About a week ago, I saw a post about the appropriate music to set the tone for a World of Darkness session. It seems that different generations and different demographics have different associations and expectations for an urban horror/fantasy setting.
This got me thinking about a post-pandemic World of Darkness. I am not referring merely to the in-world setting after COVID-19, but also to the writing and conceptualization of the setting by the authors and artists. For example, in the 1990s, both the real world and the World of Darkness felt on the cusp of the apocalypse. The World of Darkness had its end-of-days, but the real world moved right on past the Y2K Scare into the new millennium. Then, September 11th happened.
Suddenly, after a brief stint of ecological disaster movies, we were bombarded with post-apocalyptic scenarios, mostly involving zombies. (So, so, many zombie movies...) We felt ready for a clean slate and a chance to prove ourselves in a world falling and fallen apart.
This trend, too, eventually passed. Then, came nostalgia and grieving for futures that never came, utopias promised by corporations and naive speculators. This was the peak of hauntology, vaporwave, and retrofuturism/retromania. And we were primed for being "terminally online".
Once COVID-19 finally swept the globe, then eventually faded, so much and so little had changed. If we had just undergone a drastic, life-changing experience, why did nothing really change? Why does nothing ever seem to happen any more?
We feel isolated and lonely, shouting into an electronic void where any responses may not even be human.

I'd also like to gesture towards "liminal spaces" and analog horror for a peek into the psyche of the younger generations and their hopes and fears.