I (blood-red heart) vampires. Not any particular incarnation of them (though there are some incarnations I do particularly dislike), but the mythos of them. Creeping, skulking, life-stealing, blood-drinking, vein-piercing, sexual-metaphor-but-not-sexy-themselves vampires.
How do I love vampires? Let me count the ways.
Aarrrgh! It’s offic’ly Talk Like a Pirate Day! And in honor, we’re goin’ t’ look at a burnin’ question: Why d’ our pirates talk like this?
Of course, thar aren’t a lot o’ recorded pirate speeches. Even court records o’ tried and convicted pirates don’t capture t’ dialect o’ t’ accused. What we think o’ as “pirate speak” developed rel’tively recently in modern media.
At times, life is strangely kind. This time, it was both kind and strange. Foxes became a hot internet meme, and in an… unexpected way.
Have you heard of the bowing deer of Nara?
Sika deer (probably from shika, Japanese for “deer”) are spotted into maturity and still have a strong population in Japan. They were once sacred, considered divine messengers, and now they are protected. In Nara Prefecture, they roam freely and harass visitors for treats.
We’ll be presenting tonight on Japanese Folklore & Mythology (and talking about Kitsune-Tsuki) at InConJunction in Indianapolis. And I’ve added a new video clip, my favorite scene from Ran, to the panel. /rubs palms together gleefully/ Say hello!
I talk a lot about Japanese folklore here on the blog, for obvious reasons, but I haven’t talked much about ninja. And ninja have certainly entered national pop culture and folklore, so they’re as valid a topic as any other.
Plus, I got to have dinner with some lately. I don’t mean I dined with students of Bujinkan Taijutsu or other martial arts heirs of ninjutsu skill, I mean the dressed-in-black, popping-out-of-ceilings legend of thousands of movies and cartoons and books. Those ninja.
Imagine my delight when I stumbled upon the Peter Cushing Centennial Blogathon and realized it tied directly to Asian folklore and therefore I could totally justify a blog post.
Cushing had a long and varied career, playing everyone from Sherlock Holmes to the Sheriff of Nottingham, but even those who aren’t film buffs will remember him as Grand Moff Tarkin in Star Wars (as pictured here), one of the few who could successfully tell Darth Vader when to step off.
But Cushing had a particular niche in horror films, and that’s what we’re going to talk about today — specifically, his role as Van Helsing in a kung fu zombie vampire movie.
You read that right.
The yuki onna is a femme fatale of Japanese folklore. When travelers are lost or exhausted in the winter snows, the yuki onna (“snow woman”) appears to greet them — and they are never seen again.
/cue shivery music/
Did you ever want to know the difference between a mononoke and an ayakashi? Do you know how to escape a kappa, if one wants to eat you? Have you ever wondered if you were missing some in-jokes in your favorite anime or Asian film? (Yes, very likely.)
Today I intend to justify fantasy as a genre. Not that it needs justified, no more than any other genre, but I’m going to anyway.
But first, I’m going to tell you a story.
