Vivian Asimos's Blog: Incidental Mythology, page 2

Intelligence and Taskmaster

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Taskmaster is a UK panel show unlike most other UK panel shows. If you’ve never seen one of their panel shows before, this may not be the best start, but it’s definitely up there among the best. The original idea of panel shows was to have a rotating cast of guests, with maybe only one or two fixtures, who then discuss on a particular topic. News-based panel shows, like Have I Got News For You, has two fixtures on each side of the desk, but guests to join and also guest hosts. Mock the Week had a rotating cast of guests joining the primary host Dara O Briain.

Taskmaster is slightly different because instead of each episode having a different cast, the rotations only happen once a series. Each series, we are given our five contestants and they stay the same until the end. Throughout that time, we get to know the ones we didn’t know as well, and also see new and different sides to the ones who were once familiar to us. Also, unlike a lot of other panel shows, much of Taskmaster is pre-recorded.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s talk about what Taskmaster actually is. Each series, five contestants compete in a series of strange and interesting tasks to gain points based on the successes or failures of the tasks, or the appeasement of the Taskmaster. The Taskmaster is comedian Greg Davies - a very tall, imposing figure who uses his form and presence to instil the idea of the “Taskmaster” as one who controls and pulls puppet strings. The idea that contestants do these various tasks set by and to appease the Taskmaster is the primary story of the show.

Contestants do their tasks way before filming the actual panel part of the show. During filming, the contestants sit on a stage and watch their performances together, and only at that point do they realise how well or how poorly they did.

The tasks themselves are quite varied. One may be something as silly as needing to do the most complete change possible during the time it takes to take an elevator. Others, get several dogs to sit on a spot all at the same time. Sometimes, they have to solve riddles to find something, or put together a creative cinematic sequence. Tasks are all quite different from one another, and varied in their approach.

This the primary reason why the Taskmaster panel show is quite different than what has come before. The structure of it is all so different, and yet also, strangely, familiar.

Today, I want to talk about Taskmaster, but most notably, I want to discuss it’s relationship to what we think of as “the Intellectual”. I like when shows and people subvert the social expectation. I like when things do what isn’t necessarily expected. Taskmaster does this in representations of intelligence and cleverness.

Taskmaster, as a show, allows people to approach the same problem in a variety of ways. Probably the best example of this was the task where contestants had to discover what was inside a locked briefcase, during the Champion of Champions game. Bob Mortimer looks around the room for the answer, Katherine Ryan counted rice for the answer, Josh Widdicomb solved the complicated math equation to reach the answer, Rob Beckett simply guessed the answer, and Noel Fielding just smashed the case open. Each of the five contestants approached a physical task in such uniquely different ways that reflected each of their personalities, approaches, and understanding of problem solving. And because the points were based on how fast they could determine the answer, Noel ended up actually winning that one. Maybe some would think simply smashing a case for the answer isn’t very clever, at least not as clever as figuring out the equations on the nearby chalkboard, and yet it ended up being the best answer in terms of speed.

I think the briefcase task is probably the best example of what makes Taskmaster an interesting show. It allows a fluidity to contestants and their creative problem solving, and there is typically no direct single answer or solution. Tasks and solutions are set up purposefully to allow a diversity of answers or approaches, meaning that the diversity of ways that contestants think is not only displayed, but also celebrated.

In fact, it is often the solutions most unique and out of the box that do the best, or at least are the most memorable for the audience. These contestants, often thinking of solutions that others have not, can come from different types of people, and not just those who are traditionally thought of as “intelligent.”

Intelligence, typically in Western society, is tied to formal education. I have a PhD, and the amount of times people have just assumed this means I’m intelligent is rather high. When, in reality, I have met many people on tenure tracks who are not as intelligent as others who have never even graduated high school.

Taskmaster is the best demonstration of the variety of ways people can be intelligent and show off their cleverness, regardless of their background. The idea of Taskmaster, the concept of a show giving tasks to contestants and judging their abilities, sounds like one which would privilege levels of traditional intelligence, either that, or it would make this traditional intelligence entirely unimportant. The truth of Taskmaster is that both of these are happening simultaneously.

There are some “typically” intelligent figures who have come on the show. Richard Osman, for example, had moments of his ways of thinking serving him well, and others where it didn’t. Richard Osman did not win his season. In fact, he ended up in third place, with both John Richardson and Katherine Ryan beating him out. However, he demonstrated the kind of way he thinks in the very first recorded task of the season. The contestants were tasked with putting three exercise balls on the mat at the top of the hill. While others struggled to move the balls up the hill, Richard went up to the hill, took the mat, and brought that down. However, when tasked to make a bridge, he didn’t do as well.

But perhaps the best example of a typically considered intelligent person doing poorly on Taskmaster is Victoria Coren Mitchell. Victoria is a well known writer and presenter, the daughter of journalists, and her brother is a journalist. She has spoken about her time at Oxford, and gets to live out her persona of a stereotypical nerd on her show Only Connect.

But Victoria did famously poorly on Taskmaster. She ended in last place on her season, and by quite a large margin. In fact, on one task where she was asked to make a popcorn necklace and then maybe, or maybe not, ring a bell, she lost five points.

Her prize tasks showed off the kind of person she is. In the first prize task, contestants were asked to bring in the most awesome square, where she brought the Triple Word Score square from Scrabble. However, her continued failure to do well at some tasks demonstrates that just because one has a more typical level of intelligence, does not necessarily mean that they would beat out others when given tasks which even them out.

I think that’s one thing Taskmaster does quite well - tasks vary in type and approach. This means that there is no singular way of thinking which prevails throughout the show. Rather, its a variety of approaches and considerations which end up being praised. Those who do well throughout the entire series are typically those who demonstrate a flexibility and varied approach themselves, though aside from Dara O Briain there are few who fit in this category.

That being said, when Victoria Coren Mitchell was given a task which was suited to her way of thinking, she blew it out the water. Perhaps one of the most famous tasks from her season was a team task, where the contestants were asked to solve a riddle through walkie-talkie communication, where each contestant had a different element of the riddle. In order to even figure out what the riddle was, they had to get people in different rooms to do different things and then put all the puzzles and pieces together.

Victoria, however, simply didn’t need her other half. Despite not having half of the code, she was still able to decipher the riddle and then solve it, all while her partner Alan Davies sat back in a Charlie Chaplin hat.

Different forms of tasks, with different requirements and constraints, means that participants have different chances to show of a variety of ways in which they can excel. Solving a puzzle or a riddle was well suited to Victoria, but terrible for the group of three who took several hours to get to the same solution.

Other tasks are more creative tasks, where participants are asked to make a movie featuring a particular item, or maybe film a movie only using a camera on a pair of wellies. These types of tasks allow more creative types to flourish and show off their skills. Active tasks which require more physical dexterity or skill, such as throwing a potato in a hole in one attempt. However, many of these tasks also have extra dimensions to them, allowing individuals to find multiple types of solutions. For example, for the potato one, contestants were not allowed to touch the red green, so some rolled up the green using a stick - meaning that not all the solution was required to use physical dexterity.

Taskmaster allowing a variety of solutions to one task means that those who would typically not do well in traditional settings for intelligence - like school - could still flourish. This is because the outcome may not necessarily be the only thing that is judged.

Let’s look at that briefcase example again to explain. While every contestant needed to have the same answer - frozen peas - the answer was only the thing that stopped the task. The actual solution was not the answer, but rather the steps taken to get there.

Rhod Gilbert, in season seven, was perhaps the most varied in his approaches. His ADHD brain meant that he saw tasks in often very different ways, and approached things differently than his peers. This would, often, upset his teammates, but sometimes it also worked in his favour. His creative ways of thinking would benefit him, even when he didn’t necessarily expect it.

In a challenge where contestants were told to tie themselves up so well that the winner would be the longest Alex took to untie, an alarm would go off which sounded for a second task, where contestants had to change clothes very quickly. This meant that most of the contestants had to quickly untie themselves, and then change, and then retie themselves, throwing off the flow of their task.

Rhod, on the other hand, had taken a different approach to the task. Choosing to tie up Alex solved the solution of needing Alex to take a long time. This also meant that the interruption wasn’t actually a problem for him - even though he hadn’t known this interruption would happen.

Now, one word on the actual making of the show before I completely let this drop. Much of the emotional experiences of the various successes and failures on the show, where we either root for or root against certain contestants, is purely based on editing. Because all the tasks are already finished and filmed by the time they are being judged and presented, the production team has the ability to craft important and interesting stories for each of our contestants. While sometimes Greg may judge some contestants differently than production may have expected, or at least they don’t have that predetermined idea, much of the solutions are already known, for example for time-based solutions. If someone was the fastest for a fastest wins challenge, there’s not much difference that can be made. This means that editing teams arrange the tasks in a different order than they were filmed in order to make the most compelling story for the season.

This is important, because one of the reasons why Victoria’s amazing riddle solve was so great was that we had already had a few episodes were Victoria was doing poorly. We saw how she was floundering and that her way of thinking and approaching the world wasn’t being showcased. And then she gets given that riddle task and blows it out of the water, showcasing just how wonderfully intelligent she is. If this task had happened as the very first one of the season, I don’t know if people would have loved it quite as much as they have. But seeing how she has been doing, and then having that contrasted with such a wonderful display, the audience was on their feet cheering for her, doing something we all would have expected her to be able to do quite well. But because she was finally doing this, we cheered even harder.

This can also work against contestants, giving us the sudden great cheering roar, to then have it all taken away again suddenly. This happened to Joe Wilkinson on his amazing potato throw - where after him doing famously poorly throughout the season we cheer for his amazing victory, only for it to be taken away and return back to the position we recognise.

As someone who spent a lot of time in higher education, I saw how much it only recognised and admired one to two ways of thinking and learning. I was lucky I fit that category. There are so many intelligent and amazing people out there who think differently than those ways, or learn differently, and therefore they struggle in school. Our society likes us to think that these people are dumb. But Taskmaster helps to show us that people are not dumb just because they didn’t finish traditional schooling. Mae Martin, the winner of series 15, never graduated high school. That doesn’t make them dumb, just that they weren’t suited to that, nor was their life in a place to make that something that was possible. And yet they won Taskmaster, allowing them to show off other ways they think, move and approach problem solving in new, unique and intelligent ways.

I’m not sure if it’s meant to be a critique on this type of intellectual shade in society, but that’s how I see it. I think Taskmaster shows us how different we all are, in ways that we approach the same problem, or different avenues we may take to come to the same place, but that in all of that, we are all, deep down, intelligent and capable in our own ways.

Self-Mythology in Win or Lose

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Pixar’s new miniseries Win or Lose focuses on a co-ed middle school softball team called the Pickles. Each episode covers the same week period of time leading up to the championship game, with the audience being able to see this week from a different character’s perspective.

Obviously, Win or Lose is a show about perception - both personal perception and the perception of others. The show demonstrates how things are never incredibly clear - the direct actions or personal views of one person does not necessarily resonate to the point of being seen and interpreted the same way by others. But it also does not necessarily make the action inherently bad - it’s just different.

I would have described this series as consisting of several intersecting stories, but I think that makes it sound as if stories do not naturally intersect. Every action or decision I make has an impact on the way others are experiencing, interpreting or understanding their own stories and life. All of our stories are intersecting, even if we may not realise it.

What’s more interesting, I think, is that Win Or Lose demonstrates the process of Self-Mythologisation. We see how it happens, often why it happens, and the impact it has on our understandings of both self and the world around us.

Self-Mythology is a very human act, where we habitually tell stories about ourselves where we are centered in the narrative. In other words, Self-Mythologsing is the creation of a narrative that makes us our own heroes and protagonists. This can be in more extreme forms, where I personally see myself as a hero and the most important, or it can be more subtle, demonstrating simply our own perceptions and points of view. An individual’s self-mythology demonstrates their own perception of self, as well as how they perceive the influence and experiences of others.

Self-mythology is not necessarily a bad thing, nor is it inherently positive. It is simply a fact of human narratives, and the way our points of view paint our experiences so strongly. We are, as people, just stories at the end of the day, and it is through our stories that we construct ourselves, our experiences and connections with others, and also our understanding of both the physical and social worlds we inhabit.

I obviously spend a lot of time on this channel talking about storytelling, and particularly more cultural forms of storytelling like mythology, folklore and legends. And when we talk about these stories, we think of them as inherently social - and by social, I mean involving more than one person. But sociality, and socialisation, is not something that only happens when directly around other people. We are inherently affected by the social all the time, even when we close our doors and are, temporarily, alone.

Storytelling, and even our formal cultural forms of storytelling, do not necessitate a group of people to do it. Jay Mechling, a folklorist, has an article about Solo Folklore that I highly recommend. In it, he stresses that folklore is something which can be performed in a group of any size, whether it be large, two people, or even alone. In fact, Mechling goes on to talk about how folk events - whether they be storytelling or other connections to the folk group like cooking - happens in relativity to an observer, which can be the same as the person taking the action. Because when I do something, I’m not just doing it, I’m also observing that action taking place.

This is also how mythology, and more importantly for our discussion today, self-mythology, can be a one person show and still be mythology. The stories I tell about msyelf, even if they do not leave my own mind or my own room when I am alone, are still present, still observed, and still understood.

That all being said, when the story reaches a new audience - say someone finally observes that personal narrative I was telling - and suddenly the story can be perceived and understood differently than maybe it was from the previous audience.

This is what I particularly liked about Win or Lose - the differences that exist between the self-mythology of different characters. The way one sees the reality of a particular event can be different to the other. While these two realities may seem unable to exist at the same time, I think it still can due to the ways we understand ourselves and our experiences.

We see the various characters’ own self-mythology in the form of cartoon paintings of self and world in a different way. Their inner thoughts and understandings of self are drawn to a larger and more dramatic effect. For anxious Laurie, for example, her anxiety becomes mentally manifest as “Sweaty” - a blob which feeds on and explores Laurie’s mental state.

Let’s use, as an example, the dichotomy of Vanessa and Rochelle. Rochelle is Vanessa’s daughter, and so their stories intersect consistently, and highly impact the experiences of the other in a way that is only comparable to Laurie and the Coach, who are the other child/parent pairing.

We met Rochelle first. She’s the daughter of a single mom who takes on a lot of the stress of the home environment. Her own personal viewpoint is as an adult businesswoman, because of her focus on needing money to support her family, as well as the very adult pressures she feels due to her position in the family. Unlike the other members of the team, Rochelle has to raise the money for her involvement in the team herself. We see her struggle with this, while also not sharing the experiences of it with her mother, when the price for joining the team goes up.

We see Rochelle’s daily activities and her intense focus on achieving. She goes around school as both a kid, and as her adult businesswoman, works the concession stand to make extra money, and significantly helps her mother with household responsibilities to help out due to her mother’s multiple jobs.

In a morning montage, we see Rochelle care for her mother who is struggling in the morning. We see her physically brush her mother’s teeth to help make her mother get out of bed and ready for the day.

However, when we see Vanessa’s point of view, Rochelle’s help is nowhere present in her own morning montage. Instead, it’s Vanessa’s strength and resilience as a single mother that pushes her through, and, more importantly for Vanessa, it’s the support and love of her social media followers.

One of Vanessa’s jobs is working as an influencer. We see her own support and coping mechanism physically manifest in the form of floating hearts to represent her various likes and followers. For Vanessa, it is through the support of her online community of other single moms, as well as her own intense need to just get on it things, that makes her get up and ready in the morning.

These two differnet stories of what the morning looks like may seem contrary to one another. It may seem like one person is right and the other is wrong. But that is not necessarily the case. Both of these can be true simultaneously. While Vanessa may have grown unaware of the various help and support her daughter does around the house, Rochelle also is unaware often of the true life and struggle her mother goes through. Rochelle often sees herself as the responsible one, but we frequently see Vanessa standing up to take on responsibilities for her daughter and her family, just in ways that Rochelle does not see.

In fact, social media itself is a large disconnect for the two. Rochelle does not follow her mother’s account, and therefore only sees an occasional post. She thinks Vanessa only posts positive things, skewing the perspective on what their life is like. However, when we see Vanessa, we see how often she turns to her followers for support, discussing openly the struggles and difficulties she faces.

And, again, there is no side that is inherently wrong. Vanessa does post good things, and her perspective and storytelling on the matter may make it seem like she’s skewing things differently than Rochelle would like. But that is also Vanessa’s reality, both the high and the lows. In fact, Rochelle’s perspective on the hidden nature of Vanessa’s social media comes from Rochelle’s own use of multiple accounts to hide and change her story depending on location and aspect. Therefore, it would track that she would assume the same of Vanessa.

The group dynamic of the series, and the emphasis on their intersecting stories, helps to really push the importance of perception, and the impact our mythologising has on our understanding of both ourselves and others. We are constantly presented with these differences, often given back to back.

The series released two episodes at a time, often grouping them together to present juxtaposed narratives. Vanessa and Rochelle, for example, were released at the same time. This meant that we are more aware of the differences their narratives presented, and we remember where each character is at similar time-frames, knowing what may or may not be coming next.

The self-mythologising in Win or Lose is primarily driven by the inner characterisations, the coping mechanisms in which each character sees themselves in certain facets in order to better approach themselves or the world. Laurie’s friend Sweaty demonstrates her own self-mythologising as being under the thumb of a larger, more fierce-some foe who frames themselves as a friend. The umpire and teacher, Frank, imagines himself in armour, inspired by his love of fantasy novels. Taylor and Yuwin reveal inner children who they keep shielded from the world.

This separation of inner and outer selves is a good demonstration of how we tell our stories and our experiences in different ways depending on the setting. The way we hold our inner selves is slightly different to the way we tell our stories when in other company. Again, this is not in a negative way, it’s just a human way. The way Taylor and Yuwin hide their inner selves is incredibly similar to the ways we hide aspects of ourselves from different parts of society at different times.

During the first bits of lockdown, back in March and April of 2020, I was finishing up teaching at my university. Obviuosly, I had finish out my seminars online, from home, like most teachers and pretty much everyone else. I remember coming out of my first seminar, and my husband commented “I’ve never heard your teaching voice before”. It made me realise how I inherently spoke differently when teaching in front of a class compared to when I was just hanging out at home. This change in my presentation of self wasn’t anything conscious, but something that we all inherently do.

This is because the things we think of as “ourselves” are inherently performances for other people, and, yes, that includes ourselves as well. Our understanding of what this self is is impacted by our history, our bodies, our own experiences and our interactions with different other social world and beings.

Win or Lose shows individuals’ inner selves as something that can directly interact, deal with problems, and impact the world, even though it is not something that is actually physically manifest. Lori’s anxiety sweaty ball, for example, physically weighs her down, pushing her, moving things, and other aspects of world impact. Despite this, we all know, including Lori, that Sweaty isn’t actually impacting the world, but it’s impacting Lori and the way that she navigates both herself and the world she interacts with. It’s her social worlds, but one she doesn’t reveal to others.

Rochelle’s business woman persona is one which paints how she views herself, but also how she presents herself to others. Whenever she needs to buck up and act more adult, this is how she paints herself. Therefore, the way she presents herself to others is part of her self-mythologising, but is also presented as a way to navigate her own presentation to others to achieve what needs achieving.

Taylor and Yuwin’s hidden inner children, on the other hand, were selves which were hidden and nurtured away from prying eyes. These are the selves only reserved to show particular people, like the way that I am only a particular kind of person with my husband, and not in front of anyone else.

I think what I love most about Win or Lose is also that not every member of the team gets their own episode. There are glimpses of other people, who also get different perspectives when shown from other people’s view points. My favourite example of this is Tom, the tall first baseman for the Pickles. We get different glimpses of him throughout the series. In one, he’s a threat to Yuwin’s relationship to Taylor. But for Taylor, she seems to infer that there is something of concern happening to Tom’s brother. He also seemingly is stressed from his family life, turning to Rochelle and unethical means to achieve academically, and expressing to Vanessa that, despite her poking into Rochelle’s private life, that he wishes she was his mother.

Despite this glimpses, we never get a full episode on Tom. We don’t see his inner self, or his struggles. We don’t hear his self-mythology, but through the experience of the show, we learn that this still exists, even if we don’t see it.

Win or Lose helps to paint a picture about how storytelling is all about perspective, and how a difference in perspective shifts narratives and understandings. All stories are impacted by the narrator and the experiences they have and currently are facing. Win or Lose helps to paint the way that self-mythologising happens at all times, and how this perspective also impacts our views and the stories we tell of ourselves and others.

One of the amazing things about mythology is that sometimes we get the same story but told from a different perspective, and because of that it feels so massively different. Because this is what the reality of life is - that our stories and our histories all look so different when only looked at from a slightly different person who may not even be massively involved.

So each of our character’s self-mythologising is just that - their own stories, their own perspective, not just on the events happening around them but, more importantly, of themselves. The same week can be so different depending on whose story of the week we’re listening to. This also means that each person’s narrative should be given importance, because each is painting the story, the event, the world, and themselves, in a unique way.

Psych and the Camp Detective

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Psych is one of my favourite shows. Its one of those shows stands out vaguely in its premise, and mostly in its presentation. Psych aired on the USA Network in 2006, around the time that many police procedurals, buddy cop shows, and other detective shows were proliferating. Shows like House, Monk, and the Mentalist were also incredibly popular shows in a similar genre. Where Psych differentiated itself was in its presentation of the genre, it’s writing leaning far into the comedy to present characters, crimes, and premises as, frankly, absurd.

Psych’s main character, Shawn Spencer, has been trained to be an incredible detective from a young age from his father who was a well respected and skilled homicide detective. When his observational skills, which he uses to earn a bit of money calling in anonymous tips, begins to get him in trouble, he claims to be a psychic to explain his ability to quickly and efficiently solve crimes.

Psych, therefore, is a series of lies as a premise. It forces the primary characters to solve crimes in silly ways, and present their evidence in even more absurd fashions. Absurdity, exaggeration, and humour is at the core of Psych. I would argue that this is a presentation of camp, and the show utilises camp to introduce writing that is, at the same time, nuanced, subversive and also flips aspects of a familiar genre to present it in new and interesting ways.

Psych ultimately plays with tropes of the detective genre. It has many familiar elements, such as the group reveal in which all suspects are gathered and the detective unveils the secrets of each one, leading to the culprit. The detective has superior deductive reasoning or observation skills, which often puts them as somehow above the other characters and figures in the story. The detective also has a friend or assistant who accompanies them, sometimes offering specialist advice and sometimes simply being the sounding board or the voice of the audience.

Psych has all of these features, though often in more camp forms. Most finales of episodes include the group reveal, though often in a much more absurd and over the top way, playing with the idea that Shawn is supposed to be pretending to be a psychic. His observation skills are highlighted to the audience so they know, but his act of observing, and his communication of these, are presented as absurd. In relation to other observers, his skill is presented as far superior, which is what led to his position of pretending to be a psychic. His friend and companion, Burton Guster, is his childhood friend whose in on the lie. He’s a pharmaceutical sales rep with a skilled nose, who is able to give expert advice on what he knows, stands in for the audience in places, and gives Shawn a confidedant. The relatinoship between the two, however, also plays with the way others see or rumour more classic duos, like Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. Their relationship is a bromance that soemtimes borders on actual romance, allowing also the dynamics between them to live in the same absurdity as the rest of the show.

Psych utilises archetypes of characters as well, not just genre archetypes, which are also played for artifice. Lassiter plays the harsh and brash, yet ultimately inferior detective. Jules is the attractive female, rookie detective. The primary detective figure is outside social structure, something important to the genre that I’ve talked about before, but here it is done on purpose. He’s made to be childish and sometimes off putting, rather than being ostricised for any social reasons. For example, Poirot is outside social structure due to being a foreign refugee. Sherlock Holmes is clearly neurodivergent and potentially asexual. Shawn, on the other hand, fits most social standings but plays himself outside of them through his own doing.

I keep mentioning the idea of the show being “camp”, but maybe lets talk about what exactly that means. Andy Medhurst wrote that “[t]rying to define Camp is like attempting to sit in the corner of a circular room. It can’t be done, which only adds to teh quixotic appeal of the attempt”. Camp, therefore, is something that eludes very strict or obvious definitions. In many ways, its fits the anecdotal definition of pornography: “I’ll know it when I see it” definition.

But obviously, this isn’t going to suit the purposes here, we need something to grab onto to decide whether Psych is actually camp. Susan Sontag was one of the first to academically attempt to parcel out what camp is and isn’t. There are a few problems with her approach, however. In her discussion of camp, she differentiated betwen the artifice and the authentic. Authenticity was described as “high camp” while artifice was was of a lower taste. In fact, this type of high culture/low culture, good taste/bad taste type of discussion was the primary backbone of her work, pitting some aspects of culture against others.

I’m not a big fan of this, and not just because I have a love for things that are considered terrible taste. If we think about taste through a more sociological lens, we can see that things are a lot more complicated. Taste is often something that is inherently tied to other social conditions, such as economic class, gender, and even race, because these things are inherently tied to social order - what is considered a lower social order is inherently connected to that which is of lower taste. Pierre Bourdieu described taste as an “acquired disposition” - it is not something which is inherently given to someone as a gift or as a natural element, but rather something that is constructed through the various systems of social order.

However, thinking of this kind of social order is actually important in thinking about camp. Camp works as a system of destabilisation, one which collapses the typical distinctions of object and subject until they become one another. Put in less academic terms, camp pushes boundaries and definitions, forcing us to think of things that have typical boundaries between them as no longer having those boundaries. Camp plays with expectation and result, forcing the viewer to question their expectations and why they had them to begin with.

So let’s look at it without Psych for a second. We can think of three primary aspects of camp that I think may lead to recognising it when we see it, or to defining it, whichever you may wish to do. These elements are: exaggeration, artifice, and extremity. Aspects of the subject of the camp is exaggerated, made to feel way less authentic, and given a level of extreme that causes the viewer to question the reality of what they are seeing, and therefore to push our own expectations.

Camp is typically used to describe elements of predominately gay male culture, and often that which is also primarily white. Old school drag shows, for example, is a camp demonstration of femininity. By presenting the absurd female from the point of view male gayness, it creates a strange version of femininity which exists on the boundaries. Though, according to some scholars, this form of drag specifically may help to reinforce gendered hierarchies - but maybe that’s a topic for a different day.

Anyway, the almost exclusive holding of camp as one for white gay men has meant that other performances of camp have long gone unstudied. One recent study of camp helped to change this by centring the discussion on Dolly Parton - who is an example of camp from women. Her presentation of typical femininity is done to such an exaggerated extreme that we often separate these aspects of her as something that is so obviously false as to almost become meaningless. Therefore, aspects of the femininity which often come to define women, have defined Dolly Parton to such an extent that it almost becomes silly to continue to do so. Because of course the big hair and big boobs are there - its Dolly. So what else do you have to say?

Psych, I believe, is camp as is presented from the point of view of straight men. I know some people may have a problem with camp, something so long associated with gay culture, being presented as something possible to have a straight angle, but I think it’s important to see what happens with camp in these new social hands. As straight drag queen Maddy Morphosis has said, we get to see the spectrum of queer, but there is also a spectrum of straight which is often not allowed in straight people - particularly of straight men. Straight men are often told exactly what straight maleness looks like, and are forbidden from straying from that unless they are not straight. As a show, Psych utilises the familiarity of a genre and its archetypes to create over the top writing and acting to demonstrate what camp looks like from the perspective of straight masculinity.

Shawn Spencer embodies the two primary character archetypes: the detective, and the playboy. As a detective, his absurdity in the position creates a mockery of typical police work, the police force, and also what it means to be a genius. As he points out in the pilot episode, the facade of Shawn as a psychic is perfect, because the only way to prove that he is not a psychic is for him to say he’s not. There is no other way to prove it. And therefore, Shawn’s role as psychic also plays with our social understanding of truth, evidence, and what is possible in our reality - all of which are incredibly important elements to stay firm in a mystery story.

Shawn’s archetype as the playboy is one that morphs and finds solid grounding as the show continues, though always present from the pilot episode. Shawn directly plays with his role of attractive masculine playboy by playing with the expectations of what this may look like. He does not remain strictly firm in his heterosexuality, but allows the same flowing of attraction and admiration to be present on many people, regardless of gender. In fact, the two primary masculine figures - Shawn and the oppposing police detective Lassiter - are both set up to be present to be the typical masculine heterosexual leads, but neither are played strictly so. While Shawn plays with his expectation of his sexuality, so much so that many fans believe Shawn to possibly be bi, Lassiter has been confirmed canonically by the show’s creator as being pansexual. Therefore, the only figure that maintains a strong stereotypical straight masculine presentation is actually the only chracter who is canonically not straight.

If we can strictly define anything, it would be the show Psych itself as one that is probably best described as a show about artifice. The entire premise is based on lies and presentations of falsehood as reality, and this is how the show reads even to the audience. Everything is played to an absurd level - it is not meant to be serious or gritty or realistic. It’s meant to be funny and silly and ridiculous. While it has deeper episodes, even those have punchlines played for laughs in the middle of things too serious.

Psych’s camp is meant to question the dynamics of the detective genre, to consider the power dynamics at play and the ways that certain character types and archetypes are typically played. Psych’s absurdity also leads to a collapsing of some of the rooted structural necessities we have come to understand both in media and outside of media - like how knowledge is gained, and what can be both real and fake simultaneously. We question how knowledge is garnered and understood, and how layered lies can create a reality that is, perhaps, more real than what it was before the lies entered. As the theme song goes, I know you know that I’m not telling the truth, and yet the artifice of the situation remains in place, regardless.

I love Psych - perhaps because of its absurdity above all else. But despite its goofy presentation, it’s also a more quiet absurdity than one may think. It’s more subtle in its camp, focusing more on the premise to do the heavy lifting for it. And, maybe - just maybe - this is also why the show did not garner as much praise as its less campy counterparts like Monk. Because camp is meant to question the status quo, to show the problems with the mainstream society. And I think Psych did do this, and did this to a wonderful, and forever funny, extent.

Frieren, Grief, and Memorialisation

One of the disappointing parts of a story is when it ends. We can lay awake wondering what happens past the point of where we left it, but little is known for sure. We’re simply left wondering if “happily ever after” is truly the case.

I think this is why Frieren is so captivating as a show. Technically, the show is called “Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End” - allowing us to explore a story that begins at the end. And the idea of it all beginning at the end is the whole focus. Frieren is a story about grief, and loss. It’s about confronting the end, as we continue to move past “ever after”.

Frieren is an elf, blessed with a very long life. She joins up with a group of adventurers determined to take down the Demon King, whose demons are destroying villages and killing people as they destroy life around them. Frieren, Himmel, Eisen and Heiter together killed the Demon King.

And this is actually where the story starts. Fifty years after the defeat of the Demon King, Frieren has been spending her time travelling around and gathering spells. When she comes back to visit the capital, she finds Himmel very different to how she left him. He’s now old. As is everyone she travelled with. Her companions begin to die, and Frieren is faced with the realisation of a long life.

Much of Frieren as a show is about death and grief - not just Frieren herself, but all her new companions are also dealing with grief. For Frieren, she obviously is dealing with the loss of her companions. Fern, her foster father who was also Frieren’s companion Heiter. Their frontline fighter Stark lost his whole family in a demon attack on his village. Grief is centered in the story, constantly giving us characters who are grappling with grief in a variety of ways and understanding themsleves in the world in slightly different perspectives.

Frieren has her own issues with grief. Being an elf gifted with a long life, she had long seen herself as somehow outside the humans she interacted with. They were like house flies are to us - short lived and temporary. She even confessed as much to Himmel and the others before their parting after defeating the Demon King. Ten years to Himmel was a large percentage of his life. But ten years for Frieren was nothing. And yet, she reflects grief at not only the passing of her companions, but also on the decision to not have spent more energy to know them.

I have already done a video essay on grief. When talking about Spiritfarer, we discussed grief and some of the sociological appraoches tot he topic. I’ll review some of here, but not extensively. Historically, in Western academia, we have seen a growth of understanidng of grief - starting with something that was pathologised, and ending with something that is highly discussed. While we are newly approaching things with a more full lens, we still have a lot to learn about grief and the ways we experience it. In Spiritfarer, we focused on the “continuing bonds” theory of grief. There are still aspects of continuing bonds in Frieren, though it is focused much more on the process of memorialisation.

During the period of time where we pathologised grief, grief was something to move on from. It was supposed to be hidden, and quickly moved past. We are now, however, in what has been dubbed “spectacular grief” - the time period in which hidden grief is removed, and we are now free to discuss it. In fact, during “spectacular grief”, grief is not only free to be discussed, but is often discussed and takes over much of the conversation.

Frieren fits well in this period of spectacular grief. It pivots grief to be a primary theme, and we get front row seats to get to see and hear what grief looks and feels like.

While the sociology and anthropology of grief has a lot to learn and grow from its more problematic past, what it has shown us is that grief is not a simple process. Its not straightforward, nor proscribed. Someone may go through the five stages of grief, but another may not - and that does not make their grief any less than. It is simply different. Bereavement is not something which can be set up as something that we can just tick boxes off as they come and go. It’s not a diagnosis with a prognosis.

What we have learned through experiencing grief and studying grief, is that grief is something that is never finished. There’s a saying in anthropology that is often used: “constant state of becoming”. This is something you hear a lot, in a variety of spaces. And I think it encompasses grief. But what does it actually mean when we say this?

It means that we are cosntantly in a process of internalising the experience and making it become a part of us. It’s not a one step, or even one time, thing, but something that is continuous. We are never finished re-understanding, re-analysing, and re-personalising these experiences. Grief is not something you finish and complete, but rather something that comes back throughout your life, in new forms and new understandings.

In Frieren, grief and grieving is centered around memory. Frieren spends her time reflecting on her previous ten year journey, re-experiencing, re-analysing, and re-personalising her experiences. Fresh context gives her fresh understandings of her cmpanions, even those already passed. She also is able to reflect on how such a small amount of time impacted her life so drastically, even though she was unaware of such at the time.

Throughout the story of Frieren, she gathers new companions to join her. She starts with Fern, a mage she is tricked into taking on as an apprentice by Heiter before he dies. Her other companion, Eisen, who is also blessed with a longer life than humans though not as long as Frieren, had tried to train Stark, a fighter who is also a bit of a coward. The three begin to travel back up North, to an area near where the old Demon King’s castle still stands. She retraces her steps, coming back to villages, towns and cities she had visited so many decades before.

Not only is she tracing her way through the same path, but her ultimate goal is try and communicate with the dead. Therefore, the show, and Frieren as a character, has completely centered on grief. She is contantly re-living, re-experiencing, and re-contextualising her previous experiences, and seeing how the memory of the long past is still lingering into the present.

This all being said, there is an important difference painted here. Not all memory is created equal. Frieren focuses so much on individual memory - Frieren’s memory of her companion, or even Fern remembering her foster father. But when the discussion of memory shifts to being about heroic deeds and national memory, this is seen as far less important.

Himmel’s memory is kept large as a hero. He’s remembered fondly, and statues of him are erected throughout the countryside as Frieren makes her way through. The statues, however, do not remind her of his great deeds, but rather of his personality. The memories most saved and cared for are those focused on simple acts, and direct interactions with individual people. A Mage Frieren meets, Wirbel, confesses that growing up he admired Himmel for his great heroic deeds. However, his village spoke more of the small acts of care Himmel had performed for the individual people - simple things, such as carrying heavy baskets.

These more simple memories are more of what carried Himmel’s memory. Frieren reflects on how Himmel insisted on doing these small acts of kindness - not to be remembered as a hero, but because it was the just thing to do. Wirbel reflects that these memories are important because they reflect how simple people are just wanting live their life, and therefore grand exploits of heroic ventures rang less important than carrying heavy baskets for the merchant.

In fact, Frieren as a show frequently shows us how heroic memory - the memory of great big deeds - was less important than those more centered on everyday life. Heroic memory is often short lived, and dies out after time. When the cares and concerns of the world have moved beyond the evil that was taken care of, the memory of these great deeds begins to fall. In other words, the memory of heroes only lasts for as long as the reason to remember them last. But eventually, these things fade.

We actually see this happen. Not to Himmel, but to a reflection of someone who was once like Himmel. Frieren’s party runs into another elf, named Kraft. He is living on his own, also travelling around the world exploring and adventuring. He speaks, though, of a time when people would have known his name. Later, Frieren encounters a statue of Kraft with a human companion. The villager who has asked for Frieren to clean the statue admits that both names have been forgotten, as well as the reason they had statues to begin with. But they are known as heroes, nothing more.

Kraft does not seem upset with this change. He sees it as a matter of life and the flow of memory. But this is probably because he has his own memories of his time, his adventures, and his friend.

Frieren points out this issue of heroic memory at the very end of the first season. Lernen, an old mage, was brought up to great prominence but in a time of peace brought about by the defeat of the Demon King. He laments this era of peace because he was unable to create a legacy for himself.

Frieren reflects on how childish this is. Instead, she talks about the people who care for him, and how these people care, love, and cherish him. These memories are what will move forward.

Memory of the great deeds are less important, less caring, and less real in many ways than the memories cherished by those dear to you. It also demonstrates how memory is short lived - life is temporary. Although those who love you and care for you carry your memory, they, too, will pass. But no legacy would last forever.

Frieren is, in many ways, the anime version of Shelley’s Ozymandias. Large statues can be erected with great memory of your legacy, but “nothing beside remains” as the “lone and level sands stretch far away.”

Frieren is about loss. It’s about grief. It’s about realising and re-contextualising the things you have lost. We can sit here and talk for ages about these things we have lost, the people who are no longer around us, the lives we are no longer living, the people no longer living them with us. We can talk about all these things, and reflect on how they affect us. But we also carry them in our memory, think about them, reflect on them. We remember those who have left us behind, and the lives we used to live.

But Frieren teaches us more than this. It doesn’t just teach us to remember, or to cherish these memories. It doesn’t just teach us about grief and loss. It teaches us about death, yes, but more importantly, Frieren teaches us to carry things with us. It tells us that its not about moving on, but about carrying things with us. It’s not about just death, but its about what it means to live.

Mythology Retelling in Hades

When studying or thinking about the connections between mythology and video games, there are three approaches one can take. The first is to look at how video games retell the narratives in mythology: how do these classic tales look in this new format of storytelling? The second is to look at how storytellers are using this new medium as a conduit for their own stories. This is rather similar to the first, but an important distinction is in who is doing the telling. In the first, we have outside forces drawing inspiration from mythology, in the second it is the community itself who is doing the telling. An example of this would be Never Alone, which was created alongside an Inuit Tribal Council who saw video games as a valuable format to tell their traditional tales through. The third approach is in looking at video games as mythology itself. I’ve already done a video on this third approach, of video games as mythology itself. But in all honest, there are connections and relationships between these categories. Nothing when talking about people is ever clean to categorise and label, and this is no exception. So there are bound to be similarities, or games or conversations about games which either fit into several of these, or none of these.

But that’s all something to discuss at a different time. Today, I want to turn our attention to that first category: the idea of video games as conduits to tell old traditional mythologies. How do these new forms of storytelling use and translate old myths to new purposes? And for that, I want to focus on the game Hades by Supergiant games.

Before we get into Hades, I should explain one thing. Video games as storytelling mediums is actually a relatively new, and somewhat radical thing to say. Not for, like, normal people who play games, but for academia. In the early days of video game studies, the field was divided in two: people who thought of video games as primarily stories, and those who thought of video games as primarily games. It was called the narratology/ludology divide. While this debate is more or less gone considered irrelevant now, it’s worth noting that for even early views of video games, the idea of thinking of them as stories was actually debatable. As far as this little petty argument is concerned, we’ll situated ourselves right there in the middle. Video games are definitely storytelling mechanisms, but they are also games. We can actually think of it as both at once.

Anyway, let’s talk about Hades. Hades was initially released in early access in December 2018, with a full release in 2020. Players play as Zagreus, the son of Hades and Persephone, who has been kept away from the rest of the Olympians by his dad. Encouraged to try and find his mother, who is currently away from the Underworld, Zagreus decides to escape the Underworld to reach his mother and Mount Olympus.

The developer, Supergiant Games, as made some of my favourite games. Bastion and Transistor are masters in the combination of narrative and game. Everything works so beautifully together, from the gameplay to the music to the story and the voice over work. Their third game, Pyre, attempted to play with procedural storytelling. But the nature of that game meant that replaying it wasn’t really on the cards for many players. So Supergiant made Hades a roguelike game, where players are required to replay areas and sections of the game continually, which allowed them to truly explore this form of storytelling.

As Zagreus progresses through the many different rooms and layers of the Underworld, he is given encouragement and boons from the other Olympic gods to imbue him with extra powers and advantages to help his escape, most of which is erased from him at death. But because Zagreus is prince of the Underworld, death for Zagreus is never really death, but simply a restart to his quest.

Obviously, Supergiant leaned on Greek mythology to create Hades. Interestingly, they picked a relatively obscure figure in Greek mythology to center the whole narrative on. Like a lot of myths throughout space and time, there are some variants to Zagreus, even with his far fewer references in comparison to the much more popular counterparts.

Before I get into these variants, it’s important to remind you, as I’ve said this a few times before, that alterations in the oral tradition is not always due to simple memory. Often, storytellers would actively choose to change the narrative to reflect alterations that either had happened, or they wanted to happen, the society around them. Other times, their own interpretation to create ease of understanding would also come into play. Either way, these variants are part of storytelling and important.

Anyway, the variants for Zagreus are quite a few. The first is that Zagreus is not always understood as the son of Hades. In some narratives, he’s the son of Zeus and Persephone. In this version of the story, many of the Olympians are lusting after Persephone, and so Demeter hides her daughter away in a cave. Zeus finds her and disguises himself as a serpent when he, ya know, takes advantage of her. The biggest resource we have for this story is the Dionysiaca, a 48-book epic poem focused on the god Dionysus.

The connection to Dionysus is important. Zagreus is often associated with Dionysus, sometimes so closley that they are understood as the same person. According to mytholographer Timothy Gantz, in the lost poem of Callimachus, the poet refers to a “Zagreus Dionysus” - one name. However, the exact amounts of these are a little in question. The Zagreus Dionysus is considered by these considerations as the first Dionysus, who was dimembered by the Titans as an infant.

So here we have three important aspects of Zagreus: he is Hades’ son, he is Zeus’ son, and he actually is Dionysus, or at least closley related to him. These are some fairly large discrepensies for a storyteller to take on, especially one in 2018 writing a video game.

Supergiant had a few options for how they wanted Zagreus’s story to unfold for them. Their version of Zagreus could be any of these, and Supergiant chose for Zagreus to be, solidly, Hades’ son. There is no question of whether or not Zagreus is Hades’ offspring. They look fairly similar, this fact is repeated regularly in the game script, but also Zagreus’s apperance solidifies his heritage of both Hades and Persephone. Zagreus has heterochromia: his left iris is the same colour green as his mother Persephone, and his right the red of Hades. Supergiant left no question on this front.

But they then do something very interesting with the story of Zagreus. This is primiarly focused on the mechanic of the granting of boons throughout the playthroughs of the game.

Almost every time a god shows up during an escape attempt, when they grant Zagreus their boon, they have something to say. At times, these are funny little witicisms. Ares may make some comment about war, for example, or Artemis makes a comment about the hunt. Other times, they convey interesting commentary on the story of the game. The dialogue system for Hades is rather complicated, and is programmed to reveal on certain lines of dialogue at very specific times when they are relevant to the player’s unique choices or experiences. Sometimes gods will remark on the boons already in Zagreus’s possession, for example, or will note on progress through the primary story. Duo boons, or boons where they are a combination of two gods powers, will also create unique dialogue. Aphrodite and Ares, for example, make commentary about their relationship before the player/Zagreus has to make their choice.

At one point, after receiving a gift from Zagreus, Zeus says this:

“Ah, most splendid of an offering, young man. And while we’ve yet to even meet in person, I already feel as though the two of us are close, why, closer than you must be even with your father! Oh, hahaha! Perhaps we ought to go telling everybody I’m your real father, am I right?”

Supergiant, therefore, has decided to incorporate all the varieties of Zagreus’s myth simultaneously, in the same narrrative. In some ways, it makes a lot of sense. These variants exist in our world, so why not in a different world? Despite playing a game where we, as the player, know explicitly that Zagreus is Hades’ son, we are now given an explanation of sorts for why there is a variant of Zagreus as a spawn of Zeus.

The nature of the game as a roguelike means that the game is often telling multiple stories at once. Stories only progress when certain acitivities or conversations have been met. For example, one of the characters Zagreus can meet in his journey through the Underworld is Sisyphus (and his boulder). The story of Sisyphus can only be progressed when Zagreus talks to him or gives him gifts. But sometimes, the player may not encounter Sisyphus on their attempt. This means that stories progress at different times and in different forms. Sometimes, a run may progress the story with Nyx, sometimes with one of the Olympians, sometimes with Sisyphus, and sometimes with no one at all.

There is another small side story that unfolds through several different conversations and attempts. During a conversation with Dionysus, the god of wine proposes to Zagreus that they play a little prank. Zagreus agrees, and the next time the player/Zagreus speaks to Orpheus in the House of Hades, he tells Orpheus that he and Dionysus are the same, connected back from a time that Zagreus was devoured by the Titans.

Later, Orpheus can be heard playing a song telling hte story of Zagreus, in which Orpheus explores the deep connections between Dionysus and Zagreus. Even when Zagreus attempts to tell Orpheus it was a joke, Orpheus does not listen.

To explore this further, most of the connections between Dionysus and Zagreus are taken from Orphic sources, or the writings from Orphism, a mysterious religious group following Orpheus. You know, the bard. Therefore, the choice to have these variants of Zagreus being told specifially by Orpheus is actually a direct commentary on the connections and stories of the Orphic sources.

So, what does all this mean? Well, the first is that Supergiant games has told a wonderful story with Greek mythology. The game developers and writers were able to tell their story about Zagreus, with references to all these various Greek gods and mythic figures, and always pay some kind of homage to the variants of the myths that exist in our world.

What is interesting about Supergiant’s own retelling of Greek mythology is in their acknowledgement of the variants of the story. Instead of picking one version and sticking with it, forsaking all others, they provided reasons for the others existing. Zeus is both joking and bragging about the strong figure fighting to escape the underworld being his own son. Orpheus was mislead by a joke to tell a fanciful, and ever growingly elaborate, version of Zagreus as Dionysus who had been devoured by the Titans. We see these other versions existing, and can provide reason for them. They are not just ignored, but incorporated into the existing narrative.

But we cannot leave out one important facet; by telling their version of Zagreus, they are adding to the canon of Zagreus myths. For many people, probably the vast majority who did not spend their extra time reading myths or reading about the study of myth, Hades was quite possible the first and only time they have ever encountered the figure of Zagreus. Therefore, their version of Zagreus becomes a primary one for many. And not just in aspects like his parentage or whether or not he’s actually Dionysus. But also smaller aspects of the story, like his perosonality, the fact that he’s openly bisexual and polyamorous, and his many feats, even when gudied by the player. These aspects of the story become a version themselves. Maybe not as old as the Orphic sources, but still present and still impactful. Without Supergiant, the figure of Zagreus would still be that obscure mythological reference.

As I said at the beginning, these categories of how to study myth are seldom clean. Even in this example, we have to admit that, at times, video games can be myths themselves. They still tell these stories and have the power to influence the ideas and interpretations of these old and complicated figures. This retelling of the myth becomes a version of the myth itself, one which, at least for now, seems to be rather enduring.

Jack Skellington: Trickster

Probably one of the most talked about figures from mythological archetypes is the Trickster. The Trickster has really captured our imagination, making them figures we really love to hear from, and even replicate them in contemporary storytelling. While some of the ubiquity of Trickters could be because of the broad definition of the term, I think it’s mostly because of the importance of figures like this. We need Tricksters, both the old and the new.

So I want to talk about Nightmare Before Christmas, but specifically I want to study the primary figure in the movie: Jack Skellington. The idea of Nightmare Before Christmas is that there are special towns which are dedicated to each holiday, and the people there help to make that holiday happen.

In Nightmare Before Christmas, we start on Halloween, where we first meet Jack Skellington, the Pumpkin King. He’s the guy, the one that everyone loves. He’s the ultimate scary figure who helps to run Halloween town. However, Jack has a problem. He’s feeling creative ennui. Despite being the King of Halloween Town, and being far loved and respected by the community, he feels somewhat out of place and unsure of himself. In Jack’s Lament, he sings that he has tired of his position, and seeks out something new and unique. This dejection leads him to wander through the woods through the night, where in the morning he comes across a set of trees with pictures depicting aspects of various holidays on them. Enraptured by the one with a Christmas tree, he falls into Christmas Town and falls in love with the very different vibe and experience of the holiday. After his visit, he becomes intent on making others understand the experience, ultimately leading him to try and take over Christmas for himself.

There’s something really interesting about the character arc of Jack Skellington in Nightmare Before Christmas. I think a large part of this has to do with the fact that he’s a Trickster figure. His role as Trickster is what puts him in a position to live as both a fool, a cultural hero, and a representation of the liminal.

Let’s start with the idea of the Trickster. Tricksters are rather different from one another in a lot of ways. Not all tricksters are exactly the same, but they share certain characteristics. So while not every characteristic I talk about today is going to be shared ubiquitously, there are going to be overlapping ideas and considerations.

Our first more basic idea of the Trickster in relation to Jack is the idea that the Trickster is a master of disguise. In many stories of Tricksters, they are able to dress up as a different figure and completely fool those around them as to their personality. There are two points where we can point to Jack as disguising himself. The first is in the opening of the movie, as the town gathers to sing Halloween Town and introduce the viewer to the world. As the camera begins to move in, we pass by a creepy scarecrow with a sign for Halloween Town on it. At the end of the musical number, we see this scarecrow again, who suddenly moves on its own, lights itself on fire, and then reveals itself to be none other than Jack. We are immediately introduced to Jack through his ability to change himself and mould himself to different perspectives.

We see him disguise himself one other time, when dressing up as Santa. When Sally remarks that he doesn’t seem like himself, Jack excitedly exclaims that was the point. Jack is actively looking to alter himself, to fool others into thinking he is the real Santa. He is aiming to lose himself into the role, wanting to completely become someone different in his portrayal of Santa.

While we do not actively see it, we do hear him reference other personalities and characters he has drawn on. In his song, Jack’s Lament, Jack makes reference to some of the other ways people have known him, including simply being “Mr Unlucky”, and also being known in our own world.

Jack’s ability to easily disguise himself and shift between personalities is actually something that helps to point out an important element of his personality. He is, at the end of the day, a monster. Monstrosity, as I’ve mentioned before, is often defined by their inability to fit into proper categories. The vampire, for example, live between the categories of life and death. Monsters are often the markers of liminal spaces and positions. Jack moves through his own liminal position fluidly.

In fact, being a liminal figure is also a marker of Trickster figures. But Jack is different than the other monsters in Halloween Town, and therefore a different consideration of monster. So let’s talk about what we mean, real quick, by liminal. The idea of liminality was initially popularised by Arnold Van Gennep, when talking about rites of passage, or rituals which mark important social life steps like coming of age rituals, marriage, and even graduation. Van Gennep understood rites of passage as consisting of three primary stages: seperation, liminality, and incorporation. In separation, the individual withdraws from their current position in society. During the liminal stage, they are no longer of their previous status, but not yet of the other, living in a stage between stages. In the third, the individual is re-incorporated into society taking up their new position.

In Van Gennep’s consideration, the idea of liminality, the stage between stages, is a stage in itself. Its a phase someone can be in, rather than a type of person. The position they hold is liminal, not themselves, as they will be reincorporated at a later point in time.

Anthropologist Victor Turner took these ideas and built on them. In particular, Turner really expanded on this idea of the liminal, bringing it out of rites of passage specifically and into other forms of ritual, including pilgrimage.

Since Turner, the term “liminality” and its definition of ambiguity and between-ness has really taken ahold of the social sciences. In many considerations, it is not just a phase, but also a type of person. Some real world example of liminal people could be stateless people, or those who are between home and host, both a part of society and also seperated from it. Many in the LGBT community also see themselves as liminal, as they do not fit into broader society’s cultural categories.

Which leads us to the Trickster - a character archetype which is often defind by its liminality. Coyote, for example, is an important Trickster figure for many Native American mythological cycles. Coyote is both a cultural hero and a cultural villain, a figure which does much for the people, but also puts them at risk. According to stories from the Chelan people, Coyote belongs to the animal people, but at the same time holds powers like the Creator, but is also subject to the Creator, who can punish Coyote.

As a Trickster, Jack is a complicated liminal figure. He is both of Halloween town while also apart from it. He’s the King, but is not an actual official like the Mayor. Throughout the movie, he’s not often interacting directly with the people as friends, but rather as a figurehead. He is on a stage giving orders, or standing seperate from them while they dote praise on him. The only figure he is seen directly having a normal conversation with is Sally, and only right at the end.

He is also one of the only figures who truly understands Christmas Town. Sally also seems to understand, though she is also a liminal figure in many ways, not being allowed to fully incorporate into the town as a figure due to the oppressive figure of Dr. Finkelstein. But Sally is probably a subject for a different video.

Jack’s liminal nature means that he also embodies one of the other characteristics of a trickster: being a boundary-crosser. Now, by boundary crossing, we do not necessarily mean physically or emotionally. Though, Jack does definitely do this. The nature of being skilled at scaring others means that he is by his nature crossing those kinds of emotional boundaries. But like I said, that’s not technically what we mean.

By boundary-crossing, we mean someone who can move between cultural or social categories. Because he does not belong to a particular category, he can move between these categories freely, and often dabbles in them. The point of a trickster’s movement between and around social categories is meant to break these social norms. Its because of these broken categories that they become cultural heroes, but it is also because of these broken categories that they become cultural villains.

Jack actually fulfills both of these positions: he is both the villain and the hero of the story, a true representation of the roles a trickster can be. Jack’s changes throughout the film are brought on by his desire to find new cultural avenues. He is yearning for something new and something different to experience. What he is really hoping for is a change of position. He is tired of being liminal. He want to find something comfortable, to have a place to belong.

This becomes more obvious when he becomes transfixed by his experiences in Christmas Town. Jack had experienced his something new he was yearning for. He found something different and unique. But it wasn’t enough for him to simply experience it, he wanted to become it. He wanted to move from his liminal position to a place more secure and socially present. He begins to capture the imagination of Christmas, and sees it as the realisation of all his hopes and dreams, and the possible path for his future. He wants to become Christmas, and take it all for himself. He feels he needs to do this in order to feel fulfilled because otherwise he would still be on the margins.

His takeover of Christmas is what sets him up as a cultural villain. Not just because of his absolute destruction of Christmas - but because of his braking of the cultural understandings and categories of Christmas. While there is a tradition of “spooky Christmas” - like, for example, A Christmas Carol - there is a solid separation of feel, obligation, and expectation between Halloween and Christmas. This separation was difficult to explain to the residents of Halloween Town, and to Jack to a certain extent. When Sally tries to tell Jack that she got a vision that his Christmas would be “terrible”, Jack interprets this as a positive due to the social categories and distinctions of Halloween Town, even though this is not what she intended.

Essentially, Jack’s role as a liminal figure affects the categories and individuals within those categories that he interacts with. Christmas is the victim of that. Inevitably, his liminal nature is impacting the Christmas he is creating. He is not just replicating Christmas, he is altering its form to become something in between, like Jack himself. However, the result is a marring of the original category, making it something impure, in a more Mary Douglas version of that word.

It isn’t until he is literally blown out of the sky that Jack comes to realise that his version of Christmas wasn’t right at all. But it is during this reflection that Jack comes to realise that his attempt to join cultural categories he doesn’t actually belong in is the problem. He comes to remember that his role as liminal figure is one to have security in. It’s what gives him the ability to scare, the ability to disguise, and the ability to shift easily to new perspectives and understandings.

It is when he is back to being Jack the Pumpkin King, rather than Jack the Christmas-takeover, that he moves also from being the cultural villain to the cultural hero. It’s his newfound excitement in self that allows him to move quickly, efficiently, and to stand toe-to-toe against Oogie Boogie. On saving Santa, he becomes the cultural hero.

I think Jack’s role as Trickster is what allows him to move through the story the way he does, but more importantly its why we fall in love with Jack, despite him actually not being that great of a guy. We find ourselves rooting for him, because he has a freedom we don’t. His role is to be in between, to exist as something other, and that is appealing. And even when he is a villain, he’s a fun villain that we still want to see succeed.

The Chthulucene Reviewed

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Every so often, there’s an academic term that spreads out from the Ivory Tower and becomes a common phrase understood and used a lot. Joseph Campbell’s monomyth was one from the Hero with a Thousand Faces - the idea that every hero myth follows the same structure. One of the more recent ones has been the Anthropocene. The idea of the Anthropocene has become immensely popular, both inside and outside formal academia. It’s presence is not only on the front of books, but also on podcast titles and YouTube channels.

The Anthropocene is originally a term from geology, and is a definitional term for a particular geological epoch. It’s name literally translates to “the age of man”. It’s based on the idea that human activities have a direct affect on the world around them. The term has grown outside of its specific geological usage, and it has grown to have a place in other disciplines. Its use outside of it is probably most popularised by the podcast The Anthropocene Reviewed, by John Greene.

This all being said, the Anthropocene as a concept is not without its critiques. The Anthropocene, most notably in its more implicit understandings, is presenting a particular view of the world. The focus is on how humans have impacted the landscape and world - but always keeps humans as the central focus.

Philosopher Donna Haraway has a different -cene to present - the Chthuluscene. Despite its ame being incredibly similar to the Cthulhu of Lovecraft, its name is actually derived from Greek, references to the Chthonic, or earth goddesses or forces. In fact, she spells it with an extra H, just to try and shift the understanding. That being said, thinking about the Chthuluscene with Lovecraft in mind may not necessarily be a bad thing. But we’ll get there.

The Chthuluscene differs from the Anthropocene in several ways, but one very important one for our purposes here. According to Haraway, “Unlike the Anthropocene… the Chthuluscene is composed of continuation histories and cross-species practices of becoming with one another”. In other words, humans are not the most important protagonists in the story of life. Other beings, other life, is just as much a part of the formation of the world, and our interactions with it, as we are. Centering ourselves as the main thing is part of the problem with the world as it is. By thinking about us as a part of a fuller conceptual weave of beings is a better way of thinking about how our impact on the world has occured.

To truly be able to alter our understanding from a human centric approach to a more holistic approach, we need to embody the narratives that point us in this direction. As Donna Haraway writes: “we need stories (and theories) that are just big enough to gather up the complexities and keep the edges open and greedy for surprising new and old connections.” Is through stories we connect to others, through stories we understand ourselves, and through stories we understand our place in the world.

Luckily, we have stories that paint us in the direction of the Chthuluscene. These stories don’t exclude humans, but also don’t centre them as the only important creature, nor are the other living beings in our environment at the mercy of humans without their own intentions and actions.

On a more horrific view, we can think of the Chthuluscene’s more literary namesake - the Cthulhu mythos. While Lovecraft’s view of an active environment filled with creatures who can react against us, pitting humans as not the protagonists of the world, was something to be scared about and to try and avoid. But the idea of it can, in some respects, fit the Chthulhuscene.

But I think a better example would be one from Studio Ghibli. Really, many of Ghibli’s movies have a centering of nature, either directly, in the case of Nausicaa and Princess Mononoke, but also more generally and implicitly, like Spirited Away. Hayao Miyazaki has explained that the most distinguishing aspect of Ghibli’s animation is in its depiction of nature. He says: “We don’t subordinate the natural setting to the characters… That is because we feel that the world is beautiful. Human relationships are not the only thing that is interesting. We think that weather, time, rays of light, plants, water, and wind - what make up the landscape - are all beautiful. That is why we make efforts to incorporate them as much as possible in our work”. Incorporating nature and the landscape as not something separate from the humans involved is an important part of the Chthuluscene. It’s not a lack of human involvement, but rather an acknowledgement that we are as much a part of the landscape as the trees are.

This is, in fact, the entire point of Princess Mononoke. Ashitaka finds himself in the middle of a war between humans and nature. The town’s over-consumption and industrialisation is marring the landscape, turning nature and environmentalism against them. Ashitaka, however, situates himself not on either side of the war. He is not fully against the humans, nor is he against the natural forces. He sees a way for both to live together, to see humans as a part of the natural landscape as much as the forest spirit and the kodamas.

In a more simplicit anthropocentric take, the movie would be a good vs evil war, where Ashitaka would have to either show how humans deserve to be cared for and thrive, or how the environment is the peaceful, serene, human-devoid landscape it is often depicted as. Instead, Princess Mononoke is a depiction of the Chthuluscene - a knowledge humans do impact the environment, but that the environment impacts us just as much in return.

Miyazaki claims to have been profoundly influenced by the “broadleaf evergreen forest culture hypothesis” of ethnobotanist Sasuke Nakao. The theory is that there were broadleaf evergreen forests in prehistoric times which covered a large percentage of Asia, including Japan and up to the Himalayas. These forests nurtured a “common culture”, focused on a forest way of life.

Now, I don’t want to speak either for or against this theory - I’m not a botanist nor a historian. But I am an anthropologist, and we can see how this idea has greatly impacted Miyazaki. His work reflects a positionality of nature as not something that is set in contrast to humans. Like Ashitaka, Miyazaki sees it as possible to marry the two worlds, rather than existing in a place where one has to choose between the two. It’s not a choice, but rather an acknowledgement that there is a way to live in both positions. But in order for humans to flourish, they have to acknowledge the role that nature plays in their world, and no longer position themselves as the protagonists in that view.

There are some Western storytellers whose stories can also point us to the Chthuluscene. The world of J.R.R. Tolkien is one in which nature has a power, an agency, and an important role in the world of MiddleEarth.

The world of Middle Earth is one which consists of many creatures, and not just the humanoid ones either. Sure, dwarves, elves, hobbits, and humans all exist together, but there are also other forces, too. In the movies, when the Fellowship is climbing Mt Caradhras, its Saruman who whips up a storm to force the Fellowship into the Mines of Moria. However, this is not how Tolkien originally conceived of this. In the books, its the Caradhras itself which wants to push the Fellowship away from it, as it rejects them climbing on it.

Tolkien also has an important relationship with forests. The Fangorn forest is an old forest, where the hobbits first encounter Ents. The Ents are the tree shepherds, the keep the trees in the forest. This means that trees can move, have agency, have the ability to change the landscape through their own initiatives. We see this more actively in the Battle of Helm’s Deep.

As Theoden and Aragon led the cavalry charge to drive the Orcs out of the fortress, a forest is suddenly present at the enemies rear. Their attacks drive the Orcs into the present Huorn Forest, a forest so angry with the orcs that it consumes the orcs and bury them, never for them to emerge.

Huorns are described by Treebeard as a transitional form of tree - they could either be Ents who have become more tree-like, or trees who have become more animated. The case for the Huorn forest which travelled the landscape to assist at Helm’s Deep is less clear, and could be a combination of the two. As Fangorn forest’s Ents showed, there was anger in the forest toward Orcs and the servants of Sauron.

Trees and nature in Tolkien’s work are often given a place of prominence. They have a power to them, and a feeling of connection and togetherness. Treebeard laments that the trees cut down by the Orcs around Isenguard were his friends. Connecting and loving the forest is a reciprocal action in Middle Earth - beings do not love trees unrequited, but can be loved and cared for back in return. And likewise, beings who hate and disrespect the forest can be hated and disrespected in turn.

In other words, Tolkien understands that the role of humans - or other humanoid living beings in Middle Earth - is not separate from the landscape and nature, or even other life around the world. Its all necessary to work together, to see the role of everything and everyone, regardless of species. The Battle of Helm’s Deep demonstrated that - pushing out evil required the work of many of the living creatures around Middle Earth, including the Rohirrium, Elves, Men, and forests.

Donna Haraway is not unaware of stories which help to demonstrate the world as part of the Chthuluscene. She draws, in particular, on the work of Ursula Le Guin. But there are many creatives seeing our current epoch not as the Anthropocene, but as the Chthuluscene. This distinction is important because it de-centres the human in our mind. If we want to make changes to help the environment, we have to understand the environment as an important, functional part of our world. Its adjusting our perspective, understanding that humans are not the protagonists, whose actions are separate from having a consequence on the rest of the world. And also, in response, the environment, and the nonhumans in our lives, also have a great impact on us. Because we do not live in the Anthropocene, but in the Chuluscene.

Cosplay and the Dressing of Identity

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So, in case you didn’t know, I’m a writer. I write nonfiction books that are deep anthropological studies of popular culture as contemporary mythology. That’s why this channel is called Incidental Mythology - its a study of our mythology, which just happens to be our myths through the connections we form through it, incidentally.

Recently, I published a new book. I started this research about four years ago. It’s an anthropological study of cosplay, looking at it as a demonstration of mythic performance. If popular culture is our mythology, than performing the characters and elements from these myths would be a form of mythic performance. The rest of this video essay is going to be an excerpt from the book, with a few alterations to make it make sense outside of its original context. The images of cosplayers you are going to see were very kindly allowed for my use by the cosplayer photographers who took them, and they are all featured in the book as well. If you want to hear more, you can go buy my book because it’s already out now! Available anywhere you buy your books. Anyway. I hope you like it.

Many would say the art of cospay began in the 1980s and ‘90s with the rise of mainstream mass pop culture media alongside the growth of fan conventions and comic cons. While this was when the term ‘cosplay’ was coined, there has been a long history of people dressing up as fictional characters. We could, of course, begin by drawing connections to traditional dances and performances of mythical characters and stories, though for now I will put that aside. Even without this influence, similar circumstances of ceremonial and artful dressing of characters can be traced to the Carnival of Venice, whose many stock characters and masks create an environment for individuals to feel more like themselves in society.

Obviously, the history of cosplay is also dependent on its definition. When thinking about the history of dressing in special outfits, we would have to consider the extensive background of folk costumes. But if we stick to the typical understanding of cosplay as dressing as fictional characters for a particular event of common interest, we also see this reaching far earlier than the 1980s. In March 1877, Jules Verne hosted his first masked ball, where attendees dressed as characters from his books. Masquerades in general were sometimes used as opportunities for attendees to dress as characters from literature, literally masking their identity in their outfits. In 1912, August Olson dressed as Mr Skygack, a comic strip character, at a masquerade. Even in terms of of fan conventions, the history is longer than one may think. The first cosplayer is often thought of as being Myrtle R. Douglas, who cosplayed alongside her then boyfriend Forrest Ackerman at Worldcon in 1939.

The history of cosplay is long and complicated because the exact nature of cosplay, as opposed to other forms of dressing up, is also rather difficult to untangle. Cosplay has a lot of similarities with other forms of what I like to call “dress plays”: activities where individuals dress with the purpose of playing around with identity. Drag, live action role play, and historical re-enactment are just three examples of different forms of dress play which have intersecting moments with cosplay.

The reason why drag, LARP, re-enactment, and even TTRPGs, and other forms of dress play are so complicated is because dressing is such an important part of our lives as social beings. A lot of studies of fashion and dress talk about how fashion is a form of communication. As fashion scholar Malcolm Barnard puts it, fashion is what makes ‘us’ into ‘us’. It becomes a form of identity creation and cohesion, and allows people who are ‘us’ to recognise ‘us’, while also making it very clear to ‘them’ that they are not ‘us.’

People have been using dress in this way for a very long time. Religious dress is often the marker of the in-group versus out-group, as well as a way of communicating beliefs and worldviews. The hijab, for example, is not only a marker of Muslim identity, but carries with it the implicit and multifaceted meanings behind the hijab. We seldom wear something just to wear it.

When we get dressed, it is not just the clothes we must consider. Clothes gon on to a body. It is through our bodies that we see, and are seen by, the world. Seeing me is also seeing my body and seeing the dressing on my body. Anthropologist Mary Douglas wrote about how we all have two bodies: a physical one and a social one. The social body in many ways controls the way our physical bodies are read and understood by the people around us. Our physical experiences and understanding of our physical body are always ‘clothed’ by our social categories and social worlds. In many ways, there is no such thing as a nude body, because we are always clothed in these thoughts and considerations. Douglas’s two bodies are always in interaction and communication with each other, constantly reinforcing the categories of one on to the other. Essentially, our bodies are more than biological mechanisms. They are also social tools for communication and categorisation. For example, my gender is inscribed as both a social body and a physical body, and which gender I am is read through the social and used as a way to assume aspects of my physical. But the social dynamic of gender is always present, informing and altering aspects of the physical understanding.

Cosplay also reveals the intricate relationship between body and dressing. Many participants have expressed a change in their confidence when cosplaying, even when outside of cosplay. My participant Grayson, for example, told me that “cosplay’s about being, like, giving that extra boost of confidence as well”. In fact, the confidence gained through cosplaying was Grayson’s favourite and most notable part of it. “For me, particularly, it would be the confidence… in body. Confidence. Because I feel like I’m more confident as that character. I feel more pretty as that character. I feel more… I feel like I’m more accepted as that character than I am myself.” The art of dressing, and the performance associated with it, have an impact not only on the performance but on the body which did the dressing. You can’t really talk about dress without tlaking about the body, and the way dressing impacts the body and the body impacts the dressing. Cosplayers will, for example, transform a costume to have a head covering for people who culturally wear a head covering, or use either wigs or natural hair for Black cosplayers. In these instances, the body of the cosplay is also impacting the way the dressing happens. Cosplay is ultimately an activity which incorporates elements of the body, the art of dressing, and the performance associated with the body and dress.

When a cosplayer inhabits the identity of the dress of the character, their body is still the cosplayer’s. This means there is a complicated double relationship of communication happening with cosplayers - not only are they performing the identity of the character, but they are also performing the identity of themselves. The cosplayer’s body is still there, and still communicating certain relationships these types of bodies have with the social worlds around them; the body’s abilities or disabilities, skin colour, and gender all impact the way the social world understands them, even when in cosplay. But the character’s identity is tied in with this communication.

This means there are two ways cosplayers can understand their own body’s relationship to the original media to create a new text in their representation: the first is in direct imitation, where they endeavour to maintain ‘accuracy’ to the original, including costumes, performances and the body; and the second is in textual transformation, where the cosplayer takes advantage of the differences between the original text and themselves to adapt it. Of course, these aren’t exclusive categories. Cosplayers can fall into both types depending on the cosplay they are doing, as well as delving into and out of these categories depending on the act they are doing. Hey may seek to be more like direct imitation when taking photos, but happy to be adaptive at cons, for example.

Cosplay may, on the surface, appear as a light-hearted aspect of dressing up. I remember when I had a conversation with someone about this project while I was researching, we started chatting about the intricate and complicated nature of cosplay. This person I was chatting to, at the end, said, in surprise, “I guess it’s more than just dressing up, then.” It is important to note that there is no such thing as “just” dressing up. Dress itself has a detailed sociology that helps us demonstrate to others who we are, and it’s all on our body, which is also read and understood on a variety of different levels such as gender, race, ability or disability, and economic status.

The history of cosplay is long, and potentially much longer if we continue to look down the history of mythic performances. But even if we don’t, it’s far longer than just the 1980s and ‘90s, and mostly it is because people have always intuitively known the importance of dressing the body, and the way this communicates a variety of beliefs, ideas, and actions.

We think of things as special: we have specialised actions and thoughts and beliefs and connections to our mythic fictions. And dressing as this fictionalised Other can change us, because our body and our dress are an important way of communicating ourselves. Changing these things can actively change the way our identities are understood and read by others. There is something more about masked performances than just wearing a mask. Likewise, there is something more about cosplay than just wearing a costume.

The Divine Beast Dancing Lion

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So, one evening, while watching a some Elden Ring speedrunners, my husband commented that he wondered if the DLC boss Divine Beast Dancing Lion had the same weak point on the head. When I asked why it wouldnt’ be so, he said it was because of the way it’s a puppet boss, so woudln’t the weak points be the performers. Which made me realise that I should do a whole video on this. So today, we’re going to talk about why this boss is actually a dancing lion.

Let’s start with doing a more in depth look on this boss. From the moment the DLC was first announced, I thought this boss had a super cool design. It was obvious from that first look that this was a different kind of design. In this, it’s two humanoid figures manipulating a puppet of the divine beast moving the figure around. Zulle the Witch did a video on the Divine Beast Dancing Lion, showing that the model for the boss actually does have these figures programmed in.

The story behind the boss is that these divine beasts were once messengers of the heavens. People called the sculpted keepers used representations of these divine beasts to perform rituals such as the one for the lion dance. However, once Messmer came, the ritual turned to more martial means and the once divine creatures were used for army or for sport.

So let’s talk about this. The Ritual of the Dancing Lion in Elden Ring is very reminscent of the dancing lion rituals from China. In fact, rituals like this are not exactly abnormal nor unique to either China or FromSoft. Masked rituals, and other similar ones in which performers dress in costume or mask, are enacted as a way to bring the divine - or whatever figure is being represented - to live, temporarily, among them. Oftentimes, this performance is as a re-enactment of the feats and narratives of the figures the performers are representing.

In these various rituals, the identity of the performer and the identity of the performed become enmeshed. There are a lot of different ways to explain this. In a more theatrical sense, we have Richard Schechner’s distinction between make believe and make belief. Make believe is something we’re used to - it’s the childish “as if” play where we are consciously aware of the distinctions present between reality and fiction, our seperation of what is us and what is the played actor. Make belief, on the otherhand, intentionally blurs these boundaries. In other words, some performances are meant to be more real than others, and to purposefully bring the real into the play, and the play into the real.

Now, a real quick note on the idea of “play”. In Western thought, we think of play as something childish and unimportant. Play is something that we grow out of, and is not something worthy of actual adult consideration. This has also impacted academic approaches to play - where play is either studied as part of childhood studies, or academics make leaps to try and justify their studies. The term “serious play” for example has been used by sociologists and academics such as Sherry Ortner and Tanya Luhrmann. Even Clifford Geertz’s conception of “deep play” attempts to paint play as something actually socially relevant. However, both deep play and serious play have a side effect. By saying “this play is different, this play is serious” we are still maintaining the conception of play as something frivilous. It’s not that all play is serious, but this play is serious.

So when I say play, I don’t mean that its frivilous or childish, but that its serious and important. Not because its different than other play, but because play is just like that - it’s always serious, but also not at the same time. Ritual is a great example of this - its a form of play that is typically considered different. But what paints ritual as different than other forms of play is all in the categorisation of the moment.

Let’s look at the dance of the Divine Beast for this. In the lore of the world, this ritual was an important act for the Hornsent, one which allowed the community to connect to the Heavens through their messengers - the Divine Beasts. After Messmer’s conquering, however, the beasts were put to different purposes, mostly militarily. While militaries can still have their rituals, the purposes, activities and engagements are rather different. These kinds of alterations happen all the time, especially when colonisation occurs. But which activities at what point are considered what kinds of rituals? These definitions are amorphous, constantly changing, and up to interpretation. But that’s a whole ‘nother discussion for a whole ‘nother day.

Anyway, if we think about ritual in terms of Schechner’s make belief, where the boundaries of the real and the play are blurred, we have another note to make about the notion of “real”. Reality is the dimensions of the possible - in other words, our conception of reality is based on what we consider to be possible in the world. Therefore, reality is something that can be entirely cultural based.

For some of you watching this video, the idea of speaking to God, and hearing responses back, whether actually or symbolically, is probably an idea that sounds unrealistic and impossible. For for others of you watching this, it’s entirely possible, and quite probably an every day experience for you.

Let me tell you a story. Back when I used to teach at a university, we used to have the first year students do a fieldwork project: they were asked to go to some kind of religious service (I taught religious studies), and to do a little report. The city we were in had a Spiritualist church which sat very near to the university, so many students saw an opportunity to have fun. Spiritualist churches are known for their communication with the dead - an experience that many students found impossible. Therefore, they thought they would be able to have a laugh while doing this project.

We ended up having to stop doing this project, because so many students who went to the Spiritualist church - or other non-Christian churches - had an existential crisis and mental breakdowns because they experienced something outside of their conception of reality.

Now you may roll your eyes at this, but do remember that so did my students before they went.

The point is this: many cultures have conceptions of what’s possible, which may or may not line up with what you see as possible. So when we have a performance which blurs reality and performance, creating an effect on the real, this is fully within the realms of their reality.

And I know, I know - I’m talking about a video game at the end of the day, which is not real. We can all agree on that. But a lot of Elden Ring is based on very real cultures and ideas. The Dancing Lion Divine Beast is based on Chinese lion dances. Languages and mythologies are derived from Welsh and Old English. There are connections to the meat world in a lot of fiction. In many ways, we can use our engagement with fiction to do a reverse almost of Schechner’s make belief - by playing in these spaces and thinking about them seriously, we can also reveal new ideas that can affect our understanding of the reality outside of these play spaces.

So let’s talk about more physical meat world stuff for a second. Let’s talk about masks and masked performances. These are quite common in a lot of areas of the world, including the Americas and Asia. Our Chinese lion dance can in many ways be described as a masked performance - a masked ritual in which performers wear their costumes and perform. However, calling them costumes and performances can be detrimental to really understanding what’s happening in these rituals.

When someone puts on a mask in these types of dances, there is a direct play happening between the identities of the performed and the performer. The mask represents the Otherness, whether this is a god, or a messenger of the gods, or a mythic hero. But the mask also has an ambiguity to it, because it is both of this supernatural or Other figure, as well as for the very human entity to wear it. The Otherness it represents becomes both an obstical for the performer - who is unable to be fully a god or whatever the figure is - but also is the goal. I talked about this a bit more in depth on my video on Orville Peck’s mask, if you’re interested.

But essentially, these performances are a direct mixing of identities. The person wearing the mask is not just a person in a costume - they are that Other entity, though only temporarily. In that moment, the play of make belief is very real, very serious, and very actualised in the world. The performance and the performed are the same.

So, essentially, the two figures hidden under the costume of the dragon in Elden Ring are not just figures in a costume. During the entirety of their performance, they are the lion. They are not figures manipulating a mask, the mask’s Otherness as come alive. This is why they are able to channel the powers of the lion’s identity - because the lion is there, in the room. They are just the conduits for it to happen.

So yes, the lion’s head is the weak point, because this performance is not playing “as if” the lion is real, but it actually is.

Spiritfarer and the Sociology of Grief

Spiritfarer is a beautifully artistic game from developer Thunder Lotus Games, and is an entirely about grief and death. Our playable character Stella takes on the role of a psychopomp, ferrying souls to the land of the dead.

When it comes to Spiritfarer’s treatment of death and grief, it explores these heavy topics in a very realistic way without ever feeling heavy-handed. So today, I want to explore this game, how it paints a positive depiction of grieving, and how its a great demonstration of the sociology of grief.

On paper, the job of the Spiritfarer is to bring the souls of the recently departed to the Everdoor, or the final place for the souls to leave the place of spiritual limbo and move on. However, Stella does much more than this. Throughout their time with you, you help them progress through their issues. You give them food, hugs, and assist them in their various needs and wants. This eventually leads them to feel more comfortable arriving at the gate.

Grief has, in academic treatments in the 20th century, been considered something more pathological. It was a mental obstruction which needed to be gotten passed in order to be “cured” from bereavement. This view was shaped by Western ideas of scientific rationality. The understanding of grief as disease made it more difficult to understand how grief is more complicated - it’s reflective, nuanced, and immensely personal.

Anthropologists highlighted how our social situations impact our grief. When we started to see bereavement as something more inherently complicated, we becan to understand how it incorporates all aspects of the process both before and after death: it incorporates dying, death, mourning, memorialisation, religion, ethics, and even legal considerations and issues.

Bereavement is not just one instance, or one moment, or even something that can be “gotten passed”. Rather, its an ongoing process of learning and adjusting.

In 1996, Dennis Klass coined the idea of “continuing bonds”. Continuing bonds was the idea that our social connections and relationships continue, even after death. Sometimes, this through our knowledge of physical objects, items that the dead have left for us to treasure and be reminded of them. It could also be other human relationships we shared with the deceseased - friends who we maybe only connected with through that person may grow or become more important with the shared loss. It could also be places we shared, a continuing process of visiting locations that remind us of those who have passed on. Locattions, items, and people all cement us to the deceased, and we continue to have these relationships far past the passing.

So this is a social aspect of bereavement that we’re talking about. But our case study of the day is Spiritfarer, a typically first-person game. You can play the game with someone, who takes over your little cat friend, but the vast majority of play is singular. Singular experiences which reflect social realities can be overly complicated to understand and difficult to pull off from a game-developer standpoint. But Spiritfarer accomplishes this.

Spiritfarer embodies continuing bonds in the relationships forged with the spirits. We do not just assist the spirtis for no reason. We see their connections to places, things, and others. We design and decorate their cabins to reflect their original home lives and the things that are of importance to them. The food they eat is specifically chosen to give them the greatest happiness and connect them to the lives they once had.

But this is just from the persepective of the spirit. Our interactions with them, giving them the experiences they want, imparts on us how important these things are for the people we are supporting and helping. These interactions not only paint a picture of who these spirits were as people, but what it is that will remind us of them as we move forward.

As each spirit leaves our boat, moving onwards through the Everdoor, we continue to have their presence surrounding us. Sometimes directly in the empty rooms still decorated in their way, sometimes through other aspects we interact with regularly. Atul continues to exist in his lvoe of food, especially porkchops and fried chicken. His commentary on certain food items also paints his own social bonds. He talks about popcorn and how it reminds him of times with his children. We find Gwen twice at the villa she grew up in, where she finds herself constantly drawn to. She struggles to reconcile her life, her death and the locations she finds connections in. And after she has passed through the Everdoor, we still feel her connection when revisiting the villa.

Spiritfarer’s continuing bonds works in two different ways. We see how they impact the character we play as, but this action also impacts us as players. Video games, as an inherently interactive media model, is not just a one way street. They come to be through our interaction with them, yes, but the best games leave an imprint on us in a similar way. Stella’s interactions with teh spirits demonstrate where these continuing bods are for the characters. But there are also bonds left upon us as players.

Whenever a spirit leaves through the Everdoor, we still keep theri home on the boat. We are reminded of elements of them as people when we enter their door, or even when we pass their building. We think about them again when we scroll through our recipes and are reminded of their past favourite foods. Even after our friends have passed through the Everdoor, we continue to think of them, and we continue to feel their presence, while also feeling their absence. It’s a perfect demonstration of what grief feels like: having their bones present, while also having their absence very much felt.

There’s something very important at the core of our shift of understanding grief. When we changed from understanding grief as pathologic to social, we also changed our perspective of what a person is. Who we are as people is not restricted to something individual. We are not separate beings away from others who then disappears ater our passing. We are not separate from others. Humans are inherently social creatures - we live with and for others. So, part of who we are as people also lives within the people we are surrounded by. I am not just myself, but am also made up of who I am in the eyes and connections of family, friends and my siginficant other. I live as part of them, and continue within them. When I pass, they will each carry a part of who I am with then. Likewise, I carry within me multiple poeple who have passed.

So I carry others’ personhoods within me, and others carry mine within them. Each person I meet in my life carries this personhood inside them. The spirits you ferry to their final crossing in Spiritfarer are more than just random individuals. They represent the people we attach ourselves to throughout our lives, the ones in which we see ourselves reflected. Family members who have always been there in our lives. Best friends, who we’ve grown and developed alongside. Teachers who, while soemtimes harsh, show us we can accomplish more than we think. Poligical leaders who inspire us, but whose private lvies are a lot messier than we thought. The characters chosen not only impacts the character of Stella, but also us as players. I see in them reflections of those who have built my own personhood, pieces of who are nestled within me.

This is why, in our normal non-gaming lives, when these people pass, it feels as if part of us is gone as well. Because there was a part of us in them - part of us that has been formed and developed through our relatinoship with them. But likewise, when one of them pass, we still carry a part of them with us, the part of them reflected in our own experiences and developed through our relationship.

All of this is in the development of Spiritfarer - echoed in every passing of a friend, every building erected on our boat, and every hug we give to our friends. Even the nooks and crannies of the world are filled with reminders and markings of those important, even to the developers. For example, one island had a small memorial to a stillborn child a developer mourns. The bond of the child is still in the developer, and now forever present in a video game. And even more than that, its presence connects through our social bonds others playing the game who similarly mourn, creating new relationships through the experience of grief.

Spiritfarer does not treat grief as a simple five step process. It doesn’t show us what bereavement looks like through a progression that ends with a great acceptance that allows us to move on. Instead, it paints grief as a constant. It is not assume what the player will feel, allowing the experience to be nuanced and reflective. It demonstrates bereavement as something inherently non-clinical. It doesn’t so much as rely on continuing bonds, but rather subtly demonstrates them through interaction, experience and a love for others. It demosntrates them through focusing on the social aspects of our lives, and therefore the social dimensions of grief.

The game’s interaction with us marks us with the grief and loss experienced through the game, but also with the hope of personhood’s retainment. Its the hope and love of the continuation, an understanding of the inherent connections of death to ourselves, that things are never truly gone or truly gotten over. But always remain.

Continuing bonds can hurt. The constant reminders of the personhood we carry with us is not one we wish to be reminded of on a regular basis. But they also allow us to feel, to maintain connection to those who have passed. They can be healing, as well as harming.

Spiritfarer is the greatest demonstration of grief because it is so very real. It is one that does not end in neat little bows of acceptance, or one that is clinical and ends with a cure to the pain. Rather, it shows us how grief is messy and troublesome, nuanced and complicated. It can hurt and heal simultaneously. And its just as beautiful.