This reads as "I'm trying to hide my shitty opinions behind twisted logic".

In the case of thr last of us, why the fuck would anyone care what gender or race you are? Most of the world is dead or infected and in order to survive you need to get along with anyone still breathing.

It's also not helpful for the modern day world to continue to reinforce bigoted ideals. I'd much rather forego a degree of "realism" in order to allow people of all walks of life be involved in the project and normalize the idea that every single person is equal to the viewers. Cause apparently there's still some fuckheads who haven't figured that out

Wut.

In Handmaids Tale the black women are treated wayyyy worse and are the ones who cook and clean and act as servants.

And what about the last of us makes you think there’s no racism anymore from the minuscule snippet of the world we have seen in the show?

Trash take

When you're all working together to just survive and everyone is relying on everyone else. The Little shit just doesn't seem important anymore.

I haven't watched the show (also: neither off your examples are movies, op), but in the novel Gilead's interest in fertility supercedes its racism.

>Neither are 'natural,'

I know you're having a rough week with Trump and DeSantis imploding, but goddam, op.

Racism is a product of society, at least in post apocalyptic scenarios where that falls apart it makes sense that people wouldn’t give a fuck cause they’re just trying to survive

Because governments definitely don't institutionalize white supremacy or gender roles.

What a putrid post

Romans had slaves for 100s of years it wasn't based on race.

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This seems like a whole lot of nothing.

With such radical change from such a drastic event (apocalypse in film being at its core a metaphor for a deep rooted rational fear of drastic change) It does not seem to far from reality that when everything we know is gone it is human agency to come together. Consider the world wars or cold war in which whilst racism and sexism run rampant, a common fear brought people of all walks of life together.

Bringing rampant racism or xenophobia into a script for the sake of realism would do nothing but distract from the story being told...

The Walking Dead handled this topic. Shitty people will still be around, but their opinions don't matter anymore. The only thing that matters is working together to survive. And as much as you say that it takes an institution to enforce equality, it takes an institution to hold a group of people down as well. So unless the survivors are mostly racist/sexist, it really won't be an issue. It's not human nature to discriminate, that is a learned trait.

I'd say the post-apocalyptic The Mist (2007) handled this quite well. Based on a Stephen King novel, it tells the tale of a band of ordinary people of all races and genders who hole up in a supermarket ... and rapidly abandon all logic and reason to form a quasi-cult, turning quickly on the logical and rational people who they eventually blame for the acocalypse.

The point is that ordinary people will rapidly fall in line behind whatever demagogue has the power at that particular moment in time.

>Women's rights and you can forget about minortiy rights.

>Both concepts require a very strong government and have to be institutionalized.

>Neither are 'natural,' in fact the opposite is natural: tribalism and domination of the weak by the strong

Yeah... nah. This isn't true. It's modern mythology parroted by dudebros who fail so badly in society they assume they're just better suited to a world without it, but with little to back it up.

We have remarkably little evidence of the kind of constant conflict doofuses assume to be our natural state. In fact, we have more evidence of art than of conflict in prehistory. And we have a very significant body of evidence to tell us that prehistoric societies - who would have been subsistence hunter gatherers, relatively comparable to a post apocalyptic society - cared for their aged, disabled and vulnerable.

So every day life, for a primitive human, wasn't the kind of Mad Max all against all stuff people want to think. Maybe that changed in a crisis, or maybe not, but there are plenty of examples of disasters and collapses even in recent history where people took care of each other in spite of institutional failures/absence/apathy.

Let's think about a fairly recent situation of massive crisis for another reason though - WW2 was a notable period of advancement for women and minoritised groups, because the stakes were so high we needed everyone. We couldn't afford to use institutions and government to penalize those people, and many minority groups spoke of the difference afterwards when the emergency stepped down and they were sent back to the figurative back of the bus again.

On the other hand, the rights of women and minorities were seldom under more threat than they have been under Fascist governments, who are strictly institutionalized governments.

So it's more complicated on both sides than the scenario you've assumed. On the one hand, a more organized society just made it easier to screw the vulnerable on an industrial scale; on the other hand, the emergency meant the organization used to screw the vulnerable elsewhere suddenly no longer had the luxury to continue doing it. Many tribal societies colonized by "strong government" states suffered set backs to social rights their members had before (women were more independent day to day in several places before Britain conquered them, for example)

But going back to our "natural" state, the fact is, we're evolutionarily built to be lovers, not fighters. Among our closest relatives in nature are the bonobos, an often matriarchal social animal that bonds and resolves disputes mostly by fucking or masturbating. We are related equally closely to the more aggressive chimps, sure, but we're physically far more different. Chimps are incredibly strong and have ferocious teeth, and we've got neither.

Think about it in fact - what predator animal do you think you could overpower unarmed in a fight?

Fucking nothing. We're not stronger than bears, we're not toothier than wolves or clawier than lions. We can't outswim sharks or out run cheetahs. We can't bite crocodiles back or hold our own against hippos.

We should be fucked. But we're not. The reason we run the world isn't because we're especially naturally aggressive. It's because we have big complicated brains and walk upright, which means we can use and develop sophisticated tools, and we can adapt and communicate with far greater complexity than any other animal bar none. Nothing. There is nothing else on earth that can outclass us in terms of capacity to collaborate, and that alone makes us the dominant species on the planet. We are so finely tuned towards collaboration, in fact, that socially isolating a human causes them measurable physical harm.

Those two traits also make childbirth very dangerous compared to other species though - those big baby noggins get stuck in the narrow pelvis we need to stand up - and child rearing incredibly costly - it takes forever for a human child to become independent because it does a much greater proportion of its development outside the womb than most animals. That means the success, of our entire species, for thousands of years, has come on foot of the fact that people unable to fend for themselves for roughly a year (for the mother) and at least a decade (for a child) can rely on the adults around them to care for them.

That is what has made us the fittest, and it's why all those beardy survivalist end timer loons are going to die of a twisted ankle the first chance they get because they forgot they need to eat every day and sleep for about a third of it when they were choosing to go it alone. The idea of humans as selfish, rugged individualists is, and has always been, nonsense. We're simply not built for it.

If you were in a tiny post apocalyptic group of survivors and one of the others is from a demographic group you don't like but is otherwise pulling his weight, you're not going to send him packing or hurt him, are you? You can't afford to, you need his help. Are you going to mistreat the women in the group?

Why? What do you do the day after that, when you all still have to live with each other, in the absence of anyone else?

And can you sleep with one eye open...?