The Digital Bestiary: Cu Chulainn

Stephen Reid (Left) - J.C. Leyendecker (Right)

    Cu Chulainn is the most popularly invoked name from the great mythological cycles of Ireland, although popular culture does not extract images from the Irish myths with much frequency except to provide names to weapons in JRPGs or for exceptionally dangerous seeming roller coasters. His training, heroic exploits, and death form the major part of the Ulster Cycle, concentrated primarily in the epic Táin Bó Cúailnge, and he remains one of the principal culture heroes to emerge from the region beside his counterpart in the Fenian cycle, Finn McCool. 

The Lost Child (2017)

The Lost Child, PS Vita/PS4/Nintendo Switch (2017)

    The Lost Child was released to the world on August 24th, 2017. "Something wicked lurks behind the facade of the modern world. Hayato Ibuki, occult journalist, is on the case!" reads a series of captions in the trailer for the English release. "This looks cool, I got Shinigami Tensei wibes from this" reads a comment on that same video. Absolutely. 

    A budget dungeon-crawler developed according to the specifications of the PlayStation Vita and released as the window of viability for games of this lineage had closed, The Lost Child follows on the genealogy of such works that have steadily emerged since the Japanese 'occult boom' some six decades prior, and signifies an especially diluted form of the urban-occult fantasy exemplified by the Megami Tensei series. Actually playing this game is like being whipped in the face with banality, but there is a strange specificity of context, with little to no documentation in English, that demands closer examination.

Wild Arms (1996) - A Brief Taxonomy of Demonkind

The Quarter Knights of Wild Arms - Not discussed in this article because they all have names like "Boomerang" and "Zed"

    Wild Arms is less celebrated for its occult themes than for other dominant aesthetic influences. But the influence of the Western is faint in this inaugural entry- it manifests in the periphery, in several tracks adapted from the oeuvre of Enrico Morricone, as a selection of characters in period-attire, or in the presence of native caricatures that forgoe the unfortunate 'beastman' allegory typical of the genre. Wild Arms is certainly of its era in all other facets, deriving the bulk of its narrative and aesthetic conventions from such touchstones as Castle in the Sky, Nadia, Record of Lodoss War, and Future Boy Conan. However, it puts forth one influence to a greater extent than many of its contemporaries: the Western Esoteric tradition.

Nature and Religion in The Green Knight

The Green Knight, Dir. David Lowery, 2021

     In The Green Knight, nature and the religion of medieval Europe are uneasy bedfellows. Christianity comes to signify all of civilization in a negative-conceptual sense- in the sense that human society is an organism that exists at variance with the earth, like something feebly transposed over the vastness of the world. This feeling is realized in Camelot, a loose confederation of squalid pastures and masonry, ruled by a monarch whose infirmity* reflects the ailing character and fallibility of his realm. Structures that conceal their own decrepitude, a host of ineffectual symbols, a world that has entered upon a long senescence. We are ushered in by an image of Gawain as saint, scepter and globe in hand, head flanked by the solar disc, consumed in fire. This is a twin image: Gawain will enter the flame and die to the world and live and be transformed, but under the auspices of a self-conscious iconoclasm.