry, Bender, and Professor Farnsworth time travel in a fast-forward-only time machine to the year 10,000 — After the End, in the sense that society has crumbled. They continue moving forward, hoping society will rebuild and one day someone will invent backwards time travel. We get to see society collapse several more times, for varying reasons including enslavement by giraffes, Robot War, a flood, an apparent ice age, and a parody of the Time Machine people. They keep going until they reach the year 1,000,000,000 — After the End of all life on Earth. They decide to keep going forward, as they really have nothing else to do, to see the end of the universe, billions of more years in the future, after the last proton "dies". Turns out time is actually cyclical, and the universe then restarts, allowing them to move "forward" to their starting point...which they proceed to miss, forcing the Professor to take them "around again."
  - In the Disenchantment episode "Dreamland Falls," Fry, Bender and Farnsworth make a Freeze-Frame Bonus cameo in the time machine from this episode, leading to fan speculation that Disenchantment's medievalesque fantasy world takes place in one of "The Late Philip J. Fry's" Medievalesque future societies, or even one of the societies that rose and fell between 2000 and 3000, when Fry was frozen.
Highlander: The Animated Series takes place after a meteorite hits Earth and sets off nuclear missiles (which were armed in preparation to shoot it down but the launch was delayed by an Immortal). Centuries have passed, and the world looks almost alien, with jungles covering much of it and strange animals present everywhere. After the collapse of civilization, the remaining Immortals have sworn to forgo the Game and keep certain scientific knowledge for when humans are able to make use of it again. Except for Kortan, who chooses to Take Over the World instead, ruling from the only city/fortress on the planet using remains of old tech to dominate primitive humans. The protagonist, Quentin, is the last of the McLeods (considering he's Immortal, there won't be any more) whose destiny is to find all the Immortals (now calling themselves Jettators) and collect their stored knowledge to help restore civilization. Naturally, Kortan is also searching for the knowledge.
- Oh, and Quentin later gets to meet the Immortal who blames himself for the catastrophe. The Immortal is an expert astronomer who claimed that the meteorite would miss and that exploding nukes so close to the atmosphere would be worse, causing the military to trust him and not launch (but not disarm the missiles). Unfortunately, the meteorite diverts from the path plotted by the Immortal and smashes into the planet. Naturally, he's still feeling guilty about that.
The Hollow: The desert has indicators of it at least being such a place; namely the wrecked, sand-buried remains of flight-capable vehicles and the Horsemen of the Apocalypse mulling around and eating what Death calls "provisions".
One episode of Justice League sees several characters trapped in a parallel universe. It turns out that this world was destroyed by war, and the normal city the episode is set in (including this world's version of the Justice League) are being created by the mental powers of a mutated survivor.
- Another episode features Superman accidentally being sent to a post-apocalyptic future where the human race is extinct. He meets the immortal Vandal Savage who claims responsibility and is so remorseful that he helps send Superman home so that he can stop his past self.
Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts: Sometime during the 21st century, two hundred years before the start of the series, the Earth was ravaged by a currently unspecified apocalyptic event that forced mankind underground and resulted in the surface being controlled by warring classes of mutated animals with human-like intelligence.
The Last Kids on Earth follows a group of teenagers who have survived after their hometown has become swarmed by Monsters and Zombies.
The final season of The Owl House has the Boiling Isles in a post-apocalyptic state after the Day of Unity, during which King let the Collector take over in order to stop Belos from exterminating magickind. In the several months since, the Collector's antics have wrecked the island's infrastructure and turned most of its inhabitants into puppets, including all but a select few adults, and further havoc is wrought during Belos' Last Villain Stand in the Grand Finale. This is even reflected in the survivors' Costume Evolution, with the Hexsquad, who were previously stranded in the Human Realm, generally looking better for the wear than those who stayed in the Demon Realm. After Luz and co. redeem the Collector and kill Belos, everyone returns to normal and reconstruction efforts restore the setting to its former glory.
Genndy Tartakovsky's Primal might take place on a post-apocalyptic Earth due to the fact that Mira is speaking Arabic, which would not appear until 1st to 4th century AD and comes from a more advanced society than Spear.
Samson and Sally takes place in a world where the environment is all but destroyed, and cities are sunk. And, for some reason, people have started whaling again.
Debatable in Samurai Jack. In the opening sequence, it is revealed Aku, the main antagonist of the series, threw open a portal in time and sent Jack to the distant future, where Aku's evil "is law". Whether the setting is actually post-apocalyptic or not is debatable, but it definitely seems that was what the creators were going for.
- Connections with other Cartoon Cartoon-era Cartoon Network cartoons have been made though. The first episode has clues showing that Jack arrived in the ruins of The City of Townsville Photo proof. Considering the plot of Samurai Jack though, Aku's post-apocalyptic world would have been undone once Jack went back in time to stop him.
Skyland was set after a point in which the entire world had broken up into sections, and required air vehicles to move between sections.
Strongly implied in ThunderCats (1985) and ThunderCats (2011). The planet is called Third Earth, there are remnants of Lost Technology, and in the original Mumm-Ra mentions how he remembers when it was once First Earth.
Cybertron of many Transformers continuities. The planet is often rendered barren and uninhabitable by the Great War. Nevertheless, there are often Cybertronians who desperately try to eke out a meager existence after most of the Autobots and Decepticons abandon the planet.
- The Earth of Beast Wars II is one of these as well.
Visionaries is a cartoon set on a world where, a few years previous a mysterious force has causes technology to become inert, ushering in an "Age of Magic" where the society is medieval in appearance. Magic users - good and evil - become humanity's rulers. Some stories reference the previous Age of Science, many of the current characters having positions of authority back then.
Two What If…? episodes What If... Zombies?!, What If... Ultron Won? and What If... The Emergence Destroyed the Earth? are set after an apocalypse, the former takes place after a Zombie Apocalypse that is accidentally unleashed from the Quantum Realm which is contained to just earth, the middle sees Ultron launching nuclear missiles and eradicating most of humanity before getting hold of the infinity stones and destroying many civilizations and eradicating most of life in the universe, while the latter is set on an asteroid of the last remains of Earth, ruled over by Quentin Beck, after the Celestial Tiamut was born and shattered Earth.
The civilization that produced the Xybers in Xyber 9: New Dawn ended in fire probably centuries before the series starts.

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