Post-apocalyptic
11The Signal · 65Also written: post-apocalypse, after the end of the world
Stories set after civilisation has been destroyed, by war, disaster or something stranger.
11The letters of this term total 65, an 11 — the number of inspiration, tension, and heightened awareness.
What it means
A post-apocalyptic story is set after the collapse of civilisation. The cause may be nuclear war, pollution, plague, alien invasion or something never explained, and the story follows those who live in what is left.
In manga
Japan's experience of the atomic bombings and of rebuilding after the war gave the theme special force. Katsuhiro Otomo's Akira begins with Tokyo destroyed and rebuilt. Hayao Miyazaki's Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind takes place a thousand years after an industrial war has poisoned the world. Fist of the North Star turned the nuclear wasteland into a stage for martial-arts epic.
Its two moods
Some post-apocalyptic manga are about survival and violence, where the strong rule and the hero fights them. Others are quiet and melancholy, following people who live slowly among ruins and find beauty in a world that is ending. Both moods are common, and many series contain each.
Why it matters
The genre lets manga ask what in human society is worth keeping when everything else is gone. It is also a reliable source of striking images: overgrown cities, deserts, and the remains of technology no one understands any more.
The term by its numbers
Counted letter by letter this term comes to 65 — 11 once reduced, and a master number, so it stops there.
The 11 governs inspiration, tension, and heightened awareness. The reference files it as a signal received early. It is a lens rather than a verdict, but it is a consistent one: the 11's heightened, high-voltage intuition about what comes next is the pressure under this entry.
Split the term again and the vowels give a Heart's Desire of 5 (change) against a Personality of 6 (responsibility) in the consonants — change underneath, responsibility on the surface. The gap between them is where the subject is most interesting.
The Signal asks one thing of everything on it: remember that nobody noticed this at the time. The 11 is unstable and knows it. Being early and being wrong are indistinguishable until later. The other entries that reduce to 11 are collected on The Signal.
Seen in
- Fist of the North StarIn a world wrecked by nuclear war, a wandering martial artist who can kill with a touch fights the warlords preying on the survivors.
- Nausicaä of the Valley of the WindA princess of a small kingdom navigates war and ecological collapse in a poisoned far-future world, in a work considerably darker and more complex than its film adaptation.
- AkiraIn a rebuilt Tokyo after a catastrophic explosion, a member of a teenage biker gang develops uncontrollable psychic power, with consequences the city cannot contain.
- Blame!A near-silent figure walks through an endless self-building megastructure searching for a genetic key, in a work told almost entirely through architecture.