Deidream #56: Apocalypse Wow

An author’s note

A particular moment from Pacific Rim and Nick Fury’s “until such time as the world ends, we will act as though it intends to spin on” gives me courage. My father has expressed similar sentiment about the “Today is our Independence Day!” moment from Independence Day.

Been thinking of how we use fictional metaphors of planet-wide existential threat (via aliens or kaiju) to speak to the importance of humanity coming together in a fight for survival… and sometimes the perversion of our obsession with “The End” infects us and tricks us into accelerating our own demise.

I’m still considering myself largely on break from Substack, but as we witness what is happening now, I couldn’t let this moment pass without makin some art.

Welcome to Apocalypse Wow.1

Why I’m here. What I’m mulling over.

I’m not a doomer. But we are witnessing the end of a world.

A world whose belly was bloated with the flesh and bones of the innocent, where cannibals and pedophiles and warmongers pointed fingers at the rest of us to decide who would live or die.

(word to my sibling spirits and I)

A world so disconnected from the heartbeat of the planet that bore it that it descended into savagery, just not the kind white supremacists would have us believe would come if we all dared to dream of living in equitable societies.

[WHAT DO YOU MEAN HE THREATENED NUCLEAR WAR IN MY NAME, AND THAT MEANS MY GROCERIES ARE MORE EXPENSIVE?]

I was a child in New York City when 9/11 happened, but I felt the crack in our facade.

(What is war? Why do I still sweat with fear every year?)

Trayvon and I are agemates. I cry every year on his birthday and wonder what it would be like if he had grown up with us. So many names chanted, so little justice…

Twenties lost in a haze of marching and begging so Black people and those poor kids stop dying in school. I was younger than the Sandy Hook kids would be by now when the headlines broke. A sophomore in college, just like they’d be today. Sometimes, I can still taste the bile and pizza I spewed into the already puke-green carpet of my dorm room after crying myself sick.

Working at a nonprofit to make a difference while witnessing workplace abuse and having no name for it. Swallowing the knives anyway, doing my part to help other (traumatized) young people save the world.2

Peddling you shiny distractions so we can “cope.” Shaking the change jar when life got too sticky. Melting my brain and yours one double tap at a time.3

Watching America finally stop pretending, stuck inside during a pandemic they abandoned us to while pledging to finally care about Black people…vote Blue no matter who refuses to call a genocide and genocide…

I am finally an adult. The coming of age is over. They kidnap my neighbors and get away with killing even white people in the street now. No longer a child, but I am made undone by the harm to children and the societies that raised them in Gaza and Sudan and Iran and Ukraine and the Congo and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and

sigh

I’m not a doomer. But we are living through a mass extinction event. Just not the kind our hopelessness or fear might be trying to convince us is happening. We are breathing through the extinction of modern empire as we’ve come to understand it and as man-made devils have come to enact it.

They are determined to take as many of us down with them as they can, and with every day we choose to love ourselves and each other enough to hope, to pray, to chant, to scream, to fight, to claw….we save lives.

Today, even if the only person you save from the jaws of empire is yourself, you have already won.

We have already won.

You said it’s the apocalypse? Wow.

Anyway.

Onward.

Something I watched that moved me.

“Today…today. At the edge of our hope. At the end of our time. We have chosen not only to believe in ourselves but in each other. Today, there’s not a man nor woman in here that will stand alone.

Not today.

Today, we face the monsters that are at our door and bring the fight to them!

For a long stretch of my life, this was my favorite movie of all time. It beat out my other favorites, The Avengers and How to Train Your Dragon. Outside of being a bisexual former Tumblrina’s dream (there are some hotties in this movie, and the power mechanics had the ships SAILING on the fanfic sites), IT MOVED MY HEART. If you’re even a bit familiar with Godzilla and the daikaiju genre as a commentary on nuclear war…4

(May those affected by the scars left behind from the crimes against Nagasaki and Hiroshima find peace, always. May the innocent stolen by empire find peace, always.)

…you can see that Guillermo Del Toro’s Pacific Rim is in direct conversation with Godzilla in a way that, if you peel back its layers, turns our imaginations back to the repercussions of World War II.

(He’s always cooking about wartime, religion, and monsters.5 He’s my dark fantasy GOAT tbh)

Its characters are people from VERY SPECIFIC powers all over the world (think about Japan, the US, Australia, the UK, China, Russia in WWII) coming together to innovate against kaiju coming through a tear in reality deep beneath the Pacific Ocean, where our first and only use of nuclear weaponry as a species happened.6

It’s a story of a group of people (FROM THOSE GLOBAL SUPER POWERS) who step up to a dangerous threat by bearing their deepest wounds and traumas to each other in order to reach what we could call literal and psychological synchronicity7 and pilot the greatest weapons humanity has ever engineered as the left and right sides of the robot’s control center. They remain wounded but are action-oriented — despite what hurts them, they risk their lives to defend humanity, and their desperate hope and significant sacrifices ensure a better future.

It has some INCREDIBLE fight sequences, but people will argue it’s not the BEST giant robot media (more later), and it’s not perfect — I think the single female main character (a Japanese woman) is written one dimensionally compared to the complexity of the (mostly white) men around her, but UGH. I DO STILL LOVE IT ANYWAY.

Once GDT left, not even sci-fi king John Boyega could save the poorly paced sequel Uprising, though.

Though I am moved by the idea of all of us coming together in the face of existential threat, it cannot be overstated that this film, the Avengers films, classics like Independence Day, and the next show I’m going to mention still arguably function as propaganda for the United States (or Japanese) military, global militarization, and the concept of species-wide survival being won through war and conquest. One could say that, despite the feel-good messaging, it is simply a remix of what individual nations or identity groups tell themselves to justify warfare IRL, but I believe the INSTINCT to tell such stories is important.

I never outright recommend this show because imo, it has a misogyny problem — an underage character is regularly made a perverted punchline where her clothes come off, and because of the nature of the conflict being fought, she and a few female characters that are part of a religious order are subjected to experimentation, psychological and physical abuse…and sometimes in the midst of this violence, their clothes also burn away because they’re being hit with fire. Whether these choices function in the work as commentary or metaphor for something within the world, or as metacommentary on things considered “typical” for anime (death to underage “fanservice” — you’re just a pervert), or are just glimmers of the author’s own inclinations, I have not explored.

I just know that is the one thing about this show that is ESPECIALLY uncomfortable, and I always warn people off the bat.

The rest of the world and the story being told? Incredible. It’s also a triumph of animation. So I powered through.

No spoilers, but including its use of religious metaphor (the in-world religion provides the cultural cloak for the baddies), Fire Force is one of my Top 10 anti-apocalypse, anti-nuclear war, anti-child abuse, climate-justice-oriented pieces of media. I’ll be revisiting, so stay tuned.

Honorable-mention anti-war and/or apocalypse stories: Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood, The Last of Us (HBO), God Eater, literally anything Studio Ghibli has ever made, and a movie that TRULY traumatized me, Left Behind.

Speaking of religion…..

Whatever nerdy shit I’m into lately.

Been thinking closely about survival instincts in organisms, and reading the Book of Revelation from start to finish to understand the religious psychosis some of these Weirdos are CLEARLY huffing in order to justify crimes against humanity and groceries being $500 while our neighbors live on the street.

I grew up in church, and after a period of resentment, I am falling back in love with it (more on that later), so I can’t help but treat those weirdos like outliers + a potential case study. I gave myself this (sort of convoluted?) thought exercise:

If I think of fascism as a parasitic organism with many heads and many limbs (war, racism, climate injustice, poverty, the perversion of religion, etc…) that is capable of such things as survival instinct but has a relatively short lifespan because it is a mutant that goes against true natural order (connectedness, communal societies, etc…) AND it is driven by the need to reproduce to ensure it endures by infecting as many hosts as possible…

AND thinking about why religious fascists are so obsessed with death, the end of the world, worlds/planes beyond this one, and the necessity of suffering in the flesh here to “earn” paradise?

Walk with me.

What would it look like if heaven were here on Earth? If everyone were fed, happy, and if the consequences of centuries of war could be eased? Does this world becoming equitable threaten their sense of self and identity and belief in suffering being a necessary part of the human condition? Does this lead them to question the necessity of the perfect “other” plane of existence, i.e., heaven? Does this starve the fascist parasite that has infected the religious body? Is it the survival instinct of the religious who function as host bodies to the fascist organism that drives their unholy double downs into bigotry, while cognitive dissonance aids them in believing themselves to be on the side of “what’s right?”

All to make it easier for the parasite to reproduce and infect others?

Like specifically, the people and entities who use religion and religious, ethno-religious, or cultural identity as a mask or container for spreading fascism, and a framework for mass hypnosis towards the acceptance of “justified” violence (cough)….

They KNOW their time is up, so they’re lashing out hardcore. Almost like…….phase three in a boss battle in a video game. Or when an animal in a (perceived or actual) fight to the death can recognize it’s losing? They HAVE to keep the body alive to spread the infection, but because it’s dying, it’s panicking?

All that led me into a rabbit hole about the American Christian obsession with the Book of Revelation, religious wars across history, what counts as a “holy war”, and also the thought that I should look into any researchers who are pulling together qualitative studies on American Christianity within the context of what we’re witnessing. I’m just wondering aloud if it would be worth capturing testimonials from self-declared “religious” Americans going all in on fascism and prodding at these sentiments to see what rot falls out, so we can literally develop anti-fascist programming to yoink the parasitic beliefs out of them/ potentially deprogram people as we do for other cults?

ANYWAY I WAS JUST SITTING IN MY HOUSE THINKIN YKWIM?~

Hateration in the dancery as a healing practice.

I hope when (REDACTED) (REDACTED) we party so hard we set world records for how turned up we get at the news. I need them not to even televise his state (REDACTED) because we’re partying so hard outside that they’re terrified that he gets recorded as the most hated, least celebrated (REDACTED) in all of human history.

I want us to get ANCIENT with it — I want pyres and effigies burning, I want our indigenous neighbors leading us in dance, and I want to hit the chickenhead and milly rock to the mourning songs They will try to convince us we should be singing in his “honor.”

I want there to be so much global ass shaking we set the Richter scale off.

I want the Devil himself to refuse to meet that man (and all of these evil mfers) at The Gates because he’s too embarrassed to be seen with losers.

And if we ever invent a way to bring people back, I want us to hit him with an Uno reverse just to (REDACTED) (REDACTED (REDACTED) again.

Fuck (and I cannot stress this enough) (REDACTED) (REDACTED) and the horsemen of the white supremacist apocalypse horses he rode in on.

IYKYK.

Something I read that shaped me.

I’m eventually going to re-read Heart of Darkness, but not right now because I AM DIVING FACE FIRST INTO HOPECORE!

FIND WHIMSY! CLING TO THE FEEL GOOD UNTIL YOUR HANDS ARE BLOODY!! READ THINGS THAT GIVE YOU HOPE.

I am currently WEEPING through these books written by icons in S.T.E.A.M.

IMAGINE A WORLD MADE FREE UNTIL WE ARE ALL FREE. IMAGINE INNOVATING TOWARDS OUR COLLECTIVE GOOD.

GONNA BE THE ARTIST-SCIENTIST I WANT TO BE BECAUSE WE CAN DO THIS. THERE ARE SO MANY REASONS WE CAN DO THIS. UNTIL WE ARE ALL FREE.

OUR PLANET IS OUR PARENT, OUR SIBLING, OUR FRIEND, AND ALL CREATURES GREAT AND SMALL ARE IN CONVERSATION WITH EACH OTHER. THE MARRIAGE OF SCIENCE AND INDIGENOUS WISDOM IS KEY. THE STORIES AND INNOVATIONS OF OUR ANCESTORS HOLD THE ANSWERS.

WE ARE REALLY GONNA SURVIVE THIS!! PROMISE!!!

Notes on the plants I grew in the concrete jungle, wet dream tomato + A cool picture I took or a photo that moved me.

NOT TO BRAG BUT MY FIRST FLOWERS AFTER A YEAR OF PURPOSEFUL TENDING TO MY COMMUNITY GARDEN ARE HERE, AND NOW THAT I’M A ✨GRAD STUDENT✨ I AM OFFICIALLY THE SCHOLAR IN RESIDENCE.

I also have my new camera baby and have been working on finding my newest visual voice, so please enjoy my first pictures.

Here’s who has visited in late winter (March) and so far this spring.

Also, I be chillin with my neighbors across age, race, ethnic identity, class, etc…just fine in my community garden. We be drinking tea and eating homemade cookies and touching grass and giving hate the middle finger.

Fascism got no place where we root deep. 🕯️🧿

A song I’ve had on repeat lately

A staple of my karaoke rotation and a favorite on one of my FAVORITE playlists:

Just a final thought.

Not my first time coping with war by looking to art and the heavens.8

We are going to get through this. Hold someone’s hand and breathe today.