Vivian Asimos's Blog: Incidental Mythology, page 9

Zelda’s Mythology

In the beginning, the world was created by three goddesses: Din created the mountains and landscape, Nayru the water and sky, and Farore the trees and creatures of the world. When their job was finished, they left the world. But before they did, they left in their wake three golden triangles: the triforce.

This is the mythology of the Legend of Zelda series. First introduced in Ocarina of Time, the three goddesses became the foundation for many of the underlying mythical narratives of the series. This mythology, however, is only found with Hylians, rather than everyone in the world. Some of the residents, such as the Zora or the Gerudo, have their own patron deities they worship instead of the three goddesses.

In other instances, we have the goddess Hylia - sometimes seen in connection to the three goddesses, and sometimes completely separate. Born in the human form of the princess Zelda, Hylia is also the mythological founder of the Royal Family, cementing the family as divinely wrought. In some games, like Breath of the Wild, Hylia seems to be the only goddess present, while in others Hylia is mixed with the knowledge of the original three.

There’s a reason I’m talking about Zelda mythology, and not just because I love Zelda mythology. I’m talking about it because Zelda’s mythology is surprisingly complex, both in how it’s understood in game and outside of game.

For the in-game mythology, it’s a lot more than just the story that gets told to give flavour to the world. It’s there as story, sure, but it’s also present as an important facet of history, architecture and landscape. The history of Hyrule is forever marked by the presence of the story of the goddess/es, particularly in the presence of the Triforce - the mystical wish-bearing divine object the goddesses left behind them. In Ocarina of Time. The presence of the Triforce was almost metaphorical - it’s physical presence wasn’t in our own physical realm, but it was rather a more spiritual presence in a spiritual realm. In future games, the triforce becomes more directly manifest, for example seeing the direct physical triforce being touched by the King in Wind Waker. The trials involving the Triforce has been etched into the history of Hyrule, and sometimes passing into historical legend and therefore becoming a type of mythology itself.

The architecture of the game-worlds often reflect the presence of these mythologies and ideologies. There is often a marked difference in the way one sees the world and the experience of these religions when in different areas of the world. In Ocarina of Time, for example, the three goddesses are represented by a multiplicity of threes in many areas of the world, with iconography of them being present in Hyrule castle and in several of the Temples. In contrast, the temple in the Gerudo wasteland has a singular female figure, often paired with a snake. The architecture in Breath of the Wild also hearkens to different aspects of mythology and ideology in different time periods. Areas such as the Lanayru Promenade are marked with stories related to the Goddess Hylia, whose statues are scattered everywhere and referred to as the only goddess, hinting at a monotheistic understanding by this point in Hylian history. In contrast, the Zonai ruins hearken back to an earlier time period of Hyrule’s history, where the iconography is more animalistic, typically related to amphibians or lizards.

Some Zonai ruins from Breath of the Wild - a stark contrast to the clean Western architecture of the Hylian part of Hyrule.

And speaking of the Lanayru Promenade, the landscape is marked by the mythology and the lived reality of these mythologies. The landscape leading from Kakariko village to the Promenade appears like a road, even though it’s not marked on the map. Following from the Promenade the unmarked road continues all the way to the Shrine which sits atop Mount Lanayru. The pathway seems to be a pilgrimage trail, one that’s alluded to by Zelda in a memory. Even though it seems no one is still using the trail, its constant use by the people over what must have been at least several decades is still marked on the landscape.

This is because mythology, ideology and religion are all lived realities. They are not just stories which are repeated in words, but are fully experienced, embodied and performed. Someone who follows Islam, for example, may have their ideologies affect their clothes, their food, and their daily actions. The way the religions are present in Hyrule reflect this reality.

But Zelda’s complex mythology also impact the out-of-game world. If mythology is what guides us, then Zelda’s mythology often works outside of the game world as much as it does within it. During research into Zelda, I met someone who had the Triforce tattooed on their arm. They explained they liked to approach things with an equal measure of Wisdom, Power and Courage - reflecting the nature of each of the three goddesses. Like the Hylians in the game, my participant marked themselves with their mythology, seeing their mythology as more than just words but as a lived reality. Like the Hylian landscape, their own body has been marked with their mythology.

The mythology is a performance - one that is lived out in architecture, in the body, in the landscape, and in the pure act of gaming itself. Mythology is not just words, but action, thoughts, and art.

Fan Fiction and Canon Transformation

A couple of months ago, I was giving a talk about mythology and popular culture (a not so-surprising topic coming from me). When taking comments, someone asked me about fan-fiction, and the alteration of canon. As I mentioned in the Star Wars canon blog, canon is complicated especially when we’re talking about mythology. I’m not the biggest fan of the idea of “canon” because canon can be changed and altered regularly - there’s no such thing as canon. And so I kinda rambled a lot on how canon doesn’t exist and the power and importance of fan-fiction and fan-art of all sorts is its ability to transform the canon.

I want to return to that topic a bit more today, because I’m no longer on the spot, and also because I don’t know whether or not I really gave justice to what it was I was trying to say at that moment. So anonymous individual who asked me a question several months ago, I doubt you’re reading this, but this one’s for you.

I want to start with the notion of canon. My scholarly foundation is in religious studies, and there the notion of canon is also sometimes discussed, though often in slightly different terms. In Christianity, for example, there are writings which are considered “apocryphal”, or writings that were left out when the Bible was being compiled. In some ways, these are pieces that can be considered non-canon, while the pieces which ended up in the Bible are the canonical writings.

But that’s assuming that things are given equal weight, or considered all the same throughout time. Some people in positions of law making in some countries like to think that certain rules are inscribed in the Bible and cannot be changed and we all must follow these rules. Yet there are other rules in the Bible which are largely ignored, such as instructions on how to sell your daughter, or how we should cut off anyone’s hand who has touched pig skin (although the most recent law alteration based on Christian beliefs isn’t actually mentioned anywhere in the Bible, but that’s a post for a different day).

Essentially, over time, individuals who really love the writings of Christianity (for lack of a better word) have changed the canon - they’ve chosen to acknowledge some things and ignore other things. This is nothing to be ashamed of - this is part of the process of social change. The world is not what it was thousands of years ago. Things are different. Our needs are different, and therefore what we need in our myths are different. What we look for in stories changes as what we need to look for changes.

We talked before about how mythology is what we use to understand ourselves and the world around us, particularly in truly solidifying the relationship between the two (ourselves and the world). What we need for this may change over time - whether it’s because we understand the world differently through our experiences as we age, or because our life changes. And what our grandparents, and great-grandparents, needed and how they understood the world is vastly different than it is for us, because the world itself is different.

Essentially, if we’re talking about canon from a mythological standpoint, it doesn’t really exist. Nothing is solid and consistent because people are not consistent - we are ever changing, ever adjusting and ever learning.

“But that’s not what we mean by canon” I hear you shout. And yes, fiction has a particular idea of canon that in many ways is tied to aspects of copyright. By “canon”, typically we mean that which is in the original pop culture work, which ideas or aspects of the story are set by the original author(s). This is to set it aside from what is brought forward by fans in their theories, fiction or artwork.

Part of this is due to the inherent difference in the way copyright law has unfurled, particularly after capitalism, between times like the Odyssey or the Bible and now. What is owned has to be laid out, in comparison to that which is not owned - in other words, ensuring that the audience is aware of what is owned by the author(s) and perhaps more importantly the publishers, and that of the audience themselves.

But this is not really how storytelling works. We are people who spin tales, and when we spin them, we tell them in ways that matches the world around us and our understanding of how it all works.

Sometimes this is done directly and consciously. Fan fiction, for example, may re-tell aspects of contemporary narratives which involve more diverse characters, or changes the primary character in some very important way, such as gender, race or sexual orientation.

But sometimes, when we re-tell stories, we do so subtly and without realising our changes. We aren’t doing it to purposefully change the narrative to fit things in an active move, but rather because we just naturally are doing this. Perhaps the best example of this would be when your friend tells you a story, and then you relay that same story to another friend or your partner. You may change small aspects of the story - not because you purposefully intend to, and not because you forgot, but because the difference between your friend’s understanding and yours may be slightly different.

For fiction, this happens when your brain just happens to forget certain aspects, or you interpret an action or event to be something that it originally wasn’t.

Fan creativity over canon is really fascinating, and demonstrates some of the most innate ways we tell stories. Canon only exists in the world of contemporary storytelling for copyright purposes. But true stories don’t have canon, and the transformations which exist is exploited by fans for the fans. Not because it’s a way to control law copyright, but because we naturally alter narratives to fit the world we live in, to understand things better and ourselves a bit better. Our emotional connections to narratives is why we do this, and why fan fiction in its many forms are one of the most important parts of contemporary storytelling.

Kim Kardashian and How Fashion is Identity

In the most recent run of Kardashians, there was a storyline of how Kim was struggling with finding her own fashion sense after her divorce to Kanye West. And I’ll be honest, I’ve been thinking of this storyline ever since it aired.

This will be the first foray into reality tv on this channel. For those of you who also listen to my podcast, the Religion and Popular Culture Podcast, will know that I do absolutely love reality tv. I can sit here and explain why its great for anthropology, but really it’s just plan ol’ fun. When people tell me I shouldn’t watch it because it’s trash, it’s kinda like telling someone they shouldn’t eat cake because it’s unhealthy – I know it’s unhealthy, that’s why I’m eating it. I know it’s trash, that’s why it’s so good. But of course, there’s still really wonderful explorations of mythology and storytelling within it, and that’s what we’re really here for.

I think Kim Kardashian, regardless of how you feel about her, will provide a really interesting case study of the storytelling impact of clothing and fashion, especially in relation to the communication of identity and culture.

I think it’s best to start with Kim Kardashian as a person and a character. Kim’s rise to fame is followed by her social perception as a sex symbol. She started on the fringes as a socialite, popping up in photos with Britney Spears as she followed around Paris Hilton.

Her sex tape with then-boyfriend Ray Jay was released just before the premiere of the reality show following around her and her family, Keeping Up With the Kardashians. Her image was then blown up in the social sphere, and her image became synonymous with sex and sexiness.

Kim’s image was carefully curated specifically for the male gaze. I’ll be honest, I’m not sure how much agency she had in this early in her career, but it became something she took control of and definitely started to manipulate for herself over time.

Perhaps this was due, in part, to her role as a model as her career grew. In a study on the performance of gender in modelling, scholars noted how models act out performances of gendered deference or flirtations in order to book jobs. This isn’t to say that models sleep with potential clients, more that they play up their femininity and sexual attraction to create an impact. Their job is to play into the male gaze, and therefore their performance of their role within that helps to show their potential while on the job.

Kim’s image was also massively impacted by fashion and her relationship to fashion. She was able to use fashion to communicate the presentation of the type of self she wanted to portray, because fashion is an important part of self-communication.

Humans are essentially cultural beings. We are tied to the social and cultural worlds around us, and it’s really difficult to parse out what experiences we are having that are not part of this and which ones are. This is because we kinda are always impacted by our social and cultural worlds – the way we engage with others are always painted from our backgrounds. And more importantly, the way we engage with ourselves is also impacted by our social and cultural worlds. This means our bodies, and what we do with them, is inherently social.

Anthropologist Mary Douglas has a theory about what she calls the “two bodies” which helps to explain this a little. She says that we actually have two bodies: a physical body and a social body. The two bodies can be incredibly close to one another, but they can also be really far away. The social body constrains the physical one, and impacts the way the physical body is perceived. Essentially what Douglas is saying is that our physical bodies are never just understood as they are, but are always filtered through our social lives and social interactions, as well as what society tells us our bodies should be.

Clothes sit at the boundary between these two bodies. They sit on the physical body, but they transform the physical body into the social spaces we move in. Our clothing is always situated in places and spaces – we think about these things when we get dressed. If we’re not leaving the house for the day, we may wear something very different than when we’re going into the office. The social body regulates what the physical body can wear, and what is considered appropriate for those spaces. In Florida, where I grew up, it wouldn’t be inappropriate to wear a bikini to the beach in the summer, but it would be incredibly inappropriate to wear the same outfit to church on Sunday. The social body is what constrains what the physical body is allowed to wear, and therefore understanding which bodies are “appropriate” and which ones are not.

Clothing’s position as the intermediary between the physical and the social body also means it’s the prime way we communicate with the world around us. Clothing becomes the link between our individual identities, our social world, and the physical body we inhabit. Fashion scholar Fred Davis argued how clothing frames the self, and serves as “a kind of visual metaphor” for our identities and avenues of social belonging. We “read” others based on their clothing, and in turn, we are “read” by others.

A lot of the theories on subcultures focuses on this – we use clothing and other aspects of adornment or bodily marks to inscribe our social belongings onto our bodies. Punk, for example, is marked by clothing choices, and you can instantly read someone as punk by looking at what they’re wearing.

But it’s important to note that choices in clothing is not always pure expression and creativity. Like the rest of our interactions, we are impacted by outside factors, such as our class, location, gender and income. Location we’ve already briefly discussed, but this can also be impacted by more broad aspects of location as well: what materials or styles we have available to us in our given country, for example, can limit our choices. Class and income may restrict what type of clothes we have access to, and what types of clothes our society tells us we are allowed to wear or not. And gender, a concept which like class and income is also socially constructed, often dictates to us what society expects us to wear. Even if you reject what you is “appropriate” for your gender to wear, you are still feeding into the same expectations by choosing actively to ignore it. These rules and regulations of the social are always inscribed on our bodies and our clothing, whether we choose to accept them or not.

But what this means is that we learn to understand these rules and aspects of communicate. We learn what stories which pieces of clothing tells, and which ones resonate with us. It also means we can learn to manipulate these stories in order to tell the stories we want with what we put on our bodies.

And manipulate is exactly what Kim Kardashian did. Whether she started her career manipulating her image, she definitely was manipulating later as time went on. She actively changed her physical body to present a different social body that made it more acceptable to become famous and widely accepted. She altered her voice, electing a higher-pitched voice with Paris Hilton-esque vocal fry, which she noticeably dropped by the time she was older. And obviously, her fashion was also carefully curated to match the image of the sexualised woman. She posed nude at times, and for Playboy, but the presentation of her image as the sexualised woman was more than just these instances – she actively chose her outfits, makeup and hair to feed the male gaze that gave her money.

Kim’s self-catered image begins to change, however, when she begins her relationship with Kanye West. As is portrayed on Keeping Up With, as well as more generally, Kim’s identity becomes morphed and moulded by Kanye as well as herself.

Kanye’s manipulation of her image, while similar in approach to Kim’s to herself, is different do Kanye being a different person. His control over her image also was a demonstration of control over her person – draping her form in Yeezy was a way of marking territory. She used her body as advertising for his business, and by doing so was also a marker of ownership over her body and identity. She became the one married to Kanye, rather than Kim as a individual to herself.

When discussing her robbery in Paris, Kim recounts how the robbers referred to her as “the rapper’s wife” rather than knowing her as Kim Kardashian. I think this is a really important in understanding the shifting of identity. Kim’s fashion was telling a different story about who Kim was than the one it was before: now she was Kim, the dutiful wife of rapper Kanye West, rather than Kim Kardashian.

As their relationship started to fall apart, so did Kanye’s control over Kim’s look. In an episode of Keeping Up With, Kim was getting ready for the 2019 Met Gala. Her outfit was supposed to convey the sense of coming out of the water, and how the water would just run off the body, giving the appearance of almost no dress at all. Kanye argued with her about the dress, saying he didn’t want his wife wearing such a dress. Kim rightfully argues back about how both of them, and especially Kanye, had crafted her image to make her the sex symbol she became.

Here, she admits the image of herself is one that is constructed carefully, and one that had a lot of input from Kanye. His reaction also shows how much he was used to the dynamic of the malleability of his wife’s image to reflect the way his eyes appreciate her. The primary issue, however, is in the shifting nature of her identity in relation to him, and how it is not reflecting in her identity with the outside world. He saw her as wife and mother, who should therefore drop the sexual imagery. Kim, however, still was seen as the sexy celebrity despite her age and status as mother. For Kanye, her outward appearance should reflect the identity of mother. For Kim, it should continue to reflect her status as a sexualised woman.

The dynamics of United States society that means that the identity of woman is somehow incoherent with the identity of sexy is a far more detailed conversation than I’m willing to have here. But for Kanye, and for other parts of society as well, the social body of Kim as object of male gaze is incompatible with the mothering body. But Kim sees the ability to continue the image she has spent years cultivating.

For me, what makes Kim inherently interesting the interrelationship she has with systems of social power. Earlier, we talked about how our fashion choices are inherently limited by outside forces such as gender, class, income and location. Some of these are obviously not as pushed onto Kim as it is, say, me. Income, for example, is definitely something she doesn’t have to worry about. You would also think class as something that’s not limiting, however it kind of is. Kim would be mocked endlessly if she was caught wearing cheap t-shirts she bought at TK Max. While income and class limits me in what I’m able to actually access and afford, it limits Kim in keeping her from being socially accepted to purchase cheaper and lower-class items. I mean, I don’t feel sorry for her for that, but it’s worth pointing out.

Kim is also impacted by her body which is gendered as female. We’ve seen the impact of this on her entire career. She used the male gaze to her advantage, crafting an image that pleased it – in voice, demeanour and clothes – in order to raise her status. The effect of her raise in fame is echoed in changes to some of the social considerations of the female body. It’s hard to now look through online shops or fashion magazines and not see models who are clearly Kardashian-look-alikes, women whose bodies are attempting to mould the same forms that Kim and her sisters have fitted in. In some ways, they have used the male gaze to transform the perception of the male gaze – shifting the look of models from thin hips to bigger hips and rear. However, this form of woman has always been sexy in the male gaze, but wasn’t always seen. The Kardashians did help to see these. While they do have the power to change some smaller aspects, they cannot go outside the norm of the sexualised woman. Khloe, for example, was criticised regularly for her larger size compared to her sisters – who, by the way, wasn’t very big anyway. While they are the epitome of sexy, they are the epitome of sexy within the constraints of the social view of sexy that already exists. They can’t change sexy, they can only change themselves to fit into the window. What’s interesting, is seeing the individual who often is seen as someone who can change the system being simultaneously trapped by it.

So we started this exploration into Kim Kardashian with an episode from the replacement of Keeping Up With, just called the Kardashians. We see Kim struggling with her fashion identity, being suddenly unsure of the way she’s presenting herself.

She’s struggling not just with what to wear. She’s struggling with her identity. Which way does she portray herself? Is she the portrait of a lawyer and businesswoman – a type of woman who typically hides her sexualised body? Or does she embrace the sex symbol she had cultivated? Or is she the mother figure Kanye wanted her to be? These are all aspects of her identity that she embraces – a business owner, a lawyer, a model – and yet are all portrayed in very different ways in the social world.

She is also no longer owned. Her identity as being “the rapper’s wife” has been stripped from her. Her being draped in yeazy as both an act of advertising and act of claiming is no longer present. Her identity is in flux, and therefore so is her fashion. And finding her fashion may help her to understand her own identity a little better. She has to suddenly re-learn how to tell her own story – how to craft her own personal mythology that is spoken of through clothes.

Fieldwork Reflection: Cosplay and Performance

“I think, in a way, I regret my cosplay… I don’t know how to explain it - and maybe I wouldn’t be feeling this way had I been more recognised. But maybe others didn’t comment on it as much because I wasn’t really alive with it. Kind of like wearing a mask and performing the myth - the performance may look the same from the outside, but the feel is different.” - Fieldwork Journal from 28th May, 2022, 18:25.

The above is from my fieldwork journal. Anthropologists typically carry these things with us, small notebooks to jot our feelings out in. It keeps us sane sometimes, in the field, when we’re surrounded by unfamiliar. It keeps us grounded. I don’t share from my fieldwork journal very often. Some anthropologists like to in their articles or book chapters, to demonstrate what was happening in the moment. I try to avoid it.

But I thought I needed to today for a reason. I wanted to capture, something that I’ve been having trouble articulating since I attended MCM London at the end of May. I’ve tried formulating it in more reasonable and articulate language, but sometimes the feeling of the moment just has way more power than whatever the English language may attempt to compile.

I’ve talked quite a bit about cosplay and performance. Never dwelled extensively on it, until now, but always about how cosplay is related to this idea of a story performed. Using their body, cosplayers take on the persona of a character and live it out in public spaces, whether those spaces be fan conventions or whether they be Instagram photo shoots.

Talking to cosplayers has reiterated this conception. During one conversation, a participant started by telling me that accuracy of costume was way more important than the performance. However, through the conversation, they constantly talked about how some people don’t have the skill or the money for a good costume and that’s fine, as long as the performance of the character makes them happy and feels true to them. When I pointed this out to them, they laughed and said I guess they were wrong - the performance is everything.

Others have said the same, though with less circular language to get there. Most started by repeating the same concept: it doesn’t matter what your costume looks like, what matters is the way you play when in the costume.

In the true name of the framework of anthropological research called “participant-observation”, I couldn’t just observe or chat, I had to also participate. I had to act myself.

I spent the last few months putting together my own cosplay. I’m still teaching myself to sew, so I don’t exactly have the skills to make my own costume. I didn’t really like the look of many of the costumes that were fully available for sale. So I decided to do it part-way, by grabbing pieces at charity shops and slowly compiling the costume that way.

I chose Chise from the Ancient Magus’ Bride for a few reasons. The first is that I absolutely love Magus’ Bride; it’s one of my favourite anime and I feel the connection to mythology and folklore. The second is that Chise is a red-head, which is an aspect of myself I didn’t always like, but wanted to embrace. The third is that her outfit is relatively simple, and filled with pieces that I felt I could easily find.

And so I went to MCM London dressed as Chise. Participating. Observing. But very much participating. And the result? It’s hard to say.

There were many people I met and spoke to in cosplay, and I enjoyed watching them and talking to them about their cosplay just as much as I usually do. But when it came to myself - my cosplay, my performance, my chat about it - it was a bit different. I was almost uncomfortable about it. My body was uncomfortable, my ego was uncomfortable. I felt awkward.

If someone had recognised and wanted a photo, I genuinely wouldn’t know what to do. I would have been overly awkward about the whole thing. But at the same time, the fact that no one did recognise it out loud, or comment on it to me, also made me uncomfortable and awkward.

I had heard from participants that being in costume meant that you were able to be less awkward than your normal self because you were able to be someone else for a few hours. I’m not sure if I truly felt that, but maybe it is, like my fieldwork journal said, because I wasn’t alive with it.

I don’t think a performance like this is something you can just put on and off without really thinking about it, or really giving it time to soak into you. Perhaps this is why crafting your own costume can be so beneficial. It gives you time to live with the form of the character you’re making. And by “really thinking” I don’t mean that cosplayers spend ages taking notes on their performance or anything. But I do believe that there is more to it than simply putting on a costume, some unspoken and inexplicable thing that makes cosplay what it is.

I think what I’m trying to get at is a better understanding of what I mean when I say “performance” when it comes to cosplay. What does this actually look like? I think we’ve seen a lot of cosplay performances, whether it be online or in person at cons. And for sure, knowing what cosplay looks like is an incredibly important question. But maybe more importantly would be the question: what does it feel like?

Tunic, and the Engagement of Story and Player

Tunic is an action-adventure game by Andre Shouldice. Released in March of 2022, Tunic presents an almost top-down view of a cute fox running around a game world. The game draws direct inspiration from the Legend of Zelda series in how the game’s narrative and game is structured with the addition of Souls-like elements and mechanics. The game relies on the player’s exploration and experiences in order to tell the story of the game. The tutorial, mechanics and other aspects of the game are hidden from the player, and relies on the player’s interaction with the game in order to be understood and experienced.

Today, I want talk about Tunic’s story, how it’s experienced and communicated to and by the player. I think Tunic is a really interesting example of how stories can be told in video games, and how they can intersect with notions and mechanics of gameplay. And the greatest part of this is the role of cyclical time.

So, I’m gonna preface this essay by saying that if you want to play Tunic and have the best experience of it, try to not watch anything or read much about it before you play. Just dive right in and love it with all of your foxy little heart.

In a previous video, I talked about how video game narratives can be understood as being on a graph-like spectrum of explicit and implicit story: explicit story being the written narrative, and implicit story being the experienced narrative. I think this may be a good place to start for our conversation today, because I want to focus on the story of Tunic, and how it relates to some conceptions and ideas that we’ve already gone over. Knowing exactly how the story is both communicated and felt by the player is really important.

Tunic, I think, would be placed somewhere in the quadrant of low explicit narrative and high implicit. This means that Tunic’s story is focused primarily on gameplay, exploration and discovery based around the player experience, and very little is presented as dialogue or written narratives in the form of cutscenes. In fact, there’s really no dialogue at all, and all the writing is in the form of strange symbols which, which technically could be translated by the player, but is mostly esoteric and incalculable.

In Tunic, there are two simultaneous and interconnected stories happening at the same time: one of the gamer and one of the in-game story. One is implicit, the other explicit. You need the first to fully complete and experience the second.

Let’s talk about the story of the player first. This story is primarily focused around the gamebook. In Tunic, the player finds pieces of paper, and each collection adds another page to the game’s gamebook. The book holds the appearance of an old NES-style rulebook, with pages on what controls do, tips on combat and exploration, and maps of different areas.

There are also annotations in the gamebook. These notes are sometimes in the same obscured language of the signs and other markings of the game. Sometimes they’re in English. Sometimes they’re in drawings and markings. Subtle arrows, or question marks, or other marks and notations on maps or information pages. Even other marks are on the page, like coffee stains. The gamebook echoes the experience of playing games with siblings or relatives, of discovering a game and exploring a game with a helpful guidance.

Tunic provides the player with the experience of playing a game through an engagement with past knowledge even when the game is fresh and new. But the knowledge is only as esoteric and difficult to read as you make it, and those who seek out the knowledge will be happily rewarded. The guidance of the gamebook also provides the player with a greater sense of nostalgia, particularly for those players who started playing video games in the times of NES guidebooks. The very first Zelda game, for example, had guidebook that provided information on story, items, and locations which helped to provide the player with context to the game. While some players wrote all over the guidebook, some may not have at all.

Tunic draws inspiration from two primary game series: Zelda and Dark Souls. Zelda clearly draws on cyclical time in it’s mythology and storytelling, as we’ve already talked about it before. In our previous video, I talked about some traditional myths’ description and connection to cyclical time, and how it’s then presented in the Zelda games. But Dark Souls also tells its story through cyclical notions of time, and like Tunic, Dark Soul’s storytelling itself is very reliant on the player engagement with world in order to shine. Dark Souls and Zelda, despite both utilizing notions of cyclical time in their narratives, they both approach it two very different ways.

Dark Souls’ cyclical nature of time is more derivative of a Buddhist worldview and notion of time. In Dark Souls, the cycle is strained and its continued presence is what is destroying the world. The goal of Dark Souls is to break the cycle. This echoes Buddhist conceptions of cyclical time and the continual creation and recreation, but with the ultimate goal of breaking this continuous cycle.

In contrast, Zelda’s games insist the player sinks into the cycle. Each game replays the same story with slight variations, and the goal is to simply play it out. Zelda sees cyclical time is kinder than the Souls timeframe, because while it traps some individuals, the cycle is seen as somehow necessary to the world, to always have someone present to battle the evil and keep the world at peace. In Dark Souls, there is no peace because of the cycle – the cycle causes pain and the only way to heal that pain is through breaking the cycle.

Tunic echoes the Dark Soul’s conception of cyclical time. The in-game narrative slowly reveals itself to the player as the character being trapped in an ever-present cycle. The small fox is always tied to fighting the heir, and upon success they take the place of the heir, and the cycle begins again. Tunic’s good ending is the breaking of the cycle, where the fox does not take the heir’s position, and the bad ending is the continuation.

Despite drawing on the clear Buddhist backing Dark Souls, Tunic doesn’t seem to connect as much to Buddhism as it does Dark Souls. The visual and some gameplay elements that connect to Zelda ends up lightening the often more negative views of cyclical time that marks the world in Dark Souls. While Tunic is occasionally marked with some sombre imagery and tonal shifts to much more grim and hopeless areas, it is, on a whole, a bit lighter than Dark Souls. But these elements also make it far darker than Zelda.

So the first narrative of the game is the story that’s written – the cyclical nature of the fox’s life which is constantly born to fight the one who came before. It’s the story in the world, the one that’s described in the game booklet, and the one that the player is piecing together has their character is as well.

The second narrative is the story of the player, one played out through the experience of exploring the world but also in discovering the various pages of the gamebook. The player’s story is unique to each player, constantly shifting and altering depending on who they are and when in their life they’re playing it. But this story is mostly directed through the discovering, reading, and engagement with the gamebook.

This isn’t to say that Tunic is the only game that has a story that’s basically the experience of the player. In that previous video about types of mythology in video games, one of those was implicit mythology – or the story that happens when an individual experiences a narrative. But the narrative here in Tunic is vaguely different because the use of the game-booklet directly engages with this part of the narrative in a way that isn’t always present. While some games have the player experience be only present due to the nature of the medium, Tunic understands this aspect as present, and actively engages with it and brings it more directly present into the experience of the game.

In other words, the game book makes the story of the protagonist the same as the story of the player. The way the protagonist breaks the cycle of rebirths and fights is through knowledge, the same exact knowledge that the player is slowly piecing together for themselves as well. It’s this knowledge that the player uses to understand the game, the experience, and even their own previous experiences with video games.

Tunic works to blur the boundaries between the player and the game. Despite the fact that I separated out these two narratives, they need to be present together to have the successful game narrative that Tunic has. For players to feel firmly invested in the narrative, the have become part of the narrative. Their exploration leads to more information, which then ultimately allows our fox to complete their quest. Tunic works to actively blur the boundaries between player and game. These boundaries are already fairly blurred anyway due to the nature of the video game medium, but Tunic takes it one step further. By drawing on our nostalgia, our experiences of relying on our communities when we play games, exploring the relationship between siblings or parents or friends when we play games, and the urge we have for completion and the notations we naturally make when doing that. These are rewarded not only with in game items, but with a better relationship with the game itself, and a result that illustrates what it is that we’ve learned.

Tunic therefore uses these experiences and connections to game, ties it directly to ourselves and our nostalgia, and reinforces it with conceptions of cyclical time and the continued idea of replay and re-engagement. I think the way Tunic tells its story is absolutely fascinating, and a lot of games can really learn how Tunic relied on the player’s relationship to game to build an impactful narrative, demonstrating directly how players impact the games they’re playing, but how, in turn, games impact us as players.

Folklore, but different - a Research Roundup Ramble

Let’s talk about folklore. I know this is a myth blog, but as I’ve mentioned before, my view of myth is very much tied up with the other words for traditional stories, like folklore, legend, and fable. I think folklore is an interesting word to discuss in the way people think about it. On its surface, it’s the “lore” of the “folk” – the stories people say. Urban legends can sometimes be thrown into the world of folklore, and it can be difficult to sometimes parse through stories and what they potentially are: myth, legend or folklore.

Folklorist Alan Dundes urged folklorists to look beyond types of genres like these (folklore, legend, myth, fiction, etc.) and instead consider “folk ideas as a unit of worldview”. Basically, we should consider things as they come to us as conceptions and ideas that a people possess, and what this reflects in their understanding of the world around them.

So that’s what I want to do today. I want to stroll through some of the ideas that are complicating the field of folklore, and drawing attention away from written narratives and to lived experiences. From the explicit myth, to the implicit myth. From the verbal to the interpreted.

Jay Mechling is a good place to start for a couple of reasons, and they’ll probably come up a few times in this post. But Mechling started with the idea that folklore exists in the perception of it, rather than in something firmly present. Simon Bronner related this to play – how we can move between play and not play without anything incredibly firmly present. If I’m playing around with you, I don’t need to say “we’re playing around now” and then close it with “and now we’re done”. Rather, you pick up on the social shifts between play and not play and follow suit with that. Our joint understanding of play to not-play is in the perception between the two of us. For Mechling, this is kinda how folklore works.

Playing off this play-frame, Bronner describes a folkloric frame. Like the play frame, the folkloric frame is there to explore how folklore can be perceived and understood between different people. If, according to Dundes, the “folk” for folklore is “any group whatsoever”, then where folklore exists, and the ways folklore can be communicated, can be in new and interesting locations.

One way to think of this is that folklore can exist between humans and non-humans. When I’m playing with a dog, the dog understands the context of the play. Similarly, the dog also understands other aspects of my body language, and can read it and communicate back with me through their own body language. In a sense, these subtle ways of communicating can be between myself – a human – and the dog – a non-human. Mechling also brings up how folklore can be a solitary act, drawing on ideas of fantasy frames and interactions of the self with the self.

Then there’s the conversation around the field called “Bodylore” – a combination of explorations of folklore with the body. Coined by Katherine Young, Bodylore understands the body’s ability to be “read” like a textual folklore/myth.

Culture is inscribed on our bodies, but bodies are also an active part in communicating that same culture or society. Our bodies, therefore, are part of a cyclical nature of culture construction and communication. Mary Douglas described our body as generating “natural symbols”. Basically, our bodies are the boundary between our personal selves and the world around us. It communicates the differences between our bodies, and also the differences between our bodies and the world around us. Learning to read a body is part of cultural communication and literacy. As we grow in a society, we understand ways of reading the body, conveying meanings from bodily modifications (such as tattooing and piercing), clothing, adornments such as jewellery, and even in the way we move our bodies, or position them in relation to the other bodies around us.

One other alternative folklore piece I want to mention are photos. Another Jay Mechling mention here, because Mechling did some work with snapshots of hunters, exploring how these photos are part of a folk performance. Photos can communicate aspects of tradition, activities and bodies that we can read and learn from when it comes to folklore and myth.

I wanted to take some time today to complicate ideas of folklore – showing how folklore itself can be something very different than we think of. It’s not just what we think of as older narratives that have slowly died out, or even the urban legends that spread in whispers of “did you hear…”. It’s also in the way we carry our bodies, or the way we get dressed in the morning. It’s in the photos we take, and the way we share these photos between loved ones and on Instagram. It’s the way we engage and communicate with the world around us, including our animal companions. And it’s even the way we spend time with ourselves. We are folk, and therefore our communications, traditions and interactions are part of our folk culture, even if no one else is around to see it.

Kim Kardashian and Marilyn Monroe’s Dress

I’m not exactly a fashion queen. Anyone could tell that by looking at what I actually wear on a regular basis, though I do know that (hopefully) all of you aren’t monitoring what I wear on a regular basis. As much as I’m reading about the importance of dress in an academic context, fashion is not something that takes up a lot of space in my brain. This is also the case for one of the ultimate fashion days: the Met Gala.

I know I’m not exactly quick on the draw for discussions on the Met Gala. It’s been a bit, and there’s an important reason for that. I’m not someone making regular commentary about who wore what at the Met. I see some stuff in passing just because I’m paying attention to pop culture like Blake Lively’s dress, the fact that people didn’t seem to really understand the theme, and – of course – Kim Kardashian’s dress.

For those that missed it, Kim Kardashian decided to wear the dress that Marilyn Monroe wore in her famous “Happy Birthday Mr President” moment. And I don’t mean she wore an homage to the dress, or a replica. She wore the same exact dress. While she did change into a replica after walking the red carpet, she was still donning the very same exact dress Marilyn once wore in 1962.

Seeing how the reaction to what Kim wore that day unfold, I wanted to throw my hat in the ring – appropriately for this blog being too late – in order to look at this fashion moment from a different perspective: that of mythology and storytelling.

So, let’s start with the story of Marilyn. Marilyn Monroe was seen as the epitome of the American Dream – the nationalist myth that in the United States, someone can come from nothing and become solidified and rich. Marilyn was raised in foster homes and orphanages and worked her way to becoming one of the most famous movie stars of all time.

While Marilyn was a very successful actress, she was primarily known as a sex symbol. Her body, hair and voice all become synonymous with sex appeal and the ultimate goal of the male gaze. When her stardom was beginning, it was revealed that she had in her past taken nude photos. The scandalous find did nothing to ruin her position, despite the age it was revealed – it only worked to propel her further into attention.

Marilyn’s persona was one of the dumb blondes. She spoke in a high-speech akin to a baby voice, acted stupid and ditzy in interviews and in photos, and pretended to be so naïve as to be unaware of how the public perceived her and her body. However, it’s been reported that this was very far from the case. Marilyn’s image was something constructed very carefully by herself. By the end of her life, she was the primary one in charge of every choice of her presentation, from what dress she wore to what photos were presented. In a strange twist of irony, it was her remarkable intelligence that led her to be perceived as stupid. She knew it was the naïve silly blonde that would appeal to men, rather than an intelligent and strong woman. In many ways, she was the exact opposite of Grace Kelly, who always presented herself as being intelligent, cunning, thoughtful and classy. Marilyn, on the other hand, was silly, sexy, and stupid. Her control over her image not only shows just how intelligent she was, but also how powerful she was. She was able to actively control the way the public and men perceived her, allowing however much she wanted in and reflecting only what she thought suitable back out. Despite being an object of the male gaze, she took the position of object and flipped it into a position of power, leveraging it to garner money, power and control over her life.

In the famous “Happy Birthday Mr President” moment, Marilyn shook off her fur stole to reveal a skin-tight nude coloured dress embellished with rhinestones. It was probably the sexiest and nudest dress that had been seen in public – especially so incredibly public – up to that point in time. It was meant to leave absolutely nothing to the imagination and convey a sense of being completely and utterly naked. While the moment was one of her most famous, it was also one of her last – she died shortly after the event from an overdose.

Marilyn’s experience with men was fraught and all over the place. She had been married three times and divorced three times, each marriage only lasting a few years at most. There had been long rumours of an alleged affair with John F Kennedy (the president she sang to), a president who had his own issues with sex scandals. Her appearance at the birthday event, the dress she wore at it, and the way she sang all did nothing to quell the rumours – only sparking them into much greater height.

The dress is seen as a remarkable historical piece – one which is the epitome of Marilyn Monroe as an important pop culture icon in the United States. It’s hard to separate the dress from Marilyn, just as much as its hard to separate Marilyn from the other aspects of her personhood.

But then, just a few weeks ago, it was worn again by someone else: Kim Kardashian.

Despite a very different upbringing from Marilyn, Kim actually has a lot of similarities with Marilyn as a pop culture figure. Kim did not grow up in foster homes and orphanages, and she did not come from poor financial beginnings. Kim’s father was a famous defence attorney, most notable for his defence of O.J Simpson (who stood in trial for killing his wife, a friend of the attorney’s wife and Kim’s mother – but that’s a story for a different post). Though, it should be noted that the money she came from is nowhere near the amount she currently has, it is an economical fact that is far easier to become richer when you already have a decent amount of capital to begin with. So, we’ll put her finances as something incredibly different than Marilyn.

But both Marilyn Monroe and Kim Kardashian are pop culture sex symbols. Kim’s body helped to shape the attitudes of what forms of body are considered sexy in contemporary popular culture. Before Kim popularised large asses, very few models would have been seen as having a sizable rear. Now, I tend to have fun scrolling through online retailers and spotting the models who are clearly picked for being Kardashian look-a-likes.

In fact, Marilyn’s nude photos can be compared to what may be argued as the start of Kim’s career: the sex tape. While many think of Kim’s sex tape as the piece that sparked her career, I think I could argue the point in either direction rather than just the one. Kim was already a well-known figure prior to the sex tape’s release (otherwise, who would care about her tape, right?). She was a popular tabloid figure, popping up in pictures with Brittney Spears and very close friend Paris Hilton. Her reality television show, Keeping Up with the Kardashians – which would become a staple of United States Pop Culture – was already ready for production or in the middle of production.

Regardless of the whether or not the sex tape was the cause of Kim’s career, it definitely didn’t harm it. Like Marilyn’s nude photos, Kim’s sex tape helped to solidify Kim as a sex symbol for contemporary popular culture.

And Kim carefully controls her image. While it may not seem that way, a quick comparison of early episodes of Keeping Up with later episodes will show a vastly different Kim. In the beginning, she spoke in a higher pitched voice tinged with a bit of a whine. She acted stupid and pretended to be unaware of her status as sex symbol while feeding into it. In later seasons, her voice is more even, and she refuses to hide her intelligence – actively working toward being a lawyer and demonstrating her control over multiple businesses. Kim has many contacts with paparazzi, and often would schedule them to come and see her in different locations in order to “accidently” promote outfits. There’s an episode of Keeping Up where Kim keeps going in and out of her hotel in different Yeezy outfits to help promote the new line her husband at the time, Kanye West, was producing.

The Marilyn dress is an important piece of a United States myth of Marilyn Monroe, but it’s also a myth in and of itself. The dress is tied intimately to the story of a woman, a controversy, and a commentary on the male gaze in relation to the conception of the “ideal American beauty”. In fact, there’s been a lot connecting Marilyn to conceptions of race and racial superiority, despite her own rejections of the matter. But I think a conversation on Marilyn, race and beauty standards is a post for a different time.

Kim’s story helps to add to the dress from a myth perspective. Dress has always been an important part of storytelling, and even historical outfits are allowed to be worn when it’s in the context of their mythic role. The moment Kim chose to wear this outfit is an incredibly important one. Not the Met Gala, or even the theme of the Met Gala (because it wasn’t on theme), but because of the timing of it all.

Kim Kardashian’s divorce with husband Kanye West has been public and vicious. There has been clear demonstrations of emotional abuse, control and threats on public platforms from Kanye directed at Kim. When they were married, he was always present when she was choosing her outfits, commenting on what she was allowed to wear and how her image should be re-controlled by him rather than herself.

A previous Met Gala with a theme that also didn’t fit Kim’s dress sparked an argument between Kanye and Kim. She was choosing to wear a dress that was supposed to mimic coming out of water. The dress clung to every curve and appeared almost nude at a quick glance. Kanye tried to reject the dress, telling her it was too sexy for a wife and mother to wear. Kim had to point out that she was a sex symbol, crafted that way by the male gaze, herself and even Kanye early in her career. His sudden rejection of this was a difficult argument between the two of them. She did end up wearing the dress.

I could imagine Kanye would have similar problems with the Marilyn dress. By donning that dress, Kim is connecting herself to the sex symbol narrative that Marilyn also crafted for herself, and in many ways is reclaiming the control and power over her own body and image. It was of mythic importance that she wears that dress at that time in that way – to connect herself to the sexual power and intelligence of Marilyn Monroe, and therefore to almost ritually connect those feelings and positions back to herself.

From a protection of historical pieces perspective, I’m not a fan of her wearing it. I like the idea of keeping women’s narratives in museums and in the cultural zeitgeist. But from a mythic perspective, I’m so happy Kim wore this outfit. In many ways, she needed to for herself. But she also needed to in order to reclaim the myth of Kim Kardashian as one that she was telling, and not anyone else.

GLaDOS: an analysis

There are a few video game antagonists that always stick out to me. Ganon or Ganondorf from the Legend of Zelda series is one, more from the constant repetition of him in my life rather than anything specific about him. Pyramid Head because he’s just… weird. More recently, Capcom underestimated the internet’s love for tall dominating women with Lady Dimitrescu.

But I think there’s one antagonist that has always captured my imagination. The robotic female voice taunting every failure in a puzzle will always haunt me. GLaDOS, the monstrous machine in Portal, is an antagonist who oversees everything, and in a lot of ways is one of the greatest misunderstood video game antagonists. Today, I want to spend a bit more time on the story of GLaDOS, and how her story as victim teaches us something about what Portal is trying to tell us.

In order to really get at the heart of GLaDOS’s role of the victimised antagonist, we need to look at several factors. In a different video, I talked about how the mythic story of a game is divided on a graphic spectrum of two types of mythic narratives: the implicit and the explicit. I’ll link to that video below if you want a more detailed overview. I’m going to approach GLaDOS along these lines: looking at her story as it is written, but also as it is experienced in an actual game form. In other words, we’re going to look at the implicit GLaDOS as well as the explicit GLaDOS.

GLaDOS as antagonist is ever-present. Unlike most antagonists, she’s readily present throughout the whole game. Not in the puppeteer controlling the world around you kind of way, but in a direct way. She comments on everything you do as a player, making fun of you for failing puzzles or taunting you and your potential inability to figure out what you have to do to move forward. No matter where you are in the lab, you are always watched – and you know you are being watched, even when you – maybe – aren’t.

Portal, in its design, replicates something akin to Foucault’s Panopticon. The Panopticon is based on a prison design created by Jeremy Bentham in the mid-19th century, the idea being that prisoners are isolated and not allowed communication while always being felt they are being watched. The idea would be that guards could see into all the cells and monitor the prisoners while not being able to be seen themselves – leaving the prisoners unable to know when they were being actively watched and when they weren’t, leading to a constant sense of surveillance.

Foucault took this idea of the Panopticon and turned it into a metaphor for power systems in society. We can see the result of this power dynamic in two different ways: the effect it has on the observed, or the prisoner, in the system; and the effect it has on the observer. In the example of Portal, this can be seen in the player (playing as prisoner), and GLaDOS (playing as observer). For the player-character, the observation results in an acceptance of the situation and a form of docility. The constant surveillance becomes normalised and the resultant behaviour is not because the surveillance is present all the time but because the society under that surveillance internalises the potential of the discipline.

But let’s talk more about the result on GLaDOS, as we do care a little bit more about her today than our player-character Chell. The Panopticon metaphor is built on a particular idea of power and power dynamics. The power in the Panopticon comes from knowledge, and that knowledge comes from the observation itself. And the observation provides more power. It’s an endless cycle. As Foucault says: "by being combined and generalized, they attained a level at which the formation of knowledge and the increase in power regularly reinforce one another in a circular process" (Foucault 1977).

Whether or not you agree with Foucault – and to be honest, I’m unsure if I do – there is definitely something akin to this in Portal. GLaDOS is the constantly observing antagonist whose power grows from their constant presence watching your every move. Sometimes, though, we’re not sure if she’s paying attention, but we are always acting as if she is.

So now let’s look at GLaDOS physical design in the game. Like most parts of video game design and creation, GLaDOS’s design went through several different forms. One of the earlier designs was an upside-down version of Botticelli’s The Birth of the Venus. Which… I guess that’s a thing that could have happened? I think it’s important to note that in all these early versions, GLaDOS was always conceived of as female. The Birth of the Venus example shows that the designers were always wanting to think of GLaDOS as a woman, and they were clearly trying to figure out how to conceive of “female” and “robot” without just making a walking android with metal boobs.

A lot of the problem comes from the perceived mutual exclusivity of “femininity” and “power” – an antagonist cannot be seen as being inherently powerful as well as being inherently feminine. In patriarchal societies, power is tied exclusively to the male domain, leaving the nature of femininity and anything else put into the realm of “female” as power-less. Ways of depicting the feminine is entirely based on socially conceived notions of feminine beauty and how female bodies should be depicted.

GLaDOS was unable to escape the male gaze. The developers decided to design a mechanical device which was given a “delicate robotic figure” to echo her femininity. The need for GLaDOS to be composed of soft lines and delicate curves is based on contemporary conceptions of the ideal female body, and yet the amount of curves that are allowed are also highly contested socially.

I bring this up because it’s important to constantly position GLaDOS in relation to men. Despite the fact that the game itself doesn’t have a lot of men present, there is an overarching feeling of the presence of men for a variety of reasons, including the entire reason for GLaDOS’s existence. But more on that later.

Both in and out of the game, the female body, and it’s many curves, are highly sexualised, highly internalised, and highly controlled. I don’t think I need to explain the sexualisation of women here. If you need that explained, I quite frankly can’t help you. When I say highly internalised, I mean that women are constantly taught to internalise the conception of the ideal female body and be constantly searching for it, no matter how unattainable that conception may be. It’s not something that is purely put upon us from an outside force, but as members of society we also begin to put it upon ourselves. This is the process of internalisation.

The female body is highly controlled through two forces: one literally done, and the other socially done. To obtain the unattainable standards of female body, women physically control their bodies in order to force them into forms required. Fashion staples such as the corset, the bustle, and even something as simple as an A-line skirt, all work to help women control their bodies. Flesh that was out of line needed to be tied back into shape. The female body needs to be curvy, but also needs to be tight and contained: a contradiction in physical body forms that only helps to illustrate how unattainable we’re talking when I talk about female bodies.

The physical control of the body through the nature of things like corsets is often due to the social control, and the physical manifestation of it. Society has already determined which bodies are considered feminine, and anything outside of that gets left behind. This is why there’s issues of fatphobia, as well as distaste for women’s bodies which are heavily muscled – just to name two examples of bodies which don’t fit.

So basically, GLaDOS’s body needed to be curvy and tight and contained to be feminine, but these conceptions of the female body work directly against social views of power, which are often conceived of as primarily masculine. The robotic nature of GLaDOS is where the more masculine power comes in, but needed to position the character in the hanging shifting form we see as a way of conveying the femininity.

This inability to see the feminine and power as being able to be paired together, particularly on how this is reflected in the design of GLaDOS, needs to be seen in the light of the backstory to GLaDOS. GLaDOS was built by Aperture Science Laboratories CEO Cave Johnson, who had hoped to eventually upload human consciousness into a machine. His assistant, Caroline, was highly intelligent and worked well alongside him.

Caroline is described as beautiful and fully feminine, but also incredibly smart. Cave Johnson describes her as the “backbone of the facility”. In the same statement, Johnson says “Sorry, fellas. She’s married. To science.” While this statement may, at first, seem to help show Caroline as an intelligent and strong woman, it ultimately ties her to the need to be controlled in some form, and her uncontrolled status positions her as a dangerous woman.

The story of GLaDOS is that Caroline’s consciousness was put into the machine, and this was – most likely – done against her will. In one of the unused audio files, you hear Caroline being scared and saying “I don’t want this!”. Obviously, this brings up questions on what exactly was being done to her. There was a rumour for a bit that the voice actor of Cave Johnson, JK Simmons, refused to record the second half of that audio because he felt it was a rape scene. To my knowledge, Simmons never said one way or the other on the subject, but one of the writers for Portal, Erik Wolpaw, addressed the rumour in an interview with Gamespot. Wolpaw said it was “insane” that anyone would think they wrote a rape scene into Portal 2.

So let’s look into it then. The story sets up the fact that Caroline was somewhere between resistant and firmly against her consciousness being put into the robot that became GLaDOS. Despite her own wishes on the matter, Cave Johnson insisted she would be placed within GLaDOS regardless. In one voice memo, Johnson states that Caroline will be his successor, that she won’t want that but that they should force her to do it anyway. This order resulted in her consciousness being put into GLaDOS.

The unused audio of her resistance could well be this act – the forcing of her consciousness out of her body and into the machine. But this means that her body was forcibly taken from her. Her body was removed from her own control through forces outside of her and against her own wishes. It’s a direct assault on her being, her sense of self, and her relationship to her body. All of this is done without her consent. In most definitions, this is rape. Caroline’s body was so in need of being touched by men that it was fully removed from her through the touch of men.

When we look at her backstory, the art of GLaDOS’s form is given a little bit of a different view. Her form was necessary for being given a type of feminine power, which – as we remember – was somehow difficult to portray because women can’t be powerful. Her form, however, is also a quiet depiction of assault. The developers specifically mentioned the Birth of the Venus as an inspiration point, but the Game-ism blog saw how the model of GLaDOS looked like a woman hanging upside down in bondage.

Viewing GLaDOS as the bound-woman, we see how GLaDOS’s form is a demonstration of her feeling of enslavement, feeling trapped and her desire for a form of freedom. But even if we strip away this particular theory and only focus on the developer’s Venus inspiration, we still see GLaDOS as inherently trapped. The femininity tied to her form is itself a form of entrapment. What has made GLaDOS “feminine” in her form has always been her captivity. The intelligent Caroline could not find a position of power without being a robot – the developers saw the raw power of the robot as the only way an intelligent and independent woman could be considered powerful. From the beginning, GLaDOS was always going to be trapped.

GLaDOS is only able to be GLaDOS due to the loss and captivity of Caroline. Caroline is a victim of assault – whether it be sexual or another form of bodily rape – and this aspect of her is the basis of her role as antagonist.

Now, I want to return to GLaDOS and Foucault. If you remember, we talked about Foucault’s metaphor of the Panopticon as talking about the interrelationship of knowledge and – yes – power. GLaDOS’s entire role as antagonist is to observe, comment, and discuss the nature of Chell’s actions. The entire concept of the world of Portal is a scientific laboratory – GLaDOS is still learning, and through that gathering of knowledge garnering power. Her power may not be the exact same big muscles and other forms of physical power, but her ultimate intellectual power is what makes her such a ferocious and memorable antagonist. Her power is not because she’s a robot, but because she’s watching everything and utilizing this knowledge to continue the Panopticon-esque world she’s in control of.

GLaDOS as antagonist is fully realised through her position as the unsilenced woman. GLaDOS is so unsilenced, she won’t shut up. She taunts you all the time, regularly commenting and mocking every step of the way. In contrast, the player-character Chell is the silent protagonist who quietly moves through the puzzles of Portal. Chell is, of course, also a female victim. Even though GLaDOS’s rape was a silent rape – one silenced behind unreleased audio files and misunderstandings from the perspectives of the writers – GLaDOS still speaks. She voices her distaste at her position and role, and the company which stripped her of her agency. She fully embodies the role of the vocal survivor, one who fights for her position to be recognised – sometimes to a violent end. What Portal is implicitly telling us in GlaDOS is that the silenced victims are the protagonists, and the vocal victims are the monsters.

The Witch Trees of Wiltshire

No, today we’re not talking about popular culture per se. Rather, we’re going to be talking about popular storytelling – or popular mythology of a different kind. I’m doing this on purpose for a few reasons: I want to explore other types of “popular culture” than the media kind, and I also wanted to talk about something that is, quite literally, close to home.

A couple of months ago, I moved to Salisbury, Wiltshire here in England. I’m still slowly getting to know the city and the surrounding area, and going on country-side walks is a fun way of doing it. A couple weeks ago, my husband and I walked to Grovely Woods, a beautiful wood just outside of Wilton, a neighbouring village to Salisbury. Most of the wood is composed of straight birch trees on either side of a Roman road. But just off the main path, a little past the entrance, are three gnarled and large trees known as the Witch Trees.

The story of the Witch Trees starts in the 1700s, when four sisters came to live in Wilton. A little after their arrival, a smallpox outbreak swept through the town, and the townspeople blamed the sisters as witches who cursed the town with the plague. They brought the sisters to the woods and bludgeoned them to death. The story goes, that they buried each sister several paces away from each other so they could not continue to conspire against the town (which of course witches can do in death). From the place they buried the bodies, these large trees grew – to forever remind the villagers of what they had done.

Visiting the trees is interesting. Three of the four are still standing, as the fourth apparently fell down in a storm a few years back. If you’re looking into the treeline, they’re not too difficult to miss – you can see the main road from the trees. Logs, twigs and other wood pieces into a circle surrounding the base of each tree, clearly marking them as something separate and special. Visitors frequently leave trinkets, including pieces of flint, jewellery, ribbons, and other items of affection. The first tree you encounter is probably the most adorned.

What makes these trees and their story interesting is that they have become markers of memorialisation. Visitors cling to the story of the witch sisters and come to remember them, even those so many hundreds of years in the future that they have no specific familial connection to them at all. But they do have a personal connection – a connection born of something quite different.

In all honesty, the historical accuracy of the story is not really important. Nor is the question of whether the trees magically grew from the graves, or if they were planted there. None of these things matter because the story is already present and a part of the world, and the story is what matters.

The story of the sisters connects the visitors to the history of the village (whether real or not), finding themselves and their own present understandings in their own village. They memorialise the story with trinkets and visitations – people may sit on the logs which surround the tree after leaving their gift.

What we see in the Witch Trees is the way individuals use story and mythology to connect themselves to the landscape, as well as to history. Wiltshire folklore cements the resident to the Wiltshire landscape as well as to other Wiltshire residents. The visitors to the Witch Trees are not only connecting to the story of the sisters, but also to the landscape of the woods that house the trees, and the other residents who also come to visit the trees.

Not to mention the beaitufl act of leaving the gifts in the first place – something akin to ritual, and yet so natural and so part of the lived experience that the giver probably doesn’t think that much of it. The act is a reciprocal one. The tree has given story, one that connects to landscape and community, to the giver. In return, the giver presents the tree with a piece of their own narrative – a piece of their own story and community, wrapped around the piece of landscape.

Monsters: the Meaning of Orcs

It’s been a while since we’ve done a monster analysis, so I decided to come back for at least just one before saving the rest of them for spooky-season. I wanted to pick one that is a common monster, one that pops up in a lot of different fantasy stories. So, let’s talk about orcs.

A quick note before we get massively into it: this post is going to focus in on orcs as they are presented in Lord of the Rings and a little bit as well from Dungeons & Dragons. I know orcs are in a lot of other places – in fact, they’re a staple in most fantasy literature, movies and television shows. But I can’t get into every single instance of orcs – we’d be here forever. Lord of the Rings heavily influenced the development of fantasy – it became the backbone of fantasy literature and media, and therefore the depiction of LotR orcs have become the depiction of orcs more generally. While LotR did also influence Dungeons & Dragons, D&D has an influence all of it’s own on other aspects of role-playing games and video games, as well as other fantasy media more generally. So for the time being, I’m putting my focus on these two fantasy ancestors, unless I want to write a book about orcs. Which, to be fair, isn’t too far outside the realm of possibility – but not today.

So why don’t we first start with the basic description of an orc. Orcs are often defined by four primary features: (1) skin colour, often a dark green; (2) homelands outside of civilisation, often far outside the locations of built-up cities; (3) a “primitive” culture; and ultimately (4) extreme aggressiveness and irrationality. Even in more recent depictions of orcs, these four elements are somewhere present – they make up the characteristics that readers instantly recognise as “orcish”.

One of the founders of the scholarly approach to the study of monsters, Jeffrey Cohen, wrote that “monstrous difference tends to be cultural, political, racial, economic, sexual”. This means that whenever we’re analysing our monsters, we tend to start thinking of the monstrous differences in terms of other more human differences. Monstrous races are a common find in human history and fantasy literature, for example the monstrous depictions of Jews and Muslims.

For Tolkien, orcs are the embodied aspect of difference to the all-white Fellowship. The entirety of the Lord of the Rings, and even the Hobbit, is a marked separation of the West and East: the “men of the West” are depicted as corruptible, but ultimately good, as opposed to the “Eastern” men (the ones riding the giant elephants) who aren’t given the same consideration of empathy. Orcs are described by Tolkien as “squat, broad, flat-nosed, sallow-skinned, with wide mouths and slant eyes: in fact degraded and repulsive versions of the (to Europeans) least lovely Mongol-types".

The skin colour associated with orcs is an important part of the inherent racist Othering of orcs. Tolkien’s description of orcs skin-colour has already been shown, with the emphasis on the “sallow-skinned” monsters. Uruk-hai are a more complicated orc, one that has been “perfected” (according to Saruman), whose skin is noted as being so dark it’s almost black. In fact, Uruk-hai from Mordor are often referred to as “Black Orcs”.

In the 1979 Dungeons and Dragons Monster Manual, orcs are described as “particularly disgusting because their coloration – brown or brownish green with a bluish sheen – highlights their pinkish snouts and ears. Their bristly hair is dark brown or black”. And the descriptions don’t exactly get better as time goes on. The 4th edition Monster Manual, first published in 2008, has an image of orcs with some hair dreadlocked, and with darker skin colours.

The image of orcs in the 4th edition Monster Manual.

The depictions of orcs as “savage” or “primitive” are also present in this 2008 Manual. Orcs are “savage, bloodthirsty marauders” who “plague the civilized races of the world”. Here, we see the typical description of orcs as being outside the typical confines of what is considered “civilisation”, often described as living in “tribes”.

In fantasy media following D&D orcs, the separation is less about good vs evil, so much as it is the civilised vs savage, or more directly, the cultural considerations of centre vs periphery. In more simplistic terms, it’s about the us vs them.

Orcs are the more obvious direct example of how fantasy monsters can embody the distinguishing of monstrous races – being the way to epitomise the monstrous nature of Mongols (as in the case for Tolkien) or Black people more generally, as seems to be more aligned in the Monster Manuals of D&D. To analyse orcs is, essentially, to analyse racism.