i think the reason i keep coming back to the scourge virus section in invincible is actually because it's been a while since i've seen a piece of media execute a real plague narrative.
i should be clear; i'm referring to a very specific kind of media that i have an autistic fascination with. i like stories that involve plagues. pandemics. outbreaks, etc. mass pestilence.
i like these narratives, because in general i have an autistic fixation on a lot of biology, specifically human anatomy/physiology/cellular biology, and disease, but also because i feel there is a unique kind of horror in a story of a plague wiping out a civilization/area. in any kind of apocalypse story, this is generally true, and i think the clearest execution of what a modern plague narrative looks like usually comes down to zombie movies, but there is something i find unique in specifically thinking about disease as a vector for apocalypse.
i mean, the way biology works makes it incredibly unlikely for any one disease to eradicate humanity, and the only way in which that would realistically work comes down to human arrogance. (zombie movies get away with this by virtue of the fact that creating living hosts with the intent of seeking out other humans to infect is honestly a valid enough strategy to be plausible irl, and it would probably have severe impacts on the human population.) these aren't bad things when it comes to telling this kind of story (in fact, it provides an easy way of saying "wow humans sure are arrogant," which sci-fi authors love), but it's to make a point about why it's not typical.
the biggest problem with it, though, is that a disease is honestly a pretty shit antagonist. it's blameless. it's unconscious, and if you make it conscious, it's boring. it's more like a force of nature than it is an enemy per se.
disease is scary exactly as is. it is just predictable enough to have some means of control and intelligibility, and that's it. that control is not absolute, nor is that intelligibility. you know just enough to know when you really are fucked. you know some things about how to catch it, that you desperately want to avoid. but there is just enough uncertainty (random air particles, spittle, other people touching these surfaces, the length of time the particles survive, your own immunities, all the surfaces of your body and the few that can be infected, and whether the infection actually takes) to make it virtually completely unpredictable. it's a game of chance, which also generally makes it dogshit for thrillers, because that uncertainty is exactly what makes it tick. once it has its hooks in you, it's a long, slow, uncertain death. but prior, it's an entire mess of random possibility. you may never catch it, or you may have already. all it takes is the last time.
those like 10 minutes in invincible following the extinction of a species and empire from start to finish, bodies upon bodies upon bodies piling mountains of corpses in the city square, disease ravaging through their population without feeling, without thought, taking countless lives, each infection feeling like an inevitability, like fate, as the noose slowly tightens around your people's neck.
it's the feeling i get playing plague inc, or the old pandemic flash games. it's rare that i find anything that captures that exact feeling, that the disease itself is the inhumanity on display. the way infection moves through a population is itself a vicious rule of nature, and it is terrifying to imagine how small we actually are in the grand scheme of it.
it's rare that i find anything that lets that stand as its own horror. every thing i've seen that tries usually turns more into a character-based CDC thriller, so rather than showing how terrifying plague can be, it shows how stressful it can be trying to prevent it from happening irl
