I wonder if that's because the apocalypse of the 80s was (in terms of the cultural gestalt) MAD nuclear war: Rocks Fall, Everybody Dies, and of a kind where bluntly you have to outright handwave HOW anyone survives because we basically don't know - our suspicion is that Everyone Dies, basically, but since the actual killers tend to be shit like radiation poisoning and cancer, and we really don't KNOW how anyone will survive assuming they do, nobody wanted to hang out there. Bluntly, there's nothing sexy about radiation poison and cancer - they involve ugly tumours, throwing up, wasting away, open sores, dull, boring pain, gi distress, etc etc etc.
You can make violence and sexual violence and death-by-violence kind of sexy. You really can't make "brain liquified by nest of tumours" and its corresponding symptoms and experiences sexy or glam. It isn't the kind of suffering that anyone enjoys: it may or may not be horrific, but most importantly it's gross in a petty, icky, "ugh wash my haaaaands"/"this smell is gonna make me throw up" way. (See also: why someone like McCaffrey would decide to go with a flu pandemic for Pern rather than the Black Death - the flu at least potentially has the decency just to make you cough a lot and suffocate to death, whereas the Black Death is actively disgusting in an embarrassing/humiliating way in its symptoms.)
So to have the Adventure, you go to the place AFTER the apocalypse. And I mean there were grim versions of that, too, but.
Whereas the gestalt-concept of apocalypse at this point seems to be scarcity, which means the actual killers are either humans doing violence to one another, or people are starving because of having been run off by the violence of other humans. We're a lot better at glamorizing violence and the results of violence than we are diarrhea and vomit. Before the End of the World concept was SO big and overwhelming and catastrophic that our way of processing it in fiction was just to jump straight to "annnnd there was a band of survivors from The Terrible Dying Times", and then the struggle and adventure was continuing to survive in the now more hostile world.
Right now we have End of the World concepts that are a lot more comprehensible: they're basically the war-zones or plague-zones that already exist on our planet, except writ large and globally. And since we CAN engage with that in our fictional fascinations, we do. So a lot more living-thru-apocalypse stuff.
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You can make violence and sexual violence and death-by-violence kind of sexy. You really can't make "brain liquified by nest of tumours" and its corresponding symptoms and experiences sexy or glam. It isn't the kind of suffering that anyone enjoys: it may or may not be horrific, but most importantly it's gross in a petty, icky, "ugh wash my haaaaands"/"this smell is gonna make me throw up" way. (See also: why someone like McCaffrey would decide to go with a flu pandemic for Pern rather than the Black Death - the flu at least potentially has the decency just to make you cough a lot and suffocate to death, whereas the Black Death is actively disgusting in an embarrassing/humiliating way in its symptoms.)
So to have the Adventure, you go to the place AFTER the apocalypse. And I mean there were grim versions of that, too, but.
Whereas the gestalt-concept of apocalypse at this point seems to be scarcity, which means the actual killers are either humans doing violence to one another, or people are starving because of having been run off by the violence of other humans. We're a lot better at glamorizing violence and the results of violence than we are diarrhea and vomit. Before the End of the World concept was SO big and overwhelming and catastrophic that our way of processing it in fiction was just to jump straight to "annnnd there was a band of survivors from The Terrible Dying Times", and then the struggle and adventure was continuing to survive in the now more hostile world.
Right now we have End of the World concepts that are a lot more comprehensible: they're basically the war-zones or plague-zones that already exist on our planet, except writ large and globally. And since we CAN engage with that in our fictional fascinations, we do. So a lot more living-thru-apocalypse stuff.
That's my off the cuff pondering, anyway. XD