Over on the Incidental Mythology YouTube channel, I recently posted up a video essay on how video games are mythology. In it, we focus on what it means that video games are mythology and how someone would go about actually studying them as mythology. I bring this up because I got an interesting comment on the video over on YouTube. It was a long post, and feel free to read it yourself. I’m so happy to say that most of the people who comment on my videos are positive, encouraging, and highly insightful, and this comment fits right in with it. The gist of the comment is questioning the relation ..read more

So, the basics of this channel is the fact that our popular culture is our contemporary mythology. This idea underlies every analysis and every reason for every study. When we look at monsters like the Pale Man or the Babadook, it’s because these are inherently important elements of our cultural stories, telling us something important about what we find scary or what we find worth protecting. I get into the more general topic of pop culture as mythology in a previous video. We’ve talked, as you may have already seen, or are just learning, about pop culture as mythology more generally. We talke ..read more

The Babadook is an Australian horror film, focused on the relationship of a widowed mother and her son. Released in 2014, the Babadook set an example of psychological horror focused on monsters. The Babadook as a monster is a type of boogeyman, reliving aspects of childhood monstrosity that comes to life through paranoia. The Babadook is an interesting monstrous figure, one that explores aspects of culture and self in the quiet and subtle ways it comes to life in the film. The way the Babadook manifests, plays with the expectations of fiction and reality, and comes to possess or alter our main ..read more

I’ve recently been thinking about things. I don’t mean thinking about general concepts of life, I mean things. Stuff. The objects and things that we surround ourselves with. Part of this started, admittedly, with playing the game Unpacking. I did a video essay where I explored the real characters of Unpacking, the things we are unpacking. It had made me continue to think about the ways that things impact our lives, and have lives of their own. When it comes to the research project on TTRPGs, there’s a lot of stuff to be thinking about. While playing a role playing game doesn’t necessitate sma ..read more

Miyazaki’s Spirited Away continues to be one of the most beautiful animated movies ever made. It tells the story of a young girl, Chihiro, who gets unwillingly whisked off to a spiritual world where she has to work at a bathhouse for the spirits in order to try and find a way to save her parents and return to her world. Its a movie filled with strange creatures, scary moments, but also moments of peace and beauty. One of the most interesting characters encountered in this movie is No Face - a creature who, at first, is a silent figure standing on the bridge. Originally, this was going to be th ..read more

Video Block Double-click here to add a video by URL or embed code. Learn more So, today I want to do something a little different. As may already be obvious by the catalogue of video essays I’ve created so far, I’m a fan of the Legend of Zelda games. They’re really an inherent part of my growing up - my mother played the original game on the NES before I was old enough to get my hands on it. So of course I want to always talk about these games, but there’s always something to reflect on and think about. The Zelda games prevalence in popular culture and contemporary society means its always a ..read more

There’s an inherent problem with studying mythology and pop culture narratives in the way that I do. I focus so much on he structure of it all. I think about how things are constructed, how they are then experienced, and how this then comes out the other end. Essentially, everything is looking at the science of it all. I’m consumed with thinking about things in ways that can be repeated and make sense. Essentially, I look for the same patterns. I look for elements that are repeated from story to story, that can capture the essence of what makes something work more than something else. This is ..read more

Video Block Double-click here to add a video by URL or embed code. Learn more At the beginning of this year, I put out a video essay on Knives Out and the structure of the whodunnit. In it, I analysed how whodunnit narratives are constructed, and how Knives Out plays with that structure in interesting and innovative ways. The thing is, I have a lot more to say about that. Since then, I’ve read quite a few more detective stories. Not just the classic Agatha Christie’s, but also contemporary detective fiction like those from Vaseem Khan and Richard Osman. I’ve done a lot of thinking about the d ..read more

So on this website we talk a lot about the role of mythology, mostly in and around pop culture but also in a more general sense. In order to understand how contemporary pop culture is contemporary mythology, it makes sense that we have to understand mythology more generally: the structures of it, the definition of it, and why it matters. One of the colloquial uses of the word myth is a sense that something is untrue. Someone may ask if something has happened, but then the response will be “oh, that’s just a myth” - meaning it’s not real, not accurate, not true. However, the idea of truth and ..read more

Momo became widely known in July of 2018 but rose to particular prominence in the early months of 2019. A string-haired demon girl, Momo, is said to entrance children when she suddenly appears in the middle of child-geared media. She possesses them, speaking to them to give morbid instructions, which culminates in the child’s suicide. The story started with the character Momo beginning to target teenagers on WhatsApp messages. The messages were typically challenges for the player to perform a series of tasks, and when there was refusal the player was met with threats. Messages were sometimes ..read more