Speaker 1: Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name
Speaker 1: is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. In it's Saturday.
Speaker 1: Time to go into the Old Vault. This time we're
Speaker 1: doing an episode from October, right, Yeah, this one is
Speaker 1: the Monstrosity Cuteness Spectrum, and this is a lot of fun.
Speaker 1: We get into some Japanese traditions, Japanese monsters, and especially
Speaker 1: Japanese monsters that have been transformed, uh from from from
Speaker 1: hideous murderous creatures into cute mascots and what that transformation means.
Speaker 1: All right, well, let's jump right in. Welcome to Stuff
Speaker 1: to Blow your Mind from how Stuffworks dot Com. Hey,
Speaker 1: welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is
Speaker 1: Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. Hey, Robert, have you
Speaker 1: seen all these cute Jason Vorhees dolls and cartoons fan
Speaker 1: art all over the Internet? Of course you have. I've
Speaker 1: at least seen some of it, but I know you
Speaker 1: shared with me an image of Jason plush doll, and
Speaker 1: I had not encountered that specific cute horror before. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So he's got the machete and there's blood on the machete.
Speaker 1: But he's adorable, but he has blood on it, like
Speaker 1: you know, murder weapons. I mean, even if we didn't
Speaker 1: know who he is, the context here is that this
Speaker 1: is a killer. Yeah. He's got a huge head, huge
Speaker 1: low set eyes. He just looks so sweet, little stumpy limbs.
Speaker 1: He's like a little cute baby Jason. And there are
Speaker 1: cute Freddy Krueger's in the same way, Cute Freddy Krueger cartoons, dolls, toys, uh,
Speaker 1: things all over the internet. And you've seen the cute vampires,
Speaker 1: the cute werewolves, cute versions of the girl from the Ring.
Speaker 1: I looked it up that exists cute predators from the
Speaker 1: movie Predator. I saw that. That's that's kind of easy
Speaker 1: because the predator already has a sort of baby shaped head.
Speaker 1: You just got to make eyes bigger. They're cute xeno morphs.
Speaker 1: You'd think that'd be difficult to do, but they're all
Speaker 1: over the internet. What is with this epidemic of monsters
Speaker 1: originally imagined to be horrifying, threatening to haunt our dreams,
Speaker 1: to chase us through our nightmares, to murder us and
Speaker 1: our friends, and instead we're making all these versions of
Speaker 1: them that are adorable with infantile characteristics that you just
Speaker 1: want to hug and snuggle. It seems inevitable, doesn't it,
Speaker 1: even even in weird cases like, for instance, the Babba Duke,
Speaker 1: which is like a child murdering monster, right, And then
Speaker 1: the same with penny Wise, the clown. Like you would
Speaker 1: think that penny Wise, this thing that appears as a
Speaker 1: clown in order to you know, drain the essence out
Speaker 1: of children and pull them into horrify them and pull
Speaker 1: them into sewers. You would think that would be beyond
Speaker 1: our ability to make cute. And yet just the other
Speaker 1: day I was looking at a cute pins of penny Wise.
Speaker 1: I'll cute it up. Yeah, Well, if you want to
Speaker 1: go in the cosmic direction, how about all the cute
Speaker 1: illithid monter, the you you know, uh cathuloom with those stuff. Yeah,
Speaker 1: when cute cute plush catulus. When my son came into
Speaker 1: my life, but I was, one of the first things
Speaker 1: we gave him was a plush cthulhu, which he loves,
Speaker 1: and it's an adorable looking creature. But yeah, he doesn't
Speaker 1: even know that it is essentially supposed to be a
Speaker 1: scary monster. I guess it's not funny to children in
Speaker 1: the same way it is funny to adults. No, that
Speaker 1: he just sees it as a cool, pretend, little creature.
Speaker 1: It's like if you encountered snuffle up agus and then
Speaker 1: somebody said, oh, yes, stuff, Lupagus is actually a patterned
Speaker 1: after this hideous monster, right, this thing that snorts you
Speaker 1: up as a liquid through its trunk. Though, I do
Speaker 1: want to say, before this epidemic of cute cartoon versions
Speaker 1: and cute dolls and stuff like that of say Freddy Krueger,
Speaker 1: there is a precedent for this within the horror media itself.
Speaker 1: Because you've seen the Freddy Krueger movies, right, the Nightmare
Speaker 1: on Elm Street. Right, I've seen the first one and
Speaker 1: I've seen the remake, and I like both of those,
Speaker 1: and the rest it's just mostly ups and just the
Speaker 1: pop cultural absorption of this ever ridiculous Freddy Krueger that
Speaker 1: that you know, that that has all these catchphrases and
Speaker 1: an ingenious kills. Yeah, that's that all just kind of
Speaker 1: blurs together for me. Well, there there's definitely an arc
Speaker 1: throughout the series where over time, the Freddy Krueger of
Speaker 1: the first movie and the first night Nightmare on Elm Street.
Speaker 1: I think Wes Craven went out of his way to
Speaker 1: make him not just a threatening monster, the standard kind
Speaker 1: of monster that will hurt you and chases you, but
Speaker 1: to make him repulsive and really just nasty. I mean,
Speaker 1: Freddy Krueger in the first movie is a character who's
Speaker 1: supposed to be a child murderer, and there are these
Speaker 1: suggestions of perversity and this this kind of gross creepiness,
Speaker 1: not just threatening monstrosity, And so from that point, I
Speaker 1: think it's really amazing that over the arc of the
Speaker 1: series Freddie becomes sort of almost something like an anti hero,
Speaker 1: like he's never actually a good guy, but he stops
Speaker 1: becoming this gross creep that you don't even want to
Speaker 1: look at, and becomes this jokester who dances and mugs
Speaker 1: for the camera and has one liners, makes jokes, and
Speaker 1: he becomes the star of the films. He becomes the
Speaker 1: reason people watch it, and it's because he's fun and
Speaker 1: he's comic. He becomes the crypt keeper, he becomes whole Cogan. Uh.
Speaker 1: And then it certainly by Jason versus Freddie, you're probably
Speaker 1: rooting for one or the other. He is, like, there's
Speaker 1: kind of a fifty fifty split there that that you
Speaker 1: may be backing this character in the brawl. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: maybe you could chalk that up in the Freddie movies
Speaker 1: just to the actor who played in Robert England being
Speaker 1: a great and likable actor despite the fact that he's
Speaker 1: settled with this incredibly repulsive role. Uh, maybe Robert England
Speaker 1: just bleeds through so much that you want to make
Speaker 1: him more and more likable. Well, it even got to
Speaker 1: the point when they when the remake of Nightmare Name
Speaker 1: Street came out, Um, a lot of people didn't like it.
Speaker 1: I actually really enjoyed it. I thought it was I
Speaker 1: thought it's a fine Hart film. I didn't like it.
Speaker 1: You didn't like I. I enjoyed it. But then again,
Speaker 1: I'm less attached to the series. But but one of
Speaker 1: the criticisms that I saw level thatt it was how
Speaker 1: could you make Freddie a pedophile? How could you make
Speaker 1: this his avert? Make this creepiness in his character so avert,
Speaker 1: as if that like ruined a hero and not just
Speaker 1: made a grotesque monster a little creepier. So I think
Speaker 1: it was always kind of implicitly suggested back in the
Speaker 1: first movie. Look, I mean they never said that outright
Speaker 1: that I recall, but it's always there in the fact that,
Speaker 1: like we were saying, he's not just a threat, he's
Speaker 1: a creep, he's perverse, right, Yeah, So it's it's interesting
Speaker 1: to see how people responded to kind of a doubling
Speaker 1: down on on the grotesque monstrosity of the character in
Speaker 1: away from the ridiculous pop culture version of the character. Right. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the version in the remake is not going to be
Speaker 1: doing I don't know, Domino's pizza commercials or whatever Freddie
Speaker 1: was doing in the eighties. But of course Freddy Krueger
Speaker 1: and the nutmar On Elm Street series is not the
Speaker 1: only series where we see a monstrous, horrifying character transformed
Speaker 1: over time into something that's more approachable, more likable, more identifiable,
Speaker 1: maybe even kind of snugly. This happens a lot in
Speaker 1: horror literature and even in horror folklore. Yeah. Yeah, we're
Speaker 1: definitely going to get into some examples from from folklore
Speaker 1: and legend, particularly some examples from Japanese folklore, because as
Speaker 1: we're talking, we inevitably talk about both monsters and the
Speaker 1: world of cute like you have to go to Japan
Speaker 1: because Japan is h is the home not only of
Speaker 1: some pretty hideous folkloric monsters, but also Kauaii. This this
Speaker 1: notion of of of like overt just overpowered cuteness, the
Speaker 1: Hello Kitty level of cuteness that has not only taken
Speaker 1: Japan by storm, but has has spread its cuttly tentacles
Speaker 1: into just about every portion of the earth. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: like overclocking the adorability process almost to the point of insanity.
Speaker 1: And I should also point out that this also goes
Speaker 1: the other way, of course, just as monsters often become cute,
Speaker 1: there are also plenty of examples of people taking something
Speaker 1: cute and making it monstrous. Um, I kind of did
Speaker 1: it just a few minutes ago talking about snuffle up,
Speaker 1: I guess. But you inevitably see people who say, do
Speaker 1: a love crafty and take on totoro or And then
Speaker 1: there's a whole area of Kauai known as Kauai and noir,
Speaker 1: which is like dark cute, where they have something that
Speaker 1: pretty much intentionally has a lag or maybe a tentacle
Speaker 1: in both the cute and the monstrous content bucket. I
Speaker 1: feel like this is something that very often happens in
Speaker 1: comedy animation. I think you know, shows like South Park
Speaker 1: and Futurama and Simpsons and stuff like that always have
Speaker 1: a scene at some point where a very cute animal
Speaker 1: turns out to be a horrifying killer. Yeah, So in
Speaker 1: today's episode, we're gonna explore this. We're gonna explore what
Speaker 1: is the relationship between the monstrous and the cute? Why
Speaker 1: is there there this in arresting interplay? And in doing that,
Speaker 1: we're going to, of course discuss a little bit about
Speaker 1: what a monster is. So I think we've hit that
Speaker 1: harder in previous episodes. Here stuff to blow your mind.
Speaker 1: We're gonna talk about what it is to be cute,
Speaker 1: what's going on when something cute hijacks our brain? And
Speaker 1: then at the end of the episode, we're going to
Speaker 1: look to really three specific examples of Japanese monsters that
Speaker 1: may or may not be transformed into something cute. We'll
Speaker 1: be discussing the Only, the Kappa, and the Tingu. All right, Robert,
Speaker 1: what is a monster? Oh? Well, you know it's it's
Speaker 1: it's like cute. It's like pornography. We know it when
Speaker 1: we see it. But if you if you really have to,
Speaker 1: you know, if you really force somebody to to define
Speaker 1: it what you tend to think about something that is
Speaker 1: awesome inform or size. It's novel and it's chimerical combination
Speaker 1: of natural forms. You know, like it's got the head
Speaker 1: of a sea horse in the body of a cow.
Speaker 1: That's a monster um or you know, you know where
Speaker 1: it's just a giant sea horse. A sea horse the
Speaker 1: size of the school bus would also be a monster.
Speaker 1: I subscribe to the Metallica theory of monster dum, which
Speaker 1: is that a monster is the thing that should not be.
Speaker 1: It's a thing that you behold and realized that it
Speaker 1: is not only not something you recognize from nature, but
Speaker 1: it's something that you do not wish nature had. Now,
Speaker 1: obviously we violate those norms all the time because we
Speaker 1: get into monsters. We we find ourselves at home thinking
Speaker 1: about monsters, and we kind of do wish there was
Speaker 1: a giant mummy crocodile with laser eyes. Right, But at
Speaker 1: least in theory, the thing a monster is is it
Speaker 1: violates natural categories in some way, and it horrifies you,
Speaker 1: makes you afraid, makes you not want it to be there.
Speaker 1: And as we discussed in our our episode, the first monster,
Speaker 1: which which came out previously for for this year's Halloween. Um,
Speaker 1: there's often a message there, if not a message that
Speaker 1: is tied up in the monster's form, then tied up
Speaker 1: in the monsters presence or in the stories about it, like,
Speaker 1: this monster is a danger to you because of whiny,
Speaker 1: because you went somewhere, or you did some thing, or
Speaker 1: you're engaged in a culture that went somewhere, did something. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Rarely do monsters appear in folklore without some kind of
Speaker 1: warning or social message. Right, Okay, so that's monsters in
Speaker 1: a nutshell. But but how about cute? Cute uh is
Speaker 1: in a way easier to nail down, but also just
Speaker 1: as ambiguous as monstrosity. Well, it's one of those things
Speaker 1: that everybody can identify it by sight. You know, you
Speaker 1: can tell, well, that's cute, that's not, that's cute, that's not.
Speaker 1: But when you're asked to give a set of criteria
Speaker 1: for how you're making the decision, you'd you'd often come
Speaker 1: up at a loss for words. Right, what's certainly the
Speaker 1: eyes of the beholder. But we can tease it apart
Speaker 1: to a certain extent. We can say, look at almost
Speaker 1: a universal images of the cute and see what's connecting
Speaker 1: with us there, and then figure out why it's connecting
Speaker 1: with us. So, for instance, kittens, babies, or of course
Speaker 1: Hello Kitty, which is essentially a kitten combined with a baby,
Speaker 1: or a small child with psychedelic color schemes, psychedelic color schemes,
Speaker 1: and of course many cute creatures of either real ones
Speaker 1: or fanciful ones. What do they have? They have big
Speaker 1: adorable eyes or perhaps big jowls, baby like cheeks. They're
Speaker 1: kind of Winston Churchill's yeah no, no, so yeah. There
Speaker 1: do appear to be some biological roots to our recognition
Speaker 1: of cuteness. It does seem to go into our mammalian
Speaker 1: brains and not just into cultural categories. So culture may
Speaker 1: very well inform a lot of what we find cute
Speaker 1: downstream of these biological cues. So, in his eighteen seventy
Speaker 1: two book The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals,
Speaker 1: Charles Darwin suggested that natural selection is probably gonna favor
Speaker 1: creatures which, in infancy possess features that cause the adults
Speaker 1: of that species to protect them and take care of
Speaker 1: their needs. Right, if you are a species that has
Speaker 1: a genome that says we usually give birth to babies
Speaker 1: we find repulsive and don't want anything to do with that.
Speaker 1: Species isn't going to do very well, right, or at
Speaker 1: least you're gonna have a situation like the Komodo dragon,
Speaker 1: where the young of the komodo dragon, they're pretty much
Speaker 1: they're on their own right, and they have to protect
Speaker 1: themselves from such threats as adult komodo drags exactly. So
Speaker 1: this would be in species that need to spend a
Speaker 1: lot of time protecting and caring for their young. This
Speaker 1: is something we see in mammals right right, and other species,
Speaker 1: but especially in mammals. So a lot of Darwin's book
Speaker 1: deals with things like the screams of infants and how
Speaker 1: the scream of an infant elicits parental attention. But usually
Speaker 1: if an object is screaming at you, you don't you
Speaker 1: just you know, don't you just find it annoying? Like
Speaker 1: you want to get away from it. Like if there's
Speaker 1: just us an orb in a room screaming at you,
Speaker 1: I wouldn't want to care for it. I would run away. Correct. Yeah,
Speaker 1: If if a human on a train is screaming, um,
Speaker 1: either may be you want to find out what's happening.
Speaker 1: You might even want to help. But there's there's at
Speaker 1: least that question mark phase of the screening, Right, what
Speaker 1: is going on here? Let me find out so that
Speaker 1: I can act accordingly. Yeah, it's attention getting, But the
Speaker 1: demands of an infant have to be more than simply
Speaker 1: attention getting to be adaptive. They have to be sharpened
Speaker 1: to appeal to specific vulnerabilities in the adult caregiver's brain,
Speaker 1: like vulnerabilities that soften anger responses and encourage protectiveness, and
Speaker 1: encourage generosity and sharing of resources and so forth. So
Speaker 1: something about the infant version of an animal has to
Speaker 1: convince the adult version of that animal to feel an
Speaker 1: attachment and to make sacrifices on behalf of this little creature.
Speaker 1: Then we'll talk about this more in a second. But
Speaker 1: in some species, these appeals for parenting could be straightforwardly chemical, right,
Speaker 1: Pheromones and scent would be examples. But couldn't these biological
Speaker 1: appeals also be visual? It makes sense, right, that's and
Speaker 1: one of the most immediate ways to interact with with
Speaker 1: an object or being is you see them and then
Speaker 1: you respond. Right. So, in the middle of the twentieth century,
Speaker 1: the Austrian ethologist Conrad Lawrenz, who I guess we should
Speaker 1: maybe acknowledged it's always weird, Like should you bring this
Speaker 1: up or not? He was also a Nazi after World
Speaker 1: War Two repudiated his views. I'm not aware that his
Speaker 1: ideology played any role in coming up with this schema
Speaker 1: we're about to talk about, but I guess it's worth acknowledging.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, I mean, I think it's always worth noting
Speaker 1: when a scientist has that in their background, because in
Speaker 1: some cases, you you definitely have science that it was
Speaker 1: skewed or compromised by his association with the Third Reich. Uh,
Speaker 1: So you have you have to at least acknowledge that
Speaker 1: it was there in order to determine if it was
Speaker 1: a factor. Yeah, I mean, like you had people doing
Speaker 1: science that was ideologically determined, not very objective. But I
Speaker 1: don't think that's necessarily the case in this case. So
Speaker 1: Lawrence plunged into this field by observing animal species and
Speaker 1: coming up with what's known as the Kinchen schema or
Speaker 1: the baby schema. It's a list of features that he
Speaker 1: believed were sculpted in order to trigger or release caregiving
Speaker 1: behaviors in adult animals, and he gave about seven criteria.
Speaker 1: So let me know what you think about these. Robert
Speaker 1: A large head Okay, yeah, babies have big heads. Predominance
Speaker 1: of the brain capsule. So that's going to mean not
Speaker 1: just a large head, but sort of the large forehead,
Speaker 1: like the swelling of the upper part of the head,
Speaker 1: large and low lying eyes, a bulging cheek region. There's
Speaker 1: the Churchill jowls, what we're talking about, short and thick extremities.
Speaker 1: A springy or elastic consistency. Yeah, they when need when
Speaker 1: you poke them. In a soft body, there's your plush stall.
Speaker 1: And finally, clumsy movements, yes, the toddling of the toddler. Right.
Speaker 1: And subsequent studies have found evidence to partially support Lorenz's schema.
Speaker 1: So this is one reason to think that, you know,
Speaker 1: even if he's some kind of crazy ideology, there might
Speaker 1: be something to this because subsequent studies seem to find
Speaker 1: some of the same stuff is true. So I'll mention
Speaker 1: one study from two thousand nine published in Ethology by
Speaker 1: Melanie Glocker at All, and this is called baby schema
Speaker 1: in Infant Faces induces cuteness, perception and motivation for caretaking
Speaker 1: in adults. And what they did in this study was
Speaker 1: they used real photos of infants digitally manipulated to accentuate
Speaker 1: or to downplay some of the features that are in
Speaker 1: line with Lorenz's criteria, and so among a group of undergraduates,
Speaker 1: the study found that the faces manipulated towards the criteria,
Speaker 1: so meaning they manipulated them to have larger eyes or
Speaker 1: a rounder face or a higher forehead, were judged to
Speaker 1: be cuter and elicited greater motivation for caregiving. People said
Speaker 1: they were more likely to give care to these, uh,
Speaker 1: these more baby scheme of faces than the ones where
Speaker 1: they really downplayed those criteria, giving them smaller eye as,
Speaker 1: smaller foreheads and narrower face and stuff like that. Huh.
Speaker 1: Now I've got a picture here, Yeah, I'm I'm looking
Speaker 1: at this right now. So, um, basically we have an
Speaker 1: array of six images, three per row, So we have
Speaker 1: this grid of baby heads here that we're looking at.
Speaker 1: And um and in the idea that there's a change
Speaker 1: in uh like cuteness from left to right. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: you've got like normal baby heads in the middle, and
Speaker 1: then on the right you've got ultra babified baby faces
Speaker 1: with like these gigantic eyes, really round faces, really sort
Speaker 1: of low faces with large foreheads, big brain capsules. And
Speaker 1: then on the right you've got unbabified baby faces that
Speaker 1: look sort of more like the kid in the omen
Speaker 1: or they look more adult. Basically, they look more like
Speaker 1: old men, you know. They're they're kind of in that
Speaker 1: category of like the older baby babies that we look
Speaker 1: at them and maybe you you cringe a little bit
Speaker 1: before you tell the the parents that it's a beautiful baby. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And they tend to have like smaller eyes, a smaller forehead,
Speaker 1: a narrower head, and a less rounding of the skull.
Speaker 1: That they look they look like weird adults rather than babies,
Speaker 1: you know. And it's interesting to to look at this
Speaker 1: and think of it in light of our basically our
Speaker 1: evolved reaction to these faces. I was looking at a
Speaker 1: study that said the scientists have used magneto and cephalography
Speaker 1: to observe a seventh of a second response time in
Speaker 1: adults to unfamiliar infant faces, but of course not adult faces.
Speaker 1: And that's going to that's uh, that difference is gonna
Speaker 1: be manifest in this array of faces as well. Like
Speaker 1: the cuter the baby, the more immediate your response to it.
Speaker 1: I imagine. So, like, you see this cute baby face
Speaker 1: with the highly babified features, and you're like, whoa that
Speaker 1: I need to pay attention to that. Yeah, I've got
Speaker 1: to look at that, and if it needs something, I
Speaker 1: guess I will go buy it some milk or some
Speaker 1: pudding or whatever it is. Baby's eat right. Put zip
Speaker 1: ties on all my cabinets is horrible plastic things, and
Speaker 1: all my wall plugs. I know. I'm I'm still trying
Speaker 1: to work through all the baby proofing on my house. Really, Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's still some annoying baby proofing that I haven't quite
Speaker 1: like broken by forcing a grower open. But so, one
Speaker 1: of the interesting things about the recognition of cuteness and
Speaker 1: its biological function is that it appears to work not
Speaker 1: just within species. Now, I can't see any real reason
Speaker 1: that you would evolve to have a caregiving preference for
Speaker 1: animals other than your own species. So it might be
Speaker 1: one of those things that's just a byproduct of something
Speaker 1: that's highly adaptable. Yeah, I mean, we're all, we're related
Speaker 1: to all these other mammalian creatures and and they're all
Speaker 1: they all have the basically basically the same survival um
Speaker 1: techniques in place in terms of parental care for the infant. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and it's kind of obvious from our experiences with kittens
Speaker 1: and puppies and so forth. But experiments do confirm that
Speaker 1: our appreciation for cuteness goes beyond the infant Homo sapiens.
Speaker 1: One example is a study I found by Anthony Little
Speaker 1: from two thousand twelve published again in Ethology called Manipulation
Speaker 1: of Infant like Traits Effects Perceived Cuteness of infinite adults
Speaker 1: and cat faces. So it found that among images of
Speaker 1: three types of faces, babies, adults, and cats, first of all,
Speaker 1: people found the babies and the cats cuter than adults.
Speaker 1: But then also when the faces from all three categories
Speaker 1: were manipulated to have baby scheme of characteristics, for example,
Speaker 1: decreasing the jaws, eyes, and increasing the forehead height, people
Speaker 1: found them cuter. And this worked for adult faces, for
Speaker 1: human baby faces, and for cat faces. Okay, so getting
Speaker 1: into kind of the Betty boot area there of like
Speaker 1: the weird like infantile but but arguably attractive adult female. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's just seeming to imply that we have the
Speaker 1: same kind of caregiving response or cuteness response to faces
Speaker 1: of all different types of creatures, no matter what age
Speaker 1: and no matter what species. Even if there's a face
Speaker 1: and you make these certain types of changes to the face,
Speaker 1: we think it's cute usually and we respond with all
Speaker 1: you know, zip tide, the chemical cabinet. You know, it's
Speaker 1: interesting to think of it in terms of survival adaptations
Speaker 1: for non human animals when you think of of of
Speaker 1: domesticated animals, cats and dogs, because certainly I think that
Speaker 1: I've certainly read some studies that argue for the the
Speaker 1: the cat's ability to essentially hijack us by making us
Speaker 1: think it's a baby on some level, you know. And
Speaker 1: and and I think dogs do that too to a
Speaker 1: large extent. Is it's certainly with puppies. So I could
Speaker 1: see it as a situation where uh an infant dog
Speaker 1: or or cat that is either found or it's obtained
Speaker 1: when the parents are killed like suddenly, those are less
Speaker 1: likely to be then killed and eaten or skinned or
Speaker 1: left for dead by the humans who have found it
Speaker 1: if it hits those same traders. You know. Now, another
Speaker 1: study I came across, the two thousand twelve Japanese study
Speaker 1: publishing POS one, and they tested the effect of viewing
Speaker 1: Kauai images are cute images on attentiveness, and they found
Speaker 1: that individuals who viewed infinite animal images performed tasks better
Speaker 1: than those who viewed adult animals. Yeah, that seems weird. Like, so,
Speaker 1: just if you had to have a calendar at your desk,
Speaker 1: have the baby animals calendar as opposed to the grown
Speaker 1: up animals calendar. Huh, I don't know. I feel I
Speaker 1: feel unfairly skeptical of that result. Has that been replicated? Well, well,
Speaker 1: let's let's let's see. So it's not just a matter.
Speaker 1: According to this study of cute things making us happier
Speaker 1: or amusing us, they also allegedly improve performance in quote
Speaker 1: tasks that require behavioral carefulness. Oh, I can see that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so it's not it's not so much. There's not a
Speaker 1: magical effect going on here. This is the idea that
Speaker 1: the cute visible stimuli may actually narrow the breath of
Speaker 1: attentional focus. I can see that. No, like that seeing
Speaker 1: a baby face would put the mind into a don't
Speaker 1: drop the baby gear exactly, and then you take that
Speaker 1: gear and you apply it to working in your spreadsheet.
Speaker 1: I can see that. Yeah, Okay, I understand the mechanism. Now, now,
Speaker 1: different studies have also looked at the effects of cute
Speaker 1: marketing on consumer strength of course, uh, and and also
Speaker 1: on whether it has a to what extended effects indulgent behavior,
Speaker 1: because the whole don't drop the baby mentality. Do you
Speaker 1: want your consumer using that that kind of mentality when
Speaker 1: they're potentially behind your product, right, you want to encourage
Speaker 1: them to drop the wallet. Yeah, they found that, uh
Speaker 1: that for some people, cute images with big eyes or
Speaker 1: baby cheeks seem to induce more careful or strained behavior.
Speaker 1: But uh, but again not every case. But it's an
Speaker 1: interesting additional study related to this whole idea of intensified attentiveness. Now,
Speaker 1: it's also worth noting that when we're talking about cute,
Speaker 1: we're inevitably talking about visual stimulant a lot here, because
Speaker 1: that's going to be the thing that's bound up in
Speaker 1: either a you know, a plushed all of of a
Speaker 1: horror monster or Halloween cost him that's derived from it. Yeah. Now,
Speaker 1: there are obviously also cute sounds, right yeah, yeah, the
Speaker 1: cute baby sound, but even the cute baby smell. I
Speaker 1: hadn't really thought about this, but you know, obviously, if
Speaker 1: you've ever smelled a baby. It's fabulous and it's hard
Speaker 1: to really put a key and put put a finger
Speaker 1: on what's happening there? Like, why is this an attractive
Speaker 1: smell to smell a baby's head? I'm sorry, I have
Speaker 1: no idea what you're talking about. Really, well, the next
Speaker 1: time you're around a baby, do yourself a favor. Uh
Speaker 1: smell It sounds creepy unless it's your baby. Well, no,
Speaker 1: you can. You can ask you and say, hey, I've
Speaker 1: been I've been reading some studies and in uh you know,
Speaker 1: in the name of science, would you allow me to
Speaker 1: smell your baby's head? Yeah? Have you seen that product
Speaker 1: on the market that is like a bottled cathead smell? No,
Speaker 1: an actual cat's head or a cathead biscuit? I think, Oh,
Speaker 1: I don't know what's what is a cat head biscuit?
Speaker 1: It's just a big old biscuit that's roughly the size
Speaker 1: of a cat's head. I'm not sure which what what
Speaker 1: region uh that that is found in? I guess somewhere
Speaker 1: in the south here. I think it's actually supposed to
Speaker 1: be a cat's head. It's like a perfume you can
Speaker 1: buy that's supposed to smell like a cat head. But
Speaker 1: cats don't really smell like anything if if it's unless
Speaker 1: it's a dirty cat like they tend to have. Like
Speaker 1: maybe they smell like pennies, a little bit like batteries,
Speaker 1: but that's about the extent of it. Uh, don't they
Speaker 1: usually smell like sulfur? We're not the ones I'm hanging stone.
Speaker 1: All right, Well, so on that note, let's take a
Speaker 1: quick break and we come back. We will get more
Speaker 1: into this conflict, this battle between cute and monstrosity. Thank you,
Speaker 1: thank Alright, so we're back. So we've talked about cute,
Speaker 1: We've talked about monsters. We've talked about them mostly is
Speaker 1: distant islands, you know, entire really separate from each other.
Speaker 1: So on one hand, you have the isle of misfit
Speaker 1: toys and then you have monster Island on the other.
Speaker 1: I suppose waiter the misfit toys not also monsters. Well, yeah,
Speaker 1: I guess they're kind of monstrous. What would be the
Speaker 1: what would be the cute island? Oh, it's that island
Speaker 1: in Japan that's got all the cats on it. Cat
Speaker 1: have an island there, you go, that'll work. So it's
Speaker 1: the difference between cat Haven cat Haven Island and uh
Speaker 1: and Monster Island. But we have to have to wonder
Speaker 1: are these two states all that different? Are they really
Speaker 1: two separate things or are they different points on a spectrum. Well,
Speaker 1: I ran across a really thought provoking paper titled Monstrous
Speaker 1: slash Cute Notes on the abivalent ambivalent nature of cuteness,
Speaker 1: and this is by social scientist Maja Rozozowska Branchinska. I
Speaker 1: hope I pronounced that at least halfway right, but I
Speaker 1: will try and link to this paper in the landing
Speaker 1: page for this episode stuff tob your mind dot com
Speaker 1: so you can see it for yourself. Um, Maja bebe
Speaker 1: as I will refer to her. She dives into all
Speaker 1: of it, noting that there's a certain ambiguity and hybridity
Speaker 1: to both monsters and cute entities. So they're cuties, if
Speaker 1: you will cut So they're not just different things, but
Speaker 1: there's something lying along the same scale. Maybe yeah, that
Speaker 1: you can think of them as both both of them
Speaker 1: as exaggerated states. And she also points out that cute
Speaker 1: images boast safe aesthetics that indicate harmless ethics. So I
Speaker 1: think it's perplexing because infants, I think we can all
Speaker 1: agree are holy, blameless creatures. M I'm not saying you
Speaker 1: can't look at one in in horror or fear, but
Speaker 1: that horror or fear is generally tied to the the
Speaker 1: ethical nature of the creature itself. You mean, not tied right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm sorry. It's generally not tied to the ethical nature
Speaker 1: of the creature itself. It's tied to you know, your
Speaker 1: Maybe it's tied feelings of commitment or uh, you know,
Speaker 1: uncertainty about the state of the world, or I guess
Speaker 1: the closest you could come to having an absolute, authentic
Speaker 1: are to the creature of the infant is to just
Speaker 1: be appalled at what it does and it's diaper, you know.
Speaker 1: But well, you could also have some kind of doctrine,
Speaker 1: I don't know, some original sin type thing. Well, yes,
Speaker 1: but that's that's you're really You're you're cheating at that point.
Speaker 1: I think you're creating a narrative that actually shames an infant,
Speaker 1: and so shame on you for doing it. And of
Speaker 1: course you might have some sort of response to just
Speaker 1: sort of the chaotic nature of infants. But if infants
Speaker 1: are chaotic, and they certainly can be they're definitely chaotic neutral,
Speaker 1: if not chaotic good, They're they're not chaotic evil. Okay,
Speaker 1: you've convinced me. Infants are, okay, Robert. Now, Likewise, the
Speaker 1: monster is traditionally a thing as rotten on the inside
Speaker 1: as it is on the outside. The monster with a
Speaker 1: heart of gold is an exception, granted of a pretty
Speaker 1: widespread exception at this point, but it's an exception that
Speaker 1: proves the rule. Well, it's kind of like those, uh
Speaker 1: the exception that proves the rule. On the other side
Speaker 1: would be those evil baby movies exactly like a possessed
Speaker 1: demon infant or something. Yeah, but generally, like a mom,
Speaker 1: monster is as evil it is as it is ugly,
Speaker 1: and a cute baby or cartoon character is as sweet
Speaker 1: as it is visually cute. Now, I like this, uh,
Speaker 1: this idea of cuteness being not just a thing that
Speaker 1: we respond to as caregivers and that makes us want
Speaker 1: to give up our protection and resources for it, but
Speaker 1: it's also something that signals harmlessness because it makes me
Speaker 1: think about the human domestication of animals. Uh. Like, for example,
Speaker 1: if you look at dogs, the domestic dog that we
Speaker 1: have today evolved both through natural but mostly artificial selection
Speaker 1: from some type of wolf like candid species within the
Speaker 1: history of anatomically modern humans. Now, because humans were selecting
Speaker 1: which features to breed into their dogs, I think we
Speaker 1: often assume that cute dog breeds where the adult of
Speaker 1: the dog is very cute. We're bred for cuteness simply
Speaker 1: for esthetic reasons, right. We wanted them to look cute
Speaker 1: because we like it. But it's also worth thinking about
Speaker 1: the post stability of a correlation between cuteness and the
Speaker 1: domesticated affect itself. Like domestic dogs seem to have been
Speaker 1: selected to retain juvenile characteristics into adulthood, and these would
Speaker 1: include things like a wider face, shorter snouts, floppy ears,
Speaker 1: a curly tail, but also positive responses to humans. This
Speaker 1: is something you would probably see in like wolf cubs
Speaker 1: or fox cubs, but not in adult wolves or adult foxes.
Speaker 1: They're the juvenile characteristics of the wild ancestor or the
Speaker 1: wild cousin that are retained into adulthood and the domesticated version,
Speaker 1: and so cuteness might not only be something that releases
Speaker 1: caregiving behaviors and adults, but it's literally correlated with the
Speaker 1: biological transformation of a wild, unruly animal that cannot be
Speaker 1: contained and is somewhat dangerous into this friendly, pliable, non
Speaker 1: threatening domestic companion. Like the cuteness shows that it has
Speaker 1: made a biological transformation into something that won't bite you
Speaker 1: and in fact might want to snuggle with you. I mean,
Speaker 1: that explains that the form of the pug right down
Speaker 1: to a t, the pug is essentially a dog that
Speaker 1: we have bread to look as much like a human
Speaker 1: infant as possible. Oh yeah, it is a human baby
Speaker 1: with four legs in a tail that can obviously buy you.
Speaker 1: Though if if provoked, Um, do pugs have teeth? Really? Yes?
Speaker 1: I mean, how much more awful would it be if
Speaker 1: we've managed to breathe the teeth out of the dog.
Speaker 1: I mean, we've metaphorically bred the teeth out of out
Speaker 1: of the dog, but but not literally alright, So that
Speaker 1: Maja bebi paper that I was discussing earlier. She also
Speaker 1: points a lot of this out about Japanese kauai, that
Speaker 1: the term itself the again, this is the Japanese cuteness
Speaker 1: or hypercuteness. Kauai derives from the word uh kawa yushi,
Speaker 1: which principally means shy and embarrassed, as well as vulnerable, small,
Speaker 1: and darling, and it's applied to both babies and old people,
Speaker 1: perhaps denoting a certain helplessness. And I also seen where
Speaker 1: there's a variation on kauai uh, like a variant word
Speaker 1: that is that that is used as a put down
Speaker 1: that has a negative connotation as meaning pet, pathetic, poor,
Speaker 1: or pitiable in a in a generally negative way. Oh
Speaker 1: so it's like on the playground when a bully says
Speaker 1: the other kid is like all little baby. Yeah. I mean,
Speaker 1: it's interesting to bring that up because my my son
Speaker 1: is in kindergarten and he's still at the age where
Speaker 1: that is the ultimate put down, Like if you're gonna
Speaker 1: insult somebody, you you call them a baby, and it's
Speaker 1: the worst thing in the world, to the point where
Speaker 1: our cat, if our cat misbehaves, yeah, are then my
Speaker 1: son will say, oh baby, mochi or or even it
Speaker 1: doesn't even have to be a person or a thing.
Speaker 1: It can just be a general idea, or it can
Speaker 1: be an object. But and you just put baby in
Speaker 1: front it, and that's like the ultimate biglittling of it,
Speaker 1: Like the toaster won't work. It's a baby. Yes, baby toaster.
Speaker 1: Like I staid of saying stupid toaster or or some
Speaker 1: or some other more adult um word, you just say
Speaker 1: baby toaster. Uh. But that's funny because I think the
Speaker 1: literature reflects that children do respond well to these infantile
Speaker 1: features as well, right, Like children like the baby schema,
Speaker 1: children like cuteness a lot. Yeah. I mean you just
Speaker 1: have to look at their stuffed animals and and there's
Speaker 1: the proof. So the idea is, perhaps the monsters and
Speaker 1: the cute are the same energy applied in opposite directions.
Speaker 1: In fact, Maga baby rights of cuteness as a pendulum,
Speaker 1: it quote works inevitably as a sort of pendulum, swinging
Speaker 1: to and fro and thus being able to play its
Speaker 1: role only up to a certain point where the sweetness
Speaker 1: becomes a mock and a pitiful or ironic alter ego
Speaker 1: of itself. And I would wonder if the same holds
Speaker 1: true of monsters as well, because if if monster rousness
Speaker 1: and cuteness, if these are essentially one slider, and you know,
Speaker 1: think of it as like photoshopry of a slider between
Speaker 1: dark and light or something, or you know, or it's
Speaker 1: a slider for shade or tint or something. Could you
Speaker 1: push the sliders so far in not only the cute direction,
Speaker 1: but the monster direction, so that the monstrous thing becomes ridiculous. Now,
Speaker 1: obviously all of this this is in the eye of
Speaker 1: the beholder, but I instantly thought of rat thinks. I
Speaker 1: thought of some of the monsters from the Spawn comics,
Speaker 1: and I thought of the monsters from the wonderful movie Freaked,
Speaker 1: which are very much modeled after I think rat thinks.
Speaker 1: So rat thinks, these are like these monsters for em
Speaker 1: bulging eyes, um, you know, grotesque smiles and teeth that
Speaker 1: are that would that were shown illustrated to ride a
Speaker 1: hot rod around. And they're not scary, They're not I
Speaker 1: wouldn't say they're necessarily cute. But it's like the monstrous
Speaker 1: elements of the character design are pushed to such a
Speaker 1: degree that it's almost impossible to find it frightful anymore. Right,
Speaker 1: It's like you almost intuitively detect excess. Yeah, and it
Speaker 1: becomes funny. Yeah, And and with cute I can think of.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's one of those you know what when
Speaker 1: you see it examples. But we've all encountered sickeningly sweet,
Speaker 1: sickening lee cute where something has been just designed so
Speaker 1: cute that it is almost repulsive. Yeah. Uh. And then
Speaker 1: the only example I can think of off hand is
Speaker 1: that I feel like the character Gur in Invader Zim
Speaker 1: this is the Younn Basquez comic and uh in TV series.
Speaker 1: The character of Gur is intentionally just so cute looking
Speaker 1: that you're it causes revulsion. Well, a lot of times
Speaker 1: the revulsion comes in, I think in the addition of
Speaker 1: text or speech, Like I think of the memes where
Speaker 1: you've got a kitten and the kitten might just be
Speaker 1: adorable on its own, but like if you add some
Speaker 1: meme text to it, it becomes gross, where the kitten says, like, know,
Speaker 1: I made you a cookie, but I eat it it. Yes,
Speaker 1: that is that's like linguistically signaling lee cute. Yeah, why
Speaker 1: is that? Why does that feel over the edge? It's
Speaker 1: like so cute it's unpleasant. No, I don't know why.
Speaker 1: I guess it's it kind of falls into the same
Speaker 1: way like a children are when they use grammar incorrectly.
Speaker 1: It can be cute um to to an almost destructive degree,
Speaker 1: Like trying to remember there's something that my son would say,
Speaker 1: and I actually hesitated to correct him because it was
Speaker 1: so adorable, and then I found it's like, I just
Speaker 1: can't do that. It's selfish with me. I need to
Speaker 1: teach the boys to speak properly, even if it means
Speaker 1: destroying these cute moments. Was he calling like a broken toy,
Speaker 1: a baby or something? No, what was it? He said?
Speaker 1: It was it'll come to me later. I'm sure. So.
Speaker 1: Masja Bebe does not shouldn't push this slighter idea specifically,
Speaker 1: but I think I think she would agree with it
Speaker 1: because she says, quote, it's possible to position both cute
Speaker 1: and monstrous in one dimension, the space that Michelle Fhuco
Speaker 1: called heterotopia, the place outside the norm, the site of
Speaker 1: revolutionary potential to change, to pose an alternate order where
Speaker 1: the coherence between words and reality is no more possible,
Speaker 1: and the paradox is the structuring rule. So it's so
Speaker 1: cute it's insane, or it's so monstrous. Yeah, yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean it's it's like that left craft Ian vibe, like
Speaker 1: the monster is so terrifying that you just lose your
Speaker 1: entire mind. And likewise, something could be that cute that
Speaker 1: you just you just you can't, you just have to
Speaker 1: it kind of gets into the whole theory about the
Speaker 1: biting of babies, like the desire to pinch a baby
Speaker 1: because it's so cute. I know you've talked about this before,
Speaker 1: but I don't know much about it. What's the deal here?
Speaker 1: We have an older episode, there's what I did with
Speaker 1: Julia on this this topic. But it's it's been studied.
Speaker 1: Like basically, you see something so cute and you just
Speaker 1: want to you want to bite it, you want to
Speaker 1: pinch it. You know, it could be a kitten or
Speaker 1: or a puppy or a child, and it's it's really
Speaker 1: that the cute has become overpowering that it has to
Speaker 1: be counterbalanced with something awful. Huh yeah, so you need
Speaker 1: to hand the cute puppy of blood splattered machete like
Speaker 1: Jason Doll. It's interesting. I hadn't thought about that, but
Speaker 1: in a way that that blood splattered machete is the pinch.
Speaker 1: It's the counterbalance here. And I wonder if there are
Speaker 1: other examples we could look to and and cute iconography
Speaker 1: where we have we have added a little, you know,
Speaker 1: some sort of an adult element, some you know, violence
Speaker 1: or terror to something, and it does serve to to
Speaker 1: balance it out and making and prevent us from going
Speaker 1: completely insane. All right, well, we've already looked at a
Speaker 1: bunch of monsters from you know, modern fiction and modern
Speaker 1: horror and stuff like that. I think we should turn
Speaker 1: our attention to traditional folkloric monsters and see if they
Speaker 1: make this same transition in our popular culture and and
Speaker 1: become cute over time. So let's let's do the case
Speaker 1: studies next from Japanese folklore after we come back from
Speaker 1: this break. Thank alright, we're back. So obviously the Japanese
Speaker 1: have many spirits, many demons, many monsters, just a rich
Speaker 1: assortment of yokai to choose from. But we're going to
Speaker 1: focus on what you can think of is the big three,
Speaker 1: the Kappa, the Only, and the Tingu. Okay, so let's
Speaker 1: let's start with the cap Are you you're familiar with
Speaker 1: the capa? Yeah? We both read this great paper from
Speaker 1: Asian Folklore Studies from by the scholar Michael Dillon Foster
Speaker 1: called the Metamorphosis of the Kappa Transformation of folklore to
Speaker 1: folklorism in Japan. And this has is just replete with
Speaker 1: all these great old Cappa legends. This is a fun
Speaker 1: monster despite the fact that in its original incarnation it
Speaker 1: was not cute. It was a nasty, creepy, gross, horrific
Speaker 1: little demon. Yeah, it's hard to really come up with
Speaker 1: a creepier, grosser, just more nefarious monster than this. Like
Speaker 1: in a way, it rivals what we were talking about
Speaker 1: with Freddie, the original Freddy Krueger, like something that's just
Speaker 1: like a weak, evil thing that has to in Freddie's case,
Speaker 1: prey on children in their dreams of while they're sleeping.
Speaker 1: And likewise, the Kappa is essentially a drowning monster. It's
Speaker 1: a it's a monster that is that serves as a
Speaker 1: as a warning and a signifier of the risks of
Speaker 1: swimming or swimming alone. Uh you know, you know a
Speaker 1: pond or a river, or even walking by a river,
Speaker 1: the inherent danger of water or using a toilet. I mean,
Speaker 1: it'll get you anywhere that's wet. Oh, it will get
Speaker 1: you too. So the Kappa also known as Kawako or
Speaker 1: the child of the River. Um. Yeah, it's essentially a
Speaker 1: Japanese manifestation of drowning fierce particularly young children. And it's
Speaker 1: signature hybridity because you're gonna find this hybrid nature in
Speaker 1: any monster for much and certainly in the three we're
Speaker 1: looking at here, is that it's essentially a tortoise with
Speaker 1: a monkey's head, or it's like a monkey that has
Speaker 1: scales on it as well, maybe webbed fingers. And some
Speaker 1: accounts also go in an otter direction by making it hairy,
Speaker 1: but that will make it cute, right, Well, depends on
Speaker 1: the otter otters are. They're not as cute as I think.
Speaker 1: It depends on the otter. Like the giant otter. If
Speaker 1: you've ever seen like a giant I think it's an
Speaker 1: Amazonian river otter. They look rather hellish. And if you
Speaker 1: actually study like the mating behavior of otters, like, they're
Speaker 1: all pretty gross, Like there's a lot of violence in
Speaker 1: their mating, horrible face chewing, that sort of thing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: But in the case of the of the Kappa here,
Speaker 1: it's other most notable feature is a small depression in
Speaker 1: the top of its skull called a sara, which contains
Speaker 1: a fluid that serves as its life force. And we'll
Speaker 1: get we'll get back to the implications of that in
Speaker 1: a second. So if this were like a low budget
Speaker 1: horror movie, it would be Cuphead, I guess. Yeah, So
Speaker 1: the capa draws people and animals into water, where they
Speaker 1: devour their prey and or drink their blood or their
Speaker 1: life essence. They're also big sumo fans, so they might
Speaker 1: be sport of suma. Yes, they love sumo wrestling, and
Speaker 1: they might try and wrestle you. And there are there
Speaker 1: at least eight regional variations on the capa, and most
Speaker 1: of what we know of them comes from early twentieth
Speaker 1: century folklorus and or amateur collectors. But if you want
Speaker 1: to avoid the kappa, there are three ways. One don't
Speaker 1: go where they are cappas, so there's a big one,
Speaker 1: you know, don't go near the water at all. Or
Speaker 1: you can befriend them by bringing a cucumber. And stories
Speaker 1: vary because they like cucumbers, but stories vary on whether
Speaker 1: eating a cucumber prior to swimming will attract or repel
Speaker 1: the monster. Now, they like cucumbers, but they don't like gourds.
Speaker 1: That's right, gourd's will repel them. And there's there's some
Speaker 1: interesting material in the in the paper here that gets
Speaker 1: into exactly like what that means, the symbolic meaning like
Speaker 1: the fault cucumber and an arguably yawnick gord, so it's
Speaker 1: it gets heavy. It's a great paper uh. And then finally,
Speaker 1: you can make a low bow to the Kappa, especially
Speaker 1: if it's challenging you to assume a wrestling match. Uh.
Speaker 1: And this will re force it to respond in kind,
Speaker 1: so it'll dump its own life force out onto the ground.
Speaker 1: Cuphead is tricked. Yeah, I think this is fascinating because
Speaker 1: this may be the only monster they can be slain
Speaker 1: through adequate alone. It's proper Japanese adequate and you will
Speaker 1: defeat it. Yeah. And this does seem to make it
Speaker 1: not quite as you know, absolutely horrific as some other monsters. Now,
Speaker 1: they're horrific qualities to it, but the fact that you
Speaker 1: can so easily trick it and uh, in the fact
Speaker 1: that it seems bound by some standards of politeness does
Speaker 1: sort of undercut its original horror. Maybe yeah, yeah, a
Speaker 1: little bit. But then again, you also have to look
Speaker 1: at this in any monster and realize that it's it's
Speaker 1: a it's not occurring in one place at one time.
Speaker 1: It's their various traditions, various versions of it. So you
Speaker 1: can easily see some somebody comes along like this monster
Speaker 1: sounds horrible. This monster needs rules to keep it in place,
Speaker 1: and these are the cultural rules that will keep the
Speaker 1: monster at bay um. Now, if you're thinking to yourself
Speaker 1: with the cop that competence sound that monstrous? So it
Speaker 1: you know, so it drowns or drains a few children,
Speaker 1: Well wait for this, because Foster in his paper points
Speaker 1: how quote not only does the Kappa have a penchant
Speaker 1: for pulling both children and adults into the water, but
Speaker 1: it often does this in order to steal the liver,
Speaker 1: a feat it achieves by reaching its arm up through
Speaker 1: the victims anus to snatch the desired organ. Yes, you
Speaker 1: heard that right, folks. It will steal your liver through
Speaker 1: your anus. And to do that it gets worse. Uh.
Speaker 1: In order to steal the liver, it has to essentially
Speaker 1: uncork the human anus by removing the non existent organ
Speaker 1: known as a sharik o dama quote a ball once
Speaker 1: thought to be the mouth of the anus. This is
Speaker 1: maybe something we should do an entire episode on someday.
Speaker 1: Is all of the non existent human organs people used
Speaker 1: to believe existed. That would be That would be good.
Speaker 1: Let's let's let's remember that one for later. Uh. Now,
Speaker 1: you're probably wondering, well, why why would they make this up?
Speaker 1: Point is there there has to be a reason to
Speaker 1: make up this organ and like clearly you can you
Speaker 1: can inspect yourself and realize that there's no cork organ
Speaker 1: in your anus. But the grim reality here is that
Speaker 1: you have a drowning victim. A drowning victim is found
Speaker 1: and they may have a quote open anus due to
Speaker 1: the unclenched sphincter muscles. And this this falls in line,
Speaker 1: of course with the Coppage role as a monster of drowning.
Speaker 1: So you find this this body and here it is,
Speaker 1: there's something peculiar about it. It's anus does not look
Speaker 1: like a living person's anus. But wouldn't this be the
Speaker 1: case with any dead person, not just somebody who drowned. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and that's something that that Foster rings up. However, my
Speaker 1: read on it though, is that if you're dealing with
Speaker 1: people who have drowned, I feel like there's a higher
Speaker 1: possibility that that body is found nude or mostly nude
Speaker 1: since it was swimming, whereas bodies in other situations may
Speaker 1: be covered with clothing and then therefore less susceptible to
Speaker 1: susceptible to this kind of folkloric exploration of what is happening. Okay,
Speaker 1: but it's not just going to pull you into the
Speaker 1: river or the lake or whatever. The Kappa also haunts toilets.
Speaker 1: That's right. It may wait until you are vulnerable while
Speaker 1: pooping or peeing, perhaps near the water, and it is
Speaker 1: it is ready to attack the buttocks and hips. According
Speaker 1: to Foster, um so it's it's not only a murderous creature,
Speaker 1: it's a creature of profound sexual violence as well. Like it.
Speaker 1: It's it's part of its design, this Kappa. That's just
Speaker 1: how monstrous it is. It's it's very much like the
Speaker 1: Fredy Krueger. Like the Kappa and Freddie are essentially cut
Speaker 1: from the same mold, right, not just threatening, but really gross.
Speaker 1: So how do we get from from this to cute?
Speaker 1: You're probably wondering? Well, As as as Foster explores in
Speaker 1: his paper, by by the nineteen sixties, folk belief in
Speaker 1: the creature it all but vanished, and it had become
Speaker 1: a quote clean cute creature, used as a symbol of tourism,
Speaker 1: of commerce, of clean water, and even as a symbol
Speaker 1: of village and national identity. Huh. And he says that
Speaker 1: this falls in line with Hans Moser's two notion of folkloreism,
Speaker 1: in which an existing folklore is taken out of context
Speaker 1: and altered or invented for a specific purpose. And of
Speaker 1: course media and commerce play a heavy role in this. Now,
Speaker 1: I thought this was interesting because I wondered about this
Speaker 1: concept of folklorism and the idea is that someone would
Speaker 1: take existing folklore and change it, or invent new folklore,
Speaker 1: or or manipulated take it out of context for some
Speaker 1: kind of intentional, conscious purpose. But it makes me wonder, um,
Speaker 1: how is that different from the way in which bits
Speaker 1: of folklore are are originally created? Like why, It's almost
Speaker 1: as if assuming that folklore um is arises unconsciously out
Speaker 1: of the spirit of the people, and that when people
Speaker 1: consciously manipulate folklore, that's a different kind of thing. I mean,
Speaker 1: I I sort of wonder to what extent the things
Speaker 1: we think of as folklore the original stories are consciously created,
Speaker 1: are they not? Well? I mean, it comes back to
Speaker 1: the whole rules thing I said earlier, like imagining someone
Speaker 1: or multiple people coming wrong and tweaking an existing legend
Speaker 1: or folklore in order to convey a point or to
Speaker 1: convey a slightly different point. Yeah, um, and then and
Speaker 1: then likewise, I mean, yeah, there's there's one example that
Speaker 1: Foster points out, and this is from the Edo periods.
Speaker 1: This was sixteen o three to eighteen sixty eight Japanese history.
Speaker 1: And in this case, apparently you had a doctor who
Speaker 1: used a story about a Kappa as a way to
Speaker 1: promote his business. The idea being that this is the
Speaker 1: case with a lot of these monsters. They have some
Speaker 1: sort of hidden knowledge or hidden powers that a crafty
Speaker 1: individual can trick them out of. And so this doctor
Speaker 1: learned some i think a bone setting uh technique from
Speaker 1: the Kappa, and he basically put that on his calling card.
Speaker 1: If you're gonna go to the doctor, then go to
Speaker 1: the go to you know, go to doctor Kappa touched
Speaker 1: and he will he will use his mystical abilities to
Speaker 1: heal you, which is essentially a marketing ploy. So keep
Speaker 1: all that in mind. But basically what happens is, Yeah,
Speaker 1: after a while, people have forgotten about the Kappa, Like
Speaker 1: there's there's not a lot of there's no longer any
Speaker 1: belief in it. People are not reporting sightings of the
Speaker 1: Kappa and uh, and then you end up going with
Speaker 1: through several waves of sort of you know, the Kappa renaissance,
Speaker 1: where people rediscover it and they start using it in
Speaker 1: new ways um and uh and and this is inevitably
Speaker 1: going to involve outsiders crafting it. That's the argument here,
Speaker 1: is that the cap Is is a creature of the
Speaker 1: rural areas. It is a creature of the people of
Speaker 1: the rural people, what's essentially kind of a peasant monster.
Speaker 1: But then you're going to have people that are cut
Speaker 1: off from all of that. Essentially, you're gonna city folk
Speaker 1: come along, take the Cappa minuth, reinvent it, reutilize it,
Speaker 1: and then after a while, like no one's connected to
Speaker 1: it back in the rural areas anymore, so they take
Speaker 1: it back. They take this this re reformed version of
Speaker 1: the Kappa, and then what do they do with it, Well,
Speaker 1: they sort of turned it into a cultural mascot. It
Speaker 1: makes me think of it. Have you ever seen the
Speaker 1: tourism materials that are sent out by the Iceland Tourism
Speaker 1: Board or whatever it is that promote the fact that
Speaker 1: people in Iceland believe in the fairies, the hidden folk,
Speaker 1: you know, the secret other world, the hidden folk that
Speaker 1: live or believe in elves and stuff like that. I
Speaker 1: don't know to what extent it is true that that
Speaker 1: many people in Iceland literally believe the fairies are there.
Speaker 1: I know some people probably do, but I doubt it
Speaker 1: is true in a literal sense to the extent to
Speaker 1: which it's promoted. But it does seem to be a
Speaker 1: thing that is Uh, it's a rumor that's spread to
Speaker 1: bring people to Iceland for tourism, because isn't that cute
Speaker 1: people there believe in elves or believe in hidden folk Yeah,
Speaker 1: forgetting of of course the fact that belief in hidden
Speaker 1: forces often in many cases can have pretty horrifying real
Speaker 1: world results. But is this it is a sanitized version
Speaker 1: of it and uh. And Foster points out that what
Speaker 1: what you have here is that you have a sanitized
Speaker 1: monster that was you that ends up being used to
Speaker 1: promote a sanitized notion of rural life in Japan. And
Speaker 1: he says that the craziest thing is that quote. Had
Speaker 1: the Kappa not been snatched up by the mechanism of folklorism,
Speaker 1: it most likely would have died or survived only as
Speaker 1: a museum relicant collections of folklore. Folklorism change, in other
Speaker 1: kept the monster alive. Wow, So this conscious manipulation of
Speaker 1: the folklore is the only reason the folklore really stays prominent. Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: like with Freddie, we can go back to Freddie and say, yeah,
Speaker 1: you can bemoan the fact that this, this, this horrifying
Speaker 1: thing from the first film was kind of killed by
Speaker 1: this subsequent incarnation. But if Freddie. Don't know how many
Speaker 1: people really that fact. But I see what you're saying.
Speaker 1: But certainly like that's how it survived. It grew into
Speaker 1: the shape and the size that was sustained by the culture.
Speaker 1: Freddie became the Freddie that uh, that that that we needed,
Speaker 1: that that that was essential apparently too modern Western living, right,
Speaker 1: or maybe not the Freddie we need, but the Freddy
Speaker 1: we deserve. Okay, So how about another monster from Japanese folklore,
Speaker 1: the One? Oh yeah, so we read another paper about
Speaker 1: this called the Transformation of the One from the frightening
Speaker 1: and diabolical to the cute and sexy. And this is
Speaker 1: by a Japanese scholar named Nariko T. Rider, also in
Speaker 1: the journal Asian Folklore Studies, and this is from two
Speaker 1: thousand three. So writer's paper is really interesting. It charts
Speaker 1: a very very similar arc to what we talked about
Speaker 1: with the Kappa, this folklore monster transforming into something that's
Speaker 1: different in modern twentieth century pop culture. The Only appear
Speaker 1: in Japanese literature and folklore going back to ancient times,
Speaker 1: and the Only are generally these large, disgusting, shape shifting
Speaker 1: monsters with one or more horns on the head. They
Speaker 1: wear tiger skinned garments, and they like to eat human flesh.
Speaker 1: Other common powers include flight and the ability to shoot lightning.
Speaker 1: And they're they're sort of different breeds of ony, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: they're they're basically two varieties. There's like the terrestrial one
Speaker 1: in the infernal Oi and the infernal Only is there
Speaker 1: to drag you to hew at the moment of your
Speaker 1: death if you were in fact deserving of one of
Speaker 1: the hell's. Yeah. So first, let's look at the old
Speaker 1: vision of the Only before they were, before they were
Speaker 1: tamed or domesticated like the Let's look at their wolf
Speaker 1: like Canada ancestor so. The scholar Ishibashi Gaha argues that
Speaker 1: the Japanese Only concept evolved from a previous type of
Speaker 1: spirit or monster, the yomotsushi kome, which is literally fearful
Speaker 1: creatures of the Netherland, and these appear as early as
Speaker 1: the Japanese creation myth known as the kojiki. So in
Speaker 1: the first known Japanese language dictionary, compiled sometime around the
Speaker 1: year nine thirty c e Only is defined as quote
Speaker 1: hiding behind things, not wishing to appear. It is a
Speaker 1: spirit or soul of the dead. So in this earlier vision,
Speaker 1: it's more of a spirit I mean. And there are
Speaker 1: these different categories of of Japanese folkloric beings. They're you know,
Speaker 1: more like the kami, you know, the deities, and then
Speaker 1: there are the yokai, which are more like the monsters. Uh.
Speaker 1: And it was during the medieval period in Japan that
Speaker 1: the only came a major part of popular folklore. In
Speaker 1: this classical monster form that we first introduced, common only
Speaker 1: features in the medieval folklore are going to include some
Speaker 1: of what we've already described, things like one or more
Speaker 1: horns on the head, skin colors like red or blue
Speaker 1: or black or yellow, a third eye in the forehead,
Speaker 1: carrying an iron mace as a weapon, wearing a tiger
Speaker 1: skin loincloth, and the fact that they're usually male, but
Speaker 1: not always and only were these horrific demon monsters that
Speaker 1: people believe to exist in the world, kidnapping people, especially
Speaker 1: young women, drinking their blood, eating their flesh. But they
Speaker 1: also seemed to be this useful cultural concept. In the
Speaker 1: words of a scholar named Kamatsu that that Rider sites
Speaker 1: in her paper many only were quote people who had
Speaker 1: different customs or lived beyond the reach of the emperor's control.
Speaker 1: And you can see this in the way that only
Speaker 1: were deployed in Japanese Imperial proper ganda during World War Two,
Speaker 1: which was depicting enemies of the states such as Winston
Speaker 1: Churchill or f DR or the Chinese leader Shang Kai
Speaker 1: Scheck as one. And it's common, of course during war
Speaker 1: to motivate your populace against the enemy by characterizing them
Speaker 1: as devils of some sort. Yeah, we see plenty of
Speaker 1: examples of that in Western countries as well during the
Speaker 1: same time period. Absolutely. Yeah. But apparently this this cultural
Speaker 1: inclusion and exclusion tactic follows the One Monster specifically deep
Speaker 1: into history. So a few stories about the only One
Speaker 1: story appears in the tenth century CE narrative Tales of
Speaker 1: the say, and it goes like this, you got a
Speaker 1: man and he falls in love with a woman of
Speaker 1: high social status, and he kidnaps her and they're fleeing
Speaker 1: in the night and there's a thunderstorm. So the man
Speaker 1: decides they should take shelter at a ruined building near
Speaker 1: the Akuta River, and the woman goes inside the building
Speaker 1: for shelter, and the man stands guard at the door
Speaker 1: all night. But when the woman as alone inside and
Speaker 1: only appears and it eats her in a single bite,
Speaker 1: that's gonna be a big own here, right, She screams
Speaker 1: when the one they're eating her, but the man standing
Speaker 1: guard doesn't hear her because of the thunder, and this
Speaker 1: portrays this sort of alliance between the one and these
Speaker 1: powerful elemental forces like lightning. Storms. Owning are sometimes said
Speaker 1: to be able to shoot lightning. Now. Another story is
Speaker 1: contained in a ninth century collection called the Nihone Ryuiki,
Speaker 1: and the story translates to on a woman devoured by
Speaker 1: an ony. So at the time the Emperor Shomu reigned,
Speaker 1: a rich family in Yamato Province had this beautiful daughter
Speaker 1: and lots of men wanted to marry her, but she
Speaker 1: was like nah, not interested, until a suitor shows up
Speaker 1: with unbelievably extravagant gifts to win her over, including three
Speaker 1: carriages full of silk, so she accepts his marriage proposal,
Speaker 1: and on the wedding night, the newlyweds stay in the
Speaker 1: house of the bride's parents. The woman's parents hear her
Speaker 1: crying out in pain during the night, but they don't
Speaker 1: do anything about it, and when her mother enters the
Speaker 1: bride in the groom's bedroom in the morning, all that's
Speaker 1: left is her daughter's head and a single finger, and
Speaker 1: the rest has been eaten by a shape shifting one
Speaker 1: which apparently appeared in the form of a handsome young man.
Speaker 1: And this is evidence early on that they only have
Speaker 1: this power of shape shifting. One of the most common things,
Speaker 1: like very often in other stories, only would appear as
Speaker 1: beautiful women in order to seduce men, and then they
Speaker 1: would turn into onny and try to devour them or
Speaker 1: kill them or something. Someone should do a version of
Speaker 1: the werewolf game with one their perfect you know, that
Speaker 1: would be perfect on. Yeah, there are only among us, Okay,
Speaker 1: so how do the only become cute? Yeah? Because it's
Speaker 1: like with the cap of this sounds pretty monstrous and horrific.
Speaker 1: This is like a standard like you know, woman eating
Speaker 1: ogre here, how does it become a cute thing. Well,
Speaker 1: writer cites several example of how only have become cute
Speaker 1: and modern Japan on a very similar time scale to
Speaker 1: what we talked about with the Kappa, you know, the
Speaker 1: Kappa especially having these cute incarnations in the second half
Speaker 1: of the twentieth century, especially around the nineteen seventies. One
Speaker 1: example of cute only that rider sites is the Loom Invader.
Speaker 1: So in nineteen seventy eight, the Japanese manga artist Rumiko
Speaker 1: Takahashi created this incredibly popular series called urus say Yatsura,
Speaker 1: which translates literally into something like those obnoxious aliens, and
Speaker 1: beginning in the nineteen eighties, it was adapted into a
Speaker 1: TV series, films, and a bunch of other spinoff media.
Speaker 1: And the premise is that there's a group of ony
Speaker 1: from outer space that arrive on Earth, sort of blending
Speaker 1: ony folklore with these alien invasion stories that started to
Speaker 1: become popular in the middle of the twentieth century. And
Speaker 1: one of these invaders is an only called Loom, who
Speaker 1: at first is part of this invasion force, but somehow
Speaker 1: she ends up becoming the the loving, into voted wife
Speaker 1: of a lecherous teenage boy on earth. Unlike the Only
Speaker 1: from medieval folklore, Lum is not overtly monstrous. Instead, she's
Speaker 1: represented primarily as cute and through overtly eroticized characteristics. In short,
Speaker 1: she's depicted as as she's supposed to be sexy and
Speaker 1: Loom has these subtle signs pointing toward the traditional Only.
Speaker 1: For example, Only usually have horns. Loum has these couple
Speaker 1: of diminutive horns on top of her head. She sometimes
Speaker 1: seems to have fangs and other indications of a cannibalistic nature.
Speaker 1: She seems to have the power to shoot lightning, which
Speaker 1: is associated with some only legend. She can fly like
Speaker 1: the One and Only are often depicted. I mentioned earlier
Speaker 1: as males wearing a tiger skin loincloth. Loum wears a
Speaker 1: tiger skin bikini. I was talking with our coworker, Lauren Vogelbaum,
Speaker 1: one of the hosts of food Stuff, another podcast in
Speaker 1: the house Touff Works Network. You should check out if
Speaker 1: you enjoy food and all things uh at all and imbibable.
Speaker 1: But I was talking to her about this because I
Speaker 1: know she is an insightful consumer of manga, and she
Speaker 1: pointed out that there are actually plenty of other anime
Speaker 1: and manga characters that display this trend of taking a
Speaker 1: traditional monster and making it cute or making it sexy
Speaker 1: or both. And one example she mentioned was a manga
Speaker 1: series known as Sayuki, in which the main characters are
Speaker 1: the monkey King character and his demon companions, but they
Speaker 1: are rendered as cute boys. These are these like attractive
Speaker 1: young men, sort of like an you know, manga boy
Speaker 1: band um, but a demonic one, and they are essentially
Speaker 1: a male parallel to the cute and sexualized only we
Speaker 1: see in Loom. But as with the Kappa, all of
Speaker 1: this with the on E comes down to like the
Speaker 1: revitalization of of rural areas. Right. Oh, well that's another
Speaker 1: aspect of it too. Yeah, so you've got this stuff
Speaker 1: in mass media, but then you've also got like we
Speaker 1: saw with the Kappa being used as some kind of
Speaker 1: a rural mascot for a town or a village. Of
Speaker 1: the town revitalization movement is another thing that writer points
Speaker 1: out is a place that the only re entered the
Speaker 1: modern consciousness and kind of metamorphose into something much sweeter.
Speaker 1: So there's this movement, the town revitalization movement in Japanese
Speaker 1: I think it's maki Okashi and uh so in the
Speaker 1: same way that the Kappa was embraced as a local mascot,
Speaker 1: it seems to only have been as well. And writer
Speaker 1: cites these examples the Oemachi in Kyoto, which is located
Speaker 1: near Mount o A. This is the traditional setting of
Speaker 1: a story called the Shooting Doji, which is about this
Speaker 1: band of one that live in the mountains, and they're
Speaker 1: doing their owny thing. You know, they're kidnapping and eating locals,
Speaker 1: especially local maidens. They'll eat their flesh and drink their
Speaker 1: blood until some warriors infiltrate the only hideout and kill
Speaker 1: all the only and writer writes that at the time
Speaker 1: of this paper, this town with the original setting near
Speaker 1: the Shooting Doji, the town is facing a depopulation crisis,
Speaker 1: with the population essentially growing old and younger people not
Speaker 1: replacing them, and one way the rest sents apparently sought
Speaker 1: to revitalize the town was to embrace the only legend
Speaker 1: and the imagery in order to attract interest and tourists.
Speaker 1: So they developed these only related legends and sites. They
Speaker 1: got an one museum, so a creature that would have
Speaker 1: once caused unspeakable terror is now this fun attraction to
Speaker 1: draw people and money. It's kind of like the small
Speaker 1: town kid, uh you know, makes good, he leaves the
Speaker 1: small town, makes it big, and then it's just invited
Speaker 1: back in and becomes a hero, even though they kind
Speaker 1: of treated him like dirt to begin with. Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: it also sort of reminds me of what you might
Speaker 1: see and say, Salem, Massachusetts, where originally you had the
Speaker 1: fear of witchcraft, which was a genuine panic that terrified
Speaker 1: people and led to deaths, and now it's more to
Speaker 1: it's embraced in this kitchy way, like witches have become
Speaker 1: a cute part of Salem's identity as a town. So
Speaker 1: they love which museums and which souvenirs and stuff like that,
Speaker 1: despite the horrifying reality of the essential like human monstrosity
Speaker 1: of the whole situation exactly. So what can we take
Speaker 1: away from this example, Well, writer has got some ideas.
Speaker 1: So we've got these two different things I mentioned, the cute,
Speaker 1: non threatening and eroticized one that appear in Japanese cartoons
Speaker 1: and the embracing of one folklore as an economic and
Speaker 1: tourism draw. And writer writes that much of the art
Speaker 1: and entertainment in Japan still views the one as evil
Speaker 1: and terrifying beings, like it's not all cute only now.
Speaker 1: She gives the example of the film Dreams by Kasa,
Speaker 1: and one of the stories in this movie apparently tells
Speaker 1: the story of humans who were turned into only by
Speaker 1: a nuclear blast. Oh man, I vaguely remember that. I
Speaker 1: mainly remember the space section of it. Yeah, not so
Speaker 1: much the only to go back and watch it. It's
Speaker 1: a horrifying idea. But now we also have these only
Speaker 1: with inherent aspects of harmlessness cuteness. The the eroticized aspects
Speaker 1: are the ones that are simply fun and familiar, like
Speaker 1: the witches now and she seems to think that this
Speaker 1: is an outgrowth of Japan's post war economic transformation. In
Speaker 1: other words, horrifying folk belief and monsters don't really make
Speaker 1: you the big bucks, but apparently cute, harmless, fun and
Speaker 1: familiar monsters can bring massive economic dividends. Capitalistic folklorism in
Speaker 1: the sense that we explored in that previous paper folklorism
Speaker 1: the manipulation of folklore seems to be directly at work
Speaker 1: in writer's point of view, but it also sort of
Speaker 1: makes me wonder why monsters in the first place, Like,
Speaker 1: if it's simply that cute, harmless or sexy characters and
Speaker 1: imagery command more economic power, why why isn't it just
Speaker 1: that we're seeing new characters of this type created, Like
Speaker 1: why are traditionally horrifying and disgusting monsters being transformed into
Speaker 1: these cute or sexy or otherwise harmless versions. Well, I
Speaker 1: wonder if part of it is that there is perhaps
Speaker 1: even subconsciously it's it's an interaction with a monstrous figure
Speaker 1: that had power over us and maybe still has power
Speaker 1: overs And by making it cute, you are You're you're
Speaker 1: making it harmless, You're taking the punch out of this
Speaker 1: monstrous creature. You're it's it's like laughing in the face
Speaker 1: of horror. Well, it almost makes me wonder if this
Speaker 1: transformation is an outgrowth of the of the skepticism and
Speaker 1: secularization of the twentieth century, Like, as people tend to
Speaker 1: believe less literally in demons, monsters and devils, would we
Speaker 1: tend to take them less seriously as genuine threats? I mean,
Speaker 1: obviously we would. And if we think that there's no
Speaker 1: genuine monster danger to warn against, what prevents us from
Speaker 1: stripping the fear inducing elements out of the monster folklore. Uh?
Speaker 1: Is it a thing we do simply because we can?
Speaker 1: Does that make sense? Like if in the past people
Speaker 1: didn't make the monsters harmless because they believed that you
Speaker 1: genuinely had to understand that these monsters were dangerous. As
Speaker 1: soon as we stopped taking monster legends literally, then we
Speaker 1: had the power to render them to defang them. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think I would buy that. It sounds like a
Speaker 1: good read hunt it. Yeah, But there's an other thing
Speaker 1: that I wonder about is like, could it represent an
Speaker 1: actual direct rebuke of the past, kind of a you know,
Speaker 1: a middle finger to the superstition that produced belief in
Speaker 1: monsters throughout you know, every culture in the history of humanity. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I mean it's because we've touched on this a number
Speaker 1: of times when we've talked about older ideas, my mythologies, religion,
Speaker 1: even where it's it's easy to take a modern approach
Speaker 1: and say, oh, well, those people were stupid. Look at
Speaker 1: the things they believed in. Monsters in the woods eating you, um,
Speaker 1: you know, some sort of strange turtle creature reaching up
Speaker 1: your anus after your liver um. But when you do
Speaker 1: when you begin to dissect these ideas and you put
Speaker 1: them in the context of the time, it's not so
Speaker 1: simple as to just say, oh, well, these these people
Speaker 1: were dumb. No, they weren't stupid. They knew less, and
Speaker 1: that's not the same thing, right, I mean, in a way,
Speaker 1: they perhaps knew more because they knew to take a
Speaker 1: like say a dangerous area or a dangerous uh you know,
Speaker 1: cultural area and it and assign a monster to it
Speaker 1: to toward people away from it, to to key the
Speaker 1: curious from getting too close. And children don't go, don't
Speaker 1: go near the water's edge because there's a monster there. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And even if you you're not up on the reasons
Speaker 1: to stay away from the water, like the realistic reasons,
Speaker 1: the monster still resonates. And we've actually touched on this
Speaker 1: on the podcast in regard to creating potentially creating new monsters,
Speaker 1: new mythologies to guards, say, places where radioactive waste are deposited. Right,
Speaker 1: so you've got high level waste, you know, the really
Speaker 1: dangerous stuff stored at a place somewhere on Earth, and
Speaker 1: that's gonna be dangerous for literally thousands of years, much
Speaker 1: longer than any kind of sign you would probably put up,
Speaker 1: would be there, or I mean if you maybe even
Speaker 1: made a really durable sign, but yeah, it's gonna outlast
Speaker 1: almost any measures you put in place to keep people away.
Speaker 1: So it's almost like you wish you could come up
Speaker 1: with a lasting cultural belief that this place is cursed
Speaker 1: and there's a monster that dwells there and there's nothing
Speaker 1: of value, and you should just a sticky image that
Speaker 1: will drive people away for hundreds of generations. And that, Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's exactly what a monster is that of you know,
Speaker 1: nations fall, empires, fall, laws, fade, signs of warning fall
Speaker 1: into the dust, but the monster persevere. And yeah, and
Speaker 1: so coming back to how we make the monsters cute,
Speaker 1: I'm wondering if it's this secular rebuke, Like is turning
Speaker 1: a monster cute an attempt to say even unconsciously, Maybe
Speaker 1: not like people do this on purpose, but are they
Speaker 1: at some level saying there are no demons, devils or
Speaker 1: monsters and I'll show you, and they do it by
Speaker 1: making the image cute. Is it like sort of the
Speaker 1: equivalent of blasphemy, but instead of against the gods, it's
Speaker 1: against the monster belief. Yeah, and of course it's dangerous
Speaker 1: to rebuke the monster, because no matter how silly you
Speaker 1: think it is, no matter how two dimensional the monster
Speaker 1: might seem, uh, there's probably a lot more going on
Speaker 1: there than meets the eyes totally. You know, I was
Speaker 1: thinking one other way to clarify what might be happening here.
Speaker 1: I don't know, maybe this won't be any additional clarity.
Speaker 1: But are there any monsters we can think of that
Speaker 1: have not undergone this process where there are no cute
Speaker 1: versions of them or almost no cute versions of them,
Speaker 1: there's not any pervasive attempt in the culture to make
Speaker 1: a toothless version of the creature. Well, if we're looking
Speaker 1: at Japanese demons, I would say that the tingo is
Speaker 1: probably an interesting case of this. Now, that's not to
Speaker 1: say they are no cute tingu. You can certainly find them.
Speaker 1: I found them just doing image searches for them for
Speaker 1: the English word tingu. But you think they're less prevalent.
Speaker 1: I'm getting the you know, somebody with more experience with
Speaker 1: Japanese culture and pop culture can maybe chime in on this,
Speaker 1: But it seems like there's less of it. You do
Speaker 1: see tingu showing up in video games and manga and
Speaker 1: all other forms of media, but they tend to retain
Speaker 1: a certain seriousness that is lacking from you know, again,
Speaker 1: the Kappa. You don't see Kappa snatching livers out of
Speaker 1: anuses as much anymore, but in these cases, the tingoo
Speaker 1: still tends to retain a certain regal character in a
Speaker 1: in a certain dangerous element as well. So I should
Speaker 1: probably talk about what the tingoo is though, for anyone
Speaker 1: who who is not familiar alright, So the Tingu. They
Speaker 1: are a warrior class of monsters who reside in the
Speaker 1: mountain forest of Mount to Karama, north of Kyoto, and
Speaker 1: their hybridity is that of a bird and a man.
Speaker 1: Usually they're described as having a humanoid body but with
Speaker 1: glowing eyes and a long red beak, and sometimes that
Speaker 1: beak is more depicted as a long nose. So I
Speaker 1: imagine if you've ever played a video game and there's
Speaker 1: a character that seems to have a mask with a
Speaker 1: long red nose, that's essentially a tingu. So they have
Speaker 1: feathered wings, and they're warlike. They're skilled in martial arts.
Speaker 1: Humans sometimes seek them out to learn their arts, but
Speaker 1: frequently go mad upon encountering them, and then of course
Speaker 1: they also have this mischievous side. So if you're if
Speaker 1: you're in the mountain woods and you hear something like laughter,
Speaker 1: well that might be the laughter of Tingu. If a
Speaker 1: tree falls, it might have been taken down by a
Speaker 1: Tingu wind. And these examples are from the book by
Speaker 1: Hruku waka Ashi, the Seven Tingoo Scrolls. So the thing
Speaker 1: about the Tingo is that they were you know, they
Speaker 1: varied inform, purpose, and even alignment. Uh. There were in
Speaker 1: some cases good Tingou, but for the most part, they
Speaker 1: were portrayed as uh, especially in medieval Japan, as being evil, vengeful,
Speaker 1: chaotic spirits. They were enemies of Buddhism. In some cases
Speaker 1: they were falling priests who failed to achieve nirvana, and
Speaker 1: they were the embodiment of Ma or Mara or obstacles
Speaker 1: to Buddhist enlightenment. Now it's worth knowing that they were
Speaker 1: different from moral evil in this regard or or aku
Speaker 1: and this the Tingu were they were. You can essentially
Speaker 1: think of them as obstructionists. Uh, you know they were.
Speaker 1: They were there to just try and prevent you from
Speaker 1: achieving enlightenment, and you had to battle them in your
Speaker 1: life to get past them. So they were kind of
Speaker 1: serious business, you know, uh, and very high minded monstrous symbols.
Speaker 1: And I think that's key to whereas these other examples
Speaker 1: were rural monsters, these were kind of the peasant monsters.
Speaker 1: The tingu was the thinking man's monster, and I think
Speaker 1: that plays into its survival. Yeah, So I wonder if
Speaker 1: something about the level to which a creature is incorporated
Speaker 1: into formalized religion rather than just being a part of
Speaker 1: informal folk creature or deity belief. That's that's true because
Speaker 1: there are shrines even uh with tingou imagery. So they
Speaker 1: were more divine in many respects, and again more more regal,
Speaker 1: more a property of the ruling class and the priestly
Speaker 1: class as well. Um, they were also tied up with
Speaker 1: explanations for a lot of serious stuff that was going
Speaker 1: on in the medieval period, a lot of the chronic
Speaker 1: social disorder and instability. They were. They were symbols of
Speaker 1: chaos to explain the rise of the warrior class war
Speaker 1: and this the political disunity, uh in what some saw
Speaker 1: is the final age of Buddha's teachings at the time.
Speaker 1: So again, you it's not that you won't find cute
Speaker 1: ting you out there or just you know, very pop
Speaker 1: culturally uh distilled images of the tingu. But I feel
Speaker 1: like you see far less of it. The tingoo still
Speaker 1: retains a lot of its original potency. Now that's got
Speaker 1: me wondering about other monsters in other traditions around the
Speaker 1: world and whether the level to which they're incorporated into
Speaker 1: the formalized version of the local religion determines how likely
Speaker 1: they are to be to be euthanized with cuteness. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because you look at Christianity and you you don't see this.
Speaker 1: This is not the case with the devil. You see
Speaker 1: plenty of cute devils out there, But well, yeah you do.
Speaker 1: I guess that's right. I mean I was gonna say,
Speaker 1: you don't see as many cute demons as you see
Speaker 1: like cute vampires and cute werewolves. Yeah, maybe you have
Speaker 1: a point there. Maybe there are they are far more
Speaker 1: cute of vampires and worlds, and there are acute demons
Speaker 1: or some of the more potentially problematic characters. I guess,
Speaker 1: like the the Angel of God. How many how many
Speaker 1: cute angels wrestling humans are there? And I guess you
Speaker 1: also have to ask a question like how how many
Speaker 1: trolls are there in the culture, Like how many, how
Speaker 1: many people were willing to take even you know, sacred
Speaker 1: cows and make them cute just for the sheer, you know,
Speaker 1: just for the giggles of doing it. Well then again,
Speaker 1: I mean, so I think there might be something to
Speaker 1: that sort of blasphemy equivalent. It's not blasphemy against the gods,
Speaker 1: but blasphemy against the monster is a sort of intentional
Speaker 1: rebuke and the desire to undercut their perceived power. There
Speaker 1: might be something to that, But I don't know if
Speaker 1: I really feel that when I, like, if I were
Speaker 1: to draw a cute vampire, I don't know if I'd
Speaker 1: feel spiteful in doing that. Well, I might just feel
Speaker 1: kind of like, oh, that's funny. You can't imagine someone going,
Speaker 1: get away from me, baby Satan. You have no power
Speaker 1: over me. Here, get thee behind me, baby Satan. So
Speaker 1: another thing I was talking to Lauren Vogelbaum about was
Speaker 1: was about this question of what contributes of the transformation
Speaker 1: of terrifying monsters into these cute versions of themselves, And
Speaker 1: she made a point that I thought was really interesting.
Speaker 1: She said, in the context of Japanese depictions of cute
Speaker 1: monsters in manga and anime. Um. What if it's the
Speaker 1: creeping sense of delayed adulthood and the extension of childhood
Speaker 1: that we see in a lot of cultures in the
Speaker 1: twentieth century and especially the second half of the twentieth
Speaker 1: century and in the twenty first century. I mean, maybe
Speaker 1: there are some cultural critics who would come back and say,
Speaker 1: this is not really a thing, this is one of
Speaker 1: those you know, bs trend pieces. But there are a
Speaker 1: lot of people who would argue that there is a
Speaker 1: sort of creeping infantilism among adults in the in the
Speaker 1: Western world especially. I mean, I know you've heard that argument, right, Robert, Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, and certainly you we it does seem like
Speaker 1: we remain many of us remain children longer. We we don't,
Speaker 1: you know, give up all of our childish things as
Speaker 1: we uh as we become adults, right, we tend to
Speaker 1: stay in school longer, we get married later. All of
Speaker 1: these things that are traditionally in cultures thought of as
Speaker 1: sort of rites of passage to adulthood get like delayed
Speaker 1: later and later into life. And so it could be
Speaker 1: possible to think about the idea of of the cuteness
Speaker 1: of monster imagery, uh well, being related to the fact
Speaker 1: that children tend to like cute imagery. So could the
Speaker 1: transformation into cuteness represent an increasingly in fantalize adult cultures
Speaker 1: attempt to make monster folklore more palatable, more cuddly for
Speaker 1: those of us who don't want to hack scariness. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think it could very well be the case. And
Speaker 1: of course it comes back to the idea too, of
Speaker 1: cute cuteness and monstrosity being upon the same spectrum, being
Speaker 1: within the same dimension. And so there's this. They're interconnected
Speaker 1: already anyway, so it's all the more easier to begin
Speaker 1: tweaking these images and skewing their meaning. Now, I want
Speaker 1: to be clear that I'm not necessarily endorsing the idea
Speaker 1: that adults are more infantile than they used to be.
Speaker 1: I just know that is a theory out there. I'm
Speaker 1: not sure if I buy it. I remain agnostic. You know,
Speaker 1: one more thing that this makes me think about is
Speaker 1: back to our episode on euphemisms. Robert, you remember the
Speaker 1: concept of the euphemism treadmill and the dysphemism treadmill. I do, yes,
Speaker 1: So the euphemism treadmill is this concept. I can't remember
Speaker 1: who came up with it. Was it Stephen Pinker, I believe,
Speaker 1: So that sounds right, and I'm going to say it's
Speaker 1: Stephen Pinker, and I can be the one that's wrong. Essentially,
Speaker 1: the idea is that you have a euphemism, which is
Speaker 1: a term you introduce to be a polite sort of
Speaker 1: illusion word indicate a concept that somehow problematic or offensive
Speaker 1: or causes people, you know, like, uh, it's the nice
Speaker 1: new word that you say, But eventually that word itself
Speaker 1: tends to become perceived in the culture as not nice.
Speaker 1: So for example, uh, crippled was supposed to be the
Speaker 1: nice word for people with disabilities, and then it came
Speaker 1: to become a word that you would never want to
Speaker 1: call somebody um. And so there's this process us like that,
Speaker 1: But then the same thing happens the other way with dysphemisms,
Speaker 1: with words that we want to use with negative connotations.
Speaker 1: So for example, how the word sucks. You know, you
Speaker 1: just say, like that movie really sucked. That used to
Speaker 1: be an incredibly vulgar and offensive, just nasty thing to say,
Speaker 1: and now little kids say it. I mean, it's everywhere
Speaker 1: it's lost its power to shock and offend. So you
Speaker 1: have to keep inventing new words. And so you're saying, essentially,
Speaker 1: we have to keep inventing new monsters as well because
Speaker 1: the old ones lose their power. I mean, I think
Speaker 1: that could to some extent be true. Like uh, that
Speaker 1: we are we may be seeing some kind of equivalent
Speaker 1: of the dysphamism treadmill with the monsters of old. Over time,
Speaker 1: they're just going to lose their power to shock and
Speaker 1: offend and they become like the little kids saying sucks,
Speaker 1: the little kids running around with cute vampire dolls. And
Speaker 1: it really it's super hard nowadays with the Internet because
Speaker 1: you have like a probably a lag time of just
Speaker 1: hours after a film comes out before someone has made
Speaker 1: a cute button or a cute T shirt or is
Speaker 1: to meme based on that monster. Yeah, it happens immediately
Speaker 1: when when there's a new movie, it happens, uh. And
Speaker 1: I think it creates a great challenge for say, horror
Speaker 1: movie creators to make a traditional monster scary. Again, think
Speaker 1: about how many recent vampire movies you can think of
Speaker 1: that have really scary vampires. They've sort of lost their
Speaker 1: power haven't they. Yeah, so if you you just can't
Speaker 1: trot off the same vampire over and over again because
Speaker 1: nobody's buying it anymore. Right. I mean when Bell Leeghostie
Speaker 1: first showed up on screens, he had people screaming in
Speaker 1: the aisles of theaters. Now you watch it and Bill
Speaker 1: Leegostie is great, but he's not scary. Yeah. We often
Speaker 1: forget just how how terrifying that performance actually was, and
Speaker 1: he is really if you if you look at it
Speaker 1: with new eyes, Yeah, especially if you knew that he
Speaker 1: would end up in Edward movies. That's true. That's true.
Speaker 1: All right, Well, there you have it. We have explored
Speaker 1: the monstrous, we've explored the cute, and we have explored
Speaker 1: the bridge between. I want to know from you out there,
Speaker 1: what do you think is going on psychologically culturally? Is
Speaker 1: happening when we take these horrifying images and creatures and
Speaker 1: make them into cute plush dolls to cuddle with? Why
Speaker 1: do we keep doing it? And what effect does it
Speaker 1: have on the culture? Yeah? What are your favorite examples
Speaker 1: of this process? And what monsters, if any, have not
Speaker 1: gone cute? Uh? And for how long will they remain
Speaker 1: that way? As always you can find us on social media.
Speaker 1: We're on Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler, and Instagram. And hey, on Facebook,
Speaker 1: we have this wonderful little discussion module you can look up.
Speaker 1: It's a group. You can join it and you can
Speaker 1: chat with the other folks who listen to the show,
Speaker 1: as well as the host themselves. And uh hey, also
Speaker 1: Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. That's the mother ship.
Speaker 1: That's we'll find all the episodes going back to the
Speaker 1: beginning of time. And if you want to get in
Speaker 1: touch with us directly with feedback on this episode or
Speaker 1: any other, you can always email us at blow the
Speaker 1: Mind at how stuff Works dot com for more on
Speaker 1: this and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff
Speaker 1: Works dot com. Ma