Vivian Asimos's Blog: Incidental Mythology, page 6

Cosplay: A Research Reflection

I do worry that any kind of reflection involving the cosplay research project will just sound like I’m gushing. I absolutely loved my cosplayers. Every single cosplayer who spoke to me was an amazing experience, all so different and unique and yet provided a wonderful insight to their communities and individualised experiences. I’ve been excited to hear some of my participants talking about how they’ve been really thinking about my questions even weeks after.

And this is the complicated thing about research. Anthropology is supposed to be like Star Trek’s prime directive: observance without interference. But like how it doesn’t work out cleanly in Star Trek, it sure doesn't in anthropology either. We, as people, are like drops in a pool, little ripple effects that hit other ripples, and send new ripples from these shock waves. We influence the people around us even if we don’t speak to them - sometimes maybe expressly because we don’t speak to them. We seek acknowledgement from those around us, or maybe we seek to understand and catch a glimmer of how the outside world views us. Maybe we want it to be combative, or maybe we hope beyond hope that it’s kind.

Just by my being there - being present, being inquisitive, being thoughtful - I have influenced cosplayers. I have caused them to consider the deep questions I asked them, like what does cosplay actually mean to them. I may have pushed in places where others haven’t, like when a cosplayer talked initially about the importance of accuracy, but then kept going on about performance. When I pointed out that apparently performance was more important, they seemed shocked and reflective.

Perhaps even bigger, I stood behind the Cosplay Journal booth at MCM, encouraging new cosplayers and affirming the experiences of long time cosplayers. I wasn’t even really being much of a researcher at that point - I was just loving the experience of being around these people and these costumes and feeling like, in some small way, I’m a part of it.

Because I inexplicably am, just by my being there. I have made new friends who I will cherish for my lifetime. Even though I hated much of the experience of being in cosplay, I cannot deny that I now feel more confident in my body when I’m wearing a skirt than I ever felt before.

And this is the bit that fewer people talk about in anthropology. We can reflect on how our sheer presence will have an affect on the people we’re studying. We can think about how our own ripple impacts the ripples we encourage ourselves to be around, even for just a short time. But we don’t like to talk as much about how these other ripples impact us right back. I may have influenced some cosplayers here and there to think more about themselves or their community. I may have encouraged newer cosplayers whose own experiences may have been different before I said anything. But I have also been impacted by cosplay.

Many cosplayers discussed feeling more confident after cosplaying, something I didn’t think I had personally experienced. But looking back, I think I actually have. It’s a subtle thing, but something that’s definitely present. While I may have pushed others to think about themselves and their friends, I, too, have thought about myself and my friends. I have gathered new friends, new confidence in my body, and a new outlook to the worlds of fandom that I have grown up loving so much.

I still don’t think I’ll ever be a cosplayer, not like the many lovely people who spoke to me. Not like the people who came to me excited and giddy about the prospect of a new costume. Not like my new friend ‘Olly, whose life revolves around costumes and construction. But I am something different than I was when I started. Perhaps I could be called a “cosplay sympathiser”, but perhaps its more that I have been marked by the experience of wearing a mask in the form of a costume, and feeling the wonderful Otherness of fiction stroke my identity.

Cosmic Horror and Religion

Today, I want to temporarily go back to the worlds of horror. I haven’t spend much time here recently - after spending years studying monsters I needed a little break. But I do really like horror and monsters and all the wonderfully horrid things that I enjoy spending time on. But I wanted to touch back on it again because - well, I don’t really have any specific reason. I just wanted to.

Anyway, I wanted to spend a little time on one of the paradoxes of horror: why someone would be so happy to engage with material that makes them scared. There are many different theories and approaches, which are all a bit different depending on the type of horror we’re talking about. So for sake of conversation today, I want to focus on supernatural horror - horror which includes elements of the above natural.

Supernatural horror is often equated with Lovecraft’s cosmic horror. For Lovecraft, cosmic horror was an exhilarating mixture of fear, moral revulsion and wonder. It’s related to an instinctual type of fear, one that’s based on something internally present in the nature of the human.

Above the fear, Lovecraft’s cosmic horror is also embedded with a nature of awe. When we talk about something being awful for Lovecraft, its in the actual sense of that word - something that is absolutely full of awe. Awe does not necessarily indicate something positive and beautiful, but can also be something so entirely morbid and unnatural that one cannot actually look away.

And it’s this awe that is often connected to religion. Religion scholar Rudolf Otto once wrote in his book The Idea of the Holy that religion has a natural element to it that sets it apart from other aspects of life. This bit is something he called the numen - the aspect of religion that can’t be explained through rational discourse. It’s something that innate, instinctual, and other-than-natural. Otto used the phrase “mysterium, tremendum et fascinans” to describe the numen: the mysterious, tremendous and fascinating.

In the Idea of the Holy, Otto described experiences with the numen, or religion expereinces, in ways that sounds on par with some kind of supernatural horror novel. The numenous aspect of religion is something that is inherently “Other” - something apart from what we have come to know and understand the world as humans. It’s something other than normal, other than natural. It provokes a sense of terror - the tremendem part - because it has such overwhelming power that leaves the human experiencing it completely tiny. And fascinans demonstrates that humans who experience this are still inherently drawn to this power and experience, despite the terror that is involved in the experience.

Otto gives us a slight insight to how horror can be understood as something that can be paradoxical. Like horror writing, religious experiences can be terrifying and horrendous and wholly Other, while also being something that is enticing and attractive. It holds some kind of charisma over us, and the awe that we feel as something that is inherently understood at some kind of fundamental level.

Otto interpreted the last part as the human conceding some kind of mercifulness or graciousness in the Other. I’m not as convinced by that part. I just think there’s something inherently enticing about an experience of a power so great that one feels dwarfed in it’s presence.

Horror readers and watchers are not experiencing some kind of understanding of mercifulness or graciousness in their experiences of the horror numen. Rather, they understand the attraction in the feel of the human being smaller than what our problems sometimes make them seem to be.

Again, this is not to say that all horror has to have this element of the awe, nor does this explain every aspect of horror. But I think every aspect of horror has it’s own reasons and ways of functioning and ways of the human engaging with it.

Another theory related to supernatural horror, and actually to this idea of the wonderful awe in cosmic horror, is the idea that horrific beings attract us as humans because of their power. This is called the “admiration of the devil” theory. This brings in complicated conversation about power, which often is related to stories which are xenophobic and racist - which, coincidentally, explains a lot about Lovecraft.

Anyway, I wanted to dip my toe back in this, but wanted to spend a little time explaining why a religion scholar may be interested in horror. Other than the fact that monsters are just kinda cool.

Pop Culture Knowledge and Anthropology

It took me a long time in academia before I met anyone, or even read anyone, who even considered the possibility of doing anthropology “at home”. Anthropology “at home” is typically the phrase used for anthropologists who study a culture they don’t have to travel to - it’s quite literally their home. The first anthropologists who were excused as being able to do this where anthropologists whose home was the away for others. Like most academic endeavours, people ascribed as the “other” are often only allowed to do research on themselves, and not stray from that. This is still a problem, with LGBT academics being regulated to only talking or teaching on issues of gender and sexuality, and black scholars only being able to talk about black culture and life.

In other words, white privileged academia has always had a difficulty putting itself under the microscope.

Anthropology at home is often looked down on in anthropological circles. At a academic conference, I was once in a group who were all talking about the furthest and most difficult travel they had getting to a field site in some kind of strange dick measuring contest. Of course me, whose primary fieldsite at the time was Reddit, was not seen as being quite up to the task.

Today, I want to talk about anthropology and popular culture, and more importantly discuss the complicated nature of doing this type of anthropological research when it comes to some of the basic ways of doing anthropology. Despite the way it is often overlooked by university academics, this freelance academic wants to take the time to show just how complicated and difficult it can be, and also advise those going into this field on how to best navigate the space.

The most difficulty thing I struggle with, personally, is the complicated struggle between cultural ignorance and cultural knowledge. I’ve mentioned on a different blog post, as well as in a couple more places, that an anthropologist’s job is to be annoying. We ask every question under the sun, and are supposed to act like newborn children, newly encountering the world and never taking anything for granted.

When doing a quick anthropological study on my mother, I found myself asking questions that I felt a bit silly asking due to me already knowing - very intimately - the person I was interviewing. But I couldn’t take anything for granted. I couldn’t assume an answer to the question, or presume what it was that my mother was thinking at any point in time. My job was to ask questions and record the answers.

This gets tricky when interviewing about popular culture matters, particularly for nerdy topics like I do. Several times during my cosplay interviews, I had people surprised that I knew different anime shows, or played video games. After one shock, a participant and myself spent about thirty minutes just talking about our favourite anime.

In many of these instances, feigning ignorance didn’t actually help me at all. It made people shut down and assume I wasn’t someone who would genuinely understand fandom. They worried I would paint them as crazed and hysteric fangirls who have no thoughts and are just cringey. The moment they realised I shared the same interests, things changed.

It means that it’s harder to ask questions that I presume the answer to. I know that these narratives are meaningful to people because they’re meaningful to me, and to my friends, and to my family. I see how it happens intimately in my every day life. So to sit and ask why anime is so great, or what’s so important about playing video games, it makes me sound disconnected and unaware.

In these situations, it’s best to play it by ear and see how the conversation flows. Though one important thing to note: when I say I feign ignorance, I never lie to my participants. Asking my questions can come across to my interviewees as someone whose ignorant, even if I don’t necessarily mean for that to be the case. Similarly, simply nodding and not interrupting with my own fan response can also come across the same way. Sometimes I smile and nod on purpose, sometimes I interject on purpose. You have to read how the interview is going and how much your interviewee just want to talk themselves without your interjection and teach you, and how much your interviewee just wants a friend.

Repetition as Mechanic and Story

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A bit of time ago, I reflected on how Majora’s Mask’s story of repetition led to it giving the feeling of something a bit darker and more depressing than other Zelda games. But repetition is pretty frequent mechanic in video games. Repetition allows players to understand how games function, to see something in tutorial and then repeat that action in slightly more complicated scenarios as the game progresses.

But some video games take the idea of repetition to a more extreme. Rogue-type games, by which I mean both Rogue-like and Rogue-lite games, prefer to take the idea of repetition as a constant. The core gameplay of these games is a dungeon crawl where the various rooms are procedurally generated. Death in these games are typically in some way scripted into the narrative and functionality, with runs through the dungeon only ending with death of the playable character.

I normally used to not really like these games as much, but recently some have really changed my mind about the genre. Games like Moonlighter, Hades and Cult of the Lamb have taken the genre and really run with it. What I find particularly interesting in these games is the way they script death and repetition into the game, and craft the narrative in such a way that repetition doesn’t really seem all that repetitive.

Repetition, in itself, is not really all that abnormal in storytelling more generally. The rule of threes is a thing in comedy for a reason - two repeats that we get, and one that doesn’t fit the standard. A similar concept is common is folklore and mythology, where we get repetition of events, stories and characters with small changes and alterations as the story progresses. This repetition helps to build tension and expectation. We know that things will alter at some point, but what point will that be?

In video games, we have two ways to tell stories. I covered this briefly in my previous video on Worldbuilding, but I’ll sum it up here: we have story as it is written and story as it is played or experienced. Now obviously there is crossover between the two, but ultimately this is a difference between the written story that is told to the player through dialogue and written narrative, and story as it is played out by the player actively. It’s the difference between telling you that your character has done something and getting the player to put in the buttons that makes your character do that thing instead.

This is, of course, a simplistic way of understanding it, but I think it gets the point across. Stories can be experienced as well as told, both inside and outside the world of video games, and both are important to telling a good story. There’s nothing so disappointing as a video game that tells a great story but has terrible ways of letting the player actually experience that story. And likewise, a good experience without a wonderful story can feel a bit empty at times. So how do games that need to rely on repetition in gameplay build the expectations and tensions without altering too much of gameplay, and while not making the narrative boring.

The first way this can happen is in scripting repetition and dungeon crawl change into the narrative. In Hades, the playable character Zagreous actually does die when the run fails. He’s just an immortal and so is brought back to the beginning to try all over again. In Cult of the Lamb, the character is reborn through their pact with the god of death. This means that the story itself revolves around trial and error and repetition. The dungeon crawl aspect is in the way the narrative explains the world the player finds themselves in. For Hades, the ever-changing world is due to a security aspect of the underworld in which elements of the chambers constantly move. Cult of the Lamb’s dungeon crawl is through a forest in which it’s easy to “get lost” or something.

The repetition in the narrative means that there’s a scripted way for both the player and the character to carry their experiences forward and therefore grow and develop change in each crawl. This is primarily through the ability for the character to keep experiences, items or elements that they gained through a run even after death. Most of the time, these are things that would feasibly be carried forward. In Hades, for example, whatever boons and money that has been collected is removed after death because the attempt is over - the money recollected by Charon when you are carried back to the land of the dead. For Cult of the Lamb, on death a large amount of your items that you collected is removed. This works as both a punishment for the player as well as a demonstration of the difficulty of carrying items back when you, ya know, die.

The second way you can have repetition with difference is through the use of a hub world. Some engage with hubworlds in far more detailed ways than others. For Hades, for example, the hubworld is simply a place to look over your details, formulate a plan for the next run, and gather some information and items from your friends who live there. Unless you’re looking into detailed reports, which you won’t really do until after you beat the final boss a time or two, you don’t spend a lot of time here. For Moonlighter, the hubworld is where the dungeon crawl is deemed as either successful or a failure. In this game, the character runs a shop where they sell items gathered in the dungeon. The player must manage item costs to keep prices from either falling or rising too much and ensure the right stock is in at the right time. This is also similar to Cult of the Lamb, which uses the hubworld of the cult to create a cult management part of the game. Here, what you collect during your runs effects the ability to manage can have positive or negative effects on your adherents. Similarly, things you do in the cult management can have positive or negative effects on your runs.

The differences in aspects of the hubworld demonstrated in these types of games, far more Cult of the Lamb and Moonlighter than Hades, means players are encouraged to do repetition again to look for the differences in the repetition. This keeps the repetition from being boring, and more in line with difference rather than similarity. In other words, it’s the hubworld that provides the possibility for tension and change in the repetition, things that are put into action by the player through another aspect of gameplay. In both of these example games, there’s essentially two games being played, which each impact the other. They also have their own storylines and narratives which weave into the others in intricate and complicated ways. So while they’re not stand-alone aspects of game, they are - in effect - a different game which the player engages with while thinking and building strategies for the more repetitive side of the dungeon crawling aspect. This means that the player goes in to the dungeon crawl with more thought and consideration in regards to what could be different, or should be different, and therefore builds their own tension through the consideration of possibility.

If gameplay is another form of storytelling, as we talked about before, than the incorporation of a new type of gameplay also introduces new ways of experiencing the story for the player. The story of the shop owner needs to tell the story of the successful shop. The story of the lamb’s cult needs the cult management side to show it’s a successful cult. Like life simulation role-playing games, the story of the success side of these things is told in the gameplay of the player.

So where does that put games like Hades, whose story revolves around successfully leaving the underworld and the hub world is not as relevant? Like the other games, the hub world in Hades does further the story but only in side conversations and detailed information on the people who surround the playable character. But, as any speedrun will show you, attention to the hub world isn’t actually necessary to have a “complete” game. Though it does give you more of the story that the game is demonstrating when actually played. You learn about the people who surround the playable character through talking to them. For Hades, the storytelling in the hub world is far more of the explicit kind - it’s the written narrative that’s scripted and presented to the player through dialogue. This is in contrast to the runs in your attempt to escape, where the success or failure or way that the story unfolds for these escaped is played rather than scripted. The developers of Hades - Supergiant Games - actually emphasises the importance of the player by directly referencing aspects of the play depending on how the run has gone. A god may reference that you look more haggard if your health is lower than normal, or sometimes referencing which boons you have gathered, or not gathered.

These types of interactions, which are dependent on the variation in the gameplay, also means that the repetition is altered in the way that the script part is presented. In other words, Hades not only makes differences in repetition in the way the story is played, but also in the way the story is presented. By reacting to the changes, even if slight and subtle, the game is acknowledging the alterations and emphasising difference.

As much as rogue-like games, and rogue-lite games if we are to make the distinction, do carry a lot of repetition in them, that’s not to say that repetition is reserved for these types of games and no others. As I mentioned before, repetition is part and parcel for storytelling in many forms of media - and no media at all. Zelda games require repetition of familiarity in structure - go to the temple, get the weapon, beat the boss, move on to the next temple. Life simulation games require repetition of routine. Repetition by itself is not necessarily an issue, but rather how the various ways that stories can be told and communicated to the player is dealt with, written, and experienced that makes a game either successful or not. Or, whether the story is a good story and experienced positively by the player.

Because as I said before, even old stories built on repetition. Hercules had seven labours, which had elements which carried over between them. But also there’s repetition between stories, tropes and structures which are repeated in order to lull the listener, or player, into a sense of familiarity and comfort. We recognise characters for what they represent, even if we are only first encountering them, and it’s these repetitions that we also carry with us in our day to day life.

But repetition in gameplay can sometimes lead to fatigue and finding the game, quite frankly, boring. But it’s not the repetition in and of itself that’s the problem but rather the way that repetition is understood and utilised by the game to increase interest, security, and heighten the experience of the player rather than lose that interest.

Meta-Folklore and Meta-Fandom

One of the things I find most interesting about delving into the whole mythology and popular culture connection is the equally as confusing natures of both the nature of storytelling more generally and the complicated nature of pop culture. This is especially true when we start talking about the nature of “fandom” and the inherent emotional connections that individuals draw to the things in pop culture they love.

Let’s start with the pop culture angle first. Fandom, or the absolute emotive love that we often associate with fandom, may seem amazingly simple at first. If I’m a fan of Lord of the Rings, that’s a thing I love. And I can love many things. I can love Lord of the Rings and the Dresden Files, and be a fan of both of these things. My fandom groups may overlap. I may recognise in some people a similarity in more than one love, which may strengthen my growing friendship with this person. A year or so ago, I met my new friend Holly, who I’m now doing the I’m a Fan of That podcast with. At first, we met up because of a mutual love of writing and research, but as we chatted we found many other connections. We both had elvish tattoos to reflect our love of Lord of the Rings, we both watched anime and played similar video games. And since that first long chat, we have become good friends. Partly this is because I find them a great person, but also this was helped along by a large number of shared interests.

But of course, I have a specific interest in a specific type of action on fandom: cosplay. I won’t spend a lot of time on cosplay here, as I try to devote separate blog posts to it, but the deep dive I’ve been doing on the subject matter as elicited a level of meta-fandom that exists in the world. Holly, for example - and I hope they don’t mind me using them as an example here - is not only a fan of Lord of the Rings and Discworld, but also a fan of cosplay. They express their love for these pop culture stories by dressing up, but their connection to cosplay goes deeper than that. They are, in essence, a fan of cosplay. Which is itself a reflection of fandom. A fandom within a fandom.

Me and my friend Holly Swinyard being total adults who can talk about serious stuff.

I want to draw on folklorist Alan Dundes now. In 1966, Dundes discussed the idea of “meta-folklore”, or folklore about folklore. This would be stories we tell that explain other stories, or jokes which are about other jokes. Maybe it’s storyteller commentary on folklore. In his article, Dundes tells a story of listening to a storyteller tell a story from American folklore, in which the storyteller added an aside where they questioned the historical accuracy of certain elements of the story. These parentheticals would, in essence, be meta-folklore.

I think fandom can learn a lot from this. There is fandom, but then there’s meta-fandom. Meta-fandoms would be the fandoms within fandoms, or the commentary on fandom from the fandom about the fandom. It’s has it’s own folklore and mythology, stories that are spun and detailed. Speculations, theories, the stories fans spin to each other aside from the canon are all parts of this meta-fandom.

I think the importance of understanding meta-fandom is from an important perspective of context. When we discuss fandom, we often discuss things from the more primary level. We talk about Star Wars fandom as the fans who engage with the canonical Star Wars pieces. We seldom talk about the people who are fans of a fanfiction writer who focuses on Star Wars in their work. We don’t talk as much about people who are fans of a video essayist who makes videos about the lore or theories and conspiracies within the narratives. These are one level removed and are therefore seen as less important.

But understanding meta-fandom means we understand the trickle down affect that happens with popular culture. Recently, Nintendo has come under fire for their intent to wipe certain content creators who focus on Nintendo content, including streamers and YouTubers. This is affect multiple levels of their fandom because it impacts the meta-fandom, the people who become fans of a YouTuber because they are also fans of Nintendo.

I’m not sure exactly how deep the meta-verse of fandom goes, but I think it’s worth chasing down and contextualising. This explores the multitude of ways that people demonstrate their love for narrative and, more importantly, the various ways that people create communities and sub-communities around these narratives. Meta-folklore and meta-fandom are both ways that the community communicates with one another while using the primary narrative as a vehicle to do so.

The Question of Sexy Cosplays

When chatting to a new cosplay friend, they bemoaned that when they went on tv to do an interview about cosplay, the very first question they were asked was “so this is a sex thing, right?” For most people, sexy cosplays, or cosplays in which the performer is dressed and posed in more sexually suggestive manners, are perhaps some people’s first and only view of the cosplay community. But even a fractionally more in-depth look will show how far more cosplays exist. The prevalence of these so called ‘sexy cosplays’ have created resentment and concern among cosplayers.

Today, I’m gonna take a deep breath, try to relax, and talk about the question of sexy cosplays.

Before digging into it, I need to make sure you readers know about one thing: I am not a cosplayer. I am not a member of the cosplay community, and I cannot and will not speak on the whole of the community. In fact, the whole of the cosplay community do not feel the same on this - not even a little. So to speak on behalf of the whole community, you’d constantly contradict yourself. So in this post, I’m not trying to make one cohesive point, but rather to show the various views on the matter that exist, and some of the arguments that are being had both actively and passively.

In a previous post, I talked about how there are two interesting things that can happen when you chat to people: everyone can say the same thing, or everyone can say something different. In the case of sexy cosplays, if it isn’t already obvious, everyone has said something different. I’m going to try and set some people in contrast to one another just so you can get a feel for how different people can be, and I’ll sprinkle in a little of my own thoughts here and there, but only as flavour.

Cosplayer: Jessica Nigri
Photographer: Martin Wong

One of the most brutal responses in the ant-camp was my participant Sam. I normally have a prepped question for sexy cosplays, but I didn’t even get the chance to ask it. Sam went in about “certain” cosplayers when I asked about what makes a cosplay a good cosplay, complaining directly about people who “just glue things on a bikini”. In almost direct contrast to that, Bailey talked about how the best cosplays are ones that make you feel good - even if you’ve “just glued things on a bikini”.

Sam’s resistance to sexy cosplays is one that’s reflected in a many people, not just Sam. And the reason why is what my friend found when being sat down for an interview. The sexy cosplays have become so recognised outside of the community that some think that’s the only cosplay there is.

The conception of cosplay as something sexual does have a negative affect on the community. Convention attendence comes with issues of safety for many cosplayers. Despite many cons proclaiming “cosplay is not consent”, cosplayers still discuss issues of people making or suggesting sexual advances or touching them without asking. Elliot told me of their hesitation to do what they called ‘risky’ characters. ‘I just don’t want creepy people around,’ they said. ‘I just don’t want anything bad to happen to be honest.’

Some cosplayers blamed the sexy cosplayers for these uncomfortable and terrifying positions they were put in. However, cosplayers who did sexy cosplays complained that just because they wore more revealing costumes did not mean they necessarily welcomed those experiences either. As the saying of ‘cosplay is not consent’, just because someone wears a revealing outfit doesn’t mean they’re necessarily welcome to sexual advances from anyone.

Cosplayer: Meg Turney
Photographer: Wes Ellis

But I think I want to focus on a different aspect of this conversation before I leave it for the time being. There’s an important element to all of this, and that is intention. Intention is incredibly important. Sexy cosplayers who enjoy the art of it all have every intention of that in their doing. They actively change costumes to mimic their wishes to reflect this aspect of cosplay, and even stage and pose in ways that demonstrate it. But drawing the line between people who are doing sexy cosplays on purpose in this way, and those who are simply cosplaying female characters who - typically - are oversexualised in their original design.

In fact, several cosplayers, including Stevie, voice their dislike over the over-sexualisation of female characters, which led them to frequently choose to cosplay male characters. Blake told me about a new cosplay they had worked on of a female character. After posting a photo of them in it online, they were so surprised by the comments that they were immediately uncomfortable with wearing it again.

Both Stevie and Blake do not intentionally partake in sexy cosplays, and yet often had to adjust their cosplays around the expectations of the audience. And yet, Stevie had only wonderful things to say about sexy cosplayers.

The conversation about sexy cosplays is complicated and nuanced, and I can’t wait to delve even further into it in the book. Obviously it was a lot to unpack in a short blog post, but I hope you got a taste and also will come to think a little more about the world of cosplay before you assume what it is.

And always always always ask for consent on touching!!

Wednesday and the Art of the Cliche

I enjoyed Wednesday on Netflix, and judging by how well the show did, I know I wasn’t the only one who did. Despite also having elements which felt inherently new, the whole show felt somehow nostalgic. Perhaps this is due to watching episodes of the various Addams family adaptations over the years. Other elements really reminded me of another teenage detective series from the early 2000s, Veronica Mars. But there’s also something more inherently familiar about the show.

When looking into how others felt about the show, I came across a few critics complaining about how cliche Wednesday was. And I think there’s a lot of truth to it. The cliches Wednesday relies on are inherently familiar and inescapable when watching it. However, unlike some of these critics, I would argue that the cliches in Wednesday are used purposefully and artfully in order to create the exact feel of the show that I felt. Netflix’s Wednesday uses cliches in order to craft a narrative that is inherently familiar, while also being able to create an interesting, diverse and different show.

When we talk about the cliche there is something inherently negative about the use of the term - its only used when talking about something that potentially shouldn’t be there. A cliche is something that points to the original author lacking some kind of original thought - a phrase or thought or trope that’s overused to a point of it being a problem. The only true difference between a common motif or a trope from that of the cliche is simply how the audience feels about it’s use.

Wednesday is full of common tropes - or cliches - that the audience will be immediately familiar with. We have the plot trope of the teenage detective. We have the protagonist who responds with deadpan witticisms, separating themselves from the community through not only the way they are but also through the way they act and what they say. Wednesday embodies the trope of the outcast - the protagonist that doesn’t fit in. She embodies this in all forms of herself. She dresses different - while all the other uniforms are black and blue, Wednesday’s is black and grey. She speaks different. Her words land more blankly and monotone, a flatness that contrasts with other people’s high emotions. Her somewhat dark academia style clothing, always in black, also contributes to her status as outcast. While others wear contemporary clothing, Wednesday’s style mixes the contemporary with vintage in such a way that makes her stand out as not quite fitting both place and time.

The outcast protagonist is fairly common across all sorts of media, and especially in urban fantasy narratives. Like a lot of urban fantasy shows, from Hilda to the Wynx Series, is an allegory for racism and xenophobia. The outside force is represented in the supernatural figure, rather than the differently skinned human, but to demonstrate how the complete outsider can still be a force for good. Wednesday uses these tropes to help represent this theme in a slightly different way while also staying true to it’s elements.

Potentially a good comparison would be another Netflix show, which started its popularity in 2016: Stranger Things. Like Wednesday, Stranger Things relies on familiar tropes and potentially cliches to tell their story. It’s not exactly groundbreaking to talk about Stranger Things’ reliance on 80’s sci-fi horror - the creators don’t exactly hide it. In fact, they try to remake exact scenes from movies like E.T. And like these movies, Stranger Things tries to tackle the conversation around the “Other”.

Even though the original elements their drawing from is from the 1980s, there were - and continue to be - similar sentiments in the Untied States in 2016. In fact, in the acceptance speech for Outstanding Performance in an Ensemble Drama Series, actor David Harbour drew the show’s primary theme out directly.

“We will repel bullies, we will shelter outcasts and freaks, those who have no home, w will get past the lies, we will hunt monsters. And when we’re lost amidst the hypocrisy and the casual violence of certain individuals and institutions, we will - as per chief Jim Hopper - punch some people in the face when they seek to destroy what we have envisioned for ourselves and the marginalised.”

Stranger Thins achieves this by relying on tropes and commonly found motifs, but presenting them in ways which demonstrate their position. Like E.T, the outcast of Eleven is the hero and saviour, while the true horror is not the outsider, but the government itself. While 80s movies typically painted the ultimate need of protection to be middle-class white nuclear families, it’s the marginalised who are painted as the true heroes in Stranger Things - the alcoholic sheriff, the poor single mother, and the group of directly nerdy kids. The drawing on familiar movies which also questioned this position in the 80s, Stranger Things positioned itself to directly contradict the political and social movements of Trump’s America.

My initial view of Wednesday as inherently similar to Veronica Mars is actually pretty spot on for a lot of reasons. Both are quite predictable when it comes to the plot and basic feel of the shows. Both follow teenage protagonists working on mysteries while attending school. Both feature social outcasts who struggle to find a place for themselves and a community to call their own.

The similarities are present because they are not exactly novel ideas to begin with. They weren’t new with Veronica Mars, and they sure aren’t new now with Wednesday. They’re inherently familiar tropes we have come to know and love, ones that make us settle into the idea of the plot with familiarity and comfort. Like Stranger Things, Wednesday presents with a situation we are inherently familiar with, bringing on elements of nostalgia while also displaying some of the inherent problems with the things we are nostalgic over.

By showing us the disenfranchised parts of society in the 1980s, Stranger Things questions the nostalgia of the 80s being a perfect and comfortable time for families. Similarly, Wednesday works to break down the nostalgia of the late 90s and early 2000s. It’s first choice was in choosing Wednesday as our protagonist. And yes, the Addams family has been around for more than just the 90s. The comics were started far before this in the 1930s. However, it wasn’t until the 90s that the Addams family came to television screens and started it’s rise in popularity in common mainstream pop culture. In fact, the television series stripped the original comic of some of it’s more scary elements and presented it as more kooky than spooky, to borrow a phrase. A series of movies also helped to propel the characters into popular consciousness - a strange family of spooky characters who also, inherently, loved each other as a family unit.

For those who grew up in the 90s and early 2000s, the Addams family was a familiar sight, even if you didn’t watch the show itself. Like a lot of cartoon sitcoms, it took the nuclear family unit as the source of the show and the drama, but by depicting a strange and gothic family that also inherently loved one another - especially the clear love and attraction that exists between Morticia and Gomez - was a strange flipping of the typical narrative of tensions and underlying anger between family members.

By also displaying tropes of the teenage detective, we also fall into the familiarity and nostalgia of shows like Veronica Mars. But like Stranger Things, Wednesday flips some of the elements of this trope. For one, the intensity of Wednesday’s otherness compared to her classmates is far more direclty drawn than Veronica Mars. This is partly due to different narrative reasons for difference - Veronica was ostracised after being popular for a time, while Wednesday never really experienced popularity to begin with. This means that Wednesday’s otherness is even more felt when put in a directly urban fantasy narrative of other “outcasts” as they are called - or, in other terms, supernatural creatures. Wednesday is not ever detailed or depicted in similar ways to her supernatural classmates, though does experience visions. And yet, she often feels like she is an outcast among outcasts.

While occasionally pointing to issues of racism, Wednesday’s primary focus of otherness is on the LGBT community. This is pointed out more inherently. The first time we see this is in the rounding up and persecution of the outcast community by Christian groups - something that could be referring to many different groups, but is felt in our current society strongly by many in the LGBT community. Enid also faces a common issue for LGBT kids when her mother suggests taking her to conversion therapy for her werewolf problem, something that even Enid points out as wrong and terrible. Ms Weems also is appalled when Wednesday confronts her about what someone’s supernatural background was and argued that she never asks for her students to define themselves. In fact, when Lady Gaga, a huge gay icon, re-enacted Wedneday’s famous dance scene on TikTok, Netlfix shared the video, captioning it as “Mother Monster has arrived at Nevermore” referring simultaneously to the monsterous nature of the school while also paying homage to Gaga’s referral of her fanbase as “monsters” because of their typical marginalisation from society. While not being overt about the gay experience directly, Wednesday is able to draw connections of monstrosity often felt by the LGBT community - a monstrosity put onto them by outward society, making them outcasts.

Wednesday would not have been as successful of a show if it didn’t rely on the tropes and cliches we have come to recognise and find comfort in. What makes Wednesday interesting isn’t the use or not use of tropes, but rather the interpretation put on a commonly used motif. The nostalgia of both the plot and the characters help us to find comfort in something that is making a larger statement about the discomfort of our contemporary society. The hate has not gone away from the town surrounding the school, and unlike Veronica Mars, there is no reason given for the hate from the town. This is because it’s echoing hate that is often not given reason.

The use of kids as protagonists is important as it demonstrates hate as a learned behaviour, rather than something that is inherent. Teenagers are young enough to still change their mind as they slowly become adults, but also have already been given the innate hate from their parents through learned behaviour. We see the struggle of this in the very cliche prom episode, when Lucas Walker, the son of the mayor, spends enough time with Enid and the other outcasts to feel like they’re also just teenagers like him. The coming of age narrative, something that in itself is a trope, is one which is a process of unlearning.

So yes, Wedneday is full of cliches. But that doesn’t make it necessarily bad. In fact, without these I don’t think the show would have been nearly as successful as it was. Tropes are tropes for a reason, cliches are overused for a reason: we find comfort in them. Narratives structures like the Hero’s Journey or the 3 Act structure are structures that give us comfort, and what makes up these structures is also important. Wednesday relies on this comfort to craft what matters most to the show itself, and to lull their viewers into a sense of ease. And this ease is important to make sure the audience is on the show’s side when it comes to their primary statements about outcasts and the Other.

While Wednesday is full of cliches, it’s also full of cliches for a reason. And I say, bring on more of it all.

The Nigella Effect

I was recently chatting on a podcast (soon to come out) about mythology and the impact of storytelling, particularly when it comes to capitalism. I’ve mentioned it several times before, most notably when discussing He-Man and the Masters of the Universe in a previous blog post. When focusing as much as I do about pop culture and mythology, the inevitable constant question is the role of capitalism in all this: can a story be meaningful and impactful when its crafted solely for the purposes of making money? When we talked about Masters of the Universe, we focused on the idea that humans, even children, are inherently particular about the stories we gravitate to. We don’t pick up only what is put in front of us, but rather we think about it, and only hold onto the toys and objects for stories we love. This week, I want to focus on a different aspect of this capitalism question, one that speaks to the role of replication, cliché and all things money-grab feeling: what I have come to call The Nigella Effect.

The Nigella Effect starts with UK celebrity chef Nigella Lawson. I say UK celebrity chef, but Nigella has really reached far farther. Nigella’s show is famous for how she delivers her information, saying words with a husky emphasis and slow sensual camera shots on food. She’s famous for being a sexy woman, whose way of speaking, cooking and filming reflects this.

Several years ago, I was sat in an academic conference room where a speaker was talking about the online phenomoneon of “food porn”. In this, they made an off-handed comment about Nigella Lawson, commenting that the only reason Nigella has done well is because she’s an attractive woman who capitilises on her sexuality. To which I would respond, yes and no. Yes, Nigella has capitilised on her own looks and our society’s obsession with sex. However, there’s something more to Nigella.

And this is where the Nigella Effect comes in. Nigella has been around on UK and world televisions, and in the world’s cookbook collection, since the late 1990s. Since she found wild success, many have tried to replicate her success, from the way her shows were filmed to the way she dressed. However, none of them have ever been able to replace Nigella. She stands alone as the prime example of sexualised cooking shows, even now, over twenty years later.

This is because there’s something else to the special sauce that is Nigella. Replicating the surface level elements of the show, which are also all important, can only go so far. There’s another element which is less readily available, something that comes through in the close soft focus lens and the husky voice. There’s something that is inherently Nigella about Nigella, and it’s that element we cling to, as much as we also cling to her sexuality.

This is the Nigella Effect. Nigella found commercial success, which means others who want to also have financial success may try to mimic it. But when they don’t find that kernel of beauty, they fail.

That’s not to say that everything that tries to replicate fails. Some have found success replicating while understanding what that secret kernel is. Take Stranger Things for example. Stranger Things mimics many elements of 80s sci-fi horror, including replicating shots from E.T. However, there is something beautiful within Stranger Things that goes beyond this replication - it understands something inherent in the original source material, as well as finding its own place and its own special something that others will seek (and perhaps fail at) replicating in themselves.

What I think the Nigella Effect teaches us that is surface level narrative structure can only go so far. A lot can be said about the narrative structures like the Hero’s Journey, or even something as basic as the three act structure. But replicating structures is only a partial element. Replicating characters is only a partial element. Replicating camera shots or colour elements is only a partial element. The most important element, one that is far more difficult to replicate, is the soul of a piece - the thing that makes Nigella Nigella, and not someone else. And we, an audience, can typically tell when something is soulless.

Enskilment and Cosplay

When looking through everything on the cosplay project, I constantly come back to the question of skill. It’s a constant conversation point, and something that comes up even when I don’t have to ask people about it.

Cosplay necessarily involves skill. To do cosplay, you have to be skilled. Some of them are obvious aspects of what people on the outside of cosplay thinks it involves, skills like sewing, for example. But there are other aspects of it. For the actual putting together of the costume, some people do sew. They style wigs and do complicated makeup. These are all skillful. So even the cosplayers who buy their costumes are still engaging in some skill, whether it’s the makeup or the wig.

But there are other less obvious skills involved as well. Character choice itself is a necessary skill, and one that involves a lot of different facets. Cosplayers discussed how so many different elements go into it: the abilities or finances they have at their disposal in comparison to how complicated the costume is, what costumes suit which environments they intend to wear it, and the personalities of the cosplayer in comparison to the character choice.

One cosplayer told me of how they were able to advise friends and loved ones on the cosplays they wanted to do.

“I mean, mostly with my best friend, it makes sense,” they told me. “Because I’ve known her for so long, I’m just kind of like, ‘Yeah, you’re a gremlin. Go off and do your cosplay.’ But sometimes, my boyfriend just kind of comes up with like, cosplay ideas. He’s never cosplayed before. But he wants to get into it. And so sometimes he comes up with some ideas where I’m like, ‘No, you should never do that.’ So sometimes if I know the person enough, I’ll be - I’ll be like, you know what, you stick with that.”

Like this cosplayer, many cosplayers struggled to articulate the way they negotiated this knowledge. It was something that was more ‘felt’ than ‘learned’. The ability for cosplayers to choice their own cosplays properly, as well as being able to point loved ones in the right direction, is an innate knowledge set that is a type of skill that is developed and understood. It takes into account detailed knowledge of popular culture and other media around them, but also a deep social and psychological knowledge of the people they care about.

Gísli Pálsson discussed the idea of enskilment - the idea that knowledge is not always a cognitive forward experience, but rather can be bodily. Pálsson explained how enskilment is a type of immersion in the world, a way of learning that is encapsulated by the simple act of being deeply involved in the flow of the everyday, rather than knowledge through a mechanical cognitive process we tend to think it is. In other words, learning is something people do, actively through the world.

In other words, learning is not always something that can be simply in a textbook. It’s also not something you can pick up from YouTube tutorials, as a lot of cosplayers use for makeup skills and wig styling. The type of learning and skill development involved in choosing cosplays is one that is more innate and learned through a socialised process of doing. It is only through the act of doing cosplay that one can really hone this type of knowledge about cosplay.

A makeup tutorial at CosXpo 2022

This type of innate skill is only one that can be learned through the process of doing, failing, and reconsidering. My own cosplay had snags that, had I more experience and innate skill, I would have been able to avoid. My cosplay was of the character Chise Hatori, from the anime Ancient Magus Bride. The character wears a simple outfit, which was, admittedly, one of the reasons I picked her to cosplay. I knew I had, at the time, no skill in clothing construction (I have, since, started teaching myself to sew, which I think is a discussion also worth considering). Instead of creating costumes, or even buying them, I decided instead to purchase clothes from charity shops and thrift stores which fit the general look of the costume I was after. I considered this a good mixture between the two worlds of buying and making - a type of make-shifting.

It was not the make-shifting that was a problem, rather my discomfort in different clothes. I’m a jeans and t-shirt kind of girl, and therefore am rather unaccustomed to wearing skirts. When I do, it’s typically when it’s a little colder out, so I’m wearing tights or leggings underneath. When I wore my cosplay to a con, though, I found myself incredibly uncomfortable. I was immensely aware of the fact I was wearing a skirt. I was aware of how I had to sit or move or stand in a way that I hadn’t been accustomed to really thinking about before. And overtime, the discomfort grew from metaphorical to painful as I wasn’t prepared for the way my thighs would be affected by the difference between wearing a skirt and trousers.

When I, later, talked of my experiences with cosplayers, they all understood exactly what I was saying. One told me that was why they never cosplayed in skirts. Another admonished me for not knowing I had to wear something under my skirt. Another shared with me that their first few cosplays carried the same issues, both the physical pain of not knowing about certain clothing items as well as the discomfort I faced at the beginning. It was all about learning both how to move in different clothes, as well as learning which clothes suit you - not in an attractive way, but in a comforting way.

What I lacked was the innate skill in understanding what clothes or costumes suited me. Not in a bodily sense, but in a personal sense. If I continued to cosplay, I would start to learn more innately which characters are ones to admire from a distance, and which ones to personally embody. One cosplayer told me of this distinction, of the difference between cosplays you want to see and take a photo with and those you want to be and take a photo in. This knowledge is something that is only gained through an innate skilful knowledge of your own body and self.

Pop Culture as Mythology

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So, I realised I should probably reassert the actual reasons for this channel. And by channel, I mean everything really. What’s in this channel is also echoed on my blog, in my books, in my life. It’s all together, and all connected. Everything comes down to a singular core basic idea: popular culture narratives are our contemporary mythology. But I thought maybe today I’d take apart this a little more.

In oder to really dissect the idea of popular culture as mythology, we should first think about what we mean by the word myth, or mythology. Like most things in the study of people, the definitions possible for what a myth is is pretty endless. Colloquially, saying something is a myth is more often as a way to say that something is not true. Obviously, I tlak about mythology and fiction simultaneously, so something being thought of as either “real” or “not real” is not really of any kind of consequence for me.

But maybe it would be fitting to start a conversation about mythology with a story. When I was growing up, my mother had a few stories she liked to repeat, in that way that mothers do. A favourite of hers was of two Buddhist monks walking through a forest. At a river crossing, they came across a woman who needed help across. One of the monks picked up the woman and carried her acros the river - even though ouching women was forbidden for these monks. As they continued their walk, the other monk kept thinking about the transgression his companion made, until finally he broke and demanded that his friend explain why he would do such a thing. His friend said “I put the woman on the other side of the river. How long have you been carrying her?”

For some, in order for any story to be considered mythology, they have to have certain narrative elements. These are what are sometimes called “substantialist” definitions - they include aspects of a story like how the narrative must be about gods, for example. But there are a lot of cultures around the world which do not really have gods. These substantialist definitions also require people looking and studying myths to need to decide which elements are considered significant and which aren’t - typically from a standpoint outside the culture they’re studying.

In contrast, some others think of myths as being an explanation for the world - why thunder exists and what it is, for example, or why spiders exist. But what about stories like my mother’s monks? In this story, there are no explanations of how things have come to this world, or why natural cocurences are present.

E.B Tylor was a scholar who understood myth as explanation. The idea was that ancient peoples needed to have some kind of rational explanation for the natural occurrences around them. For us, in today’s world, we have science to explain these things, but before they had science, they needed something else. So they had myths.

This is a bit of a simplistic way to think of both the power of storytelling and the minds of ancient peoples. People have always had the conception of rational thought, even if they lacked some examples or knowledge. This also doesn’t truly provide a good explanation for other types of stories, such as myths focusing on a hero’s exploits, like Hercules, or more ideologically focused narratives like my mother’s Zen stories.

So what is a myth, if it’s not based on what’s inside it, or some notion of truth or explanation? For this, we turn to more functionalist definitions, or definitions that are based on what a myth is doing for those who are speaking it.

For me, for Incidental Mythology, for everything that I do, I understand myth as this: a myth is a meaningful narrative, or something like a narrative, which an individual or a community uses to understand themselves and the world around them.

For my mother, the point of her stories was to help me inherently understand the world and my place within it. I was taught, for example, that it’s worse to hold onto past grievances than to just let them go. These are important instructions that a mother feels is necessary to pass onto her daughter to survive in the world. I needed to be prepared - to know myself and the way the world will treat me. Another very Buddhist saying of my mother’s was “life sucks, and then you die” - another short, pithy saying to understand how the world will treat me when an adult. These are not sacred truths, they’re not set apart from the world. In fact, they’re inherently part of the world, they are the communication of what is entirely everyday basic truths. They explained the simple functioning of the everyday realities I would face, and often based entirely in fiction.

Okay, so we’ve seen how mythology has a complicated relationship with fiction. But I’m sure it’s easy to see how myth can also be fiction when it’s stories are of legendary heroes or Buddhist monks. But what about stories from Middle-Earth, or heroes from Hyrule? For many, it’s one thing to say that fictional stories relating exactly to religious or ideological dimensions is seen as acceptable for mythology, but not stories played out in video games or on our television screens. But to that, I think we have to think about the differences in storytelling between previous times and contemporary times. What is it that makes something like my mother’s Zen monks somehow more magical - or mythic - than, say, Game of Thrones?

Perhaps time is a big factor. Old Zen stories, or the saga of Odysseus, or legends of Thor are all very old narratives. We think of them as having a legacy, a history that reaches far back. This history is what gives them legitimisation as ‘sacred’ narratives - they are important simply because they continue to exist. And there is something important there. Many stories, even contemporary popular culture narratives, have fallen out of popular attention while others have stuck around. The staying power of certain narratives is interesting - what makes them more important or more interesting for audiences than whatever new narrative comes around?

Popular culture encompasses so much of our everyday lives: from what we watch, to what we read, to how we dress, and even what we eat. There can, obviously, be meaning for individuals outside of what is popular or even to retain that meaning when what it is is no longer as popular as it once was. But popular culture is made popular by us, by a culture or society at large, and this is of particular interest to those of us looking for meaningful narratives.

When we look into fan cultures and people who really love their bits of popular culture, we can very easily see people who gravitate to narratives because they matter to them. When we grab hold of a narrative tightly, we do so because we see something within it - we see ourselves within it, or the world we understand or comprehend. I grabbed hold of the Lord of the Rings because I saw my experiences with PTSD in its pages, I understood the experience of feeling like there was no possible way of returning back home for a happily ever after. My worldview, my understanding of my place in the world had radically shifted, and I grabbed hold of the narrative that showed me the world as I understood it to be.

When doing research into the Legend of Zelda games, I encountered a lot of similar sentiments in other people. One person I chatted to had the tattoo of a triforce - an image of three triangles arranged together in a bigger triangle - on their forearm. The triforce is an important symbol in the Zelda franchise. In the game world, it’s an object of great sacred importance, left behind by the three goddesses who created the world. Each triangle represents an important facet of a person: wisdom, power and courage. The in-game myth is that anyone who has a perfect balance of wisdom, power and courage can touch the triforce and get any wish they want granted. If they do not have this balance, the triforce breaks into three separate pieces, each piece spiritually attaching itself to someone who is the embodiment of its human facet. The person who had the tattoo spoke to me about this part of the story, and said that it was always so amazing that each game forced you to play out each element of these. Your primary character had to have a balance of wisdom, power and courage in order to successfully beat the game. They expressed to me how much this meant to them, and said the tattoo was there to help guide them through their life: to approach every decision with an equal balance of wisdom, power, and courage.

Now, this lovely participant would by no means be marking the UK census record with ‘Hylian’ as their religion. They probably don’t see their connection to this narrative as being overly sacred, or a metaphor, or a historic truth. But this narrative is an important guiding light for them, it demonstrates a way to exist and move within the world. It gave them a way to understand themselves. Playing the game was a fun experience, but it also provided them with a more nuanced understanding of the world they live in, and they continued to use the game as a narrative to better understand the world. In other words, for this player, and for myself with the Lord of the Rings, these stories in pop culture are inherently mythic.

There is a typical consideration that consumers of popular culture are somehow passive - that we wade through the world sluggish and blind, picking up whatever corporation places something in our hands. While large corporations can definitely control a lot of what we see in front of us, we have a lot of control over what we take in and what we don’t. Things tend to be popular for a reason - and it’s not always super simple.

De Certeau described audiences as poachers, meaning that we move in the fictional worlds we find ourselves in and take what we we like.[ Ibid.] His work focused more on the practice of reading, but I think it can apply evenly to other forms of popular culture as well. In fact, Henry Jenkins took de Certeau’s conception of poaching and related it to the way fans comb narratives to make them their own.[ Henry Jenkins, Textual Poachers: Television Fans & Participatory Culture, Studies in Culture and Communication (Routledge: 1992)]

Fandom was first understood as something to be avoided. Fans were the over-enthused ‘Other’ - those strange fanatics who would love something and spread it to others and become so immensely emotionally attached that it was a psychological problem. We have luckily grown to understand that fandom is something that’s healthy, and that there are many types of fans out there, and fans for all sorts of different things. Fans are those who find solace, in some way or another, in something every day in popular culture.

Cornel Sandvoss, a scholar in the academic study of fandom, defined fandom as ‘the regular, emotionally involved consumption of a given popular narrative or text’.[ Cornel Sandvoss, Fans: The Mirror of Consumption (Polity: 2005)] These fans, therefore, are the clear indicators of how contemporary audiences engage with contemporary stories - with emotional connections and investments which have the potential to directly affect the audience on a deeper level. They are the ones who see the piece of popular culture as mythic.

Through fandom, we see emotional connections forming that influences the formation and alterations of personal identities. Through their connection to popular culture, they grow to understand themselves and also the world around them. My participant with the triforce tattoo is one of these - a fan of Zelda whose emotional attachment to the game is reflected in how they use the narrative to understand how they must move through the world.

For fans like the participant with the Zelda tattoo, it is more than just over-enthusiasm for something that is ‘just a game’. They are not psychological Others who need some kind of help. They are simply people who find solace in a narrative, and this solace allows them to better understand themselves and the social world they find themselves in. The fact that these narratives are more often fictional has no bearing on their ability to function as myths - just as my mother’s Buddhist monks could be fictional. Humans have the ability to separate the idea of mythology and fiction, seeing them as two categories which can overlap without any problem.

If we think about mythology in the sense of old stories, rather than new ones, then we would have to ask an important question: when did myths stop being told? And following that: why did we ever stop?

The answer, as we can see through aspects of life like fandom and popular culture narratives that are inherently important to the people telling them, re-telling them, and engaging with them, is that, quite simply, mythology has never stopped. We never stopped telling meaningful stories. The form they take, however, has shifted a little.

Our popular culture is our mythology, our contemporary narratives of heroes and gods and fantastical worlds. It communicates our world back to us, and we either grab it wholeheartedly or reject it completely. Like my participant with the Zelda tattoo, we mark these narratives on our skin and use them to guide us through life. It teaches us that our individual views of the world are not crazy - we are similar to others, and we can find a new life. Like my mother’s Zen stories, they are fictional but meaningful and so important to pass down to the generations after us.