Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (manga)

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Cover of the two volume boxset.

Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind is a manga by Hayao Miyazaki. It was later adapted into an anime film by Miyazaki, with animation work from Topcraft. It was first published in 1982. This is Miyazaki's most prominent and famous manga work.

The story starts off pretty similar to the anime adaption. A thousand years after the "Seven Days of Fire"--a catalytic event which changed the world forever--there is a small village called the Valley of the Wind. The Valley of the Wind isn't the most glamorous place to live, though. It's bordered by a vast desert and the Sea of Decay, a toxic jungle formed from the aftermath of the Seven Days of Fire. Here, our protagonist Nausicaä lives her day to day life. It's a big step down from the world we know, but at least they're living.

That was, until their status as living is interrupted by a Cool Airship who crash landed into the Valley. This leads to an incursion of the valley, resulting in a massive conflict where Nausicaä journeys away from the Valley, in preparation for a war. Thus, the our heroine's story begins. Of course, things aren't as simple as they seem, for this may be more than just a war...

The film is quite different from the manga. The manga is a massive expansion of the film's story. The film covers one and a half volumes from the seven volume manga. The entire Dorok race was excluded from the film, and many characters like Chikuku and Ohma never make it into the film. In fact, it's safe to say the manga is closer to Neon Genesis Evangelion than Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind.

Note: unlike other manga volume collections, the two volume deluxe edition does not have chapter markings. Only the end of volumes from the original publication are marked. For tropes common to both the anime and manga, visit Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind.

Tropes used in Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (manga) include:

• The Chessmaster: The Heart of Shuwa, who dispenses ancient knowledge to its subjects (and Unwitting Pawns) to keep its plans moving according to schedule.
• Doorstopper: The two volume deluxe edition. With hard covers containing five hundred pages each, the two volumes in their container can bring any door, no matter how big, to its knees. You know regular doorstoppers? They run like crazy when the two Nausicaä volumes show up.
• Gambit Roulette: And it was several millennia in the making.
• Garden of Evil: Nausicaä considers the Hidden Garden to be uncomfortably close to this.
• A God Am I: The Holy Emperor, as well as the Heart of the Crypt of Shuwa.
• Heroic RROD: Ohma's constant use of his power erodes his body by the second.
• Immortality: The Holy Emperor is immortal inasmuch as his head can be cut off and he's still as jolly a fellow as ever.
• Intimate Healing: Nausicaä saves a Torumekian soldier who was poisoned by the miasma by taking the poisoned blood from his lungs into her mouth via his mouth.
• Inferred Holocaust: The defeat of the Crypt of Shuwa marks a subtle endgame scenario. Selm tells Nausicaä that the center of the forest, where the toxins have been cleansed, is uninhabitable by the present humans, plants, and animals. Everything was modified to survive along side the forest, and cannot survive in the cleansed world. The forest will survive, but all mankind will perish. The final confrontation reveals the Crypt's plans to restore the world to it's pre-Days of Fire state using its "eggs", preserved animals and humans, which are destroyed by Ohma. Without the advanced engineering the Crypt possesses, humanity is doomed to slow extinction. This fulfills Nausicaä's role as the Blue-Clad One: the prophecy is revealed in the fourth book to not be of a messianic savior, but an angel of death and release, harbinger of the ultimate end.
  • And yet, Nausicaä assures him that though he believes humanity is doomed to destruction, life may just find a way without the interference of the Cult. In fact, her own experiments about the Sea of Corruption, as well as the Dream of the Ohmu, point to a world where the current humanity can indeed exist in a world already purified by the forest. It is only the Crypt of Shuwa which calls her on destroying (the old) humanity's chances, but the Heart of the Crypt isn't exactly the best judge of character nor does it care for (or desire) the current humanity's survival.
• Light Is Not Good: The God Warrior Ohma's "light" is actually deadly radiation. It's even worse when it tries to fly, because its light-wings are blinding-white.
• Mordor: The Holy City Of Shuwa. Tolas has a bit of this going on, too.
• No OSHA Compliance: Justified in that the OSHA died out along with Industrialized Civilization. The Pejiti excavation is really not safe and has a lot of accidents, including one of Kurotowa's soldiers falling a hundred or so feet to his death in front of him.
• Not So Harmless: Rather spectacularly, Kurotowa manages to pull this off in the space of his first appearance, going from a seemingly buffoonish lackey to proving himself dangerously competent. If he pulled the switch any faster, he wouldn't count at all.
• Path of Inspiration: The religion founded around the Crypt of Shuwa. All "holiness" that radiates from it is actually a plot by the Heart of the Crypt to cleanse the world and bring the old mankind back.
• Rule of Symbolism: The Holy Temple of Shuwa uses crosses and Eyes of God as its primary icons.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: At the very end of the manga, it's revealed that the Heart of the Crypt was programmed this way. It was built to raise an entire ecosystem that would wipe Earth clean of its creators' mistakes, and then destroy said ecosystem so the original humankind could be resuscitated to rule the world again. And it's willing to kill the current humans to do so.
  • The Holy Emperor also started out like this, thinking he could fix the world's problems and bring peace to everyone. Sadly, he was only the Heart of Shuwa's Unwitting Pawn and quickly slipped into authoritarian (and genocidal) rule.
• Wingdinglish: The Dorok language looks like this, if not translated. Characters speaking the language will have unintelligible speech bubbles next to ones which can be comprehended.
• Zip Me Up: Kushana asks Nausicaä to fasten her armor at one point in the manga. Les Yay? Of course.