As the title indicates, this is an addendum of sorts to my last post, which you can find over here: ["A Terrible Darkness"]. At Ghostlightning‘s (sort-of) request, I’m revisiting Shin Mazinger and the Gothic in light of the thirteenth episode, “First Love?  The Beautiful Lorelei!”

Here’s the “request” I was talking about, culled from Google Reader Shared Items comments (whew):

Yeah this is not a filler ep. This is a love story in the gothic tradition with faithfully (?) Go Nagai moron characters. Right Cuchlann?

[Later]

Cuchlann, yessss! My hunch is on course. Validate it when you’ve done watching the ep!

Well, I watched it, and as you might know, I’m pretty amenable to requests (let the record show the Haibane Renmei debacle was the result of public opinion: ["SF.c Call-In Podcast Poll"], I recently ran a poll determining my next long-term project ["Agenda"], and my very first SF.c post was spurred on by Pontifus’ strong reaction to a throwaway comment I’d made during my application ["An introduction, of sorts" -- with twice the tentacle rape!]).  So away we go!

Really, I’m some sort of magical prognosticating machine.  A machine, I tell you.  Was there an episode with better imagery with which to prove my point?

We’re even seeing corpse-lights, an old standby of the Gothic genre, developed perhaps from the will-o-the-wisps that lead travelers astray?  Anyway, between that, the references to Frankenstein, the resurrection concerns, and so on, this episode is rife with Gothic elements.  Much of the Gothic was set in Germany, actually.

I also noticed a kind of transition, that one could plot through the shift of the Gothic itself.  When Shiro finds out Heinrich is supposed to be dead, he wonders if they’re dealing with a ghost.  Kouji replies that they know what they’re dealing with if something’s come back from the dead, flashing back to Baron Ashura.  The shift from supernatural to scientific (or, dare I say it, SUPER-SCIENTIFIC!) explanations follows the line of the Gothic itself, which moved (generally in a line) from the ghosts of Castle of Otranto to the resurrected piecemeal man of Frankenstein. This could maybe indicate that Shin Mazinger Z is at the head of this progression in its own, GAR-robot way.

And in this very Gothic episode we find Shiro falling in love with the mysterious Lorelei.  Do I even need to warn you, at this point, that we’re dealing with a myth here?  The Loralei (depending on which version you’re reading/hearing, that’s either singular or plural) lured sailors on the Rhine to their death with their beauty and singing; they’re roughly analogous with the Sirens of Greek myth.  Have a wiki link: [->].  Shiro’s in love with her (as much as he can be, I suppose); Lorelei seems to like having him around; her father is a big (evil?) scientist guy in Germany who wants revenge on the Kabuto family.  Good times.  It’s like Romeo & Juliet, but with fewer emo wordplay gags about Rosalind.  If you’re a fan of the old Batman animated series, which went through several iterations, you might be reminded of the amazing episode where Robin, himself a boy about Shiro’s age in the show, falls in love with a cute little girl who turns out to be made from Clayface, though she doesn’t know it.  It’s a really horrifying episode, and I’m left to wonder if the same sort of thing might happen here.

Now to the question at hand:  does this sort of love story jive with the robo-Gothic awesome of SMZ, or is it just (that dreaded word) filler?  I would say yes.  Love stories are the norm in Gothic, be it in the slightly twisted marriage of Theodore and Isabella, the standard, if untrusting, marriage of Emily and Valancourt, or the crazy RAEP of Ambrosio and, uh, any woman he wanders across.  Let’s not get started on the weird shit Victor Frankenstein sees in his dreams.  Freudian readings of the Gothic are still popular for a reason, folks.

One has to wonder if things are going to work out for Shiro.  I do notice that both Loralei and the Gamia robots (objects of Ankokuji’s desperate and dedicated lust) are blondes, while Sayaka is a more typical Asian hair color (which, uh, looking at some images, varies according to version — Brunette-ish).  Does this indicate the “wrongness” of the first two relationships, and the rightness of the third?  Hard to say.  Lorelei shows up in the OP, so I’d hope she’s not just a two-episode-arc-throwaway.  On the other hand, she is the daughter of a crazy scientist who doesn’t have the good grace to be the greatest motherfucking grandpa ever (hint, it’s Juuzo); that’s not bound to end well.  Doomed love affairs are certainly Gothic, but can this relationship tell us anything more about what’s going on in the show?

With the exceptions of any female lieutenants Dr. Hell might be keeping around somewhere and Dr. Hell himself (Shiro could like some hot dude-on-littler-dude action, we don’t know), Shiro has chosen just exactly the worst person in the world to fall in love with.  This is in a family that already has a history of poor emotional states.  Kouji is almost in a perpetual state of vengeance rage, Juuzo labored for years to remedy what he sees as his destruction of his family, and there’s some sort of weird shit going on with the missing segment of the Kabuto family that we’re seeing next episode.  It’s almost as though this is another heritage passed down to the brothers alongside Mazinger Z.  It could also illustrate a kind of familial alienation:  until everything is resolved and the boys make their choices for the future, post-Doctor Hell, this normal world, represented here by cute girls, is verboten.  They can’t take part in all the regular stuff they’re protecting until they figure out what’s going on.  Finally, it represents what they could be giving up.  In becoming either god or devil, Kouji (and to a lesser extent, Shiro) would be leaving behind this world — again, represented here by cute girls.  If you’re going to be a Byronian hero, you don’t exactly get the happy relationship (unless, I suppose, you have a willing sister handy, but even that didn’t go so well).

Further Reading:

The original post by Wally Xie, on which all the comments were made in GRSI: [->]

Really defining “the Gothic” is kind of a rough job.  It started in 1764 when Horace Walpole published a novel called Castle of Otranto. The entire novel supposedly came from a dream Walpole had, in which he saw a giant, armored hand thrusting into a room.  That and more appear in the novel itself.   Since then the genre has become / sucked in a lot of different things.  The essentially realistic romances of Ann Radcliffe are also Gothic (in which nothing supernatural ever occurs, though characters think ghosts are appearing, until the ending proves otherwise — think an O. Henry story, but not as well done).  Others, like The Monk, reveled in violence, rape, incest, and all sorts of mean and nasty things.  The Gothic is often associated with architecture (literature originally borrowed the term from the study of Gothic churches), but even the classic ruined castle isn’t necessary:  Charles Brockden Brown and Nathaniel Hawthorne, among others, consciously practiced the Gothic without castles.  A whole lot of the Gothic, no matter what else they did, was concerned with family lines, lineage, inheritances, and the like.  So what the hell is it?

Let me wield the power of quotation at you for a minute:

The more a work frightens, the more it edifies.  The more it humiliates, the more it uplifts.  The more it hides, the more it gives the illusion of revealing.  It is the fear one needs:  the price one pays for coming contentedly to terms with a social body based on irrationality and menace.  Who says it is escapist? (Franco Moretti, qtd in Clery, 9)

According to Moretti, the Gothic deals with a threatening world by expanding the threats, making them worse.  This argument is very common, and we’ll use it in a minute.

The Gothic novel draws its plots, its motifs, its ghostly effects from various sources :  the supernatural realm of the ballad, and all that was mysterious and eerie in epic and the drama.  The traditional lore of old, heathen Europe, the richness and splendour of its mythology and superstitions, its usages, rites, and songs, in short everything wild and extravagant, was rediscovered by scholars about he middle of the eighteenth century and was immediately recognized as  source of powerful material by contemporary writers. (Varma 24-5)

The Gothic is a kind of amalgam literature.  Again, useful in a minute.

Now comes the part you’re probably waiting for:  how does this apply to Mazinger?  There are the obvious connections:  it’s science fiction, and in some sense SF is always related to the Gothic (more or less).  Brian Aldiss makes the connection when he claims, “Science fiction is the search for a definition of man and his status in the universe which will stand in our advanced but confused state of knowledge (science), and is characteristically cast in the Gothic or post-Gothic mould” (8).  Historically speaking, Aldiss and others tie SF’s origins to Frankenstein, a Gothic novel by Mary Shelley where a scientist toys with strange, possibly forbidden, sciences.

Does this sound familiar?

That’s the other painfully obvious connection:  Mazinger is partially about a mad scientist, one of the prime tropes that connects the Gothic with SF.  However, connections like that wouldn’t lead me to want to devote this much time to the subject — I do love mad scientists, but that’s another post.

There are other elements, possibly more important elements, to consider.  Mazinger Z itself is a pretty good place to start.  Juuzo calls Mazinger “castle of black iron,” which he leaves to Kouji to repay him for his parents’ deaths.  So it’s a kind of inheritance, and even figuratively described as a black castle, the traditional Gothic inheritance.

Mazinger as a castle is odd, at first glance — it walks around.  Wouldn’t it be a suit of armor, or a weapon, at least?  So long as Grandpa was being poetic, he could have called it a “black sword.”  But calling Mazinger a castle is very pointed.  In both Gothic and typical medieval traditions (including the Japanese medieval era), the castle is obviously a symbol of military might and power, but also a symbol of any sort of power.  If you own a castle, you own land, and land is the power to do what you want in a medieval society.  The castle becomes a symbol of medieval power.  Shin Mazinger Z juxtaposes a very old symbol with a very new one:  the super robot.  Super robots (and various other power suits) are typically symbols of newness, of a kind of ultra-male power to conquer, like the rocket ship.  But the castle is all about the past tense.  If you have a castle, you already got that power, it’s available.  The symbolism of Mazinger as an iron castle transforms it from a weapon that can be used to gain power into a place from which already garnered power can be drawn.  Kouji has inherited power from his family, he doesn’t need to go out and get it.

There’s a lot of Gothic in the “back up singers” too.  Most of the villains fit the bill rather well.

Ashura is one of the most obvious, but all of Dr. Hell’s henchmen appear to suffer from some form of bodily abnormality.  A frightening shift in the body itself is yet another common Gothic trope, though it’s viewed as a 19th century evolution of the form.

In place of a human body stable and integral [. . .], the fin-de-siècle Gothic offers the spectacle of a body metamorphic and undifferentiated; in place of the possibility of human transcendence, the prospect of an existence circumscribed within the realities of gross corporeality; in place of a unitary and securely bounded human subjectivity, one that is both fragmented and permeable.  Within this genre one may witness the relentless destruction of ‘the human’ and the unfolding in its stead of what I will call [. . .] the ‘abhuman.’  The abhuman subject is a not-quite-human subject, characterized by its morphic variability, continually in danger of becoming not-itself, becoming other.

This…  Yeah, this seems pertinent.  Not only Baron Ashura, but Blocken and Dr. Hell suffer from this kind of abhumanity.  Ashura is simply the best example.  Rotting in their grave, two lovers were revived by the terrible scientific knowledge of Dr. Hell, but halved and pieced together, a constant reminder of the “gross corporeality” and the fragmentation mentioned above.  Blocken’s head is off his body.  I have no real idea what is wrong with Dr. Hell yet; he’s blue.  Not only does this constant visibility of physicality underline the Gothic tendencies of Mazinger, it also highlights the primary theme of the show:  choice.

As I said, Kouji isn’t trying to find power.  He has it.  Boy, does he have it.  He does seem to be striving for a kind of socialization.  His home life was relatively happy, in the short glimpses we got of it, but he did lose his parents, apparently due to something his grandfather did, and then his grandfather was killed as well.  Kouji’s primary motive, at this early point, is simple revenge.  The choice is, of course, posed lucidly by Juuzo:  Kouji can become a god or a devil.  Both are evident in the show.  Mazinger resembles Zeus, one of the other super robots is based on Aphrodite; meanwhile, the Mechanical Beasts are terrible monsters and demons.  They are the poles of this field that Kouji’s caught in.  Juuzo didn’t care.  He had a responsibility to his family, and he fulfilled it; whatever Kouji does with his birthright is up to him (shades of the supposed objectivity of the scientist?).

Kouji is the Gothic protagonist in its fully realized form:  the Byronic hero.  A synthesis of the traditional heroes and villains, the Byronic hero has all the qualities of the villains and enough from the heroes to help us sympathize with them.  Good and evil?  What are they to the superman, the figure above humanity?  Byron’s Manfred sees the capitulation of this figure, when the eponymous character seeks to lose painful memories, and in his quest he will petition God, spirits, demons, death, and finally Satan himself, but unkneeling and proud all the while.  The Byronic hero could go either way — but usually went to the bad (or, dare I say, BAD END).  The Gothic themes surrounding Kouji help us to understand the position he’s in:  he has no real debt to society.  His castle may not be in the depths of the Apennines, but it is removed from the world all the same.  He gets his power from it and needs no other.  He is circled by the bodily world:  ruined but powerful bodies on the one hand, abhuman and devilish, and on the other hand the regular folks who are familiar, human, but powerless — even their super robots are useless against the kikaiju.  The dark undercurrents the Gothic tropes lend to the show not only help us see what’s happening, they also put into some thematic doubt the outcome.  In Kouji’s position, why bother being good?  What would come of it?  Perhaps we can assume he will come out “good” in the end (of course, if you’ve read/seen a previous iteration, maybe you wouldn’t be assuming), but the ambiguity, the question, is the place where the emotional action of the show takes place.

Further Reading:

I dealt more with Lewis’ The Monk here: [->]

E. J. Clery’s The Rise of Supernatural Fiction: 1762 – 1800: [-> google book link]

Varma, Devendra.  The Gothic Flame. [->]

Brian W. Aldiss’ Billion Year Spree: [->]

Hurley, Kelly.  The Gothic Body:  Sexuality, Materialism, and Degeneration at the Fin de Siècle: [->]

I also wrote about the Gothic villain (in relation to Crest of the Stars‘ Baron Febdash) here: [->]

Ghostlightning on Baron Ashura: [->]

Ghostlightning on some of the generic markers of “super robot” (in contrasting it with “real robot”): [->]

Depressingly accurate...

For anyone who missed the previous references, this past semester I took a course in the Gothic novel.  It was a lot of fun, and I learned a lot of things about the beginnings of the fantasy genre — as the Gothic genre is typically viewed.  I just happened to be taking in all of Pontifus’ attempts at video game theory as our final paper proposals were due, and I sent my professor two viable options:  the alteration of mad scientists through time and what that reflects about their culture, and the Gothic in survival horror video games.

Obviously, given the context of this blog, we decided on the latter.  Specifically, my professor told me the former option sounded good — for a dissertation — and that I might want to consider going with the other one.  So I did.  Some of the results of this process showed up on Super Fanicom already.  I may post a kind of summary, at least of some of the paper’s parts, at some point in the future.  I actually want to field the paper to journals and conferences, though, so I can’t put the entire thing up — and it’s about fifteen pages anyway, who among you would be willing to read it all?

This is probably the most important moment in the list for me — that is, for my development.  I had myth criticism on my side already, but I was beginning to think, over the course of this year, that it wasn’t quite enough, but I didn’t have much else to go on in terms of literary theory “schools.”  Going on my professor’s suggestions, I discovered phenomenology (see earlier link).  Now, I don’t know if I’m going to be a terrible, hybrid mythic-phenomenologist for the rest of my days, but it kicked me in the pants, if you will.

If you’re curious about my topic, at least, it ran like this:  I explained video games through phenomenology, then looked at how Resident Evil and Silent Hill are Gothic, the synthesized the two sections by claiming that the concerns of the contemporary Gothic are played out better in video games than in most prose fiction, because of the phenomenological edge the gaming environment provides (Hint: it’s all Freudian).  I’m also particularly proud of the title:  “Press ‘A’ to Go Through the Dark and Scary Door.”

As Pontifus wrote on the About page, we don’t require spectacles and tweed.  In the sake of full disclosure, I should let you know my tweed smells of Goodwill, not attic, and my spectacles aren’t tiny — though the are also not large.  I’m also not wearing them just now.

I’m wearing pajamas right now, actually.  Grey pajamas, with white pinstripes.  I also have a pot of tea, with one half-full cup, sitting on my desk, next to the box of sugar cubes.  I’m not making any of this up, I’m just strange.  My room is in the second floor of a house full of English majors, effectively the attic.  My ceiling slopes, in parts, to accomodate the roof, and I am often reminded of the strange angles of the room in Dreams in the Witch-House.

Objects of interest in this room that may eventually claim my sanity, if not my very life:  a war banner of Gondor, a stuffed Killer Rabbit, a Doctor Who scarf I knitted myself, and a pair of steampunk goggles I made myself.  I won’t go into all the books — if you’re interested in that sort of thing, you can check out what I’m currently reading, and any number of other unnecessary, stalker-ish facts about my book collection, at my Goodreads account.

Now that I have completed the introduction — it was once very popular for modern critics, especially feminists, to open papers by describing themselves — we can talk about something interesting.

Tentacle monsters.

I’m actually not a big fan of tentacle hentai — my interests lean more toward yuri than anything else.  But there’s a lot of interesting stuff to talk about, I think, concerning tentacle monsters.

The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife

The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife is, at least according to Wikipedia, often cited as the beginning of tentacle erotica.  In a literal sense this has to be true — it’s erotica that features tentacles.  Michael Moorcock, in his book Wizardry and Wild Romance, rejects tracing fantasy to mythology, as mythology was not authored in the same way fantasy was and is.  In the same vein, I don’t think it’ll be very useful to talk about octopuses and squids in erotica while looking at tentacle porn, simply because the interesting part is the sheer, alien horror tentacles are meant to cause in the viewer — if you like it, you like that horror.  People read horror novels all the time.

I should warn you now that I’m in a Gothic novel class, so I’ll probably be mentioning it a lot until mid-December.  Anyway, we just finished reading The Monk, by Matthew Lewis.  It features a monk, Ambrosio, who’s corrupted by a woman who’s snuck into the monastery just to meet  Ambrosio.  The climax, or one of them, comes when Ambrosio rapes a young woman in a crypt and then kills her as she tries to escape.  This book was written and published in the 1790s, and people were horrified by the content, though that didn’t stop them from buying it.  Ambrosio ends up dabbling in Satanic magic, and seems to become less human as time goes by — though, of course, he doesn’t feel that way about it.  He’s bitten by pangs of conscience, but usually in the form of worrying about discovery and punishment.  Other notable moments in the book are when a fellow named Raymond, waiting for his mistress to rush from a castle so they can run off and get married, clasps the ghost of a dead nun to his chest, and when aforementioned mistress, imprisoned for getting pregnant after taking a nun’s vows, carries her dead baby around, even when, as she puts it herself, it has become a mass of putrescence.  She talks about the worms in the flesh twining around her fingers.

Why am I bothering with all this stuff from a book over two centuries old?  To set up examples of similar stuff, basically.  Ann Radcliffe (she wrote the Mysteries of Udolpho), delineated “terror” and “horror.”  She claimed that terror is good and healthy — effectively, it was the sublime, like Wordsworth and Coleridge were obsessed with.  Terror draws humanity, and people can use it to contemplate their place in the world, their mortality, and their connection with God.  Terror at a dizzying height atop a rugged mountain, for example. scares the shit out of you and makes you think that you should be a better person, because you could die.  Horror, on the other hand, is a repulsive attribute of something, it pushes people away, freezes them up, and is useless.  If you want to look for the two elements in something, Radcliffe claimed that terror is the unknown — like the threat of afterlife at the bottom of that long drop — while horror is known and hated, like a dead body rotting in your arms.

Lewis effectively inverts these two.  Ambrosio eventually signs his soul over to the devil to avoid being burned at the stake, only to have the devil throw him off a cliff, killing him — but only after he writhes around, shattered and broken, for six days.  The fire would have been easier, but Ambrosio ran from the terror of it, as he didn’t know what lay on the other side, while the devil led him to believe he’d continue in our world for a while, and Ambrosio knew what was in our world.  However, Agnes (the mistress from earlier) seems to be redeemed by her horror.  Certainly, she seems perfectly fine after losing her mind in the dungeon, and even marries the guy who accidently tried to make out with the dead nun instead.

Tentacle rape works on this line.  It is a known horror, but usually attached to an unknown terror.  Lovecraft used tentacles a lot — his monsters were indescribable, but many had tentacles at the ends of their amorphous, squamous bodies.  Or, at least, they made tentacles out of themselves for a while, like an amoeba.  Now, Lovecraft didn’t write about sex.  Ever, really.  He seemed to be afraid of it — at least, the Barthian author-unit as a descriptor of patterns in a selection of texts seemed to be afraid of it.  Lovecraft did marry someone, so we can assume he had sex.  It just doesn’t ever show up in his fiction.  But Lovecraft is the acknowledged master of horror when it comes to mind-bending, impossible to understand monsters that assault the mind as readily as the body.

And now we get to the sex.  Aren’t you pleased?  Toshio Maeda introduced tentacle rape in 1987 with his Urotsukidoji manga.  He had very good, practical, pragmatic reasons for using tentacles:  it was illegal to show penises.  However, we’re not interested in what he needed to do — illustrate penetration — but what he chose to use — tentacles.  Perhaps Maeda was thinking of The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife when he came up with his soon-to-be-infamous trope.  But he put together two things:  horror and terror.  Horror is the simple violence inherent in the act, even fictional, of rape.  It’s familiar (in a relative sense).  The tentacle is a terror, it’s frightening, alien, unknown.  Many people won’t eat squid because of its texture, the look and shape of it — the same attributes that led Lovecraft, Maeda, and any number of other people to use squid limbs as an element of horror writing.

A short note at this point:  I’m not claiming any sort of primacy for Lovecraft.  I don’t know when translations of Lovecraft’s work made it over to Japan, if they were around before or after Maeda would have been planning out his manga.  I’m claiming a shared ouvre of horror.

This pattern of combination, of terror and horror, that is T(tentacles) + H(sex), draw audiences to tentacle rape even as the individual bits and pieces should repulse.  It’s The Monk all over again.

And never mind that, like Janet Weiss, some of the ladies end up liking it.  Maybe they heard a bell ring.