First Exhibit: The apocalyptic mode of writing, as a social endeavor, provides creators the ability to critique gender normativity within post-devastation rebuilding and to disrupt the expected oppressed / oppressor binary. When nothing is left, when our characters reach The End, an abandonment of traditional gender norms and an acceptance of gender-diverse identities catalyze communal restructuring. The televised adaptation of Brian K. Vaughan’s and Pia Guerra’s comic series Y: The Last Man is a flipped narrative of gender essentialism—no longer a concern for social stratification, gender becomes a wayside factor in identity for some and an unprecedented, harmful obsession post-cataclysm for others who cannot re-enter social spaces without focusing on what they consider the essential differences in men and women. Second Exhibit: This essay poses Zora Neale Hurston’s 1935 autoethnographic folklore collection Mules and Men as an Afro-diasporic American epic that resists notions of the genre as a conclusive filial document. Composed in Hurston’s perspective, Mules and Men draws from multiple Black Southern lenses, from Florida to Louisiana, to offer a reconstruction of the epic narrative. A rhizomatic book combining African and Black American folktales—often in the same story or song or poem or conjure—Mules and Men constructs a South composed of several diasporas. These narratives contain no single origin point; rather, they show the multiple, mixed histories that combine to craft communal identity among people with a history of forced filial breakage in the transatlantic slave trade and further attempted disruption from wealthy, white land-owners. Alongside scholars who emphasize gentrification and race in their work, this analysis relies on rhizomatic thought, reaching for Gilles Deleuze’s and Félix Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1987) and Édouard Glissant’s Poetics of Relation (1990).