http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CosyCatastrophe

Alexander Fergus Selkirk, braving a hostile ocean planet, Aurora Falls After retrieving the six-pack of Aussie beer that had been left dangling below the 4.0 Celsius thermocline (JUNO gave me absolute hell for that) while I slept, I settled comfortably into the pilot's seat while cradling a galley tray loaded with choice nibbles and commenced binge-watching the entire first season of Red Dwarf . Smegging brilliant.

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"Cosy Catastrophe" is a term coined by Brian Aldiss note To dismiss the work of fellow British Sci-Fi icon John Wyndham, particularly The Day of the Triffids. The book doesn't fit the trope, but the term has stuck none the less. The End of the World as We Know It has arrived and... our heroes feel fine. Sure, it's a pity for all those billions who just perished at the hands of super-plague/aliens/nuclear war. But for our safe, middle-class heroes, it means a chance to quit their day job, steal expensive cars without feeling guilty, sleep in a five-star hotel for free, and relax while the world falls apart around them. Maybe things weren't as good as they were in The Beforetimes, but all in all, life is still enjoyable. Especially if you brought your dog.

Maybe later they'll band together to recreate a humble yet sustainable pretechnological society. Maybe, if they're of mixed genders, they'll see it as their duty to repopulate the species (wink wink). Maybe they'll just learn to accept the extinction of the human race with quiet dignity. Either way, the end of the world shouldn't be the ... end of the world, so to speak.

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Expect Arcadia since there's not as much pollution and construction.

Many have noted that the popularity of the Zombie Apocalypse in media is probably in part due to this trope. For people's sensibilities, a future in which you may be prey to flesh-hungry ghouls is worth it if at least you don't have to face all of the pressures and responsibilities of modern life anymore. In many ways, it makes life more interesting.

A high form of Escapism, as who wouldn't want to drop all the pressures of modern life, with the odd chance to prove your bravery and resilience? Compare with Scavenger World, After the End. Usually goes hand in hand with Apocalyptic Logistics. See also Disaster Democracy and Angst? What Angst?.

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Examples

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In a beer commercial, an average looking guy is stranded on a desert island with a supermodel, complete with several cases of ice-cold (don't ask how) beer. The two of them think they hear a rescue plane so the guy assures the girl he'll try and signal one if he sees it. By using shells, rocks, palm fronds and his own body (for the Y), he does get a message out to some would-be rescuers: "GO AWAY".

Anime and Manga

Comic Books

Deconstructed in the Raymond Briggs comic When the Wind Blows, and its animated adaptation. A kindly but naive elderly couple hunker down as a devastating nuclear war begins. Due to the government's poor education of the public about the matter, coupled with their total failure to understand how serious the situation is (they lived through the Blitz in WWII and think it's just like that. It's not), they end up dying slowly and painfully from radiation sickness. The worst part is that their lack of understanding of radiation leads to them making things worse, as they don't realize how stupid and self-defeating the poorly written government pamphlets are (they're told to yank doors off hinges to use as a makeshift inner shelter, than a few pages later are told to leave the doors in place as barricades).

El Eternauta starts out kinda like that... But then it gets much, much worse.

The Walking Dead is most definitely not an example at the start and for most of the story, but the Distant Finale brings it into this trope. After the initial decade or two of anarchy caused by the Zombie Apocalypse, everything starts to gradually settle down as people get used to the new normal; towns and governments are being reestablished, zombies are dying off (either from naturally decaying or being easily hunted down by humans that are now aware of their weaknesses), and infrastructure is slowly building back up. The world hasn't quite gotten back to it's pre-apocalypse level yet, but its getting there.

Fan Works

Film

Literature

Live-Action TV

Music

Fairly obviously: "It's the End of the World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)" by R.E.M. It doesn't make oodles of sense, but one can assume it's Exactly What It Says on the Tin. One interpretation of the song is about how the rich of society are happy to let the end of the world run its course, whether it be due to their own negligence or unwillingness to change, as long as it doesn't affect them. (This requires actually hearing the ultra fast lyrics, however). Or that everything people crow about being the "end of civilization!" or "this changes everything!" isn't really that big a deal at all. It's basically an argument against knee-jerk reactions and the fear of change.

The Decemberists' "Calamity Song", which is a refreshingly peppy and fun song about, well, the apocalypse. "Had a dream, of you and me in the war of the end times

And I believe, California succumbed to the fault line

We heaved relief, as scores of innocents died."

"Natural Immunity" by Supercommuter is about a man who specifically invoked this trope by hiding his natural immunity to a world ending disease so a vaccine wouldn't be made.

Alice Cooper's song "Last Man On Earth" is about a guy who wakes up one morning to find that he's, well, the last man on earth. And instead of being depressed about it, he proceeds to sing about why it's awesome.

"The End of the World" by Lenka is an upbeat song about a girl who is perfectly fine with dying as long as she dies with her loved one. At the end of the world, we'll be together, be together

If I can spend it with you, then the end of the world don't matter

At all

The protagonist of "The Story Of Willy" by King Missile has this perspective on the impending apocalypse ("Today is a special day, the last day of planet Earth, and I'm going to enjoy myself"). Even when he finds his friend Bob has committed suicide, he resolves to wait until Bob's wife gets home and take her out dancing. Of course, because this is King Missile we're talking about here, Willy then gets run over by a runaway steamroller

Tabletop Games

Early Shadowrun products' Alternate History timeline depicted downtown New York City being virtually leveled by an earthquake in 2004, and tallied the damages around 200 billion dollars. Even at 1989 prices, that figure seems preposterously like this trope, as does the premise that even that game-setting's Mega-Corp powerhouses could finance its reconstruction in a matter of a couple of decades.

GURPS Autoduel/Car Wars portrays Australia as having become a quasi superpower because it is the only continent not affected by grain blight, and their cars even run on gasoline. Pretty cushy place, if you can deal with the outrageous quarantine regulations and you're not trying to leap the Cobalt Curtain.

The setting-defining event of Chuubo's Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine is that the sun went out (more specifically, she was shot down by an arrow) and the world collapsed into a metaphysical Primordial Chaos. Then a new sun rose in the place of the old and most people picked themselves back up and went on with their lives. Just how big a deal this is depends entirely on the campaign.

Pathfinder had a horrible catastrophe 10,000 years ago as part of its backstory; a giant asteroid fell, destroyed an entire continent, and the resulting dust blocked out the sun for a thousand years. Empires crumbled, mass extinctions occurred, actual gods perished, and civilization as a whole was destroyed...except in Nidal. The people there made a deal with the god Zon Kuthon, who provided for them in return for their devotion, giving them food and shelter. Even now with things recovered, Nidal is basically the oldest civilization in the world, the only one that can trace its roots all the way back to before the disaster, and has knowledge and traditions dating from that time. The downside to getting such a Cozy Catastrophe? Zon Kuthon is the god of pain and darkness, and to date Nidal is under his thumb.

Video Games

Webcomics

In the Gifts of Wandering Ice the old world died along with most of its population, only few people survived the catastrophe and an ice age that followed it. But they didn't become bloodthirsty savages. Quite the opposite: in many ways they are much better people than their ancestors were. There are no wars in their world, also people of the new era are kind and intelligent.

Zig-zagged in ShootAround, where a girl's basketball team facing a Zombie Apocalypse enjoys it far more than they should; sometimes, however, the comic can get a lot darker about it.

At face value, Stand Still, Stay Silent has a Just Before the End sequence focused on people who end up surviving The End of the World as We Know It, then jumps to 90 years After the End, during which humanity has had plenty of time to recover and the settlements we get to see in the end of the prologue and the first three chapters are the better-off ones. However, the less cosy aspect peeks just below the surface, with some characters originating from a place where small settlements sometimes just plain disappeared and the story mostly happening in the Forbidden Zone that fell victim to the apocalypse and still contains remnants of failed attempts at preventing its spread and later failed reconquest of the lands by the descendants of those who used to live there.

Web Original

Western Animation

Real Life

Tornadoes actually are this in Real Life, for anyone not in the damage track - and since even for the very worst tornadoes, the damage track is no more than a couple miles wide at the very most. Even in long-track, violent tornadoes, there are undamaged properties, available resources, and emergency crews often nearby - and if you're outside the damage track's width, you may not even know a massively destructive tornado passed you by aside from some weird weather or an unusual power outage. A perfect Real Life example of this trope would be a condominium complex in Ocoee, Florida hit by a tornado during an overnight storm in 1998. The complex — consisting of large single-story condos — was completely leveled with the exception of a single condo on the edge of the complex's property. Not only did the couple living in this condo not even notice a tornado was destroying their neighbors while it was going on, the family only found out it had happened when they turned their TV on in the morning and saw a picture of their own condo on the morning news with the scrolling headline "MIRACLE SAVES SINGLE CONDOMINIUM" running under it. They never even lost power.

The Protect and Survive films and leaflets produced by the British government in the early 1980s seemed to imply that this would be the outcome of a nuclear conflict. Sure, you'd have to stay inside for a couple of weeks, but after that everything would be just fine and dandy. Threads and When the Wind Blows (see Comic Books, above) were produced in response. To some degree it actually made sense, because in the 1980s nuclear strategy generally shifted away from attacking population and industrial centers toward attacking enemy military infrastructure (bases, command centers, defense installations, missile silos, etc.) - under the assumption that if enemy military forces are depleted by nuclear attacks, then your conventional military could force him to surrender without resorting to mass civilian casualties. While numerous nuclear explosions around the cities are clearly not good for population, they also clearly much less harmful than nuclear attack against the cities. Still, this would mean mass death to civilians plus destruction of agriculture nonetheless. Though the latter would be naturally less than a direct nuclear attack on civilian centers, it still is something many couldn't survive in the aftermath. Radiation poisoning and the starvation due to crops dying would still kill millions.

A lot of American Civil Defense material implied this as well. Like its British counterparts mentioned above, The Day After was produced to show how bad even a "limited" nuclear war would be.

In October 2016, a photo of a Hong Kong man sitting in a Starbucks flooded due to heavy rain engrossed in a newspaper went viral.

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