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...