Post-apocalyptic fiction is humanity's cry for help

Do better this time, not next time

Thank you to 0fjd125gk87 for the image.

Since reading Haruo Iwamune’s painstakingly gorgeous Usuzumi no Hate for the podcast the other week, I’ve been thinking about the appeal of post-apocalyptic fiction.

There’s something therapeutic about stories told in a setting both recognizable and devastated. For a lot of good and understandable reasons, it’s become lowest-common-denominator non-humour to joke about the fact that we’re currently living through the end times.

Now, people have been saying we’re living through the end times since the start times. But these days, we’ve got… Well, you know what we’ve got. We’re all dealing with it. I don’t want to go into it.

The best way we’ve got for responding to and dealing with all of it is: deepening our connections with loved ones and building new connections with potential future loved ones. Let’s all do that.

The other best way is art.

To me, it seems intuitive to create art about beauty and hope and recovery when times are hard. And times are hard. But beauty and hope and recovery aren’t the most obvious associations to make with art that depicts the extinction of the human race.

Yet, in the best post-apocalyptic fiction, that’s exactly what we find. Even though – or precisely because – it’s often set against an upsetting and violent backdrop.

We as a species recognize the havoc we’re wreaking on one another. Most of it isn’t even intentional or direct, and that’s what makes it so hard to opt out of. And that feeling of ‘I didn’t sign up for this shit, let me off this ride!’ just tightens the screws.

We sense that some extinction level event is ever just over the horizon. Busta Rhymes warned us about it back in 1998. Whether it is or it isn’t, that anxiety about it looming is part of our daily lives.

You may have had low moments where you think, ‘Hell, just let it come already. (But spare me so I can see what shit looks like after the fallout.)’ I have.

Alright so end times fiction provides catharsis. It lets us see what life might be like after some big reset button gets pressed. I think it’s most often created by people who deeply love the human race, and have hope in their hearts that, if given a fresh start, we could apply the lessons we’ve learned in our history so far, and do better.

I’ve always been drawn to these kinds of stories. In the past couple of years, I’ve been steeping myself in them:

• Of course, Cormac McCarthy, the patron saint of bleakness.

• But also Hideo Kojima’s sublime expression of convenience over connectedness, Death Stranding.

• The instant-future-classics coming out of Broken River Books, in which embattled protagonists find reasons to keep fighting even while everything around them decays and corrupts.

• Another manga, Chainsaw Man, which presents itself at first as gleeful splatterpunk but is really a heartbreaking exploration of the hopelessness of today’s youth.

• And currently, Altered Carbon, which is more cyberpunk than post-apocalyptic, but I’d argue that if you woke up one day, looked around and said, “this shit right here is cyberpunk,” then your society has already experienced some kind of apocalypse, buddy.

I avoided the TV adaptation of The Last of Us because I don’t watch scripted television (😎), but mostly because I played the PlayStation 3 game years ago, and didn’t need to have whatever atrophied walnut suffices as my heart ripped out again. I’m glad they got that giraffe in there, though.

Also I lied. I do watch scripted TV occasionally, when it truly shows me something new. Last year’s Severance, on Apple TV, was a visceral post-apocalypse of the emotional variety. What happens to the internal world – the human spirit – when it can’t put up with this shit any longer?

So that’s a lot of harrowing, existential dread to expose oneself to willingly. I know that I appreciate these works because their brutality helps me see more clearly what is virtuous about humanity. But I didn’t know that there was more to it than that. Usuzumi no Hate – a title which could be translated as The Extremity (as in the end) of Diluted Ink, so reflect on that for a minute – unlocked that “more” for me.

Specifically, the postcard that came along as an insert in volume one of the printed edition of Usuzumi no Hate unlocked that “more” for me. (Support the print industry!)

It’s not unusual for manga tankobon (individual volumes of a series) to come with postcard-type inserts asking for reader feedback. That’s actually one of the really cool, unique aspects of manga as compared to other media.

But this one had a question I’d never seen before (which makes sense): 「世界でひとりだけになったら何をしますか？」, or, ‘If you found yourself all alone in the world, what would you do?’

I’m half-tempted to stop writing right there and let you think about the question.

Here we have a manga in which each chapter is a vignette that gives a peek into a life lived or recently having been lived at the end of humanity’s existence. One chapter shows a couple—a man painting a portrait of a woman posing in a chair, frozen in time by a harsh alien virus. One shows a human consciousness uploaded into a limbless humanoid robot, sitting in an otherwise-empty cinema and watching old movies on infinite loop.

But in every chapter, we are guided by Saya, who is apparently the last living person. Saya has found herself all alone in the world, and what she does is, she looks around, trying to see if she might find someone else.

But what would you do?

Whatever the answer, I think the next question becomes: Okay, so why can’t you do that now? You know, before the world ends?

Now the answer to that might be, because my ass would wind up in jail, or worse.

Fine.

But if the idea of a hard societal reset which you miraculously survived inspires you to think, ‘Yeah, if that happened, then I’d finally be freed up to do that thing I’ve always wanted to do…’

Then, maybe don’t wait?

The post-apocalypse says to us, ‘Here’s how we can do it better next time.’

But there might be no next time.