(gentle music)
- What's up guys, Michael here.
It's not every day you get to talk about a topic
as broad and as fascinating as monsters,
small monsters, big monsters, medium monsters named Paul
who accidentally eat your world-class mac and cheese
in the middle of the night.
But today we're doing just that.
And full disclosure, this is made possible
by the very cool people at Capcom
and "Monster Hunter: Rise",
which is a franchise I'm proud to say
at least one Wisecrack staffer
has dumped at least several hundred hours into.
So here's the idea that we're exploring today.
Monsters might be synonymous with scary,
but what if that's kind of all wrong?
What if we're missing out on the way monsters
can teach us about ourselves and the world around us?
We'll explain in this Philosophy of Monsters.
Human beings have been fascinated by the idea of monsters
from our earliest days, but they really came
into their own in the Western imagination in ancient Greece.
These folks waxed poetic about spooky figures
ranging from the Pastinaca, a monstrous weasel
that reeked so hard it's stank killed trees,
for the Typhoeus, a dragon with a 100 heads.
so at least none of them could ever possibly get lonely.
Which, I'm just saying, Capcom,
would make for some great DLC.
But monsters weren't just cool and weird
and creepy all at the same time,
they were also a very early attempt
to understand the world around us.
Because at the time, this was basically
humans fumbling around with an early form of science.
Unable to hop on a plane to figure out
what's going on 1,000 away,
people instead relied mostly on travelers
returning from foreign lands
who would tell scary stories about dragons
lurking in the hillsides.
And plenty of, even skeptical, budding philosophers
would write these stories down,
generally as pure fact and attempt to make sense
of these monstrous tales.
This continued into Ancient Rome,
when Pliney the Elder's approach
to writing the western world's first known encyclopedia
was, "repeat anything anyone says word for word
especially if they're talking about dope monsters."
To be fair, he did characterize more outrageous anecdotes
with phrases like, "some people say" or,
"so the story goes,"
and his book was primarily about entertaining
rather than educating.
Kind of hilariously, though, some of these tales
would prove so salient that European travelers
in the Middle Ages were alarmed not to find men
with dog heads upon arriving in "exotic lands."
Now, it's easy to laugh at people from the past
for believing in creatures like,
"human man but give him dog head."
And trust us, we laugh.
Oh, how we laugh.
But the thing is, when you think about
just how gigantic the world seemed
for people traveling on horseback,
monster myths start to make a lot more sense.
Most of the world was inaccessible
to the average denizen of Greece or Rome.
And as empires expanded, they started learning
about some genuinely weird stuff,
like this thing called the rhino
which I guess seems as plausible as three-horned zebras?
It's also worth considering an argument
from historian Adrienne Mayor.
She thinks many monster myths,
including the truly bad-ass griffin,
were actually based on fossils
from extinct creatures unearthed by early archeologists.
Mayor argues that dinosaur skeletons,
which, in ancient Grecian times,
were quite literally visible to the naked eye
on the Mediterranean seashore,
helped perpetuate ancient beliefs about monsters.
She even attributes the one-eyed cyclops to a mistake
in which early archeological enthusiasts
examined an elephant skull and decided its huge nasal cavity
was just one big ol' eye socket.
That's what my archeologist pals like to call a "whoopsie."
Of course, fanciful ideas
about real-life horned, winged monsters
remained mainstream long after ancient times,
and we're not just talking about that Big Foot truther group
on social media.
Even Thomas Jefferson believed that giant monsters
existed on the American frontier and warned Lewis and Clark
to keep an eye out for them
as they explored the American continent.
The point is that monster myths have long been a way
to make sense of a world that is largely hostile to humans,
to catalog potential predators
and to understand why nature gave some creatures claws
and me, these ugly ol' feet.
I really hate them,
I (beep) they look so bad.
Now, this notion of monsters as marvels worthy
of scientific study still permeates pop culture.
It's also all over "Monster Hunter: Rise,"
a game that, at its core, is about the awe-inspiring,
even if sometimes frightening, world around us,
and our attempts to try to understand it, control it,
and most of all, survive it.
I mean, you literally carry around a notebook
to document and classify all the creatures
you encounter on your adventures.
And so, rather than just being a game about scary monsters,
"Rise" is about the reverence and fear
inspired by the incredible world around us.
Like adventurers of old, you have to leave your home
to explore the unknown,
except you might actually get to encounter
a huge-armored creature with a powerful sticky tongue,
or a giant flying beast that could tear you apart
with his fangs, except he'd rather enjoy a crunchy apple.
And like a good scientist, you can figure out exactly
what their glands are good for.
But monsters weren't just of interest to scientists
and scientist NPCs, they were also,
and unlike this dream-haunting little guy,
considered kind of good.
As in, people literally thought
they were a weird kind of gift to humanity.
See, for much of Christian history,
monsters fascinated god-curious folks everywhere,
sparking the question, "How could a supreme creator
make big ol' ugly monsters, and more importantly why?"
Throughout the Middle Ages, religious leaders
wrote tons of texts
that proposed several different explanations.
Early on, it was most common to see monsters
as the divine creator's literal opponents,
coming from Cain or the Devil.
But theologian Augustine helped reconsider that.
He saw beasts like dragons or humans with dog heads
as potent symbols of divine power,
an indication that the laws of nature
do not apply to the universe's head honcho.
And by the late Middle Ages,
monsters began to really be seen more as metaphors.
People largely believed that monsters had been created
"to serve as examples for proper conduct
and to reinforce the teachings of the Bible."
For example, dragons were thought to reflect the dangers
of Satan, while unicorns symbolized the death of Christ.
This helps explain the popularity of the bestiaries,
or books of beasts.
These glorious, often grotesque books
cataloged common creatures, like horses and dogs,
exotic beasts like tigers and elephants,
and, best of all, imaginary monstrous beings like unicorns,
griffins and dragons with lavish illustrations.
These weren't meant to be encyclopedias
like "Pliney the Elder" made.
Instead the images were supposed
to convey the animals' symbolism
in order to propagate the predominant religious worldview.
While initially intended for inter-church book clubs,
they soon became popular luxury splurges
for wealthy showoffs.
Today, they're one of our best artistic catalogs
of how medieval Europeans viewed the world
and how they reconciled divine greatness
with legends about monstrous creatures.
And this weirdly-positive-spin on monsters
was hardly exclusive to the western world.
In Japanese culture, legends about yokai
i.e. supernatural spirits and monsters,
have long had metaphysical connotations.
Some water-dwelling yokai,
such as certain kinds of tatsus i.e. dragons,
were considered comparable to water gods.
And praying or showing reverence to them
was a way to prevent floods, drowning,
or another lost round of chicken.
Of course some terrifying tatsui
could not give two flying river stones about your prayers
and might still drown your favourite horse.
Still, here, as with the bestiaries,
we can see how monster myths can be a humbling force
that makes human beings act a little more respectful
towards the vast world around them.
That's why oversimplifying monsters as just plain scary
ruins a lot of what makes them so interesting.
Which brings us back to our glorious sponsors.
In "Monster Hunter: Rise" we meet lots of fanged, hoofed
or horned creatures who are a lot more complex
and multifaceted than meets the eye.
Far from just going stabby-stab against monsters,
the game mechanics require you to craft items,
recipes, medicines, and even buildings
by combining the resources you acquire as you hunt.
And many of the monsters are directly inspired by Yokai,
our aforementioned group of monsters
and spirit from Japanese folklore.
The Tetranadon, for instance, is inspired by the Kappa,
which, like the tatsu could really mess up your day
by creating a flood or refrain from doing so
if they were in a good mood.
The game itself takes some cues
from the Japanese Hyakki Yako.
A recurring nightmarish motif in Yokai folklore,
that basically functions as a monster parade.
Some of its earliest iterations involved the spirits
of discarded tools rising up against their former owners.
They go on to attack a town, though unsuccessfully.
In this version of the story, the spirits repent
for their violence and convert to Buddhism,
showing even mischievous tool spirits
can find a better path in life, heartwarming.
In other versions, however, people simply have to hide
from the monsters and wait out the attack.
In "Rise," these influences play out
in the new Rampage quest type,
in which you fight off hordes of monsters
to prevent them from wreaking further havoc.
While most of us no longer rely on bestiaries
to get our monster kicks,
monsters still remain important manifestations
of social and cultural forces in any given society,
representing our collective fears,
desires, and preoccupations.
This has been true for centuries and across cultures.
See, ancient Japanese culture mostly identified yokai
in creatures like foxes or serpents,
but as man-made tools became more prominent,
myths about yokai spirits dwell in tools did as well,
like in the Hyakki Yako.
It also presumably led to the inevitable question
we've all asked ourselves,
is your hammer trying to kill you?
One particularly fascinating pre-modern Japanese yokai myth
developed in farming villages as a response
to a growing class of nouveau riche families
who had gained power and become landlords.
These families were said to possess tsukimono,
or little animal spirits that brought good luck to them
and lousy luck to their enemies.
Families thought to be in possession of tsukimono
were shunned for generations, which I mean, harsh,
but ultimately, this mythos
perfectly articulated existing social issues of the time,
specifically class resentments.
And in modern Japan, Gojira would do the same,
as a giant sea monster brought back to life
by nuclear radiation.
The first film about him came out in 1954,
when memories of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
were fresh in the collective Japanese consciousness.
At the time, America still occupied Japan
and banned any talk of the bombings.
The monster represented the fears, pain and traumas
that had gone unspoken in society.
As Japanese culture evolved, Gojira
would go on to articulate everything from fears
about environmental degradation
to concerns about modern technology.
In a similar way, some of western culture's
most enduring monsters still hold power
because of the way they commented on social changes.
Take "Frankenstein."
Written by 19th century British author Mary Shelley,
the monster articulated fears
about the scientific revolutions.
Specifically, it seems to react to experiments
like that of Italian scientist Luigi Galvani,
who attempted to use electricity
to reanimate the legs of dead frogs and sheep,
and his creepazoid nephew who tried to do the same
with human corpses.
Frankenstein's monster made from a mish-mash of body parts
reanimated by the scientist in pursuit of greatness,
thus represented the terrifying possibilities
of scientific hubris gone unchecked.
His enduring cultural status
as an A-List monster makes sense.
Society remains perpetually alarmed at the possibility
that the latest science is going too far,
though until there's a microwave
that can convincingly reheat a taco,
I'm gonna say we've still got a ways to go.
Anyway, to this day,
monsters remain apt metaphors in pop culture.
And the Monster Hunter series
has historically used monsters
to represent social or cultural
or even environmental phenomena.
Like Nergigante in "Monster Hunter: World,"
who functions as a metaphor for ecological catastrophe.
And with monsters like Magnamalo, a four-legged beast
who's designed as based on Japanese samurai ghost,
right down to the balls of fire, or Onibi.
We can't wait to see what "Rise" has in store.
Traditionally, these ghosts are portrayed as resentful,
which makes us wonder if the game
will continue the series theme of humanity
getting caught up in much larger natural forces,
in this case, a rage-filled behemoth.
There's also the Almudron, based on the Dorotabo.
These guys are the spirits of dead farmers
who angrily watch as the farmers to come after
mistreat their land.
In line with Monster Hunter's ecological themes,
they haunt away the poor stewards of the land
in order to conserve their habitat.
In Japan, where fertile land was hard to find,
these myths expressed anxieties about good, fertile soil
and the misuse of that rare and valuable resource.
In short, we can't wait to see
what "Monster Hunter: Rise" has to offer.
Whether they're inspiring scientists,
confounding religious leaders,
or expressing that thing we're all thinking but not saying,
monsters matter, and not just because
they make you cry out for your mommy.
But what do you guys think?
What purpose do monster stories serve in your life?
Drop a comment and let us know.
And thank you so much to "Monster Hunter: Rise"
and Capcom for making this deep dive into monsters possible.
"Monster Hunter: Rise" is now available on Nintendo Switch,
be sure to check it out.
The game's got an exciting new Rampage quest mode,
brand new monsters,
and a fun customizable hunting companion called a Palamute.
We think you'll really enjoy it.
And for me, and my hammer, later.
(upbeat music)