The Mall
by EyesOnlyUS
Forward
Before I start, here's some of the ideas that I'm been thinking of.
The American shopping experience is dead. While most people want to blame online shopping or big box stores for their decline, the shopping mall was a collection of niche store.
The idea for The Mall should be set in a building that is a combination of two former malls in Ohio: Randall Park Mall and Rolling Acres Mall. YouTube has like a ton of videos on shopping malls lately mostly abandoned, being explored by Urban Explorers (UrbExers) or reminisced by historians.
The end result is each mall, with their lack of occupancy and disrepair makes them subject to many documentaries and are often described as "dystopian", "dark", or "one of the signs of late-stage capitalism".
I chose these two locations as the inspiration of the story namely because of guys like Jake Williams and Dan Bell who would make these videos, the latter of which started adding "aesthetic" style to his videos.
The Randell Park Mall had a set of walkways that traversed the area. It was also a multi-level mall with over 150 stores and about five or six anchor (big department) stores. A place that large could spark imagination especially with the many public corridors it had.
The Rolling Acres Mall had fallen into so much disrepair that some of the photos and videos collected by guys like Williams and Bell showed the place vandalized, skylights busted out letting the elements (especially snow) in them, and add to that so many items left in these buildings in the administrative areas that had me thinking "why didn't I consider breaking into the local mall in my area that has been abandoned for the past few years that the local police were using for some lame charity contest where they would further damage the building shooting paintball pellets at each other?"
I also wanted to consider movies like George A. Romero's 1978 cult horror film Dawn of the Dead where a group of people trap themselves inside of a shopping mall during the zombie apocalypse. A similar plot was applied in the video game classic Dead Rising which was so good it spawned three sequels. Prior to the retail apocalypse (which did not start in 2010 like the article on Wikipedia states but much earlier than that, at least it seemed like it in my neighborhood) retail was faltering, and the local leaders had the gall to build another outlet mall in a flood plain in 2003 costing upward of $200 million, only for it to close 15 years later after it was put up for auction in 2015 or 2016 at a value of less than $4 million dollars.
But here in 2019, there is something more worrisome than a zombie apocalypse if the retail industry is going through its own apocalypse causing places which could have been great places to shelter in place if the world was being over run by brain-eating monsters, and that is the actual apocalypse.
I want The Mall to be this post-apocalyptic word sort of like Cormac McCarthy's The Road only without ambiguity as to what the extinction-level event was that The Road was set in.
I find it ironic that McCarthy speaks about how when he was writing The Road how he pictured a post-apocalyptic world would be like in his interview with Oprah Winfrey in 2012, about he imagine a future with fires on a hill when at the end of 2017, we saw this image.
McCarthy spoke of his idea like it was something 50 to 100 years from now. But this over a year ago.
Complicating things is the news that was released in October 2018 about how we literally have less than 12 years to save the environment according to the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). To which the response has been everything from "we're screwed" to "it's a plot by socialists to make us stop eating beef" which I'll admit some screwhead at my state legislature last week submitted a bill to oppose Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's "Green New Deal" because the state's cattle industry because of some panic news story they saw on Fox News about how "socialist democrats are going to force you to be vegan". Now on what country is there a government mandate to force you to eat Kale, Quinoa (which sucks because it never goes through the dishwasher property), or some other overprice food item that Dr. Oz promoted at they sell for $10 at Whole Foods? More importantly, WHY DOES SAVING THE EARTH FROM EMINENT DOOM HAVE TO BE A GODDAMN POLITICAL PISSING MATCH?!
Consider that our demise was more visible and physical, say we had an asteroid situation like in Armageddon, and while basically an asteroid the size of Texas would be our untimely death, if it was avoidable, and Bruce Willis could save the planet by dropping a nuke in the core of a giant space turd, in our current political situation, if a NASA scientist busted into the Pentagon to give the bad news to the guys at the Department of Defense, and the D.O.D. approved of this dangerous mission assuming they had to present this plan to Congress, the president, and the media like it was Obamacare, every right wing radio and TV pundit would call it a conspiracy by the Left to fund Space-X, and since Donald Trump is our president he would learn about it on Fox News only for the pundits on that network to say the asteroid is a political stunt, which he would tweet that until he saw it in the sky it was "fake news", and even with bipartisan support from both parties in both houses on congress (because not everyone who is a Republican is a selfish twat or a Fox News rubber stamp) congress would approve of it, only for everybody to die because the President vetos the bill because the shut down his racist vanity project.
Yeah, I know, this isn't a political board, and I imagine part of this story would be flagged for being political in a non-political thread, but this is a story about a very real scenario made possible by the very anti-scientific partisan politics that makes stories like The Road so much sooner than they appear to be written and The Mall to be a story that will happen IN OUR LIFETIME.
So to the next generation who finds this posts, on say Archive.org or whatever other website there is in the future (maybe this one), this is a story that will be how a speculative fiction in 2019 could be a reality within a decade especially if we give up or fight against each other or call it all "fake news". The world isn't going to be at all like Ready Player One, but closer to The Road and much sooner than expected.
The Mall should be seen as a survival horror that will become our future especially with the inaction and finger pointing and fear-mongering all so grandpa can still eat red meat on Sunday with a baked potato and avoid grandma's request to eat a salad.
We should strive to be better than our parents and grandparents because lord knows how well they've fucked up the world for us. It's why we should fight to make a the world a better place like this meme says.
The Mall is not a story about politics, or environmentalism, or how we should save the planet (when we can't even save ourselves), but a story about what our world would be like if we did just say "fuck it" only to be in an "oh shit" situation, which starts out as "this is what we are now, I'm sorry the world is like this, the least we can do is survive and make the best with what little we have."
It is a story that starts with right now.
The following story is fiction. Any events that occur after the date this story was written are conicdental, speculative, and fictional.
