Blue Gender: Pop Eco-Facism

Media is filled to the brim with Humans vs. Nature as a theme. Within that as a sub-genre of sorts are stories of humans battling insects. Whether it is Anti-Fascist satire like Starship Troopers, drama like Ender’s Game, or sillier fare like Slither, or 8 Legged Freaks, the narrative of humans not necessarily fighting evil, but fighting an implacable other. The convention speaks to a sort of primal id in the human experience, that is to say, that nature, so far removed from modern man’s experience, is itself alien.

With the current trend in media portrayals of villains, there is a tendency to sympathize with them. To provide context or even justifications for the decisions antagonists take. While this nuance is useful in establishing a more, grounded and mature understanding of why people may do unjust things, it does tend to bury harm within nuance.

Evil, stripped of philosophizing, can be understood as, that which causes harm to others and Blue Gender makes no sort of pretense of any other sort of definition. Blue Gender with its bug monsters, the titular Blue, has no such requirements for justification. Blue are evil, they will destroy humanity, they can’t be reasoned with and for that reason, they must be destroyed. Blue Gender is a story of a man out of time, forced into an alien world where alien insects have come and turned humans into prey.

At least at first.

When it is revealed the story’s chief antagonist was actually Gaia, Mother Earth itself the story shifts from one of the humans fighting for survival against an alien menace, to an ecological aesop where humanity is wholly guilty of the destruction of Earth and thus the Blue, are her righteous anger.

Eco-Fascism

Ecology is in short, the study of life. Ecology activists come from a myriad of different ideological backgrounds, though most would be categorized as left of the political center. Some groups take an economically liberal point of view and believe that the market can help to solve the problems the market causes in the environment and there are other groups that seek a revolution in society, a destruction of the current modes of production. One of the more, concerning and popular ideologies is that of eco-fascism.

The term, “eco-fascist” has existed roughly since the 70s with its most notable adherent being the Unabomber, even if it’s not a title he’d self-identify with.

The main aspects of Eco-Fascism, are taking elements that are true about the global ecology problems facing humanity and using it to advance what could be best described as right-wing ideals. This line of thinking includes things such as population control, the general idea that “humans are a virus”, or that “there are too many humans” without interrogating which humans are actually causing the problems.

Ideas like this remove the causes of the global climate crisis, washing the hands of the direct culprits and making the victims of their crimes culpable.

With the rise of extreme weather and global temperatures rising every year, the most directly impacted communities come from the global south. Economically disadvantaged countries and cultures will be forced to either endure, become climate refugees, or perish, due to the economic benefits to an infinitesimally small group of profiteers.

Eco-fascist thought, accepts that the climate is getting worse, but that the victims of it should be excluded. Many call for closed borders, refusing the give aid to nations decimated by the changes to the historic climate. Eco-fascists take the ideology of Earth punishing humans and accept it as good because they’re not the ones being most harmed by it and they don’t care about those who are.

Blue Gender’s disturbing thesis

Returning to the topic, Blue Gender shows Marlene and Yuji struggling to survive on Earth, fighting to flee into a space station where the remaining humans have been living, but once they’ve escaped the Blue, they encounter the True Villain of the series Humanity.

It turns out that the entire plot of fighting these giant alien bugs and surviving by the skin of their teeth doesn’t matter because all of the humans are in space and they’re a military dictatorship. The society of Earth 2 is one of the more spartan in fiction. But then it is revealed again, special twist, that Mother Earth made the B-Cell humans and has control of them. She also drives them crazy with B-Cells which leads to the destruction of Earth 2 and she created the Blue to get rid of humans on Earth.

She wanted them dead but the “happy” ending of the story turns out is that humans will come back to a pre-colonial world, pretechnology.

Millions will die.

This anarcho-primitivist happy ending betrays one very simple fact humans kind of need a lot of the technologies that have been created and it sets the story on a perpetual cycle of repetition because humans are going to build. But they’re not allowed to grow. Earth has to be convinced to allow them to live again and refuses to let them live elsewhere.

If they fail to stay within tight parameters, Earth itself will destroy humanity. This is a very dark conclusion for the story to come to because it presupposes that humans are innately the problem that the problem comes from the fact that humans want too much that, too many humans exist and Mother Earth hates them.

This is a narrative that foists the blame for suffering and exploitation not onto the culprits, the people with power, but indicts humanity as a whole. The supposed happy ending is that Humanity is not allowed to live outside of the will of Gaia, a cruel god who hates them.

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