Romantic Individualism and Reactionary Care in Speculative Environmental Fiction

Speculative environmental fiction can inscribe reactionary responses to ecological crises even without intending to. This article examines Shinkai Makoto’s 2019 film and novel Weathering with You to show how it inadvertently encodes what I term reactionary care: an individualistic and escapist disposition toward environmental crises that diminishes collective human responsibility for both their causes and their consequences. Two mechanisms drive this encoding in this case. First, the story displaces causal responsibility away from human agency by attributing climatic disruption to supernatural forces. Second, it naturalizes individual emotional fulfilment over collective welfare by subordinating environmental engagement to the protagonists’ romantic bond as if the two were mutually exclusive. This work of fiction acknowledges a situation of environmental crisis but its representation of causes and consequences demotes it beneath a desire for romantic intimacy as if the two were incompatible.