This article examines how pandemic-era visual culture imagined the worlds that might follow COVID-19. It traces a dialectical movement across three widely circulating examples: the “nature is healing” meme, Graeme MacKay’s four waves cartoon, and Naomi Klein’s animated short A Message from the Future II: The Years of Repair. The first offers a comforting fantasy of automatic ecological recovery, obscuring irreversible environmental loss, unequal responsibility, and the dangers of human exceptionalism. MacKay’s cartoon punctures that optimism by depicting COVID-19, recession, climate change, and biodiversity collapse as successively larger waves, but its rhetoric of overwhelming catastrophe risks producing despair and separating crises that share systemic causes. The Years of Repair provides a reparative alternative grounded in solidarity, care, political struggle, and ecosocialist transformation. Its speculative future history frames art as a form of anticipatory memory capable of making structural change visible and imaginable. While the film’s limited reach and unrealized aspirations temper its transformative promise, this vision of repair can nevertheless sustain a horizon of collective possibility amid deepening social and ecological crisis. Across all three cases, the article shows that post-pandemic imaginaries derive their force from how they frame the crises confronting us and the forms of political agency they enable or foreclose.