Things are kind of crazy this year, so I thought I’d go take a Blast From the Past and take inspiration from 1999 back when we were “fighting” the “oh so scary” Y2K. I don’t know about you, but that one always baffled me as someone who did live through the hype.
And no Y2K is not the “global situation” I am taking inspiration from either. It’s the one in the 1999 movie with Brendan Fraser, Blast From the Past. That means the “Global Situation” I am taking inspiration from, and I used the word global questioningly, was the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. Considering it was a situation between two global super powers, it may well have been a global situation, but I don’t know how much people outside of those two groups were actively interested in what was going on.
In truth it doesn’t matter very much for this prompt how much interest there was worldwide, because it’s not even about an actual global situation. It’s about a perceived global situation. Maybe the global situation is real and every precaution taken is one too few and there really is no way to be too careful. Maybe stockpiling enough supplies for more than three decades and staying in an underground bunker for thirty-five years is not only not an overreaction, but it is in fact an under-reaction.
Maybe.
Or maybe locking yourself away from the world and wearing an oxygen mask to go outside and tentatively interact with people is beyond ridiculous to everyone around you.
In the movie Adam stepped out into a world he had never dealt with before and in this prompt you have to decide, what caused the parents of the character to lock themselves away from the world. Were they right to do so? How long has it been since they did? This character could be a small child almost ready to start school or they could be an adult who longs to see something, anything other than what they have before.
Nothing says that they can’t have interacted with other people either. If you use today’s technology, they could have gone to school online. They could have a degree or three from a prodigious university. They could be interacting with a lot of people who are in the same situation as them, never having gone outside to see what’s out there and if the problem is still going on. That might make it tricky to keep them from knowing what the problem was, but maybe you don’t like that part.
This is just a prompt though. Have some fun with it and forget your problems for a little while. Give them to your characters instead.
