From the Vault: Monstrosity/Cuteness Spectrum

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name
is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. In it's Saturday.
Time to go into the Old Vault. This time we're
doing an episode from October, right, Yeah, this one is
the Monstrosity Cuteness Spectrum, and this is a lot of fun.
We get into some Japanese traditions, Japanese monsters, and especially

(00:25):
Japanese monsters that have been transformed, uh from from from
hideous murderous creatures into cute mascots and what that transformation means.
All right, well, let's jump right in. Welcome to Stuff
to Blow your Mind from how Stuffworks dot Com. Hey,

(00:52):
welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is
Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. Hey, Robert, have you
seen all these cute Jason Vorhees dolls and cartoons fan
art all over the Internet? Of course you have. I've
at least seen some of it, but I know you
shared with me an image of Jason plush doll, and
I had not encountered that specific cute horror before. Yeah.

(01:15):
So he's got the machete and there's blood on the machete.
But he's adorable, but he has blood on it, like
you know, murder weapons. I mean, even if we didn't
know who he is, the context here is that this
is a killer. Yeah. He's got a huge head, huge
low set eyes. He just looks so sweet, little stumpy limbs.
He's like a little cute baby Jason. And there are

(01:36):
cute Freddy Krueger's in the same way, Cute Freddy Krueger cartoons, dolls, toys, uh,
things all over the internet. And you've seen the cute vampires,
the cute werewolves, cute versions of the girl from the Ring.
I looked it up that exists cute predators from the
movie Predator. I saw that. That's that's kind of easy
because the predator already has a sort of baby shaped head.

(01:58):
You just got to make eyes bigger. They're cute xeno morphs.
You'd think that'd be difficult to do, but they're all
over the internet. What is with this epidemic of monsters
originally imagined to be horrifying, threatening to haunt our dreams,
to chase us through our nightmares, to murder us and
our friends, and instead we're making all these versions of

(02:19):
them that are adorable with infantile characteristics that you just
want to hug and snuggle. It seems inevitable, doesn't it,
even even in weird cases like, for instance, the Babba Duke,
which is like a child murdering monster, right, And then
the same with penny Wise, the clown. Like you would
think that penny Wise, this thing that appears as a

(02:41):
clown in order to you know, drain the essence out
of children and pull them into horrify them and pull
them into sewers. You would think that would be beyond
our ability to make cute. And yet just the other
day I was looking at a cute pins of penny Wise.
I'll cute it up. Yeah, Well, if you want to
go in the cosmic direction, how about all the cute
illithid monter, the you you know, uh cathuloom with those stuff. Yeah,

(03:03):
when cute cute plush catulus. When my son came into
my life, but I was, one of the first things
we gave him was a plush cthulhu, which he loves,
and it's an adorable looking creature. But yeah, he doesn't
even know that it is essentially supposed to be a
scary monster. I guess it's not funny to children in
the same way it is funny to adults. No, that

(03:23):
he just sees it as a cool, pretend, little creature.
It's like if you encountered snuffle up agus and then
somebody said, oh, yes, stuff, Lupagus is actually a patterned
after this hideous monster, right, this thing that snorts you
up as a liquid through its trunk. Though, I do
want to say, before this epidemic of cute cartoon versions
and cute dolls and stuff like that of say Freddy Krueger,

(03:44):
there is a precedent for this within the horror media itself.
Because you've seen the Freddy Krueger movies, right, the Nightmare
on Elm Street. Right, I've seen the first one and
I've seen the remake, and I like both of those,
and the rest it's just mostly ups and just the
pop cultural absorption of this ever ridiculous Freddy Krueger that

(04:06):
that you know, that that has all these catchphrases and
an ingenious kills. Yeah, that's that all just kind of
blurs together for me. Well, there there's definitely an arc
throughout the series where over time, the Freddy Krueger of
the first movie and the first night Nightmare on Elm Street.
I think Wes Craven went out of his way to
make him not just a threatening monster, the standard kind

(04:28):
of monster that will hurt you and chases you, but
to make him repulsive and really just nasty. I mean,
Freddy Krueger in the first movie is a character who's
supposed to be a child murderer, and there are these
suggestions of perversity and this this kind of gross creepiness,

(04:48):
not just threatening monstrosity, And so from that point, I
think it's really amazing that over the arc of the
series Freddie becomes sort of almost something like an anti hero,
like he's never actually a good guy, but he stops
becoming this gross creep that you don't even want to
look at, and becomes this jokester who dances and mugs

(05:09):
for the camera and has one liners, makes jokes, and
he becomes the star of the films. He becomes the
reason people watch it, and it's because he's fun and
he's comic. He becomes the crypt keeper, he becomes whole Cogan. Uh.
And then it certainly by Jason versus Freddie, you're probably
rooting for one or the other. He is, like, there's

(05:30):
kind of a fifty fifty split there that that you
may be backing this character in the brawl. Yeah, and
maybe you could chalk that up in the Freddie movies
just to the actor who played in Robert England being
a great and likable actor despite the fact that he's
settled with this incredibly repulsive role. Uh, maybe Robert England
just bleeds through so much that you want to make

(05:51):
him more and more likable. Well, it even got to
the point when they when the remake of Nightmare Name
Street came out, Um, a lot of people didn't like it.
I actually really enjoyed it. I thought it was I
thought it's a fine Hart film. I didn't like it.
You didn't like I. I enjoyed it. But then again,
I'm less attached to the series. But but one of
the criticisms that I saw level thatt it was how

(06:11):
could you make Freddie a pedophile? How could you make
this his avert? Make this creepiness in his character so avert,
as if that like ruined a hero and not just
made a grotesque monster a little creepier. So I think
it was always kind of implicitly suggested back in the
first movie. Look, I mean they never said that outright
that I recall, but it's always there in the fact that,

(06:34):
like we were saying, he's not just a threat, he's
a creep, he's perverse, right, Yeah, So it's it's interesting
to see how people responded to kind of a doubling
down on on the grotesque monstrosity of the character in
away from the ridiculous pop culture version of the character. Right. Yeah,
the version in the remake is not going to be

(06:55):
doing I don't know, Domino's pizza commercials or whatever Freddie
was doing in the eighties. But of course Freddy Krueger
and the nutmar On Elm Street series is not the
only series where we see a monstrous, horrifying character transformed
over time into something that's more approachable, more likable, more identifiable,
maybe even kind of snugly. This happens a lot in

(07:16):
horror literature and even in horror folklore. Yeah. Yeah, we're
definitely going to get into some examples from from folklore
and legend, particularly some examples from Japanese folklore, because as
we're talking, we inevitably talk about both monsters and the
world of cute like you have to go to Japan
because Japan is h is the home not only of

(07:36):
some pretty hideous folkloric monsters, but also Kauaii. This this
notion of of of like overt just overpowered cuteness, the
Hello Kitty level of cuteness that has not only taken
Japan by storm, but has has spread its cuttly tentacles
into just about every portion of the earth. Yeah, it's

(07:57):
like overclocking the adorability process almost to the point of insanity.
And I should also point out that this also goes
the other way, of course, just as monsters often become cute,
there are also plenty of examples of people taking something
cute and making it monstrous. Um, I kind of did
it just a few minutes ago talking about snuffle up,
I guess. But you inevitably see people who say, do

(08:20):
a love crafty and take on totoro or And then
there's a whole area of Kauai known as Kauai and noir,
which is like dark cute, where they have something that
pretty much intentionally has a lag or maybe a tentacle
in both the cute and the monstrous content bucket. I
feel like this is something that very often happens in
comedy animation. I think you know, shows like South Park

(08:42):
and Futurama and Simpsons and stuff like that always have
a scene at some point where a very cute animal
turns out to be a horrifying killer. Yeah, So in
today's episode, we're gonna explore this. We're gonna explore what
is the relationship between the monstrous and the cute? Why
is there there this in arresting interplay? And in doing that,
we're going to, of course discuss a little bit about

(09:04):
what a monster is. So I think we've hit that
harder in previous episodes. Here stuff to blow your mind.
We're gonna talk about what it is to be cute,
what's going on when something cute hijacks our brain? And
then at the end of the episode, we're going to
look to really three specific examples of Japanese monsters that
may or may not be transformed into something cute. We'll
be discussing the Only, the Kappa, and the Tingu. All right, Robert,

(09:27):
what is a monster? Oh? Well, you know it's it's
it's like cute. It's like pornography. We know it when
we see it. But if you if you really have to,
you know, if you really force somebody to to define
it what you tend to think about something that is
awesome inform or size. It's novel and it's chimerical combination
of natural forms. You know, like it's got the head

(09:48):
of a sea horse in the body of a cow.
That's a monster um or you know, you know where
it's just a giant sea horse. A sea horse the
size of the school bus would also be a monster.
I subscribe to the Metallica theory of monster dum, which
is that a monster is the thing that should not be.
It's a thing that you behold and realized that it

(10:09):
is not only not something you recognize from nature, but
it's something that you do not wish nature had. Now,
obviously we violate those norms all the time because we
get into monsters. We we find ourselves at home thinking
about monsters, and we kind of do wish there was
a giant mummy crocodile with laser eyes. Right, But at
least in theory, the thing a monster is is it

(10:30):
violates natural categories in some way, and it horrifies you,
makes you afraid, makes you not want it to be there.
And as we discussed in our our episode, the first monster,
which which came out previously for for this year's Halloween. Um,
there's often a message there, if not a message that
is tied up in the monster's form, then tied up

(10:50):
in the monsters presence or in the stories about it, like,
this monster is a danger to you because of whiny,
because you went somewhere, or you did some thing, or
you're engaged in a culture that went somewhere, did something. Yeah.
Rarely do monsters appear in folklore without some kind of
warning or social message. Right, Okay, so that's monsters in

(11:12):
a nutshell. But but how about cute? Cute uh is
in a way easier to nail down, but also just
as ambiguous as monstrosity. Well, it's one of those things
that everybody can identify it by sight. You know, you
can tell, well, that's cute, that's not, that's cute, that's not.
But when you're asked to give a set of criteria

(11:33):
for how you're making the decision, you'd you'd often come
up at a loss for words. Right, what's certainly the
eyes of the beholder. But we can tease it apart
to a certain extent. We can say, look at almost
a universal images of the cute and see what's connecting
with us there, and then figure out why it's connecting
with us. So, for instance, kittens, babies, or of course

(11:56):
Hello Kitty, which is essentially a kitten combined with a baby,
or a small child with psychedelic color schemes, psychedelic color schemes,
and of course many cute creatures of either real ones
or fanciful ones. What do they have? They have big
adorable eyes or perhaps big jowls, baby like cheeks. They're
kind of Winston Churchill's yeah no, no, so yeah. There

(12:20):
do appear to be some biological roots to our recognition
of cuteness. It does seem to go into our mammalian
brains and not just into cultural categories. So culture may
very well inform a lot of what we find cute
downstream of these biological cues. So, in his eighteen seventy
two book The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals,

(12:41):
Charles Darwin suggested that natural selection is probably gonna favor
creatures which, in infancy possess features that cause the adults
of that species to protect them and take care of
their needs. Right, if you are a species that has
a genome that says we usually give birth to babies
we find repulsive and don't want anything to do with that.

(13:03):
Species isn't going to do very well, right, or at
least you're gonna have a situation like the Komodo dragon,
where the young of the komodo dragon, they're pretty much
they're on their own right, and they have to protect
themselves from such threats as adult komodo drags exactly. So
this would be in species that need to spend a
lot of time protecting and caring for their young. This

(13:23):
is something we see in mammals right right, and other species,
but especially in mammals. So a lot of Darwin's book
deals with things like the screams of infants and how
the scream of an infant elicits parental attention. But usually
if an object is screaming at you, you don't you
just you know, don't you just find it annoying? Like

(13:44):
you want to get away from it. Like if there's
just us an orb in a room screaming at you,
I wouldn't want to care for it. I would run away. Correct. Yeah,
If if a human on a train is screaming, um,
either may be you want to find out what's happening.
You might even want to help. But there's there's at
least that question mark phase of the screening, Right, what

(14:04):
is going on here? Let me find out so that
I can act accordingly. Yeah, it's attention getting, But the
demands of an infant have to be more than simply
attention getting to be adaptive. They have to be sharpened
to appeal to specific vulnerabilities in the adult caregiver's brain,
like vulnerabilities that soften anger responses and encourage protectiveness, and

(14:25):
encourage generosity and sharing of resources and so forth. So
something about the infant version of an animal has to
convince the adult version of that animal to feel an
attachment and to make sacrifices on behalf of this little creature.
Then we'll talk about this more in a second. But
in some species, these appeals for parenting could be straightforwardly chemical, right,

(14:46):
Pheromones and scent would be examples. But couldn't these biological
appeals also be visual? It makes sense, right, that's and
one of the most immediate ways to interact with with
an object or being is you see them and then
you respond. Right. So, in the middle of the twentieth century,
the Austrian ethologist Conrad Lawrenz, who I guess we should

(15:08):
maybe acknowledged it's always weird, Like should you bring this
up or not? He was also a Nazi after World
War Two repudiated his views. I'm not aware that his
ideology played any role in coming up with this schema
we're about to talk about, but I guess it's worth acknowledging.
Oh yeah, I mean, I think it's always worth noting
when a scientist has that in their background, because in
some cases, you you definitely have science that it was

(15:31):
skewed or compromised by his association with the Third Reich. Uh,
So you have you have to at least acknowledge that
it was there in order to determine if it was
a factor. Yeah, I mean, like you had people doing
science that was ideologically determined, not very objective. But I
don't think that's necessarily the case in this case. So
Lawrence plunged into this field by observing animal species and

(15:55):
coming up with what's known as the Kinchen schema or
the baby schema. It's a list of features that he
believed were sculpted in order to trigger or release caregiving
behaviors in adult animals, and he gave about seven criteria.
So let me know what you think about these. Robert
A large head Okay, yeah, babies have big heads. Predominance

(16:17):
of the brain capsule. So that's going to mean not
just a large head, but sort of the large forehead,
like the swelling of the upper part of the head,
large and low lying eyes, a bulging cheek region. There's
the Churchill jowls, what we're talking about, short and thick extremities.

(16:38):
A springy or elastic consistency. Yeah, they when need when
you poke them. In a soft body, there's your plush stall.
And finally, clumsy movements, yes, the toddling of the toddler. Right.
And subsequent studies have found evidence to partially support Lorenz's schema.
So this is one reason to think that, you know,

(16:59):
even if he's some kind of crazy ideology, there might
be something to this because subsequent studies seem to find
some of the same stuff is true. So I'll mention
one study from two thousand nine published in Ethology by
Melanie Glocker at All, and this is called baby schema
in Infant Faces induces cuteness, perception and motivation for caretaking
in adults. And what they did in this study was

(17:21):
they used real photos of infants digitally manipulated to accentuate
or to downplay some of the features that are in
line with Lorenz's criteria, and so among a group of undergraduates,
the study found that the faces manipulated towards the criteria,
so meaning they manipulated them to have larger eyes or

(17:41):
a rounder face or a higher forehead, were judged to
be cuter and elicited greater motivation for caregiving. People said
they were more likely to give care to these, uh,
these more baby scheme of faces than the ones where
they really downplayed those criteria, giving them smaller eye as,
smaller foreheads and narrower face and stuff like that. Huh.

(18:04):
Now I've got a picture here, Yeah, I'm I'm looking
at this right now. So, um, basically we have an
array of six images, three per row, So we have
this grid of baby heads here that we're looking at.
And um and in the idea that there's a change
in uh like cuteness from left to right. Yeah, so

(18:25):
you've got like normal baby heads in the middle, and
then on the right you've got ultra babified baby faces
with like these gigantic eyes, really round faces, really sort
of low faces with large foreheads, big brain capsules. And
then on the right you've got unbabified baby faces that
look sort of more like the kid in the omen

(18:47):
or they look more adult. Basically, they look more like
old men, you know. They're they're kind of in that
category of like the older baby babies that we look
at them and maybe you you cringe a little bit
before you tell the the parents that it's a beautiful baby. Yeah,
And they tend to have like smaller eyes, a smaller forehead,

(19:07):
a narrower head, and a less rounding of the skull.
That they look they look like weird adults rather than babies,
you know. And it's interesting to to look at this
and think of it in light of our basically our
evolved reaction to these faces. I was looking at a
study that said the scientists have used magneto and cephalography

(19:28):
to observe a seventh of a second response time in
adults to unfamiliar infant faces, but of course not adult faces.
And that's going to that's uh, that difference is gonna
be manifest in this array of faces as well. Like
the cuter the baby, the more immediate your response to it.
I imagine. So, like, you see this cute baby face
with the highly babified features, and you're like, whoa that

(19:50):
I need to pay attention to that. Yeah, I've got
to look at that, and if it needs something, I
guess I will go buy it some milk or some
pudding or whatever it is. Baby's eat right. Put zip
ties on all my cabinets is horrible plastic things, and
all my wall plugs. I know. I'm I'm still trying
to work through all the baby proofing on my house. Really, Yeah,
there's still some annoying baby proofing that I haven't quite

(20:10):
like broken by forcing a grower open. But so, one
of the interesting things about the recognition of cuteness and
its biological function is that it appears to work not
just within species. Now, I can't see any real reason
that you would evolve to have a caregiving preference for
animals other than your own species. So it might be

(20:33):
one of those things that's just a byproduct of something
that's highly adaptable. Yeah, I mean, we're all, we're related
to all these other mammalian creatures and and they're all
they all have the basically basically the same survival um
techniques in place in terms of parental care for the infant. Yeah,
and it's kind of obvious from our experiences with kittens
and puppies and so forth. But experiments do confirm that

(20:56):
our appreciation for cuteness goes beyond the infant Homo sapiens.
One example is a study I found by Anthony Little
from two thousand twelve published again in Ethology called Manipulation
of Infant like Traits Effects Perceived Cuteness of infinite adults
and cat faces. So it found that among images of
three types of faces, babies, adults, and cats, first of all,

(21:20):
people found the babies and the cats cuter than adults.
But then also when the faces from all three categories
were manipulated to have baby scheme of characteristics, for example,
decreasing the jaws, eyes, and increasing the forehead height, people
found them cuter. And this worked for adult faces, for
human baby faces, and for cat faces. Okay, so getting

(21:41):
into kind of the Betty boot area there of like
the weird like infantile but but arguably attractive adult female. Yeah,
it's it's just seeming to imply that we have the
same kind of caregiving response or cuteness response to faces
of all different types of creatures, no matter what age

(22:02):
and no matter what species. Even if there's a face
and you make these certain types of changes to the face,
we think it's cute usually and we respond with all
you know, zip tide, the chemical cabinet. You know, it's
interesting to think of it in terms of survival adaptations
for non human animals when you think of of of
domesticated animals, cats and dogs, because certainly I think that

(22:27):
I've certainly read some studies that argue for the the
the cat's ability to essentially hijack us by making us
think it's a baby on some level, you know. And
and and I think dogs do that too to a
large extent. Is it's certainly with puppies. So I could
see it as a situation where uh an infant dog
or or cat that is either found or it's obtained

(22:47):
when the parents are killed like suddenly, those are less
likely to be then killed and eaten or skinned or
left for dead by the humans who have found it
if it hits those same traders. You know. Now, another
study I came across, the two thousand twelve Japanese study
publishing POS one, and they tested the effect of viewing

(23:08):
Kauai images are cute images on attentiveness, and they found
that individuals who viewed infinite animal images performed tasks better
than those who viewed adult animals. Yeah, that seems weird. Like, so,
just if you had to have a calendar at your desk,
have the baby animals calendar as opposed to the grown
up animals calendar. Huh, I don't know. I feel I

(23:30):
feel unfairly skeptical of that result. Has that been replicated? Well, well,
let's let's let's see. So it's not just a matter.
According to this study of cute things making us happier
or amusing us, they also allegedly improve performance in quote
tasks that require behavioral carefulness. Oh, I can see that. Yeah,

(23:51):
so it's not it's not so much. There's not a
magical effect going on here. This is the idea that
the cute visible stimuli may actually narrow the breath of
attentional focus. I can see that. No, like that seeing
a baby face would put the mind into a don't
drop the baby gear exactly, and then you take that
gear and you apply it to working in your spreadsheet.

(24:12):
I can see that. Yeah, Okay, I understand the mechanism. Now, now,
different studies have also looked at the effects of cute
marketing on consumer strength of course, uh, and and also
on whether it has a to what extended effects indulgent behavior,
because the whole don't drop the baby mentality. Do you
want your consumer using that that kind of mentality when

(24:34):
they're potentially behind your product, right, you want to encourage
them to drop the wallet. Yeah, they found that, uh
that for some people, cute images with big eyes or
baby cheeks seem to induce more careful or strained behavior.
But uh, but again not every case. But it's an
interesting additional study related to this whole idea of intensified attentiveness. Now,

(24:58):
it's also worth noting that when we're talking about cute,
we're inevitably talking about visual stimulant a lot here, because
that's going to be the thing that's bound up in
either a you know, a plushed all of of a
horror monster or Halloween cost him that's derived from it. Yeah. Now,
there are obviously also cute sounds, right yeah, yeah, the
cute baby sound, but even the cute baby smell. I

(25:19):
hadn't really thought about this, but you know, obviously, if
you've ever smelled a baby. It's fabulous and it's hard
to really put a key and put put a finger
on what's happening there? Like, why is this an attractive
smell to smell a baby's head? I'm sorry, I have
no idea what you're talking about. Really, well, the next
time you're around a baby, do yourself a favor. Uh
smell It sounds creepy unless it's your baby. Well, no,

(25:41):
you can. You can ask you and say, hey, I've
been I've been reading some studies and in uh you know,
in the name of science, would you allow me to
smell your baby's head? Yeah? Have you seen that product
on the market that is like a bottled cathead smell? No,
an actual cat's head or a cathead biscuit? I think, Oh,

(26:03):
I don't know what's what is a cat head biscuit?
It's just a big old biscuit that's roughly the size
of a cat's head. I'm not sure which what what
region uh that that is found in? I guess somewhere
in the south here. I think it's actually supposed to
be a cat's head. It's like a perfume you can
buy that's supposed to smell like a cat head. But
cats don't really smell like anything if if it's unless

(26:26):
it's a dirty cat like they tend to have. Like
maybe they smell like pennies, a little bit like batteries,
but that's about the extent of it. Uh, don't they
usually smell like sulfur? We're not the ones I'm hanging stone.
All right, Well, so on that note, let's take a
quick break and we come back. We will get more
into this conflict, this battle between cute and monstrosity. Thank you,

(26:50):
thank Alright, so we're back. So we've talked about cute,
We've talked about monsters. We've talked about them mostly is
distant islands, you know, entire really separate from each other.
So on one hand, you have the isle of misfit
toys and then you have monster Island on the other.
I suppose waiter the misfit toys not also monsters. Well, yeah,
I guess they're kind of monstrous. What would be the
what would be the cute island? Oh, it's that island

(27:13):
in Japan that's got all the cats on it. Cat
have an island there, you go, that'll work. So it's
the difference between cat Haven cat Haven Island and uh
and Monster Island. But we have to have to wonder
are these two states all that different? Are they really
two separate things or are they different points on a spectrum. Well,

(27:33):
I ran across a really thought provoking paper titled Monstrous
slash Cute Notes on the abivalent ambivalent nature of cuteness,
and this is by social scientist Maja Rozozowska Branchinska. I
hope I pronounced that at least halfway right, but I
will try and link to this paper in the landing
page for this episode stuff tob your mind dot com

(27:53):
so you can see it for yourself. Um, Maja bebe
as I will refer to her. She dives into all
of it, noting that there's a certain ambiguity and hybridity
to both monsters and cute entities. So they're cuties, if
you will cut So they're not just different things, but
there's something lying along the same scale. Maybe yeah, that

(28:15):
you can think of them as both both of them
as exaggerated states. And she also points out that cute
images boast safe aesthetics that indicate harmless ethics. So I
think it's perplexing because infants, I think we can all
agree are holy, blameless creatures. M I'm not saying you
can't look at one in in horror or fear, but

(28:39):
that horror or fear is generally tied to the the
ethical nature of the creature itself. You mean, not tied right, Yeah,
I'm sorry. It's generally not tied to the ethical nature
of the creature itself. It's tied to you know, your
Maybe it's tied feelings of commitment or uh, you know,
uncertainty about the state of the world, or I guess
the closest you could come to having an absolute, authentic

(29:00):
are to the creature of the infant is to just
be appalled at what it does and it's diaper, you know.
But well, you could also have some kind of doctrine,
I don't know, some original sin type thing. Well, yes,
but that's that's you're really You're you're cheating at that point.
I think you're creating a narrative that actually shames an infant,
and so shame on you for doing it. And of

(29:21):
course you might have some sort of response to just
sort of the chaotic nature of infants. But if infants
are chaotic, and they certainly can be they're definitely chaotic neutral,
if not chaotic good, They're they're not chaotic evil. Okay,
you've convinced me. Infants are, okay, Robert. Now, Likewise, the
monster is traditionally a thing as rotten on the inside
as it is on the outside. The monster with a

(29:43):
heart of gold is an exception, granted of a pretty
widespread exception at this point, but it's an exception that
proves the rule. Well, it's kind of like those, uh
the exception that proves the rule. On the other side
would be those evil baby movies exactly like a possessed
demon infant or something. Yeah, but generally, like a mom,
monster is as evil it is as it is ugly,

(30:03):
and a cute baby or cartoon character is as sweet
as it is visually cute. Now, I like this, uh,
this idea of cuteness being not just a thing that
we respond to as caregivers and that makes us want
to give up our protection and resources for it, but
it's also something that signals harmlessness because it makes me
think about the human domestication of animals. Uh. Like, for example,

(30:27):
if you look at dogs, the domestic dog that we
have today evolved both through natural but mostly artificial selection
from some type of wolf like candid species within the
history of anatomically modern humans. Now, because humans were selecting
which features to breed into their dogs, I think we
often assume that cute dog breeds where the adult of

(30:50):
the dog is very cute. We're bred for cuteness simply
for esthetic reasons, right. We wanted them to look cute
because we like it. But it's also worth thinking about
the post stability of a correlation between cuteness and the
domesticated affect itself. Like domestic dogs seem to have been
selected to retain juvenile characteristics into adulthood, and these would

(31:13):
include things like a wider face, shorter snouts, floppy ears,
a curly tail, but also positive responses to humans. This
is something you would probably see in like wolf cubs
or fox cubs, but not in adult wolves or adult foxes.
They're the juvenile characteristics of the wild ancestor or the

(31:35):
wild cousin that are retained into adulthood and the domesticated version,
and so cuteness might not only be something that releases
caregiving behaviors and adults, but it's literally correlated with the
biological transformation of a wild, unruly animal that cannot be
contained and is somewhat dangerous into this friendly, pliable, non

(31:56):
threatening domestic companion. Like the cuteness shows that it has
made a biological transformation into something that won't bite you
and in fact might want to snuggle with you. I mean,
that explains that the form of the pug right down
to a t, the pug is essentially a dog that
we have bread to look as much like a human
infant as possible. Oh yeah, it is a human baby

(32:19):
with four legs in a tail that can obviously buy you.
Though if if provoked, Um, do pugs have teeth? Really? Yes?
I mean, how much more awful would it be if
we've managed to breathe the teeth out of the dog.
I mean, we've metaphorically bred the teeth out of out
of the dog, but but not literally alright, So that

(32:40):
Maja bebi paper that I was discussing earlier. She also
points a lot of this out about Japanese kauai, that
the term itself the again, this is the Japanese cuteness
or hypercuteness. Kauai derives from the word uh kawa yushi,
which principally means shy and embarrassed, as well as vulnerable, small,

(33:02):
and darling, and it's applied to both babies and old people,
perhaps denoting a certain helplessness. And I also seen where
there's a variation on kauai uh, like a variant word
that is that that is used as a put down
that has a negative connotation as meaning pet, pathetic, poor,
or pitiable in a in a generally negative way. Oh

(33:23):
so it's like on the playground when a bully says
the other kid is like all little baby. Yeah. I mean,
it's interesting to bring that up because my my son
is in kindergarten and he's still at the age where
that is the ultimate put down, Like if you're gonna
insult somebody, you you call them a baby, and it's
the worst thing in the world, to the point where

(33:44):
our cat, if our cat misbehaves, yeah, are then my
son will say, oh baby, mochi or or even it
doesn't even have to be a person or a thing.
It can just be a general idea, or it can
be an object. But and you just put baby in
front it, and that's like the ultimate biglittling of it,
Like the toaster won't work. It's a baby. Yes, baby toaster.

(34:06):
Like I staid of saying stupid toaster or or some
or some other more adult um word, you just say
baby toaster. Uh. But that's funny because I think the
literature reflects that children do respond well to these infantile
features as well, right, Like children like the baby schema,
children like cuteness a lot. Yeah. I mean you just

(34:27):
have to look at their stuffed animals and and there's
the proof. So the idea is, perhaps the monsters and
the cute are the same energy applied in opposite directions.
In fact, Maga baby rights of cuteness as a pendulum,
it quote works inevitably as a sort of pendulum, swinging
to and fro and thus being able to play its
role only up to a certain point where the sweetness

(34:49):
becomes a mock and a pitiful or ironic alter ego
of itself. And I would wonder if the same holds
true of monsters as well, because if if monster rousness
and cuteness, if these are essentially one slider, and you know,
think of it as like photoshopry of a slider between
dark and light or something, or you know, or it's

(35:10):
a slider for shade or tint or something. Could you
push the sliders so far in not only the cute direction,
but the monster direction, so that the monstrous thing becomes ridiculous. Now,
obviously all of this this is in the eye of
the beholder, but I instantly thought of rat thinks. I
thought of some of the monsters from the Spawn comics,

(35:31):
and I thought of the monsters from the wonderful movie Freaked,
which are very much modeled after I think rat thinks.
So rat thinks, these are like these monsters for em
bulging eyes, um, you know, grotesque smiles and teeth that
are that would that were shown illustrated to ride a
hot rod around. And they're not scary, They're not I

(35:52):
wouldn't say they're necessarily cute. But it's like the monstrous
elements of the character design are pushed to such a
degree that it's almost impossible to find it frightful anymore. Right,
It's like you almost intuitively detect excess. Yeah, and it
becomes funny. Yeah, And and with cute I can think of.

(36:12):
I mean, it's one of those you know what when
you see it examples. But we've all encountered sickeningly sweet,
sickening lee cute where something has been just designed so
cute that it is almost repulsive. Yeah. Uh. And then
the only example I can think of off hand is
that I feel like the character Gur in Invader Zim
this is the Younn Basquez comic and uh in TV series.

(36:36):
The character of Gur is intentionally just so cute looking
that you're it causes revulsion. Well, a lot of times
the revulsion comes in, I think in the addition of
text or speech, Like I think of the memes where
you've got a kitten and the kitten might just be
adorable on its own, but like if you add some
meme text to it, it becomes gross, where the kitten says, like, know,

(37:00):
I made you a cookie, but I eat it it. Yes,
that is that's like linguistically signaling lee cute. Yeah, why
is that? Why does that feel over the edge? It's
like so cute it's unpleasant. No, I don't know why.
I guess it's it kind of falls into the same
way like a children are when they use grammar incorrectly.

(37:20):
It can be cute um to to an almost destructive degree,
Like trying to remember there's something that my son would say,
and I actually hesitated to correct him because it was
so adorable, and then I found it's like, I just
can't do that. It's selfish with me. I need to
teach the boys to speak properly, even if it means
destroying these cute moments. Was he calling like a broken toy,

(37:44):
a baby or something? No, what was it? He said?
It was it'll come to me later. I'm sure. So.
Masja Bebe does not shouldn't push this slighter idea specifically,
but I think I think she would agree with it
because she says, quote, it's possible to position both cute
and monstrous in one dimension, the space that Michelle Fhuco

(38:05):
called heterotopia, the place outside the norm, the site of
revolutionary potential to change, to pose an alternate order where
the coherence between words and reality is no more possible,
and the paradox is the structuring rule. So it's so
cute it's insane, or it's so monstrous. Yeah, yeah, I

(38:25):
mean it's it's like that left craft Ian vibe, like
the monster is so terrifying that you just lose your
entire mind. And likewise, something could be that cute that
you just you just you can't, you just have to
it kind of gets into the whole theory about the
biting of babies, like the desire to pinch a baby
because it's so cute. I know you've talked about this before,

(38:45):
but I don't know much about it. What's the deal here?
We have an older episode, there's what I did with
Julia on this this topic. But it's it's been studied.
Like basically, you see something so cute and you just
want to you want to bite it, you want to
pinch it. You know, it could be a kitten or
or a puppy or a child, and it's it's really
that the cute has become overpowering that it has to

(39:07):
be counterbalanced with something awful. Huh yeah, so you need
to hand the cute puppy of blood splattered machete like
Jason Doll. It's interesting. I hadn't thought about that, but
in a way that that blood splattered machete is the pinch.
It's the counterbalance here. And I wonder if there are
other examples we could look to and and cute iconography

(39:29):
where we have we have added a little, you know,
some sort of an adult element, some you know, violence
or terror to something, and it does serve to to
balance it out and making and prevent us from going
completely insane. All right, well, we've already looked at a
bunch of monsters from you know, modern fiction and modern
horror and stuff like that. I think we should turn

(39:51):
our attention to traditional folkloric monsters and see if they
make this same transition in our popular culture and and
become cute over time. So let's let's do the case
studies next from Japanese folklore after we come back from
this break. Thank alright, we're back. So obviously the Japanese

(40:13):
have many spirits, many demons, many monsters, just a rich
assortment of yokai to choose from. But we're going to
focus on what you can think of is the big three,
the Kappa, the Only, and the Tingu. Okay, so let's
let's start with the cap Are you you're familiar with
the capa? Yeah? We both read this great paper from

(40:34):
Asian Folklore Studies from by the scholar Michael Dillon Foster
called the Metamorphosis of the Kappa Transformation of folklore to
folklorism in Japan. And this has is just replete with
all these great old Cappa legends. This is a fun
monster despite the fact that in its original incarnation it

(40:55):
was not cute. It was a nasty, creepy, gross, horrific
little demon. Yeah, it's hard to really come up with
a creepier, grosser, just more nefarious monster than this. Like
in a way, it rivals what we were talking about
with Freddie, the original Freddy Krueger, like something that's just
like a weak, evil thing that has to in Freddie's case,

(41:18):
prey on children in their dreams of while they're sleeping.
And likewise, the Kappa is essentially a drowning monster. It's
a it's a monster that is that serves as a
as a warning and a signifier of the risks of
swimming or swimming alone. Uh you know, you know a
pond or a river, or even walking by a river,

(41:39):
the inherent danger of water or using a toilet. I mean,
it'll get you anywhere that's wet. Oh, it will get
you too. So the Kappa also known as Kawako or
the child of the River. Um. Yeah, it's essentially a
Japanese manifestation of drowning fierce particularly young children. And it's
signature hybridity because you're gonna find this hybrid nature in
any monster for much and certainly in the three we're

(42:01):
looking at here, is that it's essentially a tortoise with
a monkey's head, or it's like a monkey that has
scales on it as well, maybe webbed fingers. And some
accounts also go in an otter direction by making it hairy,
but that will make it cute, right, Well, depends on
the otter otters are. They're not as cute as I think.

(42:21):
It depends on the otter. Like the giant otter. If
you've ever seen like a giant I think it's an
Amazonian river otter. They look rather hellish. And if you
actually study like the mating behavior of otters, like, they're
all pretty gross, Like there's a lot of violence in
their mating, horrible face chewing, that sort of thing. Yeah,
But in the case of the of the Kappa here,

(42:44):
it's other most notable feature is a small depression in
the top of its skull called a sara, which contains
a fluid that serves as its life force. And we'll
get we'll get back to the implications of that in
a second. So if this were like a low budget
horror movie, it would be Cuphead, I guess. Yeah, So
the capa draws people and animals into water, where they

(43:06):
devour their prey and or drink their blood or their
life essence. They're also big sumo fans, so they might
be sport of suma. Yes, they love sumo wrestling, and
they might try and wrestle you. And there are there
at least eight regional variations on the capa, and most
of what we know of them comes from early twentieth
century folklorus and or amateur collectors. But if you want

(43:28):
to avoid the kappa, there are three ways. One don't
go where they are cappas, so there's a big one,
you know, don't go near the water at all. Or
you can befriend them by bringing a cucumber. And stories
vary because they like cucumbers, but stories vary on whether
eating a cucumber prior to swimming will attract or repel
the monster. Now, they like cucumbers, but they don't like gourds.

(43:50):
That's right, gourd's will repel them. And there's there's some
interesting material in the in the paper here that gets
into exactly like what that means, the symbolic meaning like
the fault cucumber and an arguably yawnick gord, so it's
it gets heavy. It's a great paper uh. And then finally,
you can make a low bow to the Kappa, especially

(44:12):
if it's challenging you to assume a wrestling match. Uh.
And this will re force it to respond in kind,
so it'll dump its own life force out onto the ground.
Cuphead is tricked. Yeah, I think this is fascinating because
this may be the only monster they can be slain
through adequate alone. It's proper Japanese adequate and you will
defeat it. Yeah. And this does seem to make it

(44:33):
not quite as you know, absolutely horrific as some other monsters. Now,
they're horrific qualities to it, but the fact that you
can so easily trick it and uh, in the fact
that it seems bound by some standards of politeness does
sort of undercut its original horror. Maybe yeah, yeah, a
little bit. But then again, you also have to look

(44:55):
at this in any monster and realize that it's it's
a it's not occurring in one place at one time.
It's their various traditions, various versions of it. So you
can easily see some somebody comes along like this monster
sounds horrible. This monster needs rules to keep it in place,
and these are the cultural rules that will keep the
monster at bay um. Now, if you're thinking to yourself

(45:19):
with the cop that competence sound that monstrous? So it
you know, so it drowns or drains a few children,
Well wait for this, because Foster in his paper points
how quote not only does the Kappa have a penchant
for pulling both children and adults into the water, but
it often does this in order to steal the liver,
a feat it achieves by reaching its arm up through

(45:39):
the victims anus to snatch the desired organ. Yes, you
heard that right, folks. It will steal your liver through
your anus. And to do that it gets worse. Uh.
In order to steal the liver, it has to essentially
uncork the human anus by removing the non existent organ
known as a sharik o dama quote a ball once

(46:01):
thought to be the mouth of the anus. This is
maybe something we should do an entire episode on someday.
Is all of the non existent human organs people used
to believe existed. That would be That would be good.
Let's let's let's remember that one for later. Uh. Now,
you're probably wondering, well, why why would they make this up?
Point is there there has to be a reason to

(46:21):
make up this organ and like clearly you can you
can inspect yourself and realize that there's no cork organ
in your anus. But the grim reality here is that
you have a drowning victim. A drowning victim is found
and they may have a quote open anus due to
the unclenched sphincter muscles. And this this falls in line,

(46:43):
of course with the Coppage role as a monster of drowning.
So you find this this body and here it is,
there's something peculiar about it. It's anus does not look
like a living person's anus. But wouldn't this be the
case with any dead person, not just somebody who drowned. Yeah,
and that's something that that Foster rings up. However, my
read on it though, is that if you're dealing with

(47:05):
people who have drowned, I feel like there's a higher
possibility that that body is found nude or mostly nude
since it was swimming, whereas bodies in other situations may
be covered with clothing and then therefore less susceptible to
susceptible to this kind of folkloric exploration of what is happening. Okay,

(47:26):
but it's not just going to pull you into the
river or the lake or whatever. The Kappa also haunts toilets.
That's right. It may wait until you are vulnerable while
pooping or peeing, perhaps near the water, and it is
it is ready to attack the buttocks and hips. According
to Foster, um so it's it's not only a murderous creature,

(47:48):
it's a creature of profound sexual violence as well. Like it.
It's it's part of its design, this Kappa. That's just
how monstrous it is. It's it's very much like the
Fredy Krueger. Like the Kappa and Freddie are essentially cut
from the same mold, right, not just threatening, but really gross.
So how do we get from from this to cute?
You're probably wondering? Well, As as as Foster explores in

(48:11):
his paper, by by the nineteen sixties, folk belief in
the creature it all but vanished, and it had become
a quote clean cute creature, used as a symbol of tourism,
of commerce, of clean water, and even as a symbol
of village and national identity. Huh. And he says that
this falls in line with Hans Moser's two notion of folkloreism,
in which an existing folklore is taken out of context

(48:33):
and altered or invented for a specific purpose. And of
course media and commerce play a heavy role in this. Now,
I thought this was interesting because I wondered about this
concept of folklorism and the idea is that someone would
take existing folklore and change it, or invent new folklore,
or or manipulated take it out of context for some

(48:56):
kind of intentional, conscious purpose. But it makes me wonder, um,
how is that different from the way in which bits
of folklore are are originally created? Like why, It's almost
as if assuming that folklore um is arises unconsciously out

(49:16):
of the spirit of the people, and that when people
consciously manipulate folklore, that's a different kind of thing. I mean,
I I sort of wonder to what extent the things
we think of as folklore the original stories are consciously created,
are they not? Well? I mean, it comes back to
the whole rules thing I said earlier, like imagining someone
or multiple people coming wrong and tweaking an existing legend

(49:40):
or folklore in order to convey a point or to
convey a slightly different point. Yeah, um, and then and
then likewise, I mean, yeah, there's there's one example that
Foster points out, and this is from the Edo periods.
This was sixteen o three to eighteen sixty eight Japanese history.
And in this case, apparently you had a doctor who

(50:01):
used a story about a Kappa as a way to
promote his business. The idea being that this is the
case with a lot of these monsters. They have some
sort of hidden knowledge or hidden powers that a crafty
individual can trick them out of. And so this doctor
learned some i think a bone setting uh technique from
the Kappa, and he basically put that on his calling card.

(50:23):
If you're gonna go to the doctor, then go to
the go to you know, go to doctor Kappa touched
and he will he will use his mystical abilities to
heal you, which is essentially a marketing ploy. So keep
all that in mind. But basically what happens is, Yeah,
after a while, people have forgotten about the Kappa, Like
there's there's not a lot of there's no longer any

(50:44):
belief in it. People are not reporting sightings of the
Kappa and uh, and then you end up going with
through several waves of sort of you know, the Kappa renaissance,
where people rediscover it and they start using it in
new ways um and uh and and this is inevitably
going to involve outsiders crafting it. That's the argument here,

(51:04):
is that the cap Is is a creature of the
rural areas. It is a creature of the people of
the rural people, what's essentially kind of a peasant monster.
But then you're going to have people that are cut
off from all of that. Essentially, you're gonna city folk
come along, take the Cappa minuth, reinvent it, reutilize it,
and then after a while, like no one's connected to

(51:25):
it back in the rural areas anymore, so they take
it back. They take this this re reformed version of
the Kappa, and then what do they do with it, Well,
they sort of turned it into a cultural mascot. It
makes me think of it. Have you ever seen the
tourism materials that are sent out by the Iceland Tourism
Board or whatever it is that promote the fact that

(51:48):
people in Iceland believe in the fairies, the hidden folk,
you know, the secret other world, the hidden folk that
live or believe in elves and stuff like that. I
don't know to what extent it is true that that
many people in Iceland literally believe the fairies are there.
I know some people probably do, but I doubt it
is true in a literal sense to the extent to

(52:10):
which it's promoted. But it does seem to be a
thing that is Uh, it's a rumor that's spread to
bring people to Iceland for tourism, because isn't that cute
people there believe in elves or believe in hidden folk Yeah,
forgetting of of course the fact that belief in hidden
forces often in many cases can have pretty horrifying real
world results. But is this it is a sanitized version

(52:33):
of it and uh. And Foster points out that what
what you have here is that you have a sanitized
monster that was you that ends up being used to
promote a sanitized notion of rural life in Japan. And
he says that the craziest thing is that quote. Had
the Kappa not been snatched up by the mechanism of folklorism,
it most likely would have died or survived only as

(52:55):
a museum relicant collections of folklore. Folklorism change, in other
kept the monster alive. Wow, So this conscious manipulation of
the folklore is the only reason the folklore really stays prominent. Yeah, well,
like with Freddie, we can go back to Freddie and say, yeah,
you can bemoan the fact that this, this, this horrifying

(53:15):
thing from the first film was kind of killed by
this subsequent incarnation. But if Freddie. Don't know how many
people really that fact. But I see what you're saying.
But certainly like that's how it survived. It grew into
the shape and the size that was sustained by the culture.
Freddie became the Freddie that uh, that that that we needed,

(53:36):
that that that was essential apparently too modern Western living, right,
or maybe not the Freddie we need, but the Freddy
we deserve. Okay, So how about another monster from Japanese folklore,
the One? Oh yeah, so we read another paper about
this called the Transformation of the One from the frightening

(53:58):
and diabolical to the cute and sexy. And this is
by a Japanese scholar named Nariko T. Rider, also in
the journal Asian Folklore Studies, and this is from two
thousand three. So writer's paper is really interesting. It charts
a very very similar arc to what we talked about
with the Kappa, this folklore monster transforming into something that's
different in modern twentieth century pop culture. The Only appear

(54:22):
in Japanese literature and folklore going back to ancient times,
and the Only are generally these large, disgusting, shape shifting
monsters with one or more horns on the head. They
wear tiger skinned garments, and they like to eat human flesh.
Other common powers include flight and the ability to shoot lightning.

(54:42):
And they're they're sort of different breeds of ony, right, Yeah,
they're they're basically two varieties. There's like the terrestrial one
in the infernal Oi and the infernal Only is there
to drag you to hew at the moment of your
death if you were in fact deserving of one of
the hell's. Yeah. So first, let's look at the old
vision of the Only before they were, before they were

(55:03):
tamed or domesticated like the Let's look at their wolf
like Canada ancestor so. The scholar Ishibashi Gaha argues that
the Japanese Only concept evolved from a previous type of
spirit or monster, the yomotsushi kome, which is literally fearful
creatures of the Netherland, and these appear as early as

(55:23):
the Japanese creation myth known as the kojiki. So in
the first known Japanese language dictionary, compiled sometime around the
year nine thirty c e Only is defined as quote
hiding behind things, not wishing to appear. It is a
spirit or soul of the dead. So in this earlier vision,
it's more of a spirit I mean. And there are

(55:45):
these different categories of of Japanese folkloric beings. They're you know,
more like the kami, you know, the deities, and then
there are the yokai, which are more like the monsters. Uh.
And it was during the medieval period in Japan that
the only came a major part of popular folklore. In
this classical monster form that we first introduced, common only

(56:06):
features in the medieval folklore are going to include some
of what we've already described, things like one or more
horns on the head, skin colors like red or blue
or black or yellow, a third eye in the forehead,
carrying an iron mace as a weapon, wearing a tiger
skin loincloth, and the fact that they're usually male, but

(56:29):
not always and only were these horrific demon monsters that
people believe to exist in the world, kidnapping people, especially
young women, drinking their blood, eating their flesh. But they
also seemed to be this useful cultural concept. In the
words of a scholar named Kamatsu that that Rider sites
in her paper many only were quote people who had

(56:50):
different customs or lived beyond the reach of the emperor's control.
And you can see this in the way that only
were deployed in Japanese Imperial proper ganda during World War Two,
which was depicting enemies of the states such as Winston
Churchill or f DR or the Chinese leader Shang Kai
Scheck as one. And it's common, of course during war

(57:12):
to motivate your populace against the enemy by characterizing them
as devils of some sort. Yeah, we see plenty of
examples of that in Western countries as well during the
same time period. Absolutely. Yeah. But apparently this this cultural
inclusion and exclusion tactic follows the One Monster specifically deep
into history. So a few stories about the only One

(57:33):
story appears in the tenth century CE narrative Tales of
the say, and it goes like this, you got a
man and he falls in love with a woman of
high social status, and he kidnaps her and they're fleeing
in the night and there's a thunderstorm. So the man
decides they should take shelter at a ruined building near
the Akuta River, and the woman goes inside the building

(57:55):
for shelter, and the man stands guard at the door
all night. But when the woman as alone inside and
only appears and it eats her in a single bite,
that's gonna be a big own here, right, She screams
when the one they're eating her, but the man standing
guard doesn't hear her because of the thunder, and this
portrays this sort of alliance between the one and these

(58:18):
powerful elemental forces like lightning. Storms. Owning are sometimes said
to be able to shoot lightning. Now. Another story is
contained in a ninth century collection called the Nihone Ryuiki,
and the story translates to on a woman devoured by
an ony. So at the time the Emperor Shomu reigned,
a rich family in Yamato Province had this beautiful daughter

(58:40):
and lots of men wanted to marry her, but she
was like nah, not interested, until a suitor shows up
with unbelievably extravagant gifts to win her over, including three
carriages full of silk, so she accepts his marriage proposal,
and on the wedding night, the newlyweds stay in the
house of the bride's parents. The woman's parents hear her

(59:02):
crying out in pain during the night, but they don't
do anything about it, and when her mother enters the
bride in the groom's bedroom in the morning, all that's
left is her daughter's head and a single finger, and
the rest has been eaten by a shape shifting one
which apparently appeared in the form of a handsome young man.
And this is evidence early on that they only have

(59:22):
this power of shape shifting. One of the most common things,
like very often in other stories, only would appear as
beautiful women in order to seduce men, and then they
would turn into onny and try to devour them or
kill them or something. Someone should do a version of
the werewolf game with one their perfect you know, that
would be perfect on. Yeah, there are only among us, Okay,

(59:46):
so how do the only become cute? Yeah? Because it's
like with the cap of this sounds pretty monstrous and horrific.
This is like a standard like you know, woman eating
ogre here, how does it become a cute thing. Well,
writer cites several example of how only have become cute
and modern Japan on a very similar time scale to
what we talked about with the Kappa, you know, the
Kappa especially having these cute incarnations in the second half

(01:00:08):
of the twentieth century, especially around the nineteen seventies. One
example of cute only that rider sites is the Loom Invader.
So in nineteen seventy eight, the Japanese manga artist Rumiko
Takahashi created this incredibly popular series called urus say Yatsura,
which translates literally into something like those obnoxious aliens, and

(01:00:33):
beginning in the nineteen eighties, it was adapted into a
TV series, films, and a bunch of other spinoff media.
And the premise is that there's a group of ony
from outer space that arrive on Earth, sort of blending
ony folklore with these alien invasion stories that started to
become popular in the middle of the twentieth century. And
one of these invaders is an only called Loom, who

(01:00:55):
at first is part of this invasion force, but somehow
she ends up becoming the the loving, into voted wife
of a lecherous teenage boy on earth. Unlike the Only
from medieval folklore, Lum is not overtly monstrous. Instead, she's
represented primarily as cute and through overtly eroticized characteristics. In short,
she's depicted as as she's supposed to be sexy and

(01:01:18):
Loom has these subtle signs pointing toward the traditional Only.
For example, Only usually have horns. Loum has these couple
of diminutive horns on top of her head. She sometimes
seems to have fangs and other indications of a cannibalistic nature.
She seems to have the power to shoot lightning, which
is associated with some only legend. She can fly like

(01:01:40):
the One and Only are often depicted. I mentioned earlier
as males wearing a tiger skin loincloth. Loum wears a
tiger skin bikini. I was talking with our coworker, Lauren Vogelbaum,
one of the hosts of food Stuff, another podcast in
the house Touff Works Network. You should check out if
you enjoy food and all things uh at all and imbibable.

(01:02:01):
But I was talking to her about this because I
know she is an insightful consumer of manga, and she
pointed out that there are actually plenty of other anime
and manga characters that display this trend of taking a
traditional monster and making it cute or making it sexy
or both. And one example she mentioned was a manga
series known as Sayuki, in which the main characters are

(01:02:22):
the monkey King character and his demon companions, but they
are rendered as cute boys. These are these like attractive
young men, sort of like an you know, manga boy
band um, but a demonic one, and they are essentially
a male parallel to the cute and sexualized only we
see in Loom. But as with the Kappa, all of

(01:02:43):
this with the on E comes down to like the
revitalization of of rural areas. Right. Oh, well that's another
aspect of it too. Yeah, so you've got this stuff
in mass media, but then you've also got like we
saw with the Kappa being used as some kind of
a rural mascot for a town or a village. Of
the town revitalization movement is another thing that writer points
out is a place that the only re entered the

(01:03:04):
modern consciousness and kind of metamorphose into something much sweeter.
So there's this movement, the town revitalization movement in Japanese
I think it's maki Okashi and uh so in the
same way that the Kappa was embraced as a local mascot,
it seems to only have been as well. And writer
cites these examples the Oemachi in Kyoto, which is located

(01:03:25):
near Mount o A. This is the traditional setting of
a story called the Shooting Doji, which is about this
band of one that live in the mountains, and they're
doing their owny thing. You know, they're kidnapping and eating locals,
especially local maidens. They'll eat their flesh and drink their
blood until some warriors infiltrate the only hideout and kill
all the only and writer writes that at the time

(01:03:47):
of this paper, this town with the original setting near
the Shooting Doji, the town is facing a depopulation crisis,
with the population essentially growing old and younger people not
replacing them, and one way the rest sents apparently sought
to revitalize the town was to embrace the only legend
and the imagery in order to attract interest and tourists.

(01:04:08):
So they developed these only related legends and sites. They
got an one museum, so a creature that would have
once caused unspeakable terror is now this fun attraction to
draw people and money. It's kind of like the small
town kid, uh you know, makes good, he leaves the
small town, makes it big, and then it's just invited
back in and becomes a hero, even though they kind

(01:04:29):
of treated him like dirt to begin with. Yeah, well,
it also sort of reminds me of what you might
see and say, Salem, Massachusetts, where originally you had the
fear of witchcraft, which was a genuine panic that terrified
people and led to deaths, and now it's more to
it's embraced in this kitchy way, like witches have become
a cute part of Salem's identity as a town. So

(01:04:49):
they love which museums and which souvenirs and stuff like that,
despite the horrifying reality of the essential like human monstrosity
of the whole situation exactly. So what can we take
away from this example, Well, writer has got some ideas.
So we've got these two different things I mentioned, the cute,
non threatening and eroticized one that appear in Japanese cartoons
and the embracing of one folklore as an economic and

(01:05:10):
tourism draw. And writer writes that much of the art
and entertainment in Japan still views the one as evil
and terrifying beings, like it's not all cute only now.
She gives the example of the film Dreams by Kasa,
and one of the stories in this movie apparently tells
the story of humans who were turned into only by

(01:05:32):
a nuclear blast. Oh man, I vaguely remember that. I
mainly remember the space section of it. Yeah, not so
much the only to go back and watch it. It's
a horrifying idea. But now we also have these only
with inherent aspects of harmlessness cuteness. The the eroticized aspects
are the ones that are simply fun and familiar, like
the witches now and she seems to think that this

(01:05:53):
is an outgrowth of Japan's post war economic transformation. In
other words, horrifying folk belief and monsters don't really make
you the big bucks, but apparently cute, harmless, fun and
familiar monsters can bring massive economic dividends. Capitalistic folklorism in
the sense that we explored in that previous paper folklorism
the manipulation of folklore seems to be directly at work

(01:06:17):
in writer's point of view, but it also sort of
makes me wonder why monsters in the first place, Like,
if it's simply that cute, harmless or sexy characters and
imagery command more economic power, why why isn't it just
that we're seeing new characters of this type created, Like
why are traditionally horrifying and disgusting monsters being transformed into

(01:06:42):
these cute or sexy or otherwise harmless versions. Well, I
wonder if part of it is that there is perhaps
even subconsciously it's it's an interaction with a monstrous figure
that had power over us and maybe still has power
overs And by making it cute, you are You're you're
making it harmless, You're taking the punch out of this
monstrous creature. You're it's it's like laughing in the face

(01:07:05):
of horror. Well, it almost makes me wonder if this
transformation is an outgrowth of the of the skepticism and
secularization of the twentieth century, Like, as people tend to
believe less literally in demons, monsters and devils, would we
tend to take them less seriously as genuine threats? I mean,
obviously we would. And if we think that there's no

(01:07:27):
genuine monster danger to warn against, what prevents us from
stripping the fear inducing elements out of the monster folklore. Uh?
Is it a thing we do simply because we can?
Does that make sense? Like if in the past people
didn't make the monsters harmless because they believed that you
genuinely had to understand that these monsters were dangerous. As

(01:07:48):
soon as we stopped taking monster legends literally, then we
had the power to render them to defang them. Yeah,
I think I would buy that. It sounds like a
good read hunt it. Yeah, But there's an other thing
that I wonder about is like, could it represent an
actual direct rebuke of the past, kind of a you know,
a middle finger to the superstition that produced belief in

(01:08:10):
monsters throughout you know, every culture in the history of humanity. Yeah.
I mean it's because we've touched on this a number
of times when we've talked about older ideas, my mythologies, religion,
even where it's it's easy to take a modern approach
and say, oh, well, those people were stupid. Look at
the things they believed in. Monsters in the woods eating you, um,
you know, some sort of strange turtle creature reaching up

(01:08:31):
your anus after your liver um. But when you do
when you begin to dissect these ideas and you put
them in the context of the time, it's not so
simple as to just say, oh, well, these these people
were dumb. No, they weren't stupid. They knew less, and
that's not the same thing, right, I mean, in a way,
they perhaps knew more because they knew to take a
like say a dangerous area or a dangerous uh you know,

(01:08:53):
cultural area and it and assign a monster to it
to toward people away from it, to to key the
curious from getting too close. And children don't go, don't
go near the water's edge because there's a monster there. Yeah.
And even if you you're not up on the reasons
to stay away from the water, like the realistic reasons,
the monster still resonates. And we've actually touched on this
on the podcast in regard to creating potentially creating new monsters,

(01:09:18):
new mythologies to guards, say, places where radioactive waste are deposited. Right,
so you've got high level waste, you know, the really
dangerous stuff stored at a place somewhere on Earth, and
that's gonna be dangerous for literally thousands of years, much
longer than any kind of sign you would probably put up,
would be there, or I mean if you maybe even
made a really durable sign, but yeah, it's gonna outlast

(01:09:40):
almost any measures you put in place to keep people away.
So it's almost like you wish you could come up
with a lasting cultural belief that this place is cursed
and there's a monster that dwells there and there's nothing
of value, and you should just a sticky image that
will drive people away for hundreds of generations. And that, Yeah,
that's exactly what a monster is that of you know,

(01:10:02):
nations fall, empires, fall, laws, fade, signs of warning fall
into the dust, but the monster persevere. And yeah, and
so coming back to how we make the monsters cute,
I'm wondering if it's this secular rebuke, Like is turning
a monster cute an attempt to say even unconsciously, Maybe
not like people do this on purpose, but are they

(01:10:24):
at some level saying there are no demons, devils or
monsters and I'll show you, and they do it by
making the image cute. Is it like sort of the
equivalent of blasphemy, but instead of against the gods, it's
against the monster belief. Yeah, and of course it's dangerous
to rebuke the monster, because no matter how silly you
think it is, no matter how two dimensional the monster

(01:10:46):
might seem, uh, there's probably a lot more going on
there than meets the eyes totally. You know, I was
thinking one other way to clarify what might be happening here.
I don't know, maybe this won't be any additional clarity.
But are there any monsters we can think of that
have not undergone this process where there are no cute
versions of them or almost no cute versions of them,
there's not any pervasive attempt in the culture to make

(01:11:09):
a toothless version of the creature. Well, if we're looking
at Japanese demons, I would say that the tingo is
probably an interesting case of this. Now, that's not to
say they are no cute tingu. You can certainly find them.
I found them just doing image searches for them for
the English word tingu. But you think they're less prevalent.
I'm getting the you know, somebody with more experience with

(01:11:32):
Japanese culture and pop culture can maybe chime in on this,
But it seems like there's less of it. You do
see tingu showing up in video games and manga and
all other forms of media, but they tend to retain
a certain seriousness that is lacking from you know, again,
the Kappa. You don't see Kappa snatching livers out of
anuses as much anymore, but in these cases, the tingoo

(01:11:55):
still tends to retain a certain regal character in a
in a certain dangerous element as well. So I should
probably talk about what the tingoo is though, for anyone
who who is not familiar alright, So the Tingu. They
are a warrior class of monsters who reside in the
mountain forest of Mount to Karama, north of Kyoto, and

(01:12:15):
their hybridity is that of a bird and a man.
Usually they're described as having a humanoid body but with
glowing eyes and a long red beak, and sometimes that
beak is more depicted as a long nose. So I
imagine if you've ever played a video game and there's
a character that seems to have a mask with a
long red nose, that's essentially a tingu. So they have
feathered wings, and they're warlike. They're skilled in martial arts.

(01:12:39):
Humans sometimes seek them out to learn their arts, but
frequently go mad upon encountering them, and then of course
they also have this mischievous side. So if you're if
you're in the mountain woods and you hear something like laughter,
well that might be the laughter of Tingu. If a
tree falls, it might have been taken down by a
Tingu wind. And these examples are from the book by
Hruku waka Ashi, the Seven Tingoo Scrolls. So the thing

(01:13:04):
about the Tingo is that they were you know, they
varied inform, purpose, and even alignment. Uh. There were in
some cases good Tingou, but for the most part, they
were portrayed as uh, especially in medieval Japan, as being evil, vengeful,
chaotic spirits. They were enemies of Buddhism. In some cases
they were falling priests who failed to achieve nirvana, and

(01:13:25):
they were the embodiment of Ma or Mara or obstacles
to Buddhist enlightenment. Now it's worth knowing that they were
different from moral evil in this regard or or aku
and this the Tingu were they were. You can essentially
think of them as obstructionists. Uh, you know they were.
They were there to just try and prevent you from
achieving enlightenment, and you had to battle them in your

(01:13:46):
life to get past them. So they were kind of
serious business, you know, uh, and very high minded monstrous symbols.
And I think that's key to whereas these other examples
were rural monsters, these were kind of the peasant monsters.
The tingu was the thinking man's monster, and I think
that plays into its survival. Yeah, So I wonder if

(01:14:10):
something about the level to which a creature is incorporated
into formalized religion rather than just being a part of
informal folk creature or deity belief. That's that's true because
there are shrines even uh with tingou imagery. So they
were more divine in many respects, and again more more regal,
more a property of the ruling class and the priestly

(01:14:33):
class as well. Um, they were also tied up with
explanations for a lot of serious stuff that was going
on in the medieval period, a lot of the chronic
social disorder and instability. They were. They were symbols of
chaos to explain the rise of the warrior class war
and this the political disunity, uh in what some saw
is the final age of Buddha's teachings at the time.

(01:14:56):
So again, you it's not that you won't find cute
ting you out there or just you know, very pop
culturally uh distilled images of the tingu. But I feel
like you see far less of it. The tingoo still
retains a lot of its original potency. Now that's got
me wondering about other monsters in other traditions around the

(01:15:17):
world and whether the level to which they're incorporated into
the formalized version of the local religion determines how likely
they are to be to be euthanized with cuteness. Yeah,
because you look at Christianity and you you don't see this.
This is not the case with the devil. You see
plenty of cute devils out there, But well, yeah you do.

(01:15:41):
I guess that's right. I mean I was gonna say,
you don't see as many cute demons as you see
like cute vampires and cute werewolves. Yeah, maybe you have
a point there. Maybe there are they are far more
cute of vampires and worlds, and there are acute demons
or some of the more potentially problematic characters. I guess,
like the the Angel of God. How many how many

(01:16:01):
cute angels wrestling humans are there? And I guess you
also have to ask a question like how how many
trolls are there in the culture, Like how many, how
many people were willing to take even you know, sacred
cows and make them cute just for the sheer, you know,
just for the giggles of doing it. Well then again,
I mean, so I think there might be something to
that sort of blasphemy equivalent. It's not blasphemy against the gods,

(01:16:24):
but blasphemy against the monster is a sort of intentional
rebuke and the desire to undercut their perceived power. There
might be something to that, But I don't know if
I really feel that when I, like, if I were
to draw a cute vampire, I don't know if I'd
feel spiteful in doing that. Well, I might just feel
kind of like, oh, that's funny. You can't imagine someone going,

(01:16:47):
get away from me, baby Satan. You have no power
over me. Here, get thee behind me, baby Satan. So
another thing I was talking to Lauren Vogelbaum about was
was about this question of what contributes of the transformation
of terrifying monsters into these cute versions of themselves, And
she made a point that I thought was really interesting.
She said, in the context of Japanese depictions of cute

(01:17:10):
monsters in manga and anime. Um. What if it's the
creeping sense of delayed adulthood and the extension of childhood
that we see in a lot of cultures in the
twentieth century and especially the second half of the twentieth
century and in the twenty first century. I mean, maybe
there are some cultural critics who would come back and say,

(01:17:30):
this is not really a thing, this is one of
those you know, bs trend pieces. But there are a
lot of people who would argue that there is a
sort of creeping infantilism among adults in the in the
Western world especially. I mean, I know you've heard that argument, right, Robert, Yeah, yeah,
I mean, and certainly you we it does seem like
we remain many of us remain children longer. We we don't,

(01:17:55):
you know, give up all of our childish things as
we uh as we become adults, right, we tend to
stay in school longer, we get married later. All of
these things that are traditionally in cultures thought of as
sort of rites of passage to adulthood get like delayed
later and later into life. And so it could be
possible to think about the idea of of the cuteness

(01:18:16):
of monster imagery, uh well, being related to the fact
that children tend to like cute imagery. So could the
transformation into cuteness represent an increasingly in fantalize adult cultures
attempt to make monster folklore more palatable, more cuddly for
those of us who don't want to hack scariness. Yeah,
I think it could very well be the case. And
of course it comes back to the idea too, of

(01:18:37):
cute cuteness and monstrosity being upon the same spectrum, being
within the same dimension. And so there's this. They're interconnected
already anyway, so it's all the more easier to begin
tweaking these images and skewing their meaning. Now, I want
to be clear that I'm not necessarily endorsing the idea
that adults are more infantile than they used to be.

(01:18:59):
I just know that is a theory out there. I'm
not sure if I buy it. I remain agnostic. You know,
one more thing that this makes me think about is
back to our episode on euphemisms. Robert, you remember the
concept of the euphemism treadmill and the dysphemism treadmill. I do, yes,
So the euphemism treadmill is this concept. I can't remember
who came up with it. Was it Stephen Pinker, I believe,

(01:19:21):
So that sounds right, and I'm going to say it's
Stephen Pinker, and I can be the one that's wrong. Essentially,
the idea is that you have a euphemism, which is
a term you introduce to be a polite sort of
illusion word indicate a concept that somehow problematic or offensive
or causes people, you know, like, uh, it's the nice
new word that you say, But eventually that word itself

(01:19:43):
tends to become perceived in the culture as not nice.
So for example, uh, crippled was supposed to be the
nice word for people with disabilities, and then it came
to become a word that you would never want to
call somebody um. And so there's this process us like that,
But then the same thing happens the other way with dysphemisms,

(01:20:04):
with words that we want to use with negative connotations.
So for example, how the word sucks. You know, you
just say, like that movie really sucked. That used to
be an incredibly vulgar and offensive, just nasty thing to say,
and now little kids say it. I mean, it's everywhere
it's lost its power to shock and offend. So you
have to keep inventing new words. And so you're saying, essentially,

(01:20:25):
we have to keep inventing new monsters as well because
the old ones lose their power. I mean, I think
that could to some extent be true. Like uh, that
we are we may be seeing some kind of equivalent
of the dysphamism treadmill with the monsters of old. Over time,
they're just going to lose their power to shock and
offend and they become like the little kids saying sucks,
the little kids running around with cute vampire dolls. And

(01:20:48):
it really it's super hard nowadays with the Internet because
you have like a probably a lag time of just
hours after a film comes out before someone has made
a cute button or a cute T shirt or is
to meme based on that monster. Yeah, it happens immediately
when when there's a new movie, it happens, uh. And
I think it creates a great challenge for say, horror

(01:21:09):
movie creators to make a traditional monster scary. Again, think
about how many recent vampire movies you can think of
that have really scary vampires. They've sort of lost their
power haven't they. Yeah, so if you you just can't
trot off the same vampire over and over again because
nobody's buying it anymore. Right. I mean when Bell Leeghostie
first showed up on screens, he had people screaming in

(01:21:30):
the aisles of theaters. Now you watch it and Bill
Leegostie is great, but he's not scary. Yeah. We often
forget just how how terrifying that performance actually was, and
he is really if you if you look at it
with new eyes, Yeah, especially if you knew that he
would end up in Edward movies. That's true. That's true.
All right, Well, there you have it. We have explored
the monstrous, we've explored the cute, and we have explored

(01:21:53):
the bridge between. I want to know from you out there,
what do you think is going on psychologically culturally? Is
happening when we take these horrifying images and creatures and
make them into cute plush dolls to cuddle with? Why
do we keep doing it? And what effect does it
have on the culture? Yeah? What are your favorite examples
of this process? And what monsters, if any, have not

(01:22:15):
gone cute? Uh? And for how long will they remain
that way? As always you can find us on social media.
We're on Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler, and Instagram. And hey, on Facebook,
we have this wonderful little discussion module you can look up.
It's a group. You can join it and you can
chat with the other folks who listen to the show,
as well as the host themselves. And uh hey, also

(01:22:36):
Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. That's the mother ship.
That's we'll find all the episodes going back to the
beginning of time. And if you want to get in
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any other, you can always email us at blow the
Mind at how stuff Works dot com for more on

(01:23:00):
this and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff
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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}From the Vault: Monstrosity/Cuteness Spectrum