10/25/2025 - Teletubbies, Kenshi, and the Post-Post-Post Apocalypse

Sup fuckers, I'm sick! This is what happens when you work with children...you're rewarded with disease and insufficient sick leave to cover your recovery. I have a cold. I've noticed in LA, people don't say they have colds. They say things like, "I've just been reeling from something-I don't know what it is. I just-I know it isn't COVID, but..."

I'm using being sick as my excuse for why this blog post is late. Not playing too much Bannerlord. Sickness. But I'm still putting the date as 10/25 for the sake of continuity and technicality since I did start it on time. Whatever.

Anyways, the title's weird on this one. I'm aware. I have a loose concept for what I want to talk about and we're just gonna follow it and hope for the best.

So I was talking with my friend Moshe the other day about Noo-Noo from the Teletubbies. You know, the horrifying vacuum cleaner. The Lovecraftian being wrought from post-industrial anxiety that tends to the Tubbies' daily needs and housekeeping. That Noo-Noo.

He was saying how scary he found Noo-Noo when he was a kid, understandably so, considering how it looks like a Lynchian nightmare creature. That whenever the vacuum would appear onscreen, he would cry, cover his face, hide, and pray for mercy from an unjust god. But he also said how much Teletubbies he watched at that same age.

This is something we have in common; the show began airing in the US in April of 1998, one month before I was born, and ended its original run in 2008. I was the target demographic, and I ate that shit up. Unsurprisingly, I have no memories of any plots or stories, as much as one can say that Teletubbies has plotlines. What I do remember is how the show made me feel, and the sentiment I carried from it further into my development. And it isn't a feeling of joy.

Not to say my memory is negative, either. As bizarre as the aesthetic choices of that show are, I don't actually think they're any less bizarre to the infants and toddlers they're targeting. My memory is one of enrapturement, of a cautious focus and numinous wonder. Noo-Noo is scary, and I think that's on purpose.

Vacuum cleaners are scary, at least to a toddler. They're large, loud, and powerful. Any belongings you leave out might get sucked in. Can you imagine what would happen if you stuck your hand in there? The dog's more scared of it than you are, and that guy always seems to know what's up. So, if you're making a show trying to teach toddlers what the world is like, why start with a lie? Why make a vacuum that looks friendly and soft, with subtle edges and eyes that don't scream 'panic'? Vacuums seemed panicked the minute you turn them on.

The numinous, otherworldly nature of the Teletubbies doesn't stop there. Their world is bizarre, alien, and often dangerous. A gargantuan, monolithic pinwheel looms over their...bunker. They live in a bunker. The flowers are a mix of plastic and natural, the plastic ones massive and pastel. The sun's a fuckin' baby. And they receive all direction and guidance from a speaker that farts in and out of the ground seemingly at random.

I'm certainly not the first person to notice this. One need only look to the viral popularity of

Jars Drawings's Eldertubbies series to understand just how common this feeling of eldritch horror actually is. What feels wrong to me is the assumption that this isn't done on purpose, or at least to a meaningful effect.

When I decided to write this blog entry, I watched this video featuring show creator Anne Wood about the origin of Teletubbies.

In case you can't hear the audio or there's something offensive to you about British accents, she and co-creator Andrew Davenport thought of the idea for Teletubbies while visiting the Smithsonian and seeing an exhibit on the Apollo missions. There were costumes, archival footage. Presumably Buzz Aldrin showed up and hung out awkwardly in the corner like he tends to do. And Davenport remarked how, in their spacesuits, astronauts looked like infants plodding about.

Let's shift focus to another 20th century product of the Space Race and the Cold War it stems from: Post-Apocalyptic fiction.

Tales of the Earth's destruction stretch back to the beginnings of recorded language, and likely before. It can be found in the Flood Myths of the Bible and the Epic of Gilgamesh. The collapse of civilization was of central focus in 1st century Judaea, when a whole canon of apocalyptic stories was produced, including the New Testament and the Book of Enoch. What these stories had in common was a fixation on the apocalypse itself, not the aftermath, nor the survivability.

These were works of prophecy and myth: the whole point of their respective apocalypses were that they weren't survivable. What is common between the Flood and Armageddon is that the only way to survive is through faith and divine providence.

Fiction begins to explore the aftermath of societal collapse, and the choices necessary to survive it, in the 19th century, with Mary Shelley's novel The Last Man in 1826. It's no mistake that this coincides with the mass proliferation of novelistic storytelling, which highlights the importance of human choice as opposed to fate and providence found in earlier forms.

A few more examples of post-apocalyptic literature would surface over the course of the 19th and early 20th century, but we wouldn't see the mass popularity of the genre we know today until the century's second half, in the context of anxiety surrounding the Cold War. People were suddenly thinking about the end of the world a lot, whether it was alien invasion or nuclear annihilation, and so a genre was born to explore that.

Eventually, the Cold War wrapped up, but the genre persisted. Zombie fiction, which began during the Cold War with Night of the Living Dead, only gained in popularity. We got Shaun of the Dead, The Walking Dead, Zombieland...people like zombies, I guess.

If I'm being really honest, I don't often find these sorts of stories to be especially compelling. Like I mentioned, they're mostly just a reflection of societal fears and anxieties...we consume them for the same reason liberal white women listen to true crime podcasts. In both cases, we're afraid our neighbors want to kill us, and it feels nice for our stories to confirm that.

We have deep-seated fears about systemic failures. There's a reason the genre begins in the 19th century at the onset of industrialism, when suddenly the majority of people were dependent on bureaucratic systems. Ultimately, though, there's a reason that possibly the most popular title in the genre is the Left Behind series, an Evangelical franchise following the aftermath of the Christian Rapture; people who love hierarchical structure feel vindication in the desolation left by their destruction.

Not all post-apocalyptic stories are concerned with the immediate aftermath of widespread collapse. Some take place a few decades after. Some take place centuries. And these ones tend to have a healthy mistrust of industrial systems. Instead of the Neo-Confucian anxieties of barbarism and lawlessness, they have healthy, nurturing, social anxiety. They dislike crowds and loud people, just like me.

I'm talking about the Mad Max series, and Fallout. Stories like that. Ones that are more concerned with the rebuilding of civilization than the collapse of it. Rather than the neuroses you usually see in the genre, there's a deep sadness in them. There's always an exploration of what factors caused the system to collapse, as well as an exploration of the corruption rife in the new systems that seem to be forming.

They're a bit more my speed, in case you haven't guessed. I love Fallout: New Vegas. I think Mr. House is a magnanimous captain of industry. Sometimes, people try to classify these two forms as separate genres, calling the sad and futuristic ones post-post apocalyptic; what occurs after the aftermath.

Ultimately, post-apocalyptic fiction carries a deep concern for the past and its relevance in the present. In aftermath-fiction (the single-post apocalyptic), the past takes the form of people and positions. In The Walking Dead, Rick was a sheriff before the collapse. Once the collapse occurs, he still wants to carry the burden of enforcing law and justice in the zombie-ridden landscape of Georgia, but now it's harder because the walking dead don't listen to laws and actually the walking dead aren't out there they're in here it's us didn't you know that the title is a metaphor you FUCKING IDIOT.

The point is, The Walking Dead takes a relic of our society, the lawman, and explores what it means by placing that position and person in a context without law. Granted, you mostly find out that he's good at shooting zombies and bad at maintaining a healthy marriage, but I mean come on it's hard to make eleven seasons of compelling television.

Similarly, Night of the Living Dead takes the character of Ben, as played by Duane Jones, a black man, and places him into a zombie outbreak amongst a host of white people. Ben's casting as a black character only came after the script was already written, but there's still a thoughtful interpretation of how his position as a black man allows him to maintain calm in an emergency situation while everyone else is freaking out...after all, the idea of a large group of people trying to hold him down and kill him is a situation that black people in the mid 20th century had to constantly be prepared for.

The post-post apocalyptic stories of Fallout or Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind explore the past through means of concept. In my beloved New Vegas, the plot centers on a battle between two new nation states, Caesar's Legion and the New California Republic, over the Hoover Dam. Except they aren't new nation states...Caesar's Legion bases itself on the Roman Empire (complete with legionnaire armor and douchey Latin pronunciations), while the NCR represents the western constitutional republic, with complex vested interests and deep-seated inefficiency. The dam itself is hardly in the game...it's mostly just a symbol for power and vital resources.

The effect is a dialogue between disparate archetypes and ideas. What good is stability if it comes at the price of freedom? What's the point of freedom if it means people are unsafe? What does it matter how effective an authoritarian plutocrat would be if he also wants to fuck robots?

There's a reason that these movies, the post-post ones, all begin with a voiceover or a scrolling caption explaining the lore and history of this world's collapse; the present society of this fiction is deeply informed by the past we reside in, and it's important to know at what point our worlds were severed, because we need to learn how to avoid it. And that's the point, isn't it? It can be avoided. Can't it?

I don't remember when I first plopped Kenshi into the over-full bucket that is my Steam Library, but I know that it took me a while to actually install and play it. If I'm being honest, its graphics aren't very attractive, and it seemed extremely punishing. But Steam's algorithm often feels like an old lady in a romcom who wants to set me up with the annoying type-A businesswoman who's NOT my usual type...in that, despite myself, it's usually right about what I like. And it kept insisting up and down I'd love Kenshi, so, on some seasonal or holiday megasale, I bought it.

At this point I'll put in some effort in describing the game. Basically, you wake up in a barren landscape and you don't have shit. You want shit, because you'll starve and stuff, so you run around. But the problem is that there seem to be various criminals and demons who want to kill you when you do that, so, if you manage to have them not kill you, you decide to stop running at random.

I should mention that before you woke up, you also had to make a character. This character could be human, in which case you're given two optional subspecies...one who looks like Chris Pratt and one who looks like a color inverted Michael Jackson. You can also choose to be one of three types of bug person, a robot that seems good at everything, but it tells you not to pick because of how you'll suck, or a Shek, which sounds like Shrek but is only marginally like Shrek in that they're large and strong. You're not given any context as to what these are or what they mean...how society will react to you (which, as it turns out, is strongly) or what it might feel like playing as them outside of their mechanical data.

Okay, so now you're awake, and you've run around, and now you stop running at random. Cool. Now you have to actually inspect your surroundings. It's barren, like I said, but there's also stuff there. I'm speaking generally because you might be in different locations depending on your chosen start, but trust me, there's stuff. If you're intuitive enough, you might realize that some of that stuff is manmade. And the manmade stuff is...big. Like gargantuan. Gigantic pieces of construction as large as mountains. That's why it's hard to tell the manmade stuff from the natural. More on that later.

I eventually decided to give it a real go. I started as a bugman (or hiver) who, due to some misfortune, has lost the pheromonal connection to his Queen that prevents other hivers from letting him hang out and now is forced to wander the wastes. I ran as fast as I could through a wild jungle, avoiding tall bird monsters called "Beak Things", eventually finding my way to a Hub, which I know is supposed to be a post-apocalyptic shantytown but honestly looks like half the small towns back in Arizona.

I knew I needed money, so I figured I'd try mining from the ore deposits surrounding the city. I spend full fifteen-minute segments just watching my little bug dude mining for copper while virtual dust storms swirled overhead and run away when famished rag-wearing bandits would show up to beat me up.

Eventually, I saved up enough money mining to get some weapons and hire a mercenary to follow me around. We took to the road, and I found a swamp with mangrove trees the size of skyscrapers. I found a crazy looking city in the middle of the swamp, decided I'd settle down for a sec. Recruited me a whole gang of men. Took to the road again. And then...

...we got eaten by spiders. QUICK.

I didn't play Kenshi for a while after that. A few months ago, though, I watched this video essay by Not Saber titled "Kenshi: The Game That Hates You". When I first saw the title, I felt rather vindicated. But in fact, it seems as though he's quite a fan of the game. He goes through explaining why, too. Apparently there's a whole lot of world I didn't at all explore...a deep and profound lore spanning thousands of years. And, as turns out, ways to not get instantly devoured by spiders.

I went back and played again, and yeah, it's pretty good. You should play it if you like punishing games. Something that stuck out at me from the video was that the game's lore contains multiple apocalypses, each a long time apart, and the last one taking place millennia before the time of the game. This reminded me of another post-apocalyptic series about a young adventurer exploring a monster-ridden landscape full of multiple warring kingdoms...

Adventure Time is one of my all-time favorite shows. My love for it only grows the older I get. This essay's getting long already and I can talk for a long, long time about AT. But what I will say is that, like Kenshi, Adventure Time also features multiple apocalyptic events in its literal millions of years of lore. Starting with the dinosaurs, which are treated as a full-fledged civilization, to the collapse of our present-day industrial society, even to an apocalyptic event in the future from the time of Finn & Jake, cycles of destroying and rebuilding civilization are at the center of Adventure Time's mythos.

Something Adventure Time and Kenshi share is the treatment of apocalypse as inevitable and regular, rather than a single event. In both cases, the lense is drawn back (literally in the case of Kenshi) to show history and time as a massive continuum at which the present is only a single point, rather than the future simply being a reversible mistake. Moreover, the incredibly thick and funky lore of these two works is entirely optional for audience participation. It isn't just optional to engage in Kenshi's history, it's actively difficult. And Adventure Time episodes are largely episodic character explorations rather than deep dives into its history. In neither case is there an opening scrawl explaining how humanity was destroyed by an atomic alien climate change explosion in the year 2005. You're thrown into the world and asked to explore.

If post-post-apocalypse is distinct from post-apocalypse, then I'd argue that Adventure Time and Kenshi belong to its own category: post-post-post-apocalypse. The hallmarks of the triple-post? Exploration as its core motivating factor, rather than the factional warfare of post-post-apocalyptic works or the survivalist drama of post-apocalyptic. Aesthetically, there's also an emptiness and wilderness not seen in either of the other subcategories. Sure, Fallout and Mad Max have big empty deserts. But neither feel empty...there's stark-raving lunatics every five feet and massive pre-collapse ruins. Adventure Time's Land of Ooo is filled with small settlements and vast wildernesses in between them, just like in Kenshi.

Finally, if post-apocalyptic explores the past through people and positions, and post-post-apocalyptic explores the past through concepts and archetypes, post-post-post-apocalyptic explores the past by means of objects. In Kenshi, for example, there's a section of the map called the Bonefields. As the name might suggest, it's a dry desert plain filled with colossal skeletons and hollowed out machines, equally as colossal.

Both have been completely removed from their original purpose by the strain of time. They now sit as ruins larger than the mountains which surround them, right next to each other. Likely, the bones are from whales in an ocean now dried, and the machines, turbines from a long-dead civilization. But, next to each other, there's an enforced similarity. Two skeletons, one natural, one synthetic, but sharing a home...sharing a shape. The audience is forced to contemplate, or at the very least associate...what is the shape of a skeleton? What are bones when turned into sculpture? And are then the machines of the same size and fate actually different?

I don't just mean literal objects, I mean artifacts. In Season Five, Episode Fourteen of Adventure Time, "Simon & Marcy", Simon/The Ice King repeatedly sings the theme song from Cheers in the flashback we're given into his and Marceline's life in the immediate aftermath of nuclear annihilation. But we don't learn the context of Cheers. It'd be a little weird to, also, what with Cheers being a possession of NBCUniversal and Adventure Time a cornerstone of Zaslav's little empire.

We just hear the melody and lyrics. Lyrics sung in a dangerous wasteland to a scared young girl by a man whose mental state is quickly deteriorating by the only means he has of protecting her. What are these lyrics?

Making your way in the world today

Takes everything you've got

Taking a break from all your worries

Sure would help a lot

Wouldn't you like to get away?

Where everybody knows your name.

We don't learn about Cheers. Or Ted Danson. Or syndicated television. We don't even really learn the theme song. But we learn the shape. The major melody, and the desperate plea within it for community. And stability. And rest from hardship.

So I was talking with my friend Moshe about Teletubbies. About how Noo-Noo is scary. And how bizarre the world is. It's so...empty. And the sun is a baby. And they live in a bunker.

He told me he always had a theory that Teletubbies takes place after some long-distant nuclear holocaust, and that the Tubbies are all that's left of humanity. I remarked how aesthetically, the world that Teletubbies most reminded me of was, in fact, Kenshi.

Both feature technological artifacts treated as shapes and objects devoid of cultural context. Both center strange creatures exploring a vast world that could never be fully understood. And both, if we're being honest, are numinous and scary.

I think kids need scary things, introduced in healthy environments like Teletubbies. It's a lot better than this Cocomelon bullshit. Seriously, I work with special ed kids, and we put that nonsense on for them sometimes...I think watching pieces of fruit rot in real time would be better for their brain health than that garbage.

I'm arguing that, if post-post-post-apocalyptic fiction is a thing, Teletubbies is an example of it. Sure, there's no evidence of a collapse, but ultimately, Adventure Time and Kenshi don't really center their collapses in the way that other post-apocalyptic works do, anyways.

What Teletubbies does do is treat their audience in the same way these two works do...as aliens who ultimately derive from an unyielding history incepting at the start of life on earth but with no knowledge of it, now interacting with the relics of the past to try and determine its meaning.

This is the average Teletubbies episode...the sun does some baby shit, the Tubbies come out, they putter around a field for a bit, when the speaker comes out and announces their destination.

Then they get a video zoomed into their stomach screen by their head antennae and they watch some tiny kids do something like go to the beach or play at a park. Something which, to an audience of infants, is entirely foreign. As foreign an object as a whale skeleton in the middle of the desert. And like the whale skeleton, they are forced to appraise it. Admire the shape. Notice the colors, and textures. And derive from it meaning from the safety of their homes.

Apocalypse is the collapse of civilization. Post-apocalypse is its aftermath. Post-post apocalypse is its rebuilding. And post-post-post apocalypse is civilization's relearning. Teletubbies presented bizarre and enticing images to small children who've no understanding of the world. These images and objects come off as scary sometimes because it does so without bias. It's not telling you to like the vacuum cleaner, it's telling you the vacuum cleaner is loud, and metal, and everywhere, and also is helpful and takes care of your home.

Kenshi, unlike Adventure Time and Teletubbies, is ultimately cynical in its outlook on the future. But, like the other two, it trusts humanity enough to come to its own conclusions. To find its own destinations. The Tubbies are astronauts landing on a world that is obviously Earth but is devoid of human life. That's what feels apocalyptic. But they greet the planet and its treasured past not with fear and cynicism over lost glory, but excitement and an eagerness to explore.