With the
nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the
Lucky Dragon 5 incident still fresh in the Japanese consciousness, Godzilla was conceived as a metaphor for
nuclear weapons.
[17] As the film series expanded, some stories took on less serious undertones portraying Godzilla as an
antihero while other plots still portrayed Godzilla as a destructive monster; sometimes the lesser of two threats who plays the defender by default but is still a danger to humanity. With the end of the
Cold War, several post-1984 Godzilla films shifted the character's portrayal as a symbol of nuclear weapons to that of modern Japan's forgetfulness over its imperial past,
[18] natural disasters and the overall human condition