Solarpunk and the Apocalypse
You know what I have been thinking about a lot? How Solarpunk art is often very closely related to post-apocalyptic art. Specifically one kind of it.
Because, there is a certain type of Japanese art that often gets shared under the Solarpunk name. And it looks something like this:
(Half of these are by an artist using the name tokyogenso, who has specialized in this kind of apocalyptic art. Check them out!)
What you see in this art visually is usually man-made landscapes like cities and such, overgrown by plants. In some of these artworks (like those by tokyogenso) the implication is clearly a "human have died out/abandoned this place and it is reclaimed by nature", while others are going more for the generally cozy apocalypse vibe, where some humans are still inhabiting the half-reclaimed landscape.
And it is very obvious how this shares a lot of the visual language of Solarpunk art. It shows urban environments, but there is a lot of green, and especially in cases where human or human-like people inhabit this landscape, they often are more attuned to the nature around than modern humans are.
I mean, Yokohama Shopping Log gets regularly recommended as Solarpunk. And I also have recommended Apocalypse Hotel and several of the Eve animated music videos on the basis of their Solarpunky vibes.
I mean, Eve especially got recommended to me once as "a lot of their stuff has Solarpunk vibes", and I absolutely agree on it. It does have those vibes.
Or, heck. Another thing that I saw a lot of people talk about as "kinda solarpunky" is Pokopia. That Pokemon game with Ditto rebuilding stuff. (And I mean, I also have written in the past about how a lot of Pokémon stuff feels at least Solarpunk adjacent.) Oh, and also Bubble, that Netflix movie that I did not enjoy even thought it was pretty. Or even the other Netflix movie, what was it called? Maboroshi.
But I am... I am never quite sure how I feel about it at the same time.
Because here is the thing: we obviously do indeed not have a whole lot of media that is explicitly Solarpunk. We basically get two flavors of media: media that has a lot of Solarpunk-adjacent themes (like the Studio Ghibli stuff and a lot of the works of Ursula K. LeGuin) or media that visually does somewhat fall into the Solarpunk corner of it all. And the latter is often indeed things that fall under the "cozy apocalypse" banner.
I mean, heck. Arco, which is so far basically the one example of media that explicitly is being Solarpunk, also shows the Solarpunk future being post-apocalyptic. Yeah, sure, humans figured out the "living with nature" thing, but only after a good part of the world was destroyed.
Don't get me wrong. Outside of Pokopia, I love every single example I name here. Both the art, and the music, and the stories.
But I just... It is kinda depressing that for so many it still comes down to people struggling to imagine a world that is actually better - or if so to imagine it happening without a complete apocalypse happening fast.
I get why people are feeling like this. But also I am somewhat depressed by the hopelessness of it all.
I mean, admittedly, heck. I am not better. In my writing I have two Solarpunk worlds. World 1 is Urban Fantasy + Solarpunk, in which the timeline of that world diverges from our own in 2019 when Loki, in trying to prevent the apocalypse, kinda causes it, but it is fine. Sure, some people die but it could have been worse. But now the nature spirits are kicking everyone's butt if they dare to pollute the environment, so hooray, environmentalism has been solved on the basis of nature being very willing to kill you over it. And World 2 is a post-WWIII world, in which we ended up in a Solarpunk future after nuclear war, and a lot of unnecessary deaths.
And... yeah, man. I don't know. Because yeah, I admit it. I also cannot imagine us getting there on the basis of nothing but reforms and protests. I mean... *looks at the world* I think you all know what I mean.
But it is something that does strike me.
