A Certain Tentacled One Must Be Stirring...

[ecosophia]

Okay, this is starting to get genuinely weird. 

A friend who keeps track of all kinds of oddities in Asian culture forwarded me a link to a popular manga series by artist Iida Pochi. It's titled Ane Naru Mono, The Elder Sister-Like One in English; the main character is an orphan named Yuu who lost his parents in a car crash, has no siblings or close friends, and has been shuffled around from one foster home to another. Then one day -- I'm not sure if there's an eldritch tome involved or not -- he encounters the Great Old One Shub-Niggurath, the Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young. She grants him one wish, and -- this is manga, you know what's coming -- he wishes that she was his big sister. 

So the Black Goat of the Woods becomes his big sister. I gather the result is more or less what happens when you mash up "The Dunwich Horror" with Oh My Goddess, or something not too far from that. 

This has me scratching my head because the main character in my fantasy series The Weird of Hali is also an orphan with no siblings, who lost his parents in a car crash, and who ends up in an (admittedly more adult) relationship with a daughter of the Black Goat of the Woods. What's more, the first volume of The Weird of Hali -- in which all this is laid out -- basically downloaded itself into my head in the autumn of 2014 and got written in eight frenzied weeks of typing. Ane Naru Mono first appeared in print in March 2016. 

It's rather uncannily reminiscent of Lovecraft's story "The Call of Cthulhu," in which the emergence of the drowned corpse-city of R'lyeh and its most famous and tentacular resident is heralded by strange dreams that haunt artists, writers, and poets, and give rise to all kinds of strange paintings and the like. Somehow the idea of standing Lovecraft on his head and presenting his eldritch horrors in a sympathetic light -- as in, your big sister or your well-disposed mother-in-law -- seems to be surfacing in a lot of heads just now. It makes me wonder what's stirring in the deep places of the collective unconscious...

Comments

Another Japanese work

[packshaud]

Haiyore! Nyaruko-san, a light novel series inspired on the Cthulhu mythos, was published between April 2009 and March 2014. You can read about it in Wikipedia.
It is interesting that it ended shortly before you got inspiration for your book.

Edit:
The characters are aliens, and many of them are portrayed sympathetically--mostly, some are annoying at worst, though some are actual Eldritch horrors. It is more like Oh My Goddess!, in which the characters come to live and interact with the protagonist.

Re: Another Japanese work

[ecosophia]

I'd heard of that! I'd gotten the impression, though, that it simply borrowed the names of some Lovecraftian entities and applied them to characters in one of the standard manga plots. Clearly I should take another look.

Abandonment in fiction and psyche

[(Anonymous)]

Part of what you outline seems a lot like the basic desperate state of abandonment that starts out the heroic takes of Batman, Superman, etc. (Can you imagine those guys going home to Ma, or a Mother-in-Law?)
Abandonment and alienation have been themes in pop culture and "high brow" culture for a long time (cf. "Entfremdung" in German lit, 20th C..)

Re: Abandonment in fiction and psyche

[ecosophia]

That's certainly part of it. In The Weird of Hali, Owen's status as an orphan (to the extent that it didn't just emerge from the character) was a tactical decision -- it was a lot easier to see him integrating himself into the Eldritch-American community, so to speak, if he didn't have living family members and really felt the lack. Still, you're right that it's a common theme.

[(Anonymous)]

If only we could examine the collective unconscious to find out... One of the more frustrating characteristics of the unconsciousness(es) generally, in my opinion, is the inability to do so in any coherent manner.

But I'll have to ask my daughter about Ane Naru Mono. She is very much a manga-phile (as in, cosplay and cons) and tuned in to that sort of thing.

--David BTL

[ecosophia]

No argument there. I'll look forward to hearing what your daughter has to say!

[(Anonymous)]

That’s just fantastic!

Maybe the the black-goat and baphomet are having a moment of bonding.

[ecosophia]

Well, according to the canon, the Black Goat of the Woods is also the Black Ram with a Thousand Ewes -- fertility deities are like that -- and so it's by no means impossible that she is Baphomet...

Something's taking shape (oh, the horror!)

[(Anonymous)]

Truly fascinating, JMG! The whole phenomenon of the “collective unconscious” is mysterious and calls to question how much of it is culture-specific (for example, the idea of the “wheel” as a technology never caught on in the pre-Columbian Americas even though it was prevalent in Eurasian cultures and therefore the collective unconscious there for millennia) and how much is cross-cultural (although today, with the dominance of Western culture and literature globally even countries with strong cultural traditions of their own, like Japan, cannot be considered to be culturally independent). Something is definitely taking shape… of what, it is probably still too early to tell!

Ron M

Re: Something's taking shape (oh, the horror!)

[ecosophia]

In Jungian theory, the unconscious is like a tree, with the collective unconscious embracing all of humanity as the trunk, and then dividing up from there into racial, ethnic/national, and family unconsciousnesses as limbs, branches, and twigs respectively, and the personal unconscious as the stem on which the leaf of the individual consciousness flutters. So the question with anything emerging from the unconscious is just how far down the tree it has its origin.

The stars are coming right!

[(Anonymous)]

Loving the Hali series!

I’ve been digging through every take on Lovecraft from the esoteric end of things from the last decade or so. Not being of the paranoid mindset I have thoroughly enjoyed your take. Other authors are hung up on the horror of it all but being an “excitable Spaniard” I suppose I’m more susceptible to the dark influence of the great old ones. ;)

-RM

Re: The stars are coming right!

[ecosophia]

Delighted to hear it.

I'm not a horror fan, at all -- I like fantasy, and I love weird fantasy, but horror just doesn't turn my crank. One of the reasons I find Lovecraft so delightful is that his horrors don't frighten me in the least, so I can enjoy him as a fantasist, which he was -- one of the few truly great American fantasists of the first half of the twentieth century, in fact.

Shoggoths

[(Anonymous)]

In one of Larry Correia's Monster Hunter novels I read recently, a character had befriended a shoggoth as a child. I won't say more, as I don't want to spoil the story, but I think this goes well with your post. Hmmh...

Chris K.

Re: Shoggoths

[ecosophia]

Good heavens. The plot of my soon-to-be-published novel The Shoggoth Concerto revolves around a young woman who befriends a shoggoth, and friendly interactions between children and shoggoths -- in this case, shoggoth broodlings -- play a role in its not-yet-finished sequel, The Nyogtha Variations. The stars must be coming right, or something.

[amritarosa]

Interesting.

This strikes a synchronicity with some of my recent meditations- I have been examining my motives for seeking relationship with deity. One thing that came up for me, which I imagine is probably not uncommon at all, is that part of me is seeking a Wise, Strong Mother. Or elder sister, or aunt. Mainly because I never had one of those, and have for the most part been the more mature one in my often-troubled relationship with my own mother.

It makes sense to me that I and others, even fictional characters, would reach out to the divine powers seeking relationship to satisfy some very human needs.

Shub-Ne'hurath and Tsaathoggua seem to me to be perfectly reasonable candidates :) I welcome these mysterious and synchronous eldritch stirrings! More!

[ecosophia]

I think that's very common. One of my oddities is that I don't like to relate to deities in that kind of familial fashion or, really, in any fashion that derives from human relationships. I suspect that's a result of my Asperger's syndrome -- when I was a kid, pretty much every interaction with another human being was basically a test I was guaranteed to fail, with no way of even finding out which things I'd gotten wrong. Nonhuman things weren't like that, and I suspect that's why I gravitated toward Druid nature worship.

But I know most people don't have that kind of relationship, either with people or with deities...

[isabelcooper]

Interesting--one of the things that I've realized through conversation on the subject is that, despite/because of the fact that I have a perfectly good but not overly emotional/nurturing relationship* with my mother, the focus on maternity and mother goddesses among a lot of pagan subcultures leaves me pretty cold, and likewise, to a lesser extent (as they don't get emphasized as much in aforesaid circles) with father-figure gods.

On the other hand, one of my patrons is Aphrodite, and if there's a human equivalent for her relationship to me, it's "patient and cool older sister"--not the one who has a maternal role, but the one who does your hair before dates and helps you hide the cigarettes from Mom and Dad--which, as the older child with a close-in-age family, I never got to have or be.

(And Hermes, my other patron, is a natural for Quick-Witted Androgynous Guy With Dubious Morals That You Want To Impress--I've known quite a few of the mortal equivalent, but the appeal never really gets old there. :P)

Anyhow, a neat source of contemplation!

* Not in any harmful or harmed way, but nobody in my family is particularly touchy-feely. Love is like the sun: it's there, that's great, we need it, but looking directly at it for a long time is a Bad Idea.

[robertmathiesen]

Such "coincidences" seem not to be all that rare in the history of literature and the history of religion; even in the history of scientific discoveries they occur from time to time. They suggest to me that Terry Pratchett's Theory of Narrative Causality [in the opening pages of his "Witches Abroad," 1991] should be taken far more seriously that Sir Terry himself appears to take it--at least, than he seems to take it in public.

Briefly stated, the Theory of Narrative Causality claims that Stories exist independently of any conscious or sentient being who might tell them and any language in which they might be told. They have existed since the very beginning of time, if not before. They are life-forms in their own right. More powerful Stories survive and grow fat; less powerful Stories perish as the more powerful ones batten on them.

Stories are nourished by being told and retold. Also, "Stories etch grooves deep enough for people to follow in the same way that water follows certain paths down a mountainside." Indeed, they are "a parasitical life-form, warping lives in the service only of the story itself"--including human lives, too.

There are echoes of Dion Fortune's "The Cosmic Doctrine" here, though the emphasis is not quite the same. Pratchett's "Stories" and the "grooves" that they etch in narrative space are not all that different from Fortune's "tracks in space" that naturally develop as a cosmos takes shape.

More succinctly, the poet Muriel Rukeyser wrote, "The universe is made of stories, / not of atoms." (This is quoted from her poem, "The Speed of Darkness.")

I am slowly coming to suppose that consciousness might not be the primary material from which matter and energy arise, but that Story is the even more primary material from which consciousness itself first arises, before it can produce such fragile tertiary things as the physical universe.

[tunesmyth]

Robert, what is "Story" in this view, without someone to perceive it? As it precedes consciousness, how can it be a story? Or is it that any change from A to B can be a prime mover for consciousness because the elements that make up state "B" notice on some level a change from state "A"?

[ecosophia]

I recall Charles Fort's argument that human inventions and discoveries are just as much a part of natural cycles as flowers in the spring and falling leaves in autumn: "It steam-engines when it comes steam-engine time." Those natural cycles could certainly be understood as stories.

[isabelcooper]

Oddly enough, I'd just been reading about this one on TVTropes, which has a whole page about similar works called "Did We Just Have Tea With Cthulhu?". I haven't kept close tabs, but I'm pretty sure it's a lot longer these days...

I wonder if more and more people are starting to become okay with the idea of humanity not being the center of the universe. I've seen a lot of stories about either discovering new things about how animals/plants can relate or communicate among themselves or evaluating our relationships with same on their terms. Maybe the central Lovecraft ZOMG HORROR premise (which I've seen best, or most amusingly, summed up as "Somewhere, a squid DOESN'T CARE ABOUT YOU!") is becoming more and more absurd, in the same way that the Oh No Unbridled Sensuality And Foreigners Seducing Our Women aspects of Dracula stopped coming off as scary sometime between the 1950s and whenever Interview came out.

(And since "horrifying monster" to "maybe not that bad, really," to "mysterious romantic interest" was the vampire/werewolf/demon path, you may be well ahead of the trendline there!)

[ecosophia]

Hah! "Somewhere, a squid DOESN'T CARE ABOUT YOU!" is going into my permanent folder of Explanations of Lovecraft, somewhere near "fear of salad."

As for the trendline, though, I did a little looking around and discovered that Ane Naru Mono was originally doujin hentai, i.e., cartoon porn, and readers thought the premise was so cute that the artist created an all-ages version. So we're way past "mysterious romantic interest," into "hot babe with tentacles for hair getting kinky with protagonist" and the like. Compared to which, the portrayals of love affairs in The Weird of Hali and The Shoggoth Concerto are frankly pretty tame...

[isabelcooper]

Also, Ursula Vernon's drawings of Happy Cthulhu are pretty great:

https://www.deviantart.com/ursulav/art/Happy-Cthulhu-54946267
https://www.deviantart.com/ursulav/art/Shoggoth-Jasmine-82247065
https://www.deviantart.com/ursulav/art/Cthulhu-s-Day-Out-86330269

[ecosophia]

They are indeed. An ambition of mine I don't expect ever to be fulfilled is to have at least one of my novels published with an Ursula Vernon cover. The painting of hers that convinced me of this is this one...

https://www.deviantart.com/ursulav/art/Fog-Spirit-261014489

Probably not gonna happen in this incarnation. Still, in the immortal words of Wowbagger the Indefinitely Prolonged, "a being can dream."

[(Anonymous)]

And of course, there's The Shape of Water, an Oscar-winning film about a woman who falls for a fish man. Poor Lovecraft must be spinning, but it's a beautiful film. I know you don't watch movies, so I won't recommend it, but here's a still:

https://cdn1.thr.com/sites/default/files/2017/11/146_sow_2k_stills_171004.1_-_embed_2017.jpg

Marie

(Someone has probably already mentioned this film on this blog, but I searched the archives and didn't find anything.)

[ecosophia]

I don't think anyone has, so thank you for bringing it up. I heard a certain amount about it when it first came out from blogs I visit now and then, and most of them agreed with you.

[(Anonymous)]

We may have to take up a collection to allow our favorite Druid to hire a night comment-approver. You just can’t get these delightful literary discussions anywhere else.

[pretentious_username]

You know, as long as we're on the subject of "things in Japanese anime and manga that seem synchronous with our own experiences", it occurs to me that the reason I keep advising people to pay attention to the anime Puella Magi Madoka Magica is relevant here.

I was the kind of kid who crafted my own mythology when I was younger. (I'm not actually sure how common this is, though it's not that far off the kind of person who writes fanfiction as a teenager?) That mythology included a set of character-gods and -goddesses.

I was rather surprised when I looked at the Madoka Magica main cast (who PMMM fans, possibly more presciently than they know, call the Holy Quintet) and went "I think I know you girls - or at least you girls as fandom sees you - and have for at least half a decade before your show first aired"; they are eerily similar to the five most, let's say, central of my character-goddesses.