I love the Fallout games, A Boy and His Dog & The Road (how do the books compare to the movies?) and I lean towards more wasteland themed settings. I recently saw the movie Threads which is now one of my favorite movies and seems to be the gold standard for bleak post-apocalyptic movies. It really scratched that itch but I feel like there must be even much darker and more soul-crushing works out there.

Whether it's about how terrible people can become and makes me lose hope in humanity or about how bad things can get for people and makes me lose hope for humanity, whether it's through sheer overtness like extremely detailed overwhelmingly graphic content or through more subtle overarching psychological themes that really build up to really deeply affect you, basically anything that'll stay with me in a powerful way.

I'm more a fan of post-apocalyptic stuff but I'm also open to anything in a pre-industrialized setting say prior to the 1300s-1400s whether it's prehistory, antiquity, middle ages, etc.

I find most media always has some kind of saving grace or redemption factor as motivation for people to like and connect with the story/characters in some way which makes many of these works feel censored compared to the real life equivalents they're attempting to emulate (often and for many people life simply doesn't have any kind of redemption or saving grace beyond being alive in and of itself which in some situations isn't even a positive thing for the person being put through all these terrible things). This is something I see as a disservice to art itself so anything that has little to no compromise on that front in an attempt to make the reader feel better is extremely satisfying and artful to me. In my opinion art is supposed to make people feel strong emotions not just feel good and at this point everything is so strongly aimed at getting a positive response from people that I feel jaded to that type of art and basically just want something that'll impact me on a deeper level in the opposite way. Something cruelly unforgiving if you will.

Sorry for the long post and thanks in advance for any suggestions! 😊