Vivian Asimos's Blog: Incidental Mythology, page 10

Star wars, Robots, and Transhumanism

I’ve been doing this channel for awhile now, and I have yet to talk about Star Wars. This is half on purpose, and half on accident. A huge reason for this is quit simple: Star Wars is so binary. The good vs evil ploy is very black and white. The evil people are clearly so evil. I mean, their names are Darth Sidious and Grievous. The storytelling is not exactly subtle in the way they paint the good guys very good, and the evil guys very evil. Not to say that something has to necessarily be crazy nuance to drag something interesting into the equation, but it certainly helps. I knew I’d have to approach it at some point, but the question of exactly how was definitely a pressing concern.

But today, I wanted to talk a little about that binary nature of the world which separates good and evil as inherently different beasts. Today, I wanted to talk about some of the underlying beliefs and understandings of the world according to the Jedi vs their evil counterpart – the Sith. When we dissect these elements, we see that the Jedi order may not be this pinnacle of good and have a lot of underlying troubling beliefs to them. Even though the world is painted in very binary natures of good and evil, a more detailed look will show that maybe there is more nuance than I originally thought.

Our starting point for this discussion is actually with the presence of robotics and the question of Transhumanism. In scholarly explanations of Transhumanism, Darth Vader is actually used a lot – his transition from entirely human Anakin Skywalker to the overly roboticised and more-than-human Darth Vader is the perfect example of the idea of Transhumanism as the ability for a cyborg to be more than ourselves. Despite Darth Vader being the primary pop culture example for academic studies into Transhumanism, the conversation about Transhumanism and Star Wars doesn’t go much beyond this. Which is interesting. There’s an underlying debate about Transhumanism that exists within Star Wars – each side of the argument on each side of the binary nature of our good vs evil dynamic.

As Anakin Skywalker becomes more and more cyborg, his descent into the Dark Side is more obvious. When a “whole” human (and I should note I’m using quotes around the idea of “whole” here), he seemed saveable. But even the one-robotic-arm Anakin in the Clone Wars displays a lot of troubling aspects which point to his inevitable fall to the dark side. We also see connections to the cyborgian Dark Side in Grievous. While not a Sith, and therefore not technically Dark Side, Grievous is always on the evil side of our good vs evil divide. In the Clone Wars, he’s with the Separatists; in the movies he’s with the Empire. No matter the debate, he’s always firmly on the side of evil. He’s also quite the cyborg.

While once a man, Grievous sustained life-threatening injuries which required him to have extensive changes to his body which were mostly mechanical in nature. He also made secret alterations to his brain, which increased his natural abilities despite their active change to make him more mechanical than his original organic life-form.

Grievous, in many ways, is the foreshadowing of what will eventually happen to Anakin – who will become quite a lot more mechanical than his initial one arm. But even among Jedis, having one arm missing and a mechanical replacement was not usual. Anakin was marked by his proximity to machine.

The views on Grievous’s Transhumanism was made fairly clearly by Obi Wan in the Clone Wars. Obi-Wan describes the transformation as malforming the body, rather than seeing it as a life-saving act. In the same fight, Obi-Wan also criticises the Separatist army for being all droid – unfeeling and mostly programming. Machinery, droids, and even mechanical prosthetics are all seen as a negative to the Jedi way of life.

Me pointing out some of the more obviously religious connections of the Force and Jediism I hope will not be anything new to anyone – like most things in Star Wars, it’s not exactly subtle. But maybe this lack of subtlety works in our favour in this instance – we’re more able to see connections between religion, robotics and Transhumanism both in Star Wars and outside it.

William Bainbridge is a scholar of religion who once did a pilot study about Transhumanism and religion. In his work, he found that very traditional religious views often saw Transhumanism and aspects of Transhumaism as inherently negative. For them, the idea of cyborgian more-than-humans are actually in direct competition with their own religious beliefs. Put in more direct Christian terminology, a cyborgian human is going directly against the idea of humans as replicated in God’s own image. It’s inherently wrong.

This can be also related to Jedi and Sith conversation, with Jedi taking the place of our traditional religious views. The Jedi see the robotic nature of what once-was-human as something inherently wrong. It goes against the nature of the Force and the understanding of the place and role of humans and, more importantly, the human body.

Let’s look at the Jedi code in contrast to the Sith code to see this a bit better. The Jedi code ends with the phrase: “There is no death, there is the Force”. This is very reminiscent to Christian ideas of connecting to God through Jesus as granting “ever lasting life”. In both instances, they don’t mean you will literally become immortal through your connection to the religion. Even the most fundamentalist of Christians know that at some point their mortal body will fail them. Rather, they acknowledge that their connection means there is something beyond that – a life after life, as it were. For the Jedi, this is similar.

While the Jedi code focuses on aspects of what there is not and how all is the Force, the Sith code – at it’s more superficial – actually doesn’t seem all that bad. Their code focuses on freedom, and how the gaining of freedom is above all else. The use of the Force is simply a means to an end, with the end being the freedom they seek so much.

This focus on freedom is an actually rather interesting side note to this whole discussion, because in the Star Wars universe, there’s actually a lot of slavery. Twi’leks are often used as slaves. The number of Twi’leks owned, and female Twi’leks in particular, is a marker of social status and rank, including the Twi’lek senator. In fact, female Twi’leks are often involved in sex slave trade, as they are seen as inherently sexual. Although the consequences of this on the Twi’lek women themselves are not as deeply explored as one would hope. In fact, in some explorations of Star Wars, Twi’leks slavery is almost glorified. Sex slavery was also alluded to with Leia when she was captured by Jabba the Hut, which is also seen as a great sexy outfit despite the implications of the character’s situation.

We also see slavery in Tattooine, a planet whose history seems to involve intense slave trading no matter the era. In Tattooine, we are also introduced to the idea of chips implanted in the slave which physically keeps the slaves from escaping. This is a really intense way to keep slaves, to say the least.

In fact, the slavery on Tattooine is directly presented to the audience through young Anakin Skywalker. Anakin was born into slavery, and therefore was deeply affected by his experiences. When beginning his training as a Jedi, many of the Jedi were already fearful of Anakin’s shifting to the Dark Side because of his history as a slave, saying that his history of slavery fosters feelings of hatred. This is, of course, frankly true. Ill treatment, and especially seeing such aggregious practices as slavery, can definitely foster feelings of hatred in those who are personally affected by it. And it also fosters the inherent need for freedom, another aspect that the Jedis seem to dislike in contrast to their Sith counterpart. The Jedi view of Anakin already reveals really complicated notions of slavery is, and quite frankly how problematic.

In Anakin’s history, we see a lot of glimpses of how the Jedi treat him differently because of his past as a slave. Partly this can be due to the inherent fear of his turn to the Dark Side, but also this is partly because of classism. Many don’t take him seriously as the Chosen One because of the fact that he was born a slave – and for some if you are born a slave, there is little you can do to raise yourself above that. More so, the fixated nature of slaves as being more consumed by the Dark Side also proves to demonstrate very complicated notions of the cultural and social impact of slavery. The continued different treatment of Anakin – no matter the reason – helps to instill difference and Otherness, which will inherently push Anakin to seek more direct and conscientious notions of Freedom.

And speaking of the way Jedis treat slaves, I feel like we have to address the conception of the clones in the Clone Wars. What’s interesting about the Clone Wars is that the writers in Star Wars had to think of a way to have a massive war which didn’t completely wipe the population of the galaxy. In the Clone Wars, there are individuals who fight on both sides, but the primary troops are either droids on the side of the Separatists (another peek at the idea of robotics as bad) and clones on the side of the Republic. The clones were developed from the DNA of Jango Fett, a Mandalorian bounty hunter. Genetically speaking, the clones are Mandalorian – they are made of organic material and have personalities and viewpoints. They name each other nicknames that go beyond the numbered designation the Republic gave them. But they are expected to be nothing but soldiers and fodder for the war. They are trained to fight and die, and are given no other option. For all intents and purposes, the clones in the Clone Wars are slaves to a war – unable to escape and unable to choose for themselves what they wish to do. And they fight alongside the Jedi – whose views on the Force and life seem to not question their treatment of these individuals. This was especially made too real for me in the Clone Wars episodes that show the clones as children – who are already being trained to fight and die despite their age.

There is, also, the role of droids. We’re already talking about the view of robotics as bad in the good vs bad debate in Star Wars, so droids have to come more directly into the conversation. If Transhumanism is seen as bad because of it’s proximity to robotics, then how is a full on robot treated? And again, we can talk about slavery.

In the Star Wars universe, there are some people who fight for droid rights, but these are few and far between. Most see droids as built to be slaves, despite the incredibly present intelligence in the droids we encounter. Discussions of slavery tend to be focused on the conception of beings who are “sentient” – but the determination of sentience is complicated. How do we determine sentience? I know I’m starting to sound like that one episode of Star Trek, but I think it bares thinking about, especially when we are talking about artificial intelligence. What truly is the difference in artificial intelligence like Data, or R2D2, and the sentience of Anakin Skywalker?

In fact, many treatments of droids follow aspects of slavery constraints. Restraining bolts can be put on droids, which are hardware that restrains or alters the typical behaviour of the droid or its own obedience. Restraining bolts share a striking similarity with the mind chips implanted into the slaves like Anakin and his mother – keeping them from acting on certain actions.

The Jedi dislike of droids is pretty palbable, and in more than just that one scene with Obi-wan and Grievous. For those in universe who fight for droid rights, one of the actions they most dislike is memory wiping of droids. This is seen as working actively against the droids own personal bodily autonomy. Interestingly, we see Anakin mimicking this in the Clone Wars series. In one episode, R2D2 was taken and it was revealed that his memory had never been wiped by Anakin. Therefore, he held all the of the battle plans and floorplans that have ever been used by Anakin or R2. When Obi-Wan finds out about the lack of wiping, he’s pretty mad and orders Anakin to wipe the memories of his droids.

The fact that Anakin never has wiped the memory of R2 reflects his treatment of R2 as an equal, and perhaps reveals his own understanding of the use of droids as effectively slaves. He likes to think of R2 as a friend and colleague, rather than as a tool. This is why he refuses to upgrade to a newer droid, or to wipe the droids memory. He retains the bodily autonomy of R2 out of respect for R2’s own sentience.

Droids and robots are therefore inherently inhuman and therefore beyond the nature of what should be under the protection of Jedis for most who follow the Jedi code, while the Sith – like Anakin becomes eventually – see their inherent intelligence and personhood. It is also the Jedi who treat those from slavery poorly, and see them as an inherent threat, rather than as peoples worthy of saving and equal treatment. It is the Sith who see slavery as inherently bad, and the need for freedom as something to strive for. While this isn’t always followed through directly by all the Sith, it’s still worth considering how this appears at least on paper.

The Jedi resistance to the conception of death as the full end may be why they view alterations to save a life as inherently bad. Grievious’s initial changes to cyborg, for example, were not just done on a whim, but were the result of great injury. Anakin as Darth Vader is similar – after sustaining burns and arm amputations, the cyborgian Darth Vader is how Anakin manages to stay alive. In the Jedi mindset, they would potentially have been better off dead. A lot of the way the Jedi understand these changes reveals a lot about the Jedi view of the body and the ableism that is inherently present there.

Let’s take Anakin pre-Darth Vader, shall we? He gets his arm cut off by Count Dooku, and the plan is to give him a mechanical prosthetic. But this already alters him, and by all views of the Jedi and robotics, marks him as Other and robotic. Prosthetics are not exactly seen as normal in the world of the Jedi, which is surprising considering how many times it happens to a Skywalker. After his mechanical arm, Anakin is still a Jedi for some time – during the entirety of the Clone Wars. But how does his prosthetic compare to Obi-Wans comment to Grievious about the disgusting nature of the robotic body?

For a group who are supposed to understand life through compassion, there appear to be deep rooted inabilities to see past issues of “normality” and particularly conceptions of a “normal body”. There is little compassion for the history of slavery in both an individual and in a culture, and there is also little compassion for bodily differences which may present themselves in the form of prosthetics or cyborgian elements. Despite believing in the sanctity of life, those who continue to live in different bodies are considered something to be feared or rejected. The life of clones are not as privileged as the life of a Jedi.

So, I guess, that pre-established binary of Jedis as all good and Sith as inherently evil is not all that its cracked up to be. The strong and un-subtle delineation of good and evil seems a little more nuanced, and a little more problematic. Because discussions of Transhumanism are inherently tied to discussions of personhood and definitions of what it means to be human, by looking at the understandings of Transhumanism we can get a really good picture of the morality of the Star Wars universe, and the Jedi in particular. Their absolute resistance of Transhumanism, and especially the connections between personhood and robotics, can be ableist, classist and even pro-slavery.

Cosplay and Pop Mythology

The cosplay research project is definitely progressing and progressing quickly – and I don’t mean that in a bad way. I’ve now signed an official book deal (which you can find out more about that means on Indiegogo here) and been going to loads of fan conventions and chatting online with cosplayers. If I’m not writing for the blog, I’m transcribing interviews, reading academic texts, or talking to cosplayers. So, let’s talk a little more about the project right now. We’ve already looked briefly at the definition of cosplay in an earlier blog post, so today let’s do another starting point: the relationship between cosplay and mythology.

Obviously, on Incidental Mythology, the relationship between pop culture and myth is of our particular interest. On this blog, we understand mythology as being inherently tied to emotional investment, and popular culture can have loads of emotional investment. When we are looking at pop culture investment and interaction, mythology and the connection to the story is inherently a part of this conversation. So what does this mean for cosplay? Cosplay is clearly one of the ways people interact with mythology, but how does the interaction between cosplay, pop culture and mythology manifest and what does it mean for the individuals or communities doing it?

I think the most interesting aspect of this is in how cosplayers decide on the characters they will embody. When I was first figuring out my own cosplays, this was actually a really hard decision – there was a lot to think about. I like a lot of things, so how do I choose who to cosplay as? Cosplayers generally think of two factors when deciding on their character: the cosplayer and the location of the cosplayer.

So let’s think about cosplay as a performance – the cosplayer being like an actor getting ready for a stage show. When deciding their characters, cosplayer-performers thinks about two aspects of the performance: the performer and the audience. For the performer, the cosplayer needs a character who relates to them as an individual. This can mean a few different things. One participant I’ve chatted to discussed looking for characters who have personality traits that they want to embody themselves. The cosplay-performance allows them to embody these traits, even if only temporarily. But the character relations can also happen another way. Another cosplayer I chatted to expressed enjoying finding a character that related directly to their own personal experiences or personality traits. They used the example of cosplaying a character who had lost their mother and still remained strong. The cosplayer had also recently lost their mother, and I wanted to embody strength in the face of grief. The cosplayer directly connected to the character’s experience because of how it echoed their own.

The other part of the cosplay choice is the audience. One cosplayer told me a story about their excitement at cosplaying Shiklah, a character from the Deadpool comics, and not one person at the con recognised the character. They felt dejected, and voiced regret at having made the costume in the first place, despite their excitement about it leading up to the event.

If the cosplay is for a con, the type of con and who will be there is an important consideration for the cosplayer. I just recently returned from CosXpo, a con completely devoted to cosplay. While there, one cosplayer expressed liking that at CosXpo, you can do more obscure characters because the primary interest from those around will be the quality and details of the costume rather than on the character. In contrast, at something like Comic Con or MegaCon, they feel more pressure to do a character that a wider array of people will like because attendees tend to want to see their favourite characters.

Stage Performance of Firelord Ozai from Avatar: the Last Airbender at CosXpo. Cosplayer House of Mairon

The two parts of a performance are therefore pretty important to thinking about what the performance should even be. These two aspects can also be explored through the different ways the individual connects to the pop myth of their cosplay: the performer’s connection to the character is demonstrative of how the cosplayer connects personally to the story; the performer’s understanding of the audience demonstrates the cosplayer’s personal connection to the community.

Both aspects of character choice feeds into the ultimate conception of the piece of pop culture being an integral part of meaning-making for the communities and the individual, while also relying on the cosplayer to embody the narratives in such a convincing way to allow the story to continue to live in new environments and new formations. Cosplay becomes part of the meaning-making aspect of the original narrative – both for the wider community, but also for the cosplayer more specifically.

This is not, of course, to say that cosplay isn’t fun. The whole point of the act is because it does give a great sense of fun and entertainment for the cosplayer and the audience viewing the cosplay – but fun can have a lot of meaning behind it for the cosplayer as well.

The Reality TV Story

I can talk about all sorts of different aspects of nerd or geek culture another day. But I can only stay away from reality television for so long before my hands start to shake from the withdrawal. Today, I wanted to talk about one of the more interesting aspects of reality television: the story. I’ve talked before about the complicated nature of the “reality” part of reality television, and anyone that follows my work for even a short amount of time will know that I love a complicated view of reality. But stories are important – stories are important in scripted television and in reality television because stories are important to us as people. We tell stories every day when someone simply asks about how our day was. So of course reality television needs a good story.

I wanted to spend a quick time today talking about what it means to build a narrative in reality television and how these various narratives form. Before we get too into the weeds of it, we should pull back and first talk about types of reality television. In my personal understanding, there are two primary forms of reality tv: the competition show and the docu-soap.

The competition show is pretty straight-forward. These are shows like Top Chef, Survivor, the Amazing Race, or Project Runway. The show centres on the innate drama that arises when a group of people are all competing for the same one prize that only one person can win. Sometimes, these shows focus on the talent of their participants, such as Top Chef with talented chefs or Project Runway with talented fashion designers. Others focus on other forms of competition, like the Amazing Race which focuses on a team’s ability to navigate in unknown areas. Shows like the Bachelor or Love Island are competition shows for dating – where the winner is the one who falls in love the best. Though people would probably not word it quite like that, it’s basically what the show is.

Docu-soaps, on the other hand, tend to be more documentary style but with soap-opera like elements. These follow the same cast of characters and we, as an audience, get to live alongside their day-to-day behaviours. Shows like Keeping Up With the Kardashians or the Real Housewives franchise fit this style. The soap opera element is only in the inherent drama of the show and the drawing on personal and social turmoil.

Most often, reality shows are some mix of these two elements. While there are some pure forms – I think game shows are pretty pure competition shows – most borrow elements from one another and this helps to build their own production and narrative. Love Island and the Bachelor, for example, are both pretty solid competition shows but use and rely on a lot of docu-soap mechanics to follow the individual cast of characters.

Several contestants from the 2022 season of the Bachelor.

Typically, competition shows have two forms of storytelling happening simultaneously: you have the individual narratives of each contestant, and the overarching storyline of the show’s season. The show needs to have the individual narratives of contestants in order to build interest and stake. Audience members also learn to connect to some contestants over others, and therefore root for one to win more than another.

Top Chef, for example, likes to demonstrate how a chef-testant has grown and developed through the course of the show as their storytelling trope, even if the participant leaves the show early. A contestant learning over the show “to cook my food” is an often-repeated storyline on Top Chef, where a contestant learns the importance of the food they grew up loving. Emotional connections to food, particularly food’s connection to family, is an important recurring theme in Top Chef.

This is where the infamous call-home started to become an important marker in storytelling. Shows like Top Chef and Project Runway began showing a character call their family typically on an episode where they went home. This wasn’t done massively on purpose, but that the call home was an easy way to tell the narrative of that contestant in as expediated a matter as possible because they were going to be leaving that episode. Though as audiences caught on to the call-home as a signal of imminent departure, editors have started spreading out these scenes far more evenly.

Alongside these individual contestant narratives is the over-arching narrative of the larger season. For Top Chef, these is pretty simply “who wins Top Chef?”. But sometimes, competition shows can have far more complicated over-arching narratives. This is something that the Bachelor leaves in the hands of their “lead” – the Bachelor or the Bachelorette that the contestants are all competing for. Perhaps the most salient in recent years has been the Bachelorette Michelle, whose story as a young black woman led her to carry the narrative of “being seen” throughout the entire season. This was not just a notion that Michelle looked for in her suitors, but also was repeated in the contestants themselves as they often commented on feeling “seen” by Michelle in their more intimate chats.

The episodic competition shows also have the storyline of the challenges set for each episode and how this impacts the wider narrative. For the Bachelor, each challenge is phrased as an important aspect of a relationship, such as learning to trust, or – a favourite for the Bachelor – learning to “let your walls down” and “be vulnerable”. The contestants who do well are those who embrace this narrative and let it become part of their own narrative, leading to them declaring an important personal secret or piece of their history to the lead, inspired by the events of the day. For more talent-based competition shows like Top Chef or Project Runway, the episodic overall narrative is how individual contestants approach the challenge and learn to grow from it. Maybe their story is that they are afraid of the challenge and worried they will do poorly, which they overcome and rise to the top. Or maybe the fear gets to them too much and it causes them to go home.

Docu-soaps differ from competition shows in their length of time with the cast. The Bachelor only has the same cast for one season, and then the whole cast resets for the next season. Other than the judges, the same is for Top Chef or Project Runway. The Real Housewives, in contrast, only have cast changes slowly, maybe only one or two will be replaced between seasons. Or sometimes there will be no replacements at all because the cast is working very well as-is. Keeping Up with the Kardashians only has new cast members when there are new members of the family, and often they do not take as much of centre-stage as the Kardashian-Jenners themselves.

The cast of Real Housewives of Salt Lake City

These shows therefore have more time for the audience to develop a kinship with their cast, and their storylines do not only need to be developed over one season but can be developed over multiple seasons. But that being said, each episode and each season still needs to be able to stand on its own as a separate story itself. Think of an episode like a chapter in a larger book series – the chapter is still an important crafting of narrative but is only feeding a small part of a much larger narrative. So, episodically, storylines don’t necessarily have to be started and ended, but at least one storyline needs to have a significant development. Developments can either be taking a step forward toward “solving” the conflict, or it can be a step into further conflict and turmoil.

And this is where the role of editing becomes immensely important. Most cast members have their own producer who kind of follows them around and stokes the fires of conflict for scenes to be shot effectively. These producers are obviously important for the role of the reality show production to ensure that important scenes have these developments in storyline that we look for. However, these producers do not often, in the moment, have the same hindsight on the full season that editors do. One of my favourite elements of these was in the recent season (season two) of Real Housewives of Salt Lake City. There was a full scene left in where cast member Jen Shah is joking around with her assistant Stuart about how he helps to make her so much money in the business. This short scene would probably have been left on the editing room floor if it wasn’t for the later arrest of Jen Shah for fraud, and her assistant Stuart pleading guilty to all crimes related to their joint business. Jen later claimed that Stuart did not really work for her in those businesses, leading to that innocuous clip being played over and over again in the show.

Anyway, this was a fun little overview of the way that stories can be crafted, understood, and experienced on reality television. It’s one of those interesting elements that can be uncovered the more you watch and delve into like-narratives. I’m sure there can be a lot more said on the subject – and maybe I will do so when the withdrawals from reality tv hit me again.

Hilda’s Trolls: Otherness and Racism

It’s been awhile since we talked about Hilda. Since that essay, another season has come out on Netflix, as well as a movie. It’s time we circled back, I think, to the cute urban fantasy world of Hilda. We previously talked about Hilda and her relationship with Other-Than-Human persons, where the concept of personhood and the importance of this being bestowed to other creatures was emphasised. I’ll put a link to that video in the description. What that video didn’t spend as much time talking about is when the relationship with other-than-human was not an equal relationship of positivity. This was an important aspect of the Hilda movie, Hilda and the Mountain King.

Today, I wanted to spend some time talking about Otherness in Hilda, but this time not about the positive community side. There is another reading of Hilda that’s possible, one that explores conceptions of in-groups and out-groups, and readings about racism and race relations.

Supernatural creatures being used as a metaphor for racism and race-relations in urban fantasy is not exactly unique to Hilda. It’s explored in great detail in many books, movies and television shows, including Carnival Row and Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell. Hilda is also taking this stance in their positioning of the Supernatural Other as primarily against the human population. In fact, we can have a different reading of our previous video essay. Previously, we talked about how Hilda solved all the problems of Other-than-Humans with compassion because she saw them as persons. In a different reading that takes race-relations into account, we can see this, rather, as the human – or the stand-in for the white population – needing to understand and connection with the racial other better and see them as inherent people despite their cultural otherness.

While the conversation about the racial other could be brought to pretty much any of the Supernatural Others in the show, today we’re going to focus on trolls. This is for two primary reasons: the first being that trolls are the most central Supernatural Other throughout the entirety of the show; and the second, trolls make up the primary antagonists in the Hilda movie, the Mountain King.

In fact, the primary antagonist for most of Hilda are the trolls. We see this in the very first episode, when Hilda is chased back to her country-home by a troll. This first interaction is also the first time we see that trolls hate the sound of ringing bells. Hilda puts a bell over the nose of a troll that has turned to rock simply to let her know when the troll begins to stir. After the troll chasing Hilda when it does stir, Hilda realises that the bell is causing the troll distress and removes the bell. The troll recognises the act of kindness and leaves Hilda alone at this point.

This first troll interaction sets up the way Hilda solves problems in the world – something looks scary and like the only solution is either to run or fight, yet she finds a third way, one through compassion. We see initially how Hilda is the hug-solver, typically creating solutions through the art of empathy and compassion, which we talked much more extensively about already.

When Hilda and her mother move away from the countryside and into Trolberg, trolls become more firmly separated from their human counterparts. The entire town of Trolberg is the demonstration of how trolls are the inherent other – the large wall around the town was built to keep trolls out, and the watchtowers are armed with large bells to keep the trolls at bay.

Trollberg is the built establishment of the inherent separation of humans from Trolls – the embodiment of Us vs Them. The high walls are what helps to build the separation. Inhabitants have little way of looking out to the fields surrounding them, to feel somehow a part of the same landscape which surrounds the town as the town itself. It becomes a focus of town vs countryside, humans vs supernatural other. This is even hinted at in the first few episodes when Hilda and her mom are living in the supernatural-other filled countryside. Hilda becomes aware that the countryside is not a place for humans – she doesn’t fit there because she is not a supernatural other. The mountain beasts, the elves, and the trolls all make a point to demonstrate their presence in the world above hers. The first time we see other humans than just Hilda and her mom is when we are in Trolberg.

There are small scenes or an occasional episode where trolls come back, and Hilda still manages to solve some problems through the all-powerful-hug solution. Her and her friends successfully keep a troll child from harm before they’re able to return it to its mother. But in each of these instances, the trolls place is outside the walls, and the humans within the walls – the maintenance of the binary difference between human and other, the us vs. them.

In season two of Hilda, this inherent separation between the two worlds gets a lot more extreme. As was pointed out in that first episode, Trolls hate the sounds of bells. The walls of Trolberg are built with giant bells in the watchtower – not to warn the residents of an incoming attack, but rather as an offensive manoeuvre to keep the trolls from coming closer to the city walls. Eric Ahlberg, the leader of the Safety Patrol, uses the bells as a way to purposely provoke the trolls to demonstrate the inherent difference between the trolls and the humans of Trolberg – capitalising on the Us/Them dynamic established by the history of the city. The second season and the movie, the Mountain King, focuses on the dynamics between the humans and the trolls surrounding the city.

It's pretty obvious pretty quickly that the trolls in Hilda are the stand-in for Otherness, most notably the foreign Other and/or the racial Other. The first problem that is slowly being established in the second series is the migration of the trolls – their bodies coming closer and closer to the city is an ever-present threat to the city’s inhabitants, even if the trolls haven’t actually done anything yet. Conversation about migration and immigration is implied through the presentation. Other aspects of the troll representation is fairly heavy-handed in their presentation – including in the Mountain King movie the anti-troll propaganda film being played for the children at their school.

If we’re talking about trolls as the Other – especially the racial Other – it’s helpful to start by comparing the presentation here as it is in other pieces of popular culture. By doing so, we can see in greater detail what it is that Hilda is saying about the racial Other, and how the explicit voices about these differences compare to the implicit voice.

I think one starting point will be the trope of the Magical Negro, also called the Magical African-American Friend. I will using the term Magical Negro through this for two primary reasons – one being that while this trope is particularly present in popular culture from the United States, it is not uniquely present there. The second is that the term Magical Negro makes a lot of people very uncomfortable, and this is a very uncomfortable trope – it should make you feel uncomfortable. The trope of the Magical Negro is when a Black supporting character comes to the aid of a white protagonist, and often possesses some kind of magical powers or other-worldly insight. The best go-to examples of this trope is in the Green Mile and the Legend of Bagger Vance, but is definitely not limited to these movies. Some argue that the role of Whoopie Goldberg as a medium in Ghost also fulfils this role, for example.

The magic of the Black character, and actually their entire presence in the movie, is primarily present in order to help the white – and often male – protagonist. An important point of note is that these characters are not meant to demonstrate that all Black people are inherently magical and good – rather these characters are the exception, rather than the rule. They are present as a tool to the white character, rather than as a full example of the realities of Black culture.

The effect of the Magical Negro is that there is a subject matter that typically makes the audience – mostly assumed to be white – uncomfortable. The presence of the Black character typically would require some kind of confrontation with, or acknowledgement of, the detailed history of institutional racism and white supremacy that has resulted in the Black characters being where or who they are. Instead of having these conversations or confrontations, however, the movie chooses to portray these characters and situations in a position of gentle reassurance for the white protagonist.

When it comes to Hilda, we can definitely talk about Frida in this role. Frida’s ethnicity is never really discussed in Hilda, but the nature of it being a cartoon means we can actively see how she is racially different than her friends. She’s also the only one between the three of them who’s a training witch. Not all the witches in Hilda are Black – in fact, very few characters outside of Frida are Black, except for the occasional background character. However, in comparison to her two other primary characters Hilda and David, Frida is the inherently magical one. Frida’s role is always to stand next to her white friend, Hilda, and sometimes through her magical force.

There’s also the role of the trolls. While the trolls are not as obviously the racial Other as Frida – they’re far more implicitly representative of this racial Other than the explicit and not-even-metaphorical Frida. That being said, they are being treated in the show as the racial other, and therefore we will analyse them like the racial Other.

Beyond their stance as supernatural, Trolls are typically not portrayed as having any kind of inherent magic until the Mountain King movie. Mostly, they’re mystical nature is in their turning to stone when sunlight touches them, and then re-animating at night. Near the end of the second series, we start to get a glimmer of some inherent magic in their ability to go into the mountain, but it’s nothing too over the top about it all.

At the very end of the second series, Hilda and her mom meet a female troll that transforms Hilda into a troll, and puts her own daughter in Hilda’s place as a human. This is the most magical we ever see trolls, and she has a profound impact on our primary protagonist.

Hilda’s reaction to being turned into a troll scares the absolute everything out of her. She spends quite a bit of timing running away from the magical troll who originally transformed her. At first, we take this as her being freaked out by suddenly being transformed, and her intense longing to go home. But things are revealed to be a bit different when she is talking to Trundle.

After pushing for her next task, Trundle asks, “No time to chat?” Hilda is hesitant, and then Trundle continues. “Who’d want to be a troll longer than they have to be?”

Hilda clearly knows she offended, but still doesn’t exactly take it back. This is because there’s an inherent truth to what Trundle is saying.

In our other video, we talked about how Hilda liked to solve the problems of the world through compassion and the art of listening. She saw the Supernatural Other as equal in personhood to herself, and therefore treated them with respect and kindness. However, she constantly maintained her own humanness and still saw them as the Supernatural Other. Even though they are Other-Than-Human Persons, they are still Other-Than-Human in Hilda’s eyes.

More simply put, the Other is perfectly fine when they remain the Other. The Us vs Them dynamic is fine to maintain if there is no violence associated with it, but the clear lines remain the same. Otherness is something Hilda can have compassion for, but she doesn’t want to be the Other. To blur the lines between the Us and the Them – the Human and the Supernatural – is to begin to see ourselves as an Other, and this is fundamentally an issue for Hilda.

Trylla, the troll who transformed Hilda magically, used her magic purely to further Hilda’s personal experience. By doing so, she furthered Hilda’s own personal experience, while not really working toward her own goal very much. Yes, the solution of the Mountain King movie theoretically solves some of the rift between humans and trolls but the peace seems slightly off and like it may be short lived. It also doesn’t solve much of the reasons behind her initial use of the magic – that her child is a bit softer and seemingly unable to fit into the life and world of a troll. This particular dilemma for her remains unsolved and stagnant. The entire practice, therefore, only had a solution for Hilda.

Hilda on the surface has the beautiful exploration of Otherness but through compassion – fighting battles of Us vs Them through compassion and listening. Hilda solves problems through hugging rather than punching, and therefore seems like the perfect example of how to solve problems in the non-fictional world. We heal the divides of Otherness through hugging and listening rather than punching. But this is a very simplistic view of Otherness and the way it manifests in the world. It glosses over issues like institutionalised racism and more embedded bigotry.

While the trolls in Hilda are not overtly Black, their role as the racialised Other is apparent in their metaphoric role in the show. And through that, they’re trope as the Magical Negro is more overt. And like the Magical Negro, the viewer, Hilda and the residents have Trolberg do not have to confront the realities of the ostracization they have put on their supernatural neighbours.

While Hilda teaches us to embrace the Other, it does not teach us that being the Other is inherently okay. It does not teach us that the inherent separation of the Us and Them is bad – only that our views of the Them is bad. We are comforted by our ability to simply hug to solve our problems, and not needing to confront the issues we are creating. Like Hilda, when we acknowledge our own role in the issue, we can simply leave.

Star Wars and Mythological Canon

The time has come for Incidental Mythology to talk about Star Wars. When we talk about contemporary mythology, it’s hard to not mention Star Wars – its this ever present force of storytelling that’s dominated the last forty-five years of pop culture. And speaking of storytelling, there is something really fascinating about the way the story is put together and communicated to it’s audience. So today I wanted to spend some time talking about Star Wars, and more importantly what Star Wars canon looks like, how it’s defined, and what we know about the idea of canonisation.

There’s a lot of Star Wars content out there, and it’s only growing the more Disney produces Star Wars content. There’s not just the films and new television shows, but also a whole host of books on subject matters pertaining to canon characters, but also characters we’ve not really heard of in the movies or television shows. They expand on parts of the world history that are only mentioned in passing, giving a rich feel to the universe they exist in.

So when someone is newly embarking into the world of Star Wars, what’s canon? The continuity within the various Star Wars media is not exactly consistent and firm – it’s all kinda wiggly and ever-shifting. And when we change from a George Lucas film to a cartoon Clone Wars episode to a book by E.K. Johnston, elements and aspects of the story may change. There are inconsistencies, even between movies, so what’s a Star Wars fan to do? How does this all work?

The Star Wars universe is based on the idea that the entirety of its history is crafted by many different authors all contributing different aspects of the “historical” events. Like our own history, it’s being crafted and told from a variety of different perspectives and not necessarily all linearly tied together into one cohesive idea. It’s hard to find a full history of the world that isn’t in some way biased or ethnocentric, for example. But we can find a couple different books all about World War II from several different perspectives. And then we may struggle to find something to fill in particular voids until the next main event. Some primary historical figures may not necessarily meet other figures, even though their actions are being impacted by each other. And yes, I realise I’m talking about history so far and not mythology. But as I’ve made clear on this website before, history is in many ways a form of mythology. But Star Wars doesn’t necessarily make mythology simply through its similarity to history.

I should take a moment here, though, to mention that I will not be talking about Joseph Campbell’s hero’s monomyth. For people not knowledgeable about it, Campbell wrote a book about how he believed all hero myths to be structured the same. His book The Hero with a Thousand Faces was immensely popular and heavily influenced the creation of a lot of pop culture stories, including George Lucas and Star Wars. I’m not going to get into my own thoughts on Campbell, though you can probably glean a little of that in my myth course when I take some time to talk about it. But essentially, there’s a lot more to mythology than the simple structure of what events occur and in which order, even if Campbell was right.

The complicated thing when it comes to talking about Star Wars is it’s innate binary nature of the story. Star Wars famously paints its narratives in clear black and white, with the good vs evil nature as inherently just that – very good pitted against very evil. There’s really no wiggle room when it comes to this. I mean, one of the evil character’s name is Dark Sidious – they very heavily paint how we’re supposed to feel about that character. The Jedi are portrayed as the good figures, with the Sith as the evil. The Force has a light side and a dark side. Everything is very binary and final. Even before the Empire, the

But on closer inspections, things are not always so clearly defined in these firm boundaries. The Clone Wars, for example, was run by Palpatine/Darth Sideous, meaning that both sides of the war were inherently bad. Not to mention that the Clone army was basically just raising slaves simply to die, which seems a bit morally questionable. Even the line between Jedi and Sith is not exactly all that clear. The famous line of “Only Sith deal in absolutes” is a pretty good example of the murky boundary between the two worlds.

In fact, some in the Star Wars universe have rejected the idea of a pure light and dark side of the Force entirely. There are some Gray Jedi, so named for the blurring of dark and light. These Jedi see an ambivalence to the Force, and do not necessarily adhere to the Jedi Code nor the Sith Code, but choose to base their relationship with the Force on their own terms and experiences. Ahsoka Tano and Jolee Bindo are two examples of these Gray Jedi.

Therefore, there’s really no one event or action or even Force that can cannot have different understandings and different relationships to the story. We hear one aspect of what exactly the Force is like from Jedi in the movies, but in some of the books we get a different perspective.

The mythology of the Star Wars universe is not in its structure or strong canonical foundation – not least because there’s not really much of a strong canonical structure. It’s mythology is in it’s flexibility, the fluid nature of it’s notion of canon. What is canonical, what is important to the narrative of the history of a galaxy far away from our own and in the distant past, is up to us – the storyteller, the audience, the people who read the mythologies and come to understand them. They allow for us to manipulate, alter, and change the world based on our own understandings, reflecting the nature of the world as one which is also in flux.

It's kinda like reading a book on Persian mythology, or Greek mythology, or even Welsh mythology. We may have a book which compiles the history of these various mythological figures, but inevitably things will be missing. Stories will simply be aluded to but not present. Maybe there will be jumps from one event to the other, or two different versions of the same story but told in vastly different ways. This is because canon in these traditional worlds of mythology is not necessarily the strict and defined – it’s fluid.

Star Wars allows individual writers and artists to have their own take on the world they find themselves loving and sharing. And this isn’t necessarily what makes it a strong canonised narrative, but what makes it a mythology.

The Antlered Wendigo

I absolutely love the Ancient Magus Bride. It’s one of my favourite anime, and one that I always love going back to and digging into deeper. One of the aspects of the fan-base that I like the most is their interest in folklore and mythology, and how they discuss, research and explore each character and piece in the world. One of the primary characters, Elias, is a tall humanoid who has a stag skull as a head. What exactly Elias is has been up for debate in the fan-base, with one primary argument being that he is a Wendigo – the primary reasoning being his antlers.

Elias Ainsworth from Ancient Magus Bride

In American popular culture, wendigos are pictured as humanoid figures with antlers. This depiction of wendigos has always been interesting to me – it’s prominent in creepypasta, television and movies, including Antlers and Stephen King’s Pet Semetary. In some depictions, it’s far more werewolf-like, which is how it’s depicted in the television show Charmed, for example.

Today, I wanted to explore the wendigo, primarily looking at it’s origins in Native American folklore, and how it came to be represented by antlers. I wanted to also reflect on what it means for the antlers to be present, and how their presence has fundamentally changed the wendigo.

The story of the wendigo is from Algonquin-speaking people. These are various groups in North America, including the Ojibwe, Algonquins, Blackfoot, and several others. Wendigos here were malevolent spirits who could possess human beings. For some, wendigos were inherently tied to acts of cannibalism. A.I Hallowell wrote about wendigos through his fieldwork with the Ojibwe. Hallowell wrote that there were three meanings to the wendigo, each while separate also intricately connected. The first is the wendigo as the mythical monster; the second is the human who has become prone to cannibalistic urges; the third, the cannibalistic act. Thus, someone can “turn windigo” through their actualisation of a taboo act, and the act itself is equally monstrous to the malevolent creature. Monsters can be all sorts of different things, and uniquely one of those things while all of those things all at the same time.

There’s not a massive amount of images of the wendigo that is the same everywhere. Most often, wendigos are described as male, but are not necessarily only ever male. Carl Ray, an Ojibwe artist, has drawn a wendigo.

Carl Ray “The Wendigo”

As I’m sure it’s quite obvious, antlers are not present in that image. In fact, most of the depictions, while slightly different from group of peoples to group of peoples, tend to not ever really have antlers as anywhere in the equation.

Antlers may have first started becoming part of the wendigo description in around 1910 with Algernon Blackwood’s short story “The Wendigo”. Blackwood was an early horror writer, and whose work greatly influenced Stephen King and H.P Lovecraft to name only a few. His short story on the wendigo depicted the creature as a type of forest demon. His depiction and story of the wendigo is rooted in equal depictions of Native Americans as “savages”. His racism is palpable throughout the text, and stained the wendigo itself with the same tint. Blackwood did not spend much time on his description of the wendigo – focusing more on the emotions of fear rather than on what the creature itself looks like.

Following depictions of the wendigo from white popular culture artists draw more on Blackwood than on the Native Americans the story originated from. The view of Native Americans as inherently Other is what helped to push the wendigo into its antlered form. Native Americans are seen by white culture as inherently naturalistic and mystical. Their spirituality is over-emphasised and used as a way to demonstrate their special separateness from the more “human” white coloniser. These descriptions are what keeps Native Americans as the Other. Antlers are used in many whiter cultures as symbols of nature and spirituality – therefore inherently connecting the wendigo to the same Othered descriptions as Native Americans themselves. By adding the antlers to the creature, white people were marking the creature as mystical and naturalistic, and wholly Other.

Image of the wendigo from the 2001 film “The Wendigo”

Each pop culture creation of the wendigo draws on other pop culture, rather than on the original contexts, pulling the wendigo further and further from it’s own homeland. The antlered wendigo is a form of whitewashing, pulling the wendigo further and further away from its original context. The antlered wendigo is a perfect definitional example of cultural appropriation. There’s an added element to the antlered wendigo. By using the very light touches of original context (if even that), filmmakers and writers relying on the antlered wendigo for their narrative is able to draw on Native American folklore and myth without paying attention to the wendigo’s fuller background requiring confrontations with colonisation and genocide.

As a fan of monsters and the Ancient Magus Bride, I personally do not think that Elias is a wendigo – at least, I really I hope he’s not. He’s a British monster, one embedded in conversations of Celtic mythology and Christian folklore. To bring the Wendigo into this would require detailed conversations of the cultural upheaval that the Algonquin peoples went through – one that should not be whitewashed. The wendigo, if it is to be as purely represented as other pieces of folklore and mythology as is presented in Ancient Magus Bride, should not be antlered.

As we’ve discussed a lot on this blog, transformations in mythology do happen. In some ways, the antlered wendigo is a transformation of the mythology – and in some respects, that’s right. But we should not only be aware of our contemporary mythology, but to also recognise where it comes from. We should know the history of our mythology – and understand what conversations we are avoiding when we transform our myths. Creating new and alternate myths in our contemporary era does often give voices to those who did not have any before – but the opposite can also happen. What voices are we erasing when we let our wendigos grow antlers?

The True Main Character of Unpacking

In November of last year, a small indie game Unpacking came out. Describing itself as a “zen puzzle game”, Unpacking is a game that is simply the act of emptying boxes and settling into a new space. It’s a familiar act – the art of pulling items out of boxes and trying to find their best location. As someone who both loves organisation and has moved three times in the past two years, I found it an oddly comforting game. Part home décor, and part organisation-porn, Unpacking gives you rooms and boxes, and allows you to live in the art of unpacking. Each level gives us another step in a person’s life – from a childhood bedroom, to a university dorm room, and finalizing in a full several bedroom house. At the end of each level, a snapshot photo gets taken and inserted into a book like a scrapbook with a short sentence that gives hope and context for the life-step the move represents.

            Today, I wanted to take some time to explore Unpacking and its story. The way the story is constructed and enacted by the player is a fascinating one, and fairly unique to Unpacking. Part of this storytelling is the interesting question of who exactly the main character of the game is, an answer that is typically found within the things we unpack in the game. And while I won’t alter this approach too much, I do have a slightly different way of answering the question of who the main character of the story is. So, lets – uh – unpack this game.

            With the exception of these phrases at the end of each level, no words are provided in the whole game. No one speaks, no one gives written context or dialogue. The entire story is simply told through the art of unpacking – the new homes being unpacked and the items you are unpacking become the entire story. The locations are of utmost importance to the growth of the narrative. For example, one level is when the primary character is moving in with a romantic partner. The next level is moving back to your parent’s home. The items, how they change, and which ones get added or removed is how the progression of time shows a character’s growth, both personally and professionally.

            So who is this main character whose items we are constantly unpacking? We never see the main character, we don’t know their name, age, or any other amount of information and details about them. The only thing we have to garner this information is through their items. It’s an interesting way to tell a story, relying on the items that we have to communicate this information. This can be done in subtle ways, like when the main character first move into a house with friends after university where we see table top role playing game paraphernalia, and in all subsequent moves after that house, our character takes several of the role playing game rule books. We see how what the character does for fun, and how they define themselves as changing over time.

            The possessions grow over time. They start with one big stuffed animal that’s a chicken, and through each level its revealed they’ve gotten a growing collection of small chicks. The toothbrush always goes into a glass, which gathers chips in it as it goes. There are photos that appear, and some that – then – subsequently disappear.

            This is an interesting way to tell the story of the main character – tracing the history of a person’s interests and story through the appearance – or disappearance – of their items. We see, through the locations they live in over their life and the items they bring to those places, the history of this character and their growth to become more confident and more independent.

            After the failed relationship where they move in with someone, the importance of their career becomes much more obvious. When I was playing through the game, I was appalled that whoever they were moving in with hadn’t made space for their art. The main character clearly was an artist, and one who cared very much for their work. But it wasn’t until they move into their own place – a bit of a shabby looking house but their own – that there was finally a designated space for their work. The sudden change of heart is simply felt when the player “steps” into the office space for the first time.

            That’s the part about this game that is truly fascinating from a storytelling perspective – everything about the primary main playable character is only communicated through their things. Through the space the things go in and the things themselves. We know they’re an artist, have an interest in baking cookies, love tabletop role-playing games, and has an emotional attachment to several stuffed animals from their childhood. They journal and keep a paper diary. They wear jeans and plaid shirts, and worked at a coffee shop for several years before finally being able to do art full time. But we only have these descriptions at hand because of the objects we encountered as we unpacked their belongings.

            So I propose we consider the questions about the main character of Unpacking from a slightly different angle: and that are through the things themselves. Most of the time, when humans encounter stories, we find the human in it. Even stories about non-humans become anthropomorphic in their presentations – like Disney movies, for example.

            But I want to do something a little different. Instead of approaching Unpacking through the anthropocentric lens we’re used to seeing life and stories through, I want to have a lens on that’s more thing-centric. For a game that has so much focus on the things we have, I want to also focus on those things, but not in the hopes they give us information about a human. So let’s think about his game through things and with things.

            Here to help us is anthropologist Tim Ingold. There are a few anthropologists that are helping do the thing-centred way of thinking, but Ingold gives us some solid ways of approaching this to begin with. In order to understand it, we do have to start with our natural inclination to always put humans first. Humans are not solid but are in a constant state of becoming. We are constantly changing and growing and adjusting who we are as life continues. Our experiences, our environments, our things, and engagements all come to define us, then re-define us. We are, therefore, defined by our relations with other humans around us – our relationships, whether they be romantic or friends or family help to define ourselves and our world that we find ourselves in.

            But we are also defined by the non-humans around us. Our animal companions, for example, make up the relations we define ourselves by. Our plants, if we love plants, create our environments that we thrive in, and make up relationships as well. If you’re a little sceptical of the plants part, just ask people who surround themselves with it. We have other attachments as well. Many people feel emotionally attached to their objects, from books to photographs to even old t-shirts. These things can be objects we don’t even use in their traditional way anymore, but they still hold a special place in our hearts. When we are first meeting someone, and we go to their home, we look around and start to get a clearer picture of who they are through the objects in their home. We find these non-humans around us – from pets to things – as an intricate part of what it means to be human. So in a lot of instances, humans and things can be seen as inherently equal.

            I don’t mean that I think our yearbooks are also humans, but rather what I mean is that importance is not always necessarily only reserved for humans. If we draw meaning for our own selves from both other humans and our things, then when placing things on a hierarchy of objective importance, humans and things are a bit more equal. Some people watching this may think I am making the humans in my lives that I define and understand myself through, like my mother and my husband, as little more than “things”, but really what I’m saying is that my old copy of the Lord of the Rings trilogy that I can’t even play anymore because the DVD is region-locked to my old country should be raised up a bit more in esteem than just a piece of useless junk taking up space in my flat. So it’s not that humans mean less to me, it’s that we should learn to understand that the objects around us are more important than we typically consider in them.

            So in Unpacking, we can try to think of the game as giving us sneak peeks into some invisible human figure. But we could also see things in a slightly different way. We can take the game’s focus on the items we use to define ourselves to think with and through things rather than through humans. And when we do this, our view of the game is slightly different. Maybe we have spent too much time thinking about the human at the centre of the things, when we should be thinking about the things themselves. Our main character is not the shadowy figure of the artist who loves to bake, but there are several characters we are following through the game – the objects we find ourselves unpacking.

            One character is the stuffed chicken – whose own family gradually grows as time goes on. The chicken finds a partner and a family of baby chickens, and always finds their own place in the home as they move from place to place. Another set of characters are the photographs. They start with friends and family, but grow to include romantic partners. And they become damaged when relationships fall apart, seeing a different aspect of what photographs do and evoke. We also have the pig – the stuffed animal that starts as a comforting friend and then turns into the muse for an artist, through which they find a life, attention and celebrity. Even the toothbrush cup serves as a character – one who see weather and age as it lives its life of service.

            What the game Unpacking is giving us is not the story of an individual finding their passion and sense of self through the their life – one that we only get a glimpse of as we help them unpack their belongings in different homes. Rather, it’s a game about the objects. We see the life cycle of these objects, see how they start a life, how they grow and the relationships they build. Our character isn’t the artist – it’s the pig, the chickens, the dishware, and the plaid shirt. We get to know these characters over the course of their life, see them get chipped or worn, or how they grow and develop. How they find a constant source of love and attention, or how they become neglected. We may search for particular objects as we unpack only to find that, somewhere along the way, it disappeared from the story. And we feel that loss.

            The human removal from the story in the way the story is told in Unpacking is an interesting way to tell the story. The human removal means we are forced to see the formation of story as inherently different, and we therefore think about the main character in a slightly different way. The intense focus on the objects means that we think extensively about the objects themselves – away from the human figure we are used to thinking about. It forces us to think about the way we relate to the object around us, but more importantly, we think about how they relate to us.

The Valentine’s Day Monster: Cupid as Demon

As Valentine’s Day fast approaches, so does the onslaught of hearts in shop windows and the sudden urge to eat your weight in small chocolates. But it’s also the season where the Greek mythological figure of Eros, or Roman Cupid, begins to crop up everywhere. His chubby baby body with a bow and arrows tipped with hearts likes to hang above overhangs and appears on candy wrappers. Cupid is so synonymous with the contemporary experience of Valentine’s Day, and yet is only sometimes compared and linked to the traditional mythic figure of Cupid. So, let’s spend some time talking about Cupid today. But talking about Cupid’s “fun” side, or even his own love story, is not exactly what I had in mind.

What I want to talk about is another side of Cupid – Cupid as monster. There has been a tradition of seeing Cupid as a demonic figure, and that seems like a far more fun side of Cupid to dig into.

The tradition of Cupid as demonic monster can be traced back to a theologian named Isidore, who was writing in about the 600s. He wrote an encyclopaedia that was supposed to consider everything in life – or at least everything in life that a Christian Bishop felt was important. It was in this piece that he depicted Cupid as a monster. In fact, he describes Cupid as a demon of fornication, and discusses how Cupid as a figure represents an irrational and foolish love, not one that is true.

It's important to keep in mind both the time period of his writing, as well as his role as a Christian Bishop. We’ll talk more about that in a bit – but important to think about the fact that this is not someone who practiced any firm religious practice surrounding Cupid. Not that this matters fully, but it is important to think about how Christianity at this time was engaging with religions, beliefs and rituals they deemed as “pagan”.

Following in Isidore’s footsteps is Theodulf of Orléans, another theologian. He wrote a piece called “De libris quos legere solebam” or “About the books that I was accustomed to read” where he digs into all the popular pieces of poetry and explores more Christian moral aspects of it. One poet is Ovid, and his Metamorphosis, whose piece on Apollo and Daphne – heavily featuring Eros, or Cupid – is given particular attention.

So, Apollo and Daphne. Daphne was a woman who followed Artemis, Apollo’s sister and the goddess known as the virgin. She, and her followers, pledged to never marry and to remain celibate, forgoing all relationships of that kind with men. One day, Eros/Cupid is messing about with his archery and Apollo decides to be very Apollo about the whole thing and chastises him, teasing him about looking uncoordinated and unable to properly do archery.

Eros takes revenge by shooting Apollo with a love arrow to make him fall in love with Daphne. He also solidifies his plan by shooting Daphne with a lead arrow, which makes her hate rather than love. Apollo expresses his love for Daphne, and she rebukes him. But Apollo doesn’t like that, and chases Daphne. She keeps running away from him, and when Eros tries to make it so Apollo gets closer, Daphne shouts to ask the earth to swallow her up. The earth does so, and she becomes a laurel tree.

This particular story of Eros/Cupid is what occupies a lot of Theodulf’s mind when it comes to his interpretation of Cupid, and it’s a kind of fair one; Cupid doesn’t exactly come off well. But that’s to be expected when it comes to Greek and Roman mythology – the gods and goddesses in that world are always up to no good.

In Theodulf’s “De libris”, he writes of Cupid:

The demon of fornication is terrible and wicked, it drags
Wretches down to the brutal purgatory of loose living.
It is prompt to deceive and always ready to do harm,
Since it has the devil’s force, resources and experience at
Its command.

These different Christian readings breath a different interpretation to the mythology. Where a god of love was once present, now a demon of fornication stands. The story remains the same, but the understanding of what a god does, or how they behave, has shifted. And other aspects of society have changed as well, including what is considered moral and what is not. Shifts in religion over time also contributes to different understandings and interpretations – Theodulf and Isadore are both Christian and interpreting Greek myths through a Christian moral lens.

Notably, their issue is about the apparent sexuality, not about Apollo’s rape attempt and sexual assault on Daphne. But again, the timing of their writing means that violence against women was not their top priority.

But I think this view of Cupid as monster, as evil devil, helps to really paint how different interpretations of the same myth can completely change the way the same figure can be viewed. Whether Cupid is the cute god of love we recognise, or a monstrous demon of fornication, is probably up to you and your interpretation. But thinking of Valentine’s Day as a day of celebrating demons of love is actually pretty fun to think about.

Cosplay - Defined

For those new around here, I do other things than occasional blog posts about the intersections of myth and pop culture. In fact, I’m working on a rather large research project at the moment which I’ve dubbed the project name as “Playing with My ‘Self’”. At its heart, it’s a deep anthropological analysis of cosplay in the United Kingdom – not only how people feel about it, but it’s interesting intricacies like how it can be subversive, or it’s complicated relationship to capitalism and consumerism.

But I think there’s an interesting conversation to be had with a really basic premise: what exactly is cosplay? And I don’t necessarily mean the history of how the term came to be – the story is easy to find and involves the cross-cultural interactions between the United States and Japan. What I mean is – how is cosplay different from other acts of dressing up?

When I first started to carve out the study here, I figured the differences between things like cosplay to re-enactors would be fairly easy to figure out, but I think that was my “insider” voice talking more than my “scholarly” voice. In anthropology, we have two terms to help to differentiate the different spheres: the emic (which is the understanding from the object of study) and the etic (which is the understanding from outside the object of study). My initial views on cosplay were definitely influenced by own emic voice – which is not always a bad thing, but definitely something to recognise as you begin a study.

But when I allow myself to be confused and complicated by the field – even my own field – I start to see how things can actually get a little weird. When it comes to “costume play” – where cosplay originates – there are actually quite a few different options, from traditional cosplay to historical re-enactors, to Nerdlesque performers, to drag, and even Halloween costumes. So how do I define these terms in my etic voice? How do we define the boundaries of cosplay?

The first way that the boundary seemed to be made was in the importance of place. Cosplay was always associated with fan conventions – the art of dressing as a figure important to that convention in order to show connection to the group dynamic of the fans present. By delineating by place, cosplay is easily separated from other forms of dress play because of its presence at the con. But cosplay has grown far beyond the realms of the convention. Cosplayers make a living taking photos in their cosplays, and sharing these online, rather than only saving their creations for the convention and nowhere else. So if we can’t keep cosplay as specifically for the convention, what else can we do.

Well, let’s look at the actual act of the various dress plays. I guess we could think of cosplay as being the dressing of a fictional character. People take this in a variety of ways. We have cosplays of human characters, as well as non-human characters. So the types of characters can’t help to differentiate. People also often cosplay as original characters, and even as not-fictional characters.

Re-enactors do a similar type of dress play. They dress as not-fictional characters, drawing from history to help to build their costume. In some ways, they also are dressed as their own original characters. Their careful craft means that they construct an identity for the nameless historical figures they come to represent – an idea of what their figure has done in their life, which reflects on their clothes and the way they carry their body.

Similarly, drag is a costumed construction of an original character. The characters may be over-exaggerated versions of socialised gender, but they are still characters that the performers embody. They consider more than just costume construction and life, but also consider the way the characters should move in the world. They think about their characters’ personalities, but also their history and the way they think about themselves, their relationship to society, and their understanding of their own body.

Nerdlesque also complicates things even more. Nerdlesque performances start with costumes that we may readily consider traditional cosplay – fictional characters from popular culture – but with a bit of a sexual tease. The point of the art of Nerdlesque is to tell the story of the character chosen through the movement of the body and the removal of the costume – therefore the story of the character should not be wholly present in just the costume, but must be present in the body and the movements of the body.

There is some similarities between Drag and Genderbending cosplays, to take this conversation even further. Both explore the social construction of gender, and what this means for both the separate characters and the performer themselves. And this can grow to other considerations as well, including the transgender and Nerdlesque. I talked about this briefly in my previous post on cosplay as subversion.

We see lots of lines being crossed in all sorts of ways. It can’t just be fictional characters, nor can it be based purely on location. It can’t be based on firm ideas of exact replication, due to the heavy presence of genderbending cosplays, but then that complicates differences in regards to gender representation, and what that means for the representation of self. And that starts to get us a little further away from the definition of cosplay, and into definitions of gender, sexuality and self that is not really what we’re hoping to talk about here.

So, how do we draw these definitional boundaries? How do scholars like myself, and those following such scholarship like yourself, draw our own understandings of where cosplay exists as apart of or a part from other dress plays?

Well, one thing we can do is look at how other people have drawn these boundaries. I am not the first academic to look at cosplay – there have been others, especially from different fields which may provide different understandings than just looking at anthropologists. This would require us to look at definitions and boundaries drawn by the etic voice – the scholarship which attempts to stand outside the world of cosplay. This is mostly what academics tend to do. In any conversation on a word and a definition done by academics, we start with waxing on and on about what other people have said. How have others defined the field, defined the term, defined the locations and types of study? We focus on these things, and we either choose one, or use these definitions to draw a new definition which will – we hope – become one of those ideas and terms and citations in someone else’s bit of waxing on definitions.

But let me suggest a different way. This is not a way that is inherently new in research in general, but one that may be useful to find and use far more often in research, as well as in our every day life. We let go of etic definitions and instead focus on the emic – focus on what it is that people just living their lives say about themselves.

What this means is that we allow others to define themselves and where they see their own field’s boundaries, and we abide by that. One of the interesting things that happens when we do this is we allow others to show us what they think cosplay is, and in that we also see debates between people on this. Maybe some think that sexy cosplay isn’t “real” cosplay, for example. Or maybe the way one does cosplay – like making your own costumes – is what triumphs the definition, which may rub people, primarily those who purchase their costumes, the wrong way. If we drew our own boundaries first, we may miss some of these different aspects of the field. For example, if I initially drew the boundaries of cosplay as that which is a representation of pop culture characters in as perfect a way as possible, then I would be ignoring the important presence of genderbending cosplays, or those who cosplay as nonfiction characters in popular culture.

But looking at a cosplayer as simply someone who defines themselves as a cosplayer, I allow my own definition to be fluid. Definitions, in my opinion, need to be fluid because things change. They change over time, they change within the field and during research itself, and it also changes as cosplay itself changes. Maybe if I started this research project in the 90s, the importance of place – of doing cosplay at cons – would be found to be paramount. But now, we see how cosplay has shifted to incorporate new locations and new types of cosplay.

So, lets state the question again: how do we define cosplay? Well, I don’t have an answer for you. But I do have something to say: cosplay is what cosplayers tell me it is. A cosplayer is someone who defines themselves as such. So, if you tell me you’re a cosplayer and tell me cosplay is, I’ll listen. And if someone tells me something else a bit different, I’ll listen to that, too.

So that all being said, I’m doing some more actual ethnography this year. Follow me on twitter for up-to-date info, or to DM me if I’m going to a similar con as you. If you are at any of them, let me know what you define cosplay as. I also have a few more cons coming up, so follow me on twitter so you know where I’m going to be and when, and to make sure you know all the info on the Playing With My Self project.

The Legend of Zelda: Cyclical Time in Myth and History

Transcript:

So. Let’s start with a review of the Zelda timeline. The timeline first made its official debut in the Hyrule Historia, and its been pretty controversial ever sense. The chronology starts with Skyward Sword, and splits at Ocarina of Time into three other timelines, where all the games have become situated. With the release of Breath of the Wild, fan discussions of the timeline started back up again – where does it fall on the timeline? And with that came the dissenting voices of those who hate the timeline and think it makes no sense. And those who want to tweak the timeline. I think almost all discussions about Zelda would almost always need to either start with the timeline, or be considerate of the timeline.

I’ve had my own thoughts on the timeline, which I’ve summed up in a brief discussion in a blog post. I’ll mention the blog post more a little later on, but if you’re interested in reading more I’ll link it here. But I think there’s something really interesting in the timeline, and something we can dig into in this video. What’s really interesting in this timeline is the sheer fact that the time line is a linear chronology of cyclical conceptions and experiences.

Mythologies, as well as other forms of storytelling around the world, frequently have the combination of cyclical time told in the comfortable linear format. Probably the most prominent version of this would be Hindu mythology. Hindu conceptions of the world is broken up into different world eons, with the last being the ultimate destruction of the world. Once the world is destroyed, it is reborn and the cycle of the world begins again. Time remains cyclical, in a constant rhythm of destruction and rebirth, while the stories themselves are still constructed in some type of linear fashion – each event thought to be one after the other. But that these events can be re-experienced, leading to the death of the world once again.

For Zelda, the interweaving nature of myth, time and history is made really apparent in the Historia’s timeline. But this isn’t apparent in the timeline itself – it’s apparent in one of the paragraphs preceding the timeline under the title “Weaving History”.

“This chronical merely collects information that is believed to be true at this time, and there are many obscured and unanswered secrets that still lie within the tale. As the stories and storytellers of Hyrule change, so, too, does its history. Hyrule’s history is a continuously woven tapestry of events. Changes that seem inconsequential, disregarded without even a shrug, could evolve at some point to hatch new legends and, perhaps, change this tapestry of history itself.”

This paragraph reveals a lot about how the makers of Zelda, especially those who put together the Historia and its timeline, view the intersections between history and mythology, which isn’t all that different from other understandings in the physical non-video game world, as well.

Our first point on this we’ll pick up on is the line “As the stories and storytellers of Hyrule change, so, too, does its history.” This may seem a bit strange, especially to some. But history is a story, as much of one as any other. There are multiple versions of history – different tales that, while all about the same event may seem drastically different from one another. Sometimes, these stories are structured around artefacts or documents that we find, but ultimately these stories are interpretations and interpretations are subjective.

One of my favourite illustrations of his point is an article by Horace Miner called Body Ritual Among the Nacirema. The article mimics archaeology and anthropological studies based on artefacts and aspects of a culture that we find by looking at every day life in the United States, but framing it in slightly off ways. It’s always a great teaching article for introduction to anthropology type courses, mostly because it helps to illustrate how even the big names of scholars we’re studying might not always get things right, or may have their own subjective understanding that doesn’t necessarily match up to the students’ understandings or even those of the people we’re talking about.

History is a story, one that changes when we hear new stories and new perspectives. This is something that hit quite strongly in 2020 and 2021, though had been building prior to that for quite some time. Suddenly, the voices of those whose versions of the story had been pushed to the side and marginalised became more apparent and more widely told. And white society had a sudden change of history – which some accepted and are actively working to rewire in their own conceptions, and which some are rejecting and hiding from. But either way, the stories have changed history.

In my blog post on the Legend of Zelda as legend, I talked about how the different versions of Link could potentially be different versions of the same story, told at different times and by different people. This is why so many elements of the story are the same through each telling, but with differences that are telling for not only location but time and other elements of history such as wars. If we are to understand the Legend of Zelda from this perspective, rather than a structured timeline, then we understand the shifting nature of myth and legend through the experience of history. History impacts mythology, and mythology and storytelling impacts history.

The connections between myth and history is very common and present throughout most to all understandings of mythology and history and storytelling. In fact, in some early conceptions of mythology, they believed that people told myths as a form of their own understanding of history. This is often found in ideas like creation myths: how the world was created and when, as well as the history of the particular peoples telling the myths. Many scholars will talk about how myth can function as history in these particular ways and in more complex ways, such as Mircea Eliade and Max Muller, for example. But what is important to remember is how the reverse is also true: not only is myth able to function as history, but history can function as mythology. And this intermingling really helps to demonstrate how entirely enmeshed the whole thing is: myth and history are not two separate things that occasionally get mixed up by well-meaning but incorrect groups in the jungle – it’s an intricate dance that is played out between two incredibly similar aspects that only at times differentiate when the culture deems it necessary to differentiate.

I can’t believe I’m saying this, but… this is why the timeline is actually kinda cool. Not because of the Zelda timeline making any kind of practical sense at all, but because it points out this intermingling of the two aspects in a really clear and beautiful way that impacts the story-experience of a series of games. It also helps to give the development team an easy out when they craft a game that doesn’t really seem to fit. It’s not that development team made a mistake by not following their own canon – this new myth and story has simply changed the history and the way we understand the history.

Bringing it back to cyclical history specifically, we see the connections between cyclical time and mythology in the construction of the basis of the games. In every game, it is a reincarnation of Link, Zelda and Ganon that is being played out – the same soul of the characters being reborn over and over, and therefore replayed over and over in each iteration of the game.

But it is not just the characters who are reincarnated in cyclical forms. Bringing us back to the conception of cyclical time in the manifestation of world eras, as we talked about in Hindu mythology, there are similar cycles of world creation and destruction in Hyrule. Windwaker, for example, shows a Hyrule that was drowned in a flood (destruction) and then renewed in a version of Hyrule that is on islands (rebirth). We see a destruction of Hyrule in the past flashbacks of Breath of the Wild, and though the land the is not destroyed as it was in Windwaker, the kingdom was destroyed and then reborn through the actions taken in the game.

Even though each game is technically showing a linear aspect of time, the placement of the games in their relationship to one another automatically sees Hylian history on a cycle of death and destruction, to rebirth – in all its aspects of time.

Hylian myth is also quite cyclical, and inherently tied to the history of Hyrule. The myth of world creation, for example, is built into the physical history of the world through the presence of goddess statues and even the idea of the Triforce as being a present force in the world. The world is constantly marked by its mythic history – with the goddesses who flooded the world before Windwaker, to the Twilight scarred world in Twilight Princess.

The characters are also tied to the world’s history and myths. Most of the games start with a reminder of the way things work: the story of the legendary hero who came to save the world from the darkness, whether they were successful or not, is often mentioned. And then the story is re-lived through the story of the game.

But the words in the Hyrule Historia is important to remember: “As the stories and storytellers of Hyrule change, so, too, does its history.” The stories being crafted are from the developers, and as such aspects of the history can change over time. The introduction of the goddess Hylia into the world’s history and mythology is an important change that started around the introduction of Skyward Sword and seemed to be the prevailing mythology in Breath of the Wild. But there’s another aspect to the stories and storytellers that is more than just the developer.

The greatest storyteller is the player. As the player engages in the world, and crafts their own stories and experiences in Hyrule, the history of the world changes. The player has agency in the world, and the experiences of Hyrule’s history and mythology is therefore changed as well.

So… the Zelda timeline. I think it’s clear I’m not the happiest with it, but that’s because my experience of the games – the stories I’ve told and the stories I’ve written into the landscape of Hyrule – don’t line up with that history. My stories have changed the history and the landscape of the world. Your stories do the same. Maybe your history of Hyrule is different than mine. But that’s how history and mythology work – they change as our stories change. Because not only do we have agency in the worlds we live in – whether they are the physical worlds outside your house, the virtual worlds of Hyrule – but ultimately, our stories change the world because our stories have power. And I’d love to see your history and your mythology and see how it changes.