Nathan Radke

That was a metaphor.

That was a metaphor for the terror of atomic bombs, for the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Now...

At that time, the Japanese people, it was against the law to criticize the American government because, of course, the American government was occupying Japan.

So you can't make a movie about, you know, just the dangers of the atomic bomb, but you can make a movie about a giant radioactive lizard that crushes and burns your cities.

And metaphors are useful because they allow us to kind of cope and deal with these large out of control situations.

I mean, political chaos is real.

Division is real.

Economic hardship is real.

But those aren't monsters that you can just sort of like easily stick into a meme.

And I think in the end with this Leviathan story, there's actually, I think, two fantasies in this meme.

One, that there's a colossal monster off the eastern coast of the United States.

but two, that the government is competent and concerned enough to do something about it.

Yeah, but it's kind of reassuring.

That's the weird thing about monster stories is that they're almost reassuring in a way because if it's a monster, it's a thing that can be confronted.

It's a thing that can be battled.

Whereas so many of the things that we're afraid of right now, there doesn't seem to be any ways for us to even understand them, let alone fight back against them.

Oh, yeah, because stuff brews in water.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, it worked at a bunch of levels.