I'm looking for things that covers a specific theme. Existential dread/horror, but in a comforting way. Things that address the idea that maybe we're absolutely nothing and completely powerless compared to the impossible chaotic forces controlling our lives, but that doesn't mean life inst still worth living and we can still support each other. The two things I've found that address this sort of idea, the Car Boys Polygon series and the video game Night in the Woods both ended up having major controversies involving the people involved in their creation that made it harder to continue to enjoy the media without feeling conflicted. Sorry if this is sort of rambling, I'm not sure exactly how to word what I'm looking for. I took a class on existentialism from a professor I was friends with a few years ago and it kind of fucked me up a little. Been looking for ways to recover from that ever since.
Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (the movie) The BBC series had an ending that depressed me, but the movie ends on a much more inspiring (and comforting) note.
Simply put, you’re not nothing and you’re not powerless. You are as much and and powerful as you let yourself be. Look around you and make up your own mind! The proof is everywhere.
Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known. -- Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, 1994
I find the works of Terry Pratchett a large source of the existential comfort you're looking for. A central theme is that the world may be chaotic and uncaring, but that makes the positive traits of his characters like Captain Carrot's idealism or Sam Vimes' determination more valuable not less.
