Love in the Apocalypse
Love in popular culture typically unfolds within the reassuring temporality of the everyday. Romantic comedies trace the clumsy progression towards becoming a couple; family and friendship-based sitcoms explore the quieter registers of non-romantic affection. These genres assume a stable world—one where love is afforded the luxury of time and patience.
But what happens when time itself becomes uncertain? Or when the infrastructure that supports love—predictable futures, the promise of tomorrow, functioning institutions—begins to collapse? Apocalyptic narratives often reimagine love by stripping away the very conditions that make conventional romance, kinship and friendship possible. In disaster films, zombie outbreaks, and encounters with extraterrestrial threats, humanity is forced to confront circumstances that do not merely threaten individual relationships but also destabilise the moral and temporal frameworks through which love is understood. Therefore, this collection explores that uneasy gap: examining how love is transformed, tested, or even intensified when the world, as we know it, is ending.
Regarding apocalyptic films, Roland Emmerich’s blockblaster diasaster films undoubtedly stand out. While his films are often dismissed as mere spectacles of planetary destruction, they unexpectedly portray how love transforms under apocalyptic pressure. Beneath their explosive surfaces lies a quieter question: what kinds of love remain moral or even legitimate when the world is ending? Nguyen Mai Trang’s article examines how Independence Day (1996) and 2012 (2009) reflect shifting American expectations of love across two cultural moments. The former imagines post–Cold War optimism, where civic solidarity and personal affection coexist; the latter offers a bleaker vision in which institutional trust collapses and love narrows to the private realm of family. Within this issue’s broader exploration of love in apocalyptic settings, the article shows that disaster media does more than imagine destruction—it reveals what societies believe is worth saving.
While Nguyen’s essay reveals how catastrophe rearranges American society’s social and moral norms—deciding whose lives and loves are deemed worthy of protection—Cerys Leck’s article turns to a different cultural context to ask how those norms can be broken from within, where personal desires refuse to align with the collective’s expectations. Using the context of Japanese culture’s representation of messhi hoko (self-sacrifice for the collective), Leck’s Hodaka’s Choice: Personal Love vs the Collective in Weathering with Youanalyses how the apocalyptic setting and the protagonist’s duty to his lover complicate traditional moral frameworks. She analyses how extreme circumstances of the apocalypse can disrupt conventional social expectations, and how the moral weight of personal bonds may determine one’s choices in such a setting. In that sense, she argues that the personal stakes of the protagonists transform our reading of the apocalypse into a space where the choice of prioritising love over the collective is morally justifiable, rather than terrifyingly destructive and transgressive. If Nguyen’s apocalypses expose what a society claims to value, Leck’s apocalyptic Tokyo shows what happens when love openly defies those values.
Where Nguyen and Leck focus on who counts—whose love is endorsed or condemned—Tan Yu Xuan turns to a different but related question: what does it mean to keep loving when everything we care about is ultimately finite? His The Infinite within the Finite: Reading Interstellar through Martin Hägglund’s This Life examines how the film’s apocalyptic and science-fiction settings intensify and foreground the finite nature of love—whether directed toward a life, a project, a person, or even oneself, the subject of care will inevitably perish. This paper argues that Interstellar not only reflects Hägglund’s central claim that we continue to love despite the certainty of loss, but also demonstrates that it is precisely the vulnerability of what we value that generates the motivational force to act, and even to self-sacrifice, before it is too late.
This attention to finitude and choice carries into Truong Kim Mai’s essay, which shifts from cosmic scales back to the intimate and bodily. In her article Love beyond blood, love beyond death, she explores the capacity for love beyond biological ties. Imagining this through the apocalyptic world of Cargo (2017), where the zombie virus closes in and a bite leaves you with less than forty-eight hours to live. It raises a profound question: how would you choose to spend your final hours? Would you surrender to despair, or would you devote yourself to protecting others? Applying the concept of mortality salience – the awareness of one’s own death, the article touches on how one’s confrontation with their mortality can exemplify their acts of selfless love, not only towards their family but also the strangers around them. The proximity of death magnifies human compassion, showing that it’s not merely blood relations that determine who deserves to be loved and cared for.
Across these articles, love in apocalyptic worlds becomes a test of norms, a rebellion against the collective, a response to finitude, and an expansion of who counts as kin. As you move through this collection, we invite you to carry these insights back to the present: how do these imagined apocalypses unsettle what you take for granted about love, and how might they change the way you relate to others now?
