Vivian Asimos's Blog: Incidental Mythology, page 7

Table Top Role Playing Games and the Magic Circle

In a currently-needs-to-remain-undisclosed project recently, I was doing a lot of thinking about table top role playing games (TTRPGs). I was talking a lot about the way that narratives are crafted by both the individuals playing and the people who have gathered together to create a communal narrative.

One of the things I wanted to talk about but coudln’t due to the topic at hand was the nature of the play environment when it comes to TTRPGs. There’s a lot that can be said for the dynamics of the structure of the play environment and the way that people create that space. In many ways, we could talk about ritualisation, the concept of ritual space, and how play works with these dynamics. But I think, first, I need to talk about the magic circle, and how, I think, TTRPGs disprove the idea of it.

The magic circle was first theorised by Johan Huizinga, one of the founders of the discipline of cultural history. Now this is an old scholar. He died in the 1940s, so his work is even older, but Huizinga was the first one in Western academia to really approach the topic of play seriously. Contemporary scholarship in play studies and game studies still either rely on his work, or reject his work, because it’s the first calling point. His book Homo Ludens, first published in 1938, starts with the idea that play is foundational and essential to culture.

While Huizinga didn’t really spend a lot of time on the term ‘magic circle’, he did reflect on the idea of it. Later game theorists took the idea and ran with it more fully, especially in the realm of digital games. But the idea that Huizinga did sketch out was that all play is present in sketched out locations; play needs demarcated space that is away from the non-play of everyday life. Playgrounds and tennis courts are examples of how this space is presented as a place away from the rest of life, therefore allowing play to take place.

All play moves and has its being within a play-ground marked off beforehand either materially or ideally, deliberately or as a matter of course. Just as there is no formal difference between play and ritual, so the 'consecrated spot' cannot be formally distinguished from the play-ground. The arena, the card-table, the magic circle, the temple, the stage, the screen, the tennis court, the court of justice, etc, are all in form and function play-grounds, i.e. forbidden spots, isolated, hedged round, hallowed, within which special rules obtain. All are temporary worlds within the ordinary world, dedicated to the performance of an act apart.

Essentially, play is set apart from the rest of life that is designated as non-play, and when we enter these spaces we play. When we leave these spaces, we cease playing. Like a literal magical circle, the boundaries are upheld to create a special space.

On its surface, TTRPGs seem to uphold this idea. You don’t play until you gather around a table - or a zoom call. You have your special accoutrements: you dice, your maps, your character sheet. These are all things that have a special use for your play, and you only play when gathered around the table. When the day is over, you return to your life and are no longer playing.

However, I think when the play is given more attention, we start to see that the magic circle of the TTRPG game is not as well maintained as it initially seemed. Players move in and out of character given different environments, showing that the play circle is more porous. Players can also feel differently about play in different environments and with different people. Some players may feel uncomfortable playing with a different community and therefore feel unable to fully engage with the environment, even if the space is prepared and presented in the exact same way.

Players also can often learn from their characters and play sessions, and the release and escapism of the play allows players to take things back with them in the every day. Players talk about how their play impacts their day to day, and their day to day impacts their play in return.

I think TTRPGs present us with exactly how porous play is, and how it’s not as specially put aside from the everyday as it may seem at first. I think the magic circle is overly simplistic, and highly relies on play being something special and sacred. But the special and sacred can be profane and every day, just like TTRPGs.

Cosplay and Communities of Creativity

As should be no surprise to any regular blog readers, I’m still working on the cosplay book! And I will be working on the cosplay book until August of this year, so strap in for a few more months of this. But one of the interesting things I’ve found about cosplay and the cosplay community is the role of creativity. This creativity spreads through the fandom and the interactions within the community. So today, we’re going to talk about the cosplay community specifically as a community of creativity.

In our last cosplay blog post, I mentioned an article by Lamerichs which was about cosplay as a subculture. At the time I said we’d talk about cosplay as subculture a different time - this is that time!

Many of the groups in pop culture more generally are described as subcultures, this is because they are seen as and a group that is both distinguished from but embedded within a larger group. Dick Hebdige is perhaps the most prominent scholar who really laid the foundations of the study of subculture, through his focused study of youth subcultures in Britain. For Hebdige, subcultures are formed to challenge dominant ideologies and social normalisation that occurs in the wider culture. Therefore, their style and interactions are all done as acts of resistance.

While cosplay is something that may not be necessarily embedded in the everyday actions of wider society, and it can definitely be a form of resistance and subversion, it is not always like this. The wider cultural group, of course, can also be vastly different in different areas of the world, and yet cosplayers see themselves in cosplayers from a variety of locations.

Hebdige also commented on how the style of subcultures become gently folded into the mainstream society it initially fought to separate itself from. This was mostly described as evident in punk. What first was seen as radical, and sometimes a source of fear for the mainstream culture, it slowly becomes more commodified until it’s presence is a part of the mainstream.

A collection of cosplay wigs, construction books and other resources for cosplay creativity (taken at MCM London).

The commodification and the folding in of cosplay into wider mainstream culture is definitely something that has been occurring in the last ten to twenty years. Since cosplay was described and coined by Takahashi, its popularity is fast growing. The emergence of professional cosplayers demonstrates a place in the growing commodification of cosplay. However, I don’t think cosplayers ever initially were viewed with fear. In fact, the mainstream society at worst viewed cosplayers as social losers, rather than punk-ish miscreants.

A more complicated term that has a growing presence in discussions about cosplay and other nerd subgroups is that of the ‘neo-tribe’. The idea of the neo-tribe is primarily based on the work of Michel Maffesoli, a French sociologist. Building on the idea of modern society’s push toward more and more individualisation, Maffesoli believed that in response, individuals would start to embrace nostalgia, bringing on a era of neo-tribalism.

The network of sociology that Maffesoli built is idea on is starting to take us quite far from the world of cosplay, but the idea is that modernity causes social fragmentation. We no longer live in close knit familial stages, for example. The person who grew up surrounded by family in rural Kentucky, for example, now moves to New York, separating themselves from the world of ‘community’ as we once knew it.

The preference toward neo-tribes is two-fold. The first is the growth of importance of ‘found family’ in popular culture and popular discourse - the idea that an individual is not bound to their birth family, but rather can build their own family from those around them. The second preference is that the idea of things like ‘culture’ and therefore ‘subculture’ is inherently rigid. Neo-tribes, by contrast, are more ambivalent, reflecting a state of mind or a lifestyle choice, rather than something as strongly cemented as, say, familial clan based organisations, or formalised nationalities.

The primary advantage of neo-tribalism is how it sits in contrast to the idea of a subculture. This is getting into weird definitional wars undertaken by academics world over, where someone dislikes one so comes up with their own, and then another hates that, and it’s a constant cycle. Often, if your problem with one definition is the theoretical underpinnings, then new definitions that don’t address these are going to have the same problems. This is kinda the case with neo-tribes. The concept of neo-tribes is theoretically underpinned by the idea that modernity has caused us to no longer have traditional bonds, an idea that I don’t know if I fully agree with.

During the course of my research, while chatting with cosplayers, the term ‘community’ was used freely. This is mostly because only anthropologists sit around overthinking the terms we are using and why it may or may not matter. But also, I don’t think the individuals thinking about the cosplay community are that far off.

The idea of a community, sociologically speaking, is primarily concerned with the idea that a group of people have something in common. This can be something like location in which they live - if I live in Brooklyn, I’m a part of the Brooklyn community, for example. But this can be loose. If I move away from Brooklyn, I’m no longer part of the Brooklyn community. I may feel some affinity, and I may be able to share some of the same language if I run into someone else who still is a part of that community, but ultimately, I’m no longer there, and therefore I don’t belong. Communities are built on this - the in group vs the outgroup. To have a community, you have to have people who belong. And one of the consequences of having people who belong, is you have people who don’t.

Sample sewing kit typical of cosplayers to be able to adjust or mend costumes on the fly (photo taken at CosXpo).

But like the idea of neo-tribes, communities can be fluid. Albert Hirschmann, for example, wrote about ‘shifting involvements’ in communities. People can vary their involvement in their community, and can even drop in and out of their ‘belong’ status depending on the individual. As Hirschmann pointed out, this is most common in groups that require some degree of active engagement from its members.

So if to be in the cosplay community, you must cosplay, then individuals may feel themselves dropping in and out of the community depending on how much energy they have to give to keep their involvement active. One individual I spoke to was a student, who felt they had little time or money to engage with cosplay. They still considered themselves a cosplayer, but admitted to no longer feeling as ‘connected’.

Cosplay is, therefore, a community that defines itself by the shared love of creativity and creative action. It’s the act of cosplay that defines them and unites them, even if that act of cosplay looks different for each person. But creativity is the root of everything - cosplay is a community of creativity.

Knives Out and the Structure of the Whodunnit

Before we start, there will be spoilers. If you haven’t seen Knives Out or Glass Onion, do it. They’re amazing.

I don’t think I’m unique in saying that I really love a mystery. So many tv shows, films, books, are all about crimes and detectives, and solving a good puzzle. Whodunnits are an incredibly popular genre, and one of the newest big splashes in the genre is Knives Out, and now Glass Onion.

Today, let’s talk about the whodunnit. There’s a particular way that whodunnits work, no matter what type of whodunnit it is, and it relies on a specific relationship with the audience. Knives Out takes these elements and structures, and makes it it’s own while playing with the different ways that whodunnits unfold. So today, let’s dig into the world of the whodunnit and unravel the mystery of the genre.

As much as we talk about the whodunnit as a cohesive genre, there are different kinds of whodunnits. The way a Colombo episode develops, for example, is way different than how Murder She Wrote develops, and yet they would both be described as a detective story. Whodunnit is definitely a strange term to apply to Colombo, because every episode shows us from the very beginning who exactly dun it. But we’ll talk about that a little more in a second.

First, we should appreciate some of the elements of the whodunnit. Whodunnits capitalise on two important facets that are present in all of fiction: (1) all fiction is in some way a mystery and (2) the connection that fiction has to its audience.

So let’s focus on that first one first. All fiction is in some way a mystery. Now, I don’t mean that every piece of fiction has a murder mystery plot buried somewhere deep inside it. What I mean is that the story is set up with a problem that needs to be solved - two people who are clearly meant to be together romantically seem to hate each other from first meeting; an unkempt woman is meant to demonstrate that she’s a princess. These are problems to be solved, mysteries of the ‘how’ saved until the right time to pull them out. Complications add up, while the audience waits for it all to come apart or come together.

But what makes the mystery genre different from others is the second thing: a detailed understanding of how fiction relates to its audience, and a plan to capitilise on this front. The way this works is primarily in the way the stories are strutured. Tzvetan Todorov, a structuralist literary critic and sociologist - amoung many other things - wrote about the structure of the whodunnit as consisting of two different narratives happening in one story. The first narrative is the crime itself, the murder. It tells of the events of what happened, how it happened, who did it and why. The second narrative is the solving of this mystery, sometimes focusing on a detective who is slowly discovering the first story of the murder, taking each piece of the puzzle and fitting it together until it forms a story.

A classic detective story like Agatha Christie’s Poirot, for example, follows the second narrative closely - the one where the detective solves the murder - and through this second narrative we come to learn the first one. We, as an audience, follow Poirot, who - through a series of interviews and detailed studies of locations - unveils to the audience the first narrative of the murder.

The key to this classic whodunnit is the knowledge that each of these narratives are fragmentary and inherently not significant on their own. It’s when they become joined together that the narrative is finally complete and full. Poirot would only be interesting to follow if he was solving a murder, and the murder is only satisfying when we know the culprit did not get away with it. Each fragmentary story leans on the other in order to present one full and complete narrative.

This second narrative, the one in which the detective determines the truth of the first narrative, is tied to the presence of the audience. The audience discovers the narrative at the same time as Poirot - we are living alongside him, gathering all the information in the same way and therefore - theoretically - we are also able to come up with the same solution.

A successful detective story needs to present the story in a way where the audience is able to solve it, but feels unable to without the keen insight of the detective. The story of the whodunnit is crafted with the audience firmly in mind - they are an important character, the silent detective who is also present, looking at everything and in different people’s minds.

But when we have a whodunnit who presents us with a detective, like Poirot, the detective themselves are an important aspect of the narrative. The detective should be an interesting character, one who the reader wants to keep finding out about, and yet should not be the full central point of the story, as they are only one fragment narrative.

As I said before, there are a few different versions of the whodunnit. Poirot, who we keep relying on for examples, is a classic detective story. We follow closely the activities of our detective, who stumbles into or is asked to solve mysteries. We don’t know the other characters until the detective does. We find out about he ins and outs of the relationship of each of the potential suspects as they find out about them, running into red herrings and dead ends as much as we are pointed to the solution.

Colombo is a slightly different beast of the whodunnit. Colombo gives the audience the solution from the very beginning. We know who did it, how and why. The whole first half of a Colombo episode is that first narrative, presented to us in its entirety. The appeal, however, is in trying to figure out where the culprit messed up, how they try to hide their involvement, and how Colombo will ultimately solve the whole thing. Every piece of information uncovered by Colombo is not a nugget for us to solve along with him, but rather a piece of a puzzle for us to guess what will eventually be the culprits undoing.

The Knives Out movies are a wonderful example of contemporary stories which understand the mystery plot structure of traditional narratives, and keep faithful to it while also putting their own spin on the format.

In Knives Out, we are given a whodunnit for our contemporary times, one that builds on the nostaligia and memories of narratives past. It uses the well-trod complicated components of the mystery plot structure of previous crime dramas, but does it in a new and funny way, while never losing any of the components that built the whodunnit the way it is.

We start, of course, with the ultimate important element to start every whodunnit with: the body. Every good whodunnit where we’re not watching it for the detective themselves needs to start with the body. We need to be drawn in from the start, always beginning with the end of the first narrative element of the murder story.

Pretty quickly, we are given the typical mystery trope of the interview. The interview is an important part of classic whodunnits like Poirot. Its the part of the wstory where our second narrative, the one where the detective and audience collectively discover the first narrative, begins to happen. We start to discover the complciated relationships between individuals, get a sense for each of these people’s personalities, and start to question which one of them are truly a nefarious murderer.

Knives Out plays with the interview structure by actively showing us the interviews as they are told, but always from the persepctive of the character being questioned. Each of our victim Harlan’s children, for example, remember being irectly behind him when he blows out his birthday candles. Each one shows a slightly different aspect of the pciture of the evening, each contradiction or different that is either told directly to the detectives, or purposefully hidden, painting a picture to the audience about who this picture is, what their concerns are, and why they may be wanting to lie.

It’s not until the end of the interview structure that we are properly introduced to our detective character: Benoit Blanc. There’s a reason why Benoit doesn’t appear more actively until now. He stays in the background of the interviews, occasionally hitting a key on the piano to punctuate his own thoughts, but for no apparent reason to those present. This is because this is the first Knives Out movie, and the detective is there to solve the crime, not to be the main character. Our main character is, instead, Marta - one of the suspects and the victim’s nurse.

This is one way that Knives Out plays with the audience expectation and participation in a classic whodunnit way. While the story is not being actively written in the Dr Watson type of mystery storytelling, after the interviews the narrative shifts to be more of a Colombo type narrative. The audience feels they know the solution, and follow the character they believe did it. Unlike Colombo, though, we are actively rooting for the culprit to get away with it, though it’s unsure as to why we think this way.

Glass Onion’s structure is immediately different than its predecessor. We already start with the focus around the detective from almost the start - not the full start, though. Glass Onion focuses more around the detective as the primary character - more like Murder She Wrote than Colombo. We don’t start with the body, like we did in Knives Out, but we don’t have to. By starting with Benoit Blanc, we already know what we’re going to get into, in the same way that we see Jessica Fletcher and know what’s going to happen and how interested we are.

Actually, I think Glass Onion is more similar to a Poirot than anything else. Like Murder on the Orient Express or Death on the Nile, we start with a cast of characters and an expectation of murder. We are constantly wondering when it will happen and who would have a hand in it. All the moments leading up to the moment is just as important as the moment itself. Instead of starting with the murder and working backward, we are working forward towards it. That’s not to say that the stories are not still the two fragmentary pieces working together, of course. In the classic case of Poirot, we only see bits and pieces, and the questions are still left unfilled. Like a hole in a donut, you may say. Glass Onion capitlises on this even more by revealing elements of the story at different times, making you think you had all the pieces when you didn’t, and then doing it all over again later.

Both movies, Knives Out and Glass Onion, capitalise on classic whodunnit tropes in different ways. Both have the big gather everyone in one place and to reveal the culprit, but in two very different ways. In Knives Out, it’s to classic reveal the true culprit, but in Glass Onion it’s to comedic effect.

Knives Out and Glass Onion also rely on a particular relationship to the audience, one in which they tease out the ability to delve into and out of the two fragmentary narratives that make up the mystery whenever they please in order to reveal what they want to the viewer when they want to. Instead of playing into the trope to allow the audience to solve things the way Jessica Fletcher or Poirot does, the audience is instead lead to believe certain elements at certain times. The creators of the Knives Out series understand the relationship of the audience in the whodunnit, and actively plays with this relationship in order to allow a new perspective on a classic structure. The same story of Knives Out could have been told differently and more directly, but to a very different effect. Knives Out and Glass Onion both capitalise on the fragmentary nature of the way the whodunnit is structured by presenting the narrative in it’s fragments.

Knives Out also alters fragments by style, modifying the way the audience both interacts with and experiences the story. By changing the way the fragments are shown to the audience, they are also changing the way the audience understands these fragments and how the fragments relate to the whole more cohesive narrative. By changing this aspect of the story, the way the audience understands both fragmentary stories and interacts with them, they are actively altering the way the audience is relating to the narrative as a whole, as the audience’s relationship to each fragment is different and how they then put these pieces together to experience the entire story.

Frankly, I’m looking forward to the different types of whodunnit stories that the Knives Out movies can take on. A Colombo-style with Benoit Blanc would be, frankly, amazing, or a Holmes style where he’s gallivanting out somewhere and then magically appears with the solution that others failed to see. Knives Out’s strength is in it’s reliance on the way the stories have worked in the past, while also not being afraid to alter these elements to fit a contemporary audience.

Food and Corruption in Lord of the Rings

So I was going to do a Valentine’s day themed blog post, like I did last year. But a few things - there’s not that much variety when it comes to Valentine’s day unless I start getting into the logistics of romantic comedies. I’m not against doing that, but I just wasn’t prepared for that because the most recent rom-com I watched was Falling for Christmas, which felt more Christmas, less Valentine’s, and a whole lot of mess.

Instead, we’re going to focus on one of the ultimate loves of my life. Not my husband, but my literary husband - J.R.R Tolkien. Tolkien is my problematic fav. So we’re going to do a fun romp into the world of Tolkien and one of my favourite elements from Lord of the Rings: the relationship between food and evil.

Tolkien lives in a somewhat classic good vs evil dynamic. There are, however, some alterations to this structure. Some of those who are ‘good’, for example, do not always easily remain good, nor is it clearly obvious. Boromir, for example, is a character who starts good, but is easily corrupted by the ring and acts a bit evil, and then comes to and dies in the service of good. Likewise, characters like Gollum are not always necessarily all evil, but have some elements of good within them. In some ways, for Tolkien, the good/evil dynamic is less a dichotomy and more a sliding scale.

Tolkien points to this in his own writing, when the hobbits reflect that perhaps evil people would look and speak nicely - that not everyone who looks fair is good, or looks gross is evil. This is mostly a reference to the origins of Sauron, who when in Middle Earth crafting the rings looked fair and spoke nicely, presenting gifts as if in love to those around him, when really the goal of them were to corrupt absolutely.

One of my favourite things about the world of Middle Earth is that this sliding scale of good to evil is also reflected in a scale of food consumption. Elves are the closest to the gods, the first beings created and those who lived for some time with the Valar. Elves are vegetarian. In contrast, Orcs are the closest to evil, and who regularly comment on being cannibals.

There is, of course, a sliding scale between those who are evil and good, and likewise in the ways people eat. Humans are easily corruptable, our lovely Boromir is an example of this. Humans are very meat focused in their dining. While they do eat vegetables, it’s not as clearly present. While they aren’t cannibals, their meat consumption is still a bit high. In the movies, the Steward of Gondor has that really gross eating scene while Pippin sings - I know it’s movies versus books, but I think it’s a pretty good example of gross human eating and gross human activity.

But hobbits are perfectly situated in the middle of everything. While they can be corrupted, it is often a very slow process. But hobbits - they love to eat. They’ll eat anything. They do eat meat, like men, but it’s not like United States meals that preference the steak over the side potato. Hobbits like both the potato and the steak, and the side of sprouts. And of course they’ll have a piece of cake as a dessert, followed by cheese and crackers as an evening snack. Hobbits just eat, they enjoy the process of eating food. Food is not just a means to an end, nor is it a process of finding or delivering pain. It’s a part of life to enjoy.

They’re enjoyment of life in general reflects much of their position in regards to evil and good. They’re indifferent, perfectly in the middle. They can be swayed, but that’s not their natural inclination. Sam, for example, is never tempted by the ring. When shown acres of gardens he can control and have people working on under him, he rejects it because he only wants the garden he can tend on his own. His own little life is all that matters, and its perfect the way it is.

Capitalism and Mythology - the Story of He-Man

This blog is entirely about the idea of contemporary popular culture as contemporary mythology. But there can be push back against this idea, particularly when it comes to ideas around capitalism. Can a story that is made up with the sole purpose of making money be considered mythical? I don’t mean stories people love to make that happen to make lots of money - most authors, for example, don’t think they’re going to make millions of dollars off their books, even though some do happen to. By this, I mean stories that are crafted with the millions of dollars in mind. Disney, for example, doesn’t craft narratives purely for the art. The point is to make money. Can narratives like these be considered special and mythical? Or does the intention behind the narratives discount this idea?

For this, let’s tag in an article by scholar Joseph Laycock all about He-Man. Yes, He-Man. As in the Masters of the Universe He-Man. For those who do not have memories of the 80s, syndicated cartoons were started with the purpose of selling toys, rather than the other way around. Mattel, at one point, had a surfer dude toy - a muscular man with long blonde hair. They tried desperately to spin narratives for this figure in order to sell them, but to no avail.

In a last ditch effort, Mattel hired someone to write a story for them for this figure - and thus, Masters of the Universe was born. Mattel drew on comparative mythology in order to craft a narrative about an unassuming figure who magically transforms into the figure of He-Man to fight evil. Suddenly, the surfer dude figures flew off shelves.

So what can we learn from this history of He-Man? Mattel’s history with He-Man was one primarily focused around money. The company needed to sell. They needed money, and the story that was crafted was written with the sole purpose of making money. That being said, so was the story of the surfer dude. Despite both intentions being the same, they had wildly different outcomes.

This is because consumers have discerning tastes. They don’t just consume for the purpose of consumption - we, as consumers, do not just take in something simply because it’s in front of us. We care about what we consume. We actively think about it. I don’t even mean this only for adults either. The importance of Laycock’s article isn’t that adults care about this, but that everyone cares about this. He-Man’s primary audience are children, not adults. Even children have discerning tastes.

Basically, it means that what can be considered mythology for an individual is not something that can be determined by an outside force pressing in. Disney can create duds that we don’t buy into it. But they can also create things that we love and grab on to. Stories may be presented to us from the top down (for lack of a better explanation), but those receiving it don’t necessarily have to accept it. Similarly, stories can be brought from the bottom up, and then grabbed by these larger institutional forces in order to make money. Even though the purpose is to make money, the story is still loved and reflect the community.

In other words, the communal love of narrative is what drives the financial success, rather than the other way around. Consumers are not passive, but play an active role in their own production of meaning. And I think that’s a really powerful and wonderful thing to know.

Fan Conventions and Places of Imagination

Obviously I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about cosplay over the last year. Okay, maybe two years, and probably far before that as well due to how long I’ve been mulling over everything before actually delving into this. And for cosplay, the role of the convention is both incredibly important and also unnecessary at the same time. Many cosplayers can do their art whenever they want thanks to the internet, and this is definitely worth exploring. But today, I want to focus on the convention as a centred place for cosplay and the wider nerdy communities cosplayers come from more widely.

Nicolle Lamerichs, whose written a lot about cosplay, published an article in 2014 which discussed cosplay as a subculture. We’ll tackle the idea of cosplay as subculture next month. This month, we’re going to, instead, think about another idea Lamerichs floated past within this article - the idea of the convention as a “place of imagination”. Lamerichs is drawing on Stijn Reijinders, who in turn is drawing on the work of Pierre Nora. But let’s unpack this gradually.

Pierre Nora, a French historian, coined the term lieux de memoire or “places of memory”. The idea is many historical locations around us become centres for a collective memory, even for a memory that we may not individually have. According to Nora, a social group begins to search into its past in order to find something that roots them all together. Their shared history is something in the past, and not something they can touch and feel and collect around in any physical sense. So we think about monuments, and museums, and other centres of our past as a place in which this collective memory collates and lives. It becomes a physical presence that represents the less physical aspect of our social gatherings. This draws on an idea that humans need physical things that represent our non-physical ideas, thoughts and emotions.

Reijinders takes this as a jumping off point, and pushes the idea of lieux de memoire a little further. Instead of only thinking about memories, Reijinders starts thinking about imagination, thinking of lieux d’imagination or “places of imagination”. Reijinders started down this path due to seeing pop culture tourism - people who travel to different places that are depicted in fictional stories. Reijinders specifically focused on people who are fans of television detective stories, like people who travel to Baker Street in London to see 221B, the famous house of Sherlock Holmes, but I think many people would fall into this category. People travel to Japan as part of a Ghibli experience, for example, or people travelling to New Zealand because of the Lord of the Rings. In England, there’s a heavy presence of people traversing the English landscape to visit the many sites, both in the books and in the movies, of Harry Potter.

What Reijinders notes is that as much as people need physical spaces to exemplify their collective memories or identities as a nation, or another kind of social group, others also need physical spaces to exemplify their shared imagination. People who travel to Platform 9 3/4 in Kings Cross Station, for example, are under no illusion that Harry Potter is a nonfictional history. They know it’s fiction, but it becomes as important of a place as a monument for some important historical event.

Photo taken at MegaCon Manchester, July 30, 2022

And here Lamerichs picks the idea up. Lamerichs points out how Reijinders emphasised how individuals actualise stories through their shared imagination with others in the same fandom by visiting sites that are mentioned in, or directly related to, fictional narratives. For Lamerichs, something similar is happening at fan conventions. Rather than the fan convention’s location being something that is directly mentioned in fiction, it’s rather a temporary meeting space for the collective imagination of a fan group to actualise their collective imagination. In many senses, the actual location itself is not nearly as important as the ability to do it - the empty space of a conventional hall transformed into a space in which fans see their fictions come to live and walking around the space itself.

From a myth perspective, the idea of conventions as a place of imagination is actually kinda similar to the idea of legend-tripping, which is when individuals travel to places of urban legends or places in folklore in order to try and experience in some way the collective imagination of the story. The actualisation of the fan’s collective memory also, in some ways, sets up a type of ritual space. This is another thing mentioned by Lamerichs, but not really followed through with any kind of actual religious studies theory. I risk, here, doing the same though. Going through theories of ritual space and sacred space would be both really boring and quite frankly, unnecessary.

Photo taken at MCM London, May 18, 2022

Instead, I’m going to summarise the idea in the actual words of fans at conventions themselves. Many years ago, back in 2017, I attended CoxCon, which takes place in Telford here in the UK. I was very lucky to be able to attend for free as a researcher - I was there in order to study people’s responses and interest in horror video games as a supplemental part of my PhD. What I found was that people weren’t as interested int talking about that. They were, instead, massively interested in talking about the convention itself.

One attendee told me that, despite having social anxiety, they find it comforting and easy to talk to others at CoxCon because everyone there “shares the same values”. Many talked about the travelling to the con as the most important thing they do in the year - they save up for it all year just to be able to go. The travel there, and attendance there, is of equal importance as their collective interest in Jesse Cox, the YouTuber whose convention it is.

This was something I see echoed often in my conversations with cosplayers. The convention itself is important - not because this is the only place they feel they can do their cosplays, but because of the atmosphere of the place. The ability to live in their character, and to meet others who feel similarly is almost more important than their interest in the show to begin with. One cosplayer told me that they find the convention the best way to make friends - because it boils down to “you like this show, so do I. Let’s be friends.”

The convention as a place of imagination is a bit different than the way Reijinders imagined it. It’s a space that is constructed to reflect the imagination, rather than one that people travel to that already reflects it. It's a place that solidifies the collective identity of the community that inspires it’s existence.

Food and Storytelling: a Reflection

I’ve said it once, I’ve said it probably more than once, and I’ll say it again: storytelling is more than words. We tell stories in pictures, in movements of our bodies, and in the way we dress. Architecture tells as much story of the history of a place as the written stories and diaries. For our personal narratives, we tell them our ways with the things we have around us. When we invite others around us, we tell them our stories through the way we decorate our homes, through the way we dress ourselves, and the food we present.

This year, I had the absolute joy to combine some of the elements of myself into the Christmas I spend with my husband’s family. For the last few years, I’ve learned a lot about his family through partaking in these rituals with his family. I learn about his history through the food we eat, and also see some of the changes that are occurring in their history. Their Christmas dinner looks a lot like the traditional English Christmas dinner, for example, with pigs and blankets, sprouts, and a roast. But my husband grew up vegetarian, so its this Christmas dinner is a vegetarian version. The roast is a nut roast, the pigs and blankets are Quorn. When I first started going, the Christmas breakfast consisted of pain au chocolate and cereal. But since my sister-in-law’s partner started coming, they’ve started including toast and smoked salmon, to incorporate his story.

I’ve witnessed the changes in his family’s storytelling. And now, I get to include aspects of my own story into theirs. As new members join the family, the family’s story is bound to change and adapt, incorporating new identities and stories into their primary fold.

From an outside narrative scholar perspective, I have to admit it’s fascinating to watch. Each piece of food served on the plate as a story behind it, whether it’s present because of someone else’s story, or the way it was served is because of the personality of one of the members. My brother-in-law gets his sprouts served a different way because he’s picky. We have chocolate cakes as well as Christmas cake because some members don’t like Christmas cake. But my mother-in-law is so connected to Christmas cake that it’s served every year anyway.

But families don’t just gather members, they also lose members. They used to gather with the grandparents, for example, on either Boxing Day or the 27th. But this year, they didn’t the last two years. Any new members joining now will not know the original traditions when the grandparents were present.

When I shared my food with my in-laws, I did more than simply help take care of one of the meals for them. I gave them a part of my story. And the food that makes up part of my story is not only a history of myself, but also my siblings and their partners and my grandparents. It’s the make up of the various members of the family that join our fold, and the remnants of those we’ve lost. It’s also captured in a moment in time - a time when I was still a part of that family, joining every year. Since not being able to come back, I haven’t been as much a part of the alterations to the family and its tradition. So the story of my life before my husband is just that - a moment in time that is suspended and unable to move forward. It becomes a fragment, only a chapter rather than a full story. It becomes a fuller story when it becomes a chapter within the story of other people’s fragments.

I hope this year, when you ate your dinners - whether they be big traditional Christmas dinners with loads of family members, or smaller ones with just you and the one or two people you care most about in life, or whether you just had a normal dinner because you don’t celebrate - you take a moment to consider what stories your dinner is telling, what each side dish says, and what each piece of food says about you and your own history.

Bee and Puppycat and the Spirit of Anthropology

Bee and Puppycat: Lazy in Space is a show on Netflix that is so strangely wonderful. The history of the show, and its tracings from Cartoon Hangover to Netflix is one that’s fraught with drama. This video is not about that history. There are other places on YouTube recapping that fairly well, this is not that. Today, we’re focusing primarily on Lazy in Space, rather than the other episodes because Lazy in Space is essentially a reboot, as well as a sequel all at once.

Today, I want to talk about how the show intentionally blurs the boundaries between things that are familiar, and things that aren’t. In anthropology, there’s a famous phrase: anthropology is all about making the familiar strange, and the strange familiar. During the entire time watching Bee and Puppycat, I couldn’t get this phrase out of my mind.

Making the familiar strange and the strange familiar is an important phrase in anthropology because it really sums up the entire concept of what it is we do. We seek to make things that are strange to us seem way less strange, and the things that we take for granted far more strange. In other words, we seek to confuse the boundaries of the things we take for granted as “normal”.

The entirety of Bee and Puppycat shifts the concepts of what is familiar and what is considered strange. From the beginning, we see things that are very familiar to us. Bee is a young woman who is struggling. We see her get fired from her job, and she reflects on not being able to really hold one for long. She’s lonely, in a way, and wanting someone to take care of, to give her a sense of purpose and reason. At this moment, a glowing purple light shines above her and drops Puppycat.

Bee is incredibly relatedable as a character. She’s struggling with the basics of living a life as an adult - holding a job, paying the bills, and feeling connected. Despite this, she’s an incredibly positive person, always looking at the positives of things and seeing life as something worth enjoying.

Puppycat, on the other hand, is a different persepctive of a similar theme. Puppycat is more selfish and pessimistic. His interests only surround himself. While Bee is unable to keep a job, Puppycat simply doesn’t want one. When he first meets Bee, he asks what it means to be a pet, and is clearly primarily interested in the life of no work and someone else caring for everything.

These are all somewhat relatedable aspects of personalities, and approaches to a more capitilist centred life. What we haven’t talked about yet is that Puppycat is a creature that isn’t a cat, isn’t a puppy, and can talk to Bee - even though other people can’t understand him. In the third episode of the series, we see Puppycat talking to Bee’s friend Deckard, who simply comments on the beeps and boops that we hear as the audience.

Bee and Puppycat is kind of like an urban fantasy, in a way. There are elements to the show which are contemporary and real-world feeling. Puppycat loves watching television, especially Pretty Patrick, a celebrity chef. Bee texts her friends on a cell phone. We understand pretty quick that we’re watching a show that takes place in a contemporary world. However, there are things that are far more akin to fantasy, which situates the familiarity of the world into a strange realm.

In the very first episode, we see Bee punching fire. Her hands are completely burned, and yet she doesn’t seem fazed by it. In the same issue, glass is embedded in her boots, which she puts on with no issues. From the outside, we have a woman whose doing strange things, while acting in an incredibly familiar way in a familiar setting. In the third episode, we see Bee as a robot, shifting our view of her as a character incredibly similar to us - the viewer- and into something quite strangely away from ourselves. She moves from familiar to us to being unfamiliar to us, but she doesn’t drop the familiarity - blurring the boundaries between what is considered like us and what is considered unlike us.

Though the setting also becomes less familiar as the show continues on. In episode seven, Bee is excited to share an experience that happens on the island once a year - the island goes through all four seasons all in one day. This is definitely a unique property of the island that makes it feel a who let less normal.

While this type of shifting is normal for urban fantasy more generally, the entire vibe of Bee and Puppycat is more complicated. While a traditional urban fantasy would take a familiar setting and set fantastical elements in it, Bee and Puppycat present you the world as both fantastical and familiar at the same time, rather than as two juxtaposed elements.

The premise of the show, where Bee and Puppycat get sent to a space temp agency is, in itself, an example of this. We understand the conceptions of a temp agency, but one that sends our protagonists to strange unique planets is definitely a new one. Even though the set up is familiar in some aspects, other aspects are uniquely strange, such as the presence of the temp bot.

In the first episode, we get the beginning of Puppycat’s lullaby. He sets it up as needing to sing a lullaby to soothe a baby planet. The lullaby is set up as a traditional one, with a beautiful melody and a song about a prince who falls in love with a princess. However, the lullaby doesn’t have the happy ending that most stories like this told to children have. It’s also clear to both the viewer and the characters that Puppycat’s lullaby a story about himself, and yet they don’t take the time to dwell on that. Instead, they prod him about the fact that the lullaby simply wasn’t very good. The lullaby’s words are a flipping on the traditional and familiar lullaby, but also the treatment around the lullaby is also a flipping of the what is familiar and relatable.

One of my favourite moments in the show is in the final episode, when Deckard accidentally brings home a friend from cooking school and he comments on the strange activities going around on the island. Cass, one of Deckard’s siblings, explodes out that she has always known things were strange and she’s so excited someone finally addressed that things weren’t so normal.

In fact, throughout the show, Cass is regularly commenting on the fact that the island and the people on it aren’t exactly normal. Cass calls Bee the “little old lady girl” - referencing the fact that Bee has not aged since they’ve known her which is strange. Near the end of the series, she comments that weird stuff goes on around Bee all the time.

Cass, in many ways, plays the role of the viewer. She recognises the strange things, and questions them but never so often to break the role of the understanding that, in many ways, this is also just the way things are. Cass is, in someways, the anthropologist. The one who questions, and intentionally blurs the boundaries between the familiar and unfamiliar by pointing out the questions, both those which are fantastical and those which are typical. It’s Cass that Deckard goes to when talking about giving up his dreams of cooking school, which Cass questions in the same way she does the strange creatures and plants that pop up around the island.

In fact, the conversation between Deckard and Cass in the bginning of the series helps to summaries another important theme in the work that directly plays into the strange and familiar: the exploration of the Lazy/Work dynamic. The show explores regularly the conception of following your dreams and your passion, a theme that is inherently familiar especially to animated shows. However, the way Lazy in Space approaches this theme complicates matters.

Cass, for example, is someone who once had the passion of wrestling. She still has her boxing gloves, which they use as an ice pack at one point. However, she has shifted her track to something more practical, now working as a freelance coder. Deckard references how Cass’s contentment with her new life is what makes him consider giving up on his dreams of cooking.

Despite being a very good chef, Deckard is very bad at baking. No matter what, it comes out an absolute mess. He becomes so dispondant on the idea that he debates on not following his dream of going to a culinary school because of how they expect him to also do a bit of baking. Bee, on a trip to one of their job sites, tries to convince Deckard to follow his passions, which Deckard decides to do. Even though the show doesn’t follow Deckard massively closely through his trials with culinary school, but we do see that he isn’t getting any better with it.

Another one of Deckard’s siblings, Howell, opened up a cat cafe despite not being very good at cooking himself. This was his dream, and one that he followed through with. However, we see that with Deckard gone, the cat cafe is really struggling. The bills are starting to pile up, and he isn’t sure it’s going to survive.

Meanwhile, both Bee and Puppycat don’t really have passions outside of things that aren’t really work related. Bee cares far more about hanging out with her friends than working, and Puppycat isn’t really interested in work at all. It’s Bee and Puppycat together which involve the Lazy dynamic. While we almost constantly see Cass working, we typically only see Bee and Puppycat working on the few times they need money for something. And yet, this being lazy in space isn’t necessarily seen as a bad thing.

What Bee and Puppycat show us is that finding your passion and following it into a vocation may work out, but it also might not. And giving up your passion for something more practical may also work out for the better, like Cass, but also might not. And while some aspects of this theme is familiar, like the push to follow your dreams, some of isn’t - like the failure that happens after the push is made.

And then there’s the presence of the wish crystals. Wish crystals appear in the third episode, and after, there are a lot of strange activities around the island. According to Moully, who is making wish donuts, you have to eat the whole thing for it to work, and only sometimes can the wish work out. The odd way it works out means that Cardamum’s wish to have his mom wake up doesn’t happen the way he wishes. Deckard, also, got a small shard in his head. He sees himself baking and being happy, which pushes him to finally go to culinary school. However, he doesn’t become magically happy and successful at baking when he goes to school.

Bee and Puppycat gives us familiar themes but ones that are presented in new and unfamiliar ways, either through the way the show is presented, or the way the themes are presented. The setting, mixed with the storylines and the vibe of the show all intermix to present something that is both amazingly familiar and so distinctly unfamiliar at the same time. The show actively works to blur the boundaries between the same and the Other, the familiar and the unfamiliar. The result is a show that presents the otherworldly aspects in ways that makes the viewer feel an affinity and familiarity with them, while also actively questioning the parts of our lives that are similar and familiar to them in a way that they typically reserve for the unfamiliar. The creatures and characters that would typically be conceived of as the “Others” in the show become the great familiar characters we connect with - the robotic Bee’s body and way of living is incredibly unfamiliar to us, but her personality and characteristics are amazingly familiar.

Through the blurred boundaries of familiar and strange, the show forces us to question what has been considered ‘normal’ to us, as well as what has been considered ‘not normal’, and to push ourselves to relate more normality to that which is different, and question the normality of that which is the same.

Love Actually and the Christmas Myth

Love Actually is one of those movies that exists so fully within the British Christmas culture. It was a huge presence in the United States as well, don’t get me wrong, but after moving to the UK I was surprised by just how embedded Love Actually is in the Christmas vibe. So today I wanted to spread the Christmas spirit by talking about it - both the movie, and the idea of the Christmas spirit.

The thing is, Love Actually isn’t actually that great of a movie. It’s good, for sure, but it doesn’t really hold up and there are definitely some pretty questionable storylines that get passed off as being “romantic” rather than creepy. If my husband’s best friend filmed almost exclusively my face at our wedding and then stood outside with placards proclaiming his love, I don’t think I’d be smiling through it. And if someone I worked with decided he loved me despite not even actually having an actual conversation? But anyway, I digress. Despite these glaring issues with the movie, Love Actually still is held as the movie that really upholds the spirit of Christmas. This is all because of a few primary aspects of the Christmas Myth.

There are a lot of different Christmas Myths that we can talk about, with two very big ones being quite obvious. However, I’m not going to be talking about those two (Santa and Jesus). Instead, I’m going to focus on one of the social and cultural myths that exists about Christmas: the idea of the Christmas spirit, and what this Christmas spirit indicates.

Many people have their own ideas about the Christmas spirit, but the core aspect of it comes down to two primary factors: (1) love triumphs always; and (2) happiness no matter what because that’s the spirit of the season. It’s these two elements which directly underlie Love Actually.

Let’s start with the theme of love triumphing. I think the storyline that best sums this up is that of Sam, the young child played by Thomas Brodie-Sangster. Sam is the child of Daniel, played by Liam Neeson, who has recently lost his mother. He admits to his dad that he’s in love with a girl in his school, and is incredibly upset because she’ll be going home to America soon. “My life is over as I know it,” he says, in one scene. This culminates in the big airport scene, one of the most famous scenes from the movie, where Sam runs through security, dodging TSA agents in a move that would surely land him in a jail cell even if he is only ten, in order to tell the girl he loves her at the plane’s gates.

There is, of course, no consequence to his big display of love because it was a triumph of love. It’s also why the creepy antics of the friend with the large placard sign is romantic, rather than something worthy of a restraining order: in the Christmas season, love triumphs over all.

Unless, of course, your husband is cheating on you. This is the storyline presented by Emma Thompson and Alan Rickman, Karen and Harry respectively. But this storyline gives us the second primary theme of the Christmas myth: happiness at the end of the day. The entire movie gives us Karen’s grief over the slow realisation that her marriage is falling apart and her husband is seeing another woman. The ultimate moment of heartache happens when she sees what he’s buying his mistress thinking it was for her, but then opens up a different gift on Christmas day.

Despite this heartache, at the end of the movie she’s shown as being happy. She’s leaving her husband, and feels better for it. The Christmas spirit fills her with resilience and the will to move on. And no one can be sad on Christmas, so she is happy with her decision to leave a bad marriage instead.

Love Actually is one of those movies that will always hang around as a quintessential Christmas movie because of how it embodies the social and cultural Christmas myth of the UK, and some other areas of the world as well. Despite it’s issues, it’s popular because of how it feeds into the spirit of what Christmas means culturally in the UK. Although, perhaps some of these themes are what the spirit of Christmas is because of Love Actually.

Making the Familiar Strange

I thought I’d take some time out to talk a little more about anthropology, but not from a definitional or historical place, but more from a storytelling base. What are the stories anthropology tells, what does it say it tells, and how does it work here, on this blog and website?

Well, first of all, anthropology’s basics can be broken down to something simple: the study of humans. Typically, anthropology uses what’s called “qualitative research”- or research that’s not as based on numbers. As opposed to doing huge surveys where we break down the information into statistics, anthropology tends to favour more story-based approaches. As an anthropologist, I talk to people individually and get their stories and approaches, and then analyse that. As opposed to looking at huge large scale areas, like all of the United Kingdom for example, anthropology typically looks at very small scale communities, like one specific church that exists in one place in the UK. Now, I say typically because things can be massively different. Kate Fox, for example, did a study of English culture using anthropology and anthropological methods, which is large scale. Anthropologists can also use surveys and get larger conceptions of demographics, using the smaller scale community conversations to simply bolster and give greater information to the statistics present. But these are ways things happen, I want to focus more on the all important why.

Anthropology is all about making the familiar strange, and the strange familiar. Making the familiar strange and the strange familiar is a famous phrase anthropologists and sociologists use when approaching research and understanding our role in the whole process. What it means is simple: the point is to complicate the things we take for granted, and question them the way an outside would; we take the things typically considered the ‘Other’ and make them more relatable, and more similar to what it is that we recognise. Essentially, we like to shorten the distances between peoples, and push ourselves to break down the boundaries people use to distinguish between the ‘us’ and the ‘them’.

I think the idea of the familiar strange and the strange familiar helps to explain why qualitative research is so important to anthropological research. In order to make the ‘other’ more familiar to us, we need to hear their stories directly. The point of an anthropologist is to tell stories as they were told to us, like an early ethnographic folklorist who copies stories as told by village grandmothers. I seek the village grandmothers - or anyone really who will tell me their stories and let me think them over in my mind. Likewise, it sometimes takes deep chat with someone to really get to know them, and this can make the people we feel most familiar with feel like new people.

There was a period of time I was investigating doing an anthropological study of my own mother. I learned more about her while interviewing her than I did spending over twenty years with her as my mother. This isn’t because we never had lengthy conversations before, but because the nature of the conversation is different. This is because anthropologists are just annoying. Anthropology, at it’s heart, is a collection of questions about simple things in life: why we wear what we wear when we wear it; what we say when we say it and how we say it. We prod questions immensely with little apparent end in sight - always anchoring everything to something we can see or hear from the community or individual themselves. We sit and list endless questions about every aspect of everything - we try to revert back to a type of infancy, to point at anything basic and ask ‘what’ and ‘why’ until who we are speaking to are simply sick of us. And then we ask someone else.

For many anthropologists, they see their field sites as remote locations. They load a backpack up with essentials, a voice recorder, maybe a camera and a journal. They grab a machete and trek into the wilderness, eager to live in small villages they hope the world has never heard from before.

I, on the other hand, find my field sites in the familiar world around us. I seek out the stuff we run into every day without thinking about it. The stuff we watch or play or buy without really thinking too much about it. Popular culture are the familiar things around us that I seek to make unfamiliar. I do not trek with a machete, but with a laptop, Xbox and a high-speed internet connection. There is something interesting about people, fundamentally, and this does not change with the use of high-speed internet and online chat rooms. Some unknown community is not the only one who still tells interesting stories - we all do.

In other words, anthropology is not just about finding unfamiliar locations and people and talking about them, but the first part of the phrase - making the familiar strange - is just as important as the second part - making the strange familiar.

So I hope you enjoy this process, the process of taking everything familiar to us and making it strange and new and wonderful.