From the Vault: Monstrosity/Cuteness Spectrum

All right, well, let's jump right in. Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuffworks dot Com. Hey, 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.

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 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. 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 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 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, 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 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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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

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

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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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.

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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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

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. 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, 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 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 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. 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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.

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 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, 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 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,

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, 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 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, 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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, 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 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 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 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

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 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 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, 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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, 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 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. 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. 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, 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. 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, 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 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 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,

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

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 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 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 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 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 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, 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, 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 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. 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, 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 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

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.

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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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, 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 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, 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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.

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

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, 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 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 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 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

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 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 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, 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

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 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. 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 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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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

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, 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 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 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 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 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

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.

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 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 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 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 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 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. 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

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 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

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 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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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 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, 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,

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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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

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. 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 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. 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

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, 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, 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

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, 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, 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 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 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. 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, 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 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, 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 touch with us directly with feedback on this episode or any other, you can always email us at blow the Mind at how stuff Works dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff Works dot com. Ma