This week, we have a nice little excerpt from the second chapter of my new book Cosplay and the Dressing of Identity, out now! We chat about the history of cosplay, the sociology of dressing, and how cosplay is so much more than just dressing up.

Today's video essay was inspired by a conversation had over an Elden Ring speed run. So we're talking about probably my favourite boss design: the Divine Beast Dancing Lion. The Dancing Lion's design is based on masked and costumed rituals, most notably the Chinese dancing lion. We talk about the power of these types of rituals, why they matter, and how they work. And ultimately figure out why the beast's weak spot is still its head.

Today, I wanted to return to a topic I first wrote several years ago when Spiritfarer first came out. Spiritfarer is a game about death, dying, and grief. And its done through the social dyanamics of grief. I use primarily Dennis Klass's concept of Continuing Bonds to explore how Spiritfarer's social dyanamics depict bereavement as a constant ongoing process of realising and recognising our personhoods.

Today, I wanted to take a step back from specific studies of something to look at monsters more generally. Monsters are, of course, one of my favourite subjects to talk about, and because I'm planning a few monster studies in the near future, I decided it would be good to prime the channel with a more general study of monsters. But, of course, I had to have a good case study, so turned to Fullmetal Alchemist's most depressing monster: the child-hybrid chimera.

Today, we're finally delving into the Lord of the Rings. It's been awhile without touching it, but I'm always happy to live temporarily in Middle Earth. The point of discussion today is food - yes, food. Food for hobbits is an important part of their culture, and food metaphors and depictions form an angle of Tolkien's storytelling.

No Face is one of the most distinct creatures in Spirited Away, despite him looking incredibly simple and basic. So this essay explores what role No Face plays in Spirited Away, and what he represents. We look at the themes of consumption, connections and disconnections that are woven through the movie, and how No Face is central to all these themes.

We're returning to the idea of pop culture as mythology, but this time focusing in on video games. While this video game is a bit more technical, I think it's also really important and may be of interest to people. We get a little into what it is that video games do that situate them as mythology, but more importantly we think a little more about what that actually means.

The Babadook is an Australian horror film which changed the landscape of monster movies. The Babadook is a doppelganger monster, a creature who represents depression, complicated manoeuvres between reality and fiction, and, more importantly, ambivalent motherhood. Babadook is a representation of this type of monstrous motherhood, one which is condemned by social regulations on women and mothers.

Today, we trip into the more academic side of things with a critique of anthropologist Clifford Geertz, but we keep it Incidental Mythology by using the Triforce in Zelda to do so. We talk about Geertz's view of symbols, and the importance of multiplicity of meanings. The Triforce represents many things: the Hylian cosmology, the ideal characteristics of a person, the power of the Hylian royal family, and also a representation of the game series as a whole. So let's chat about symbols, religion, Geertz, and the Triforce!

This month's essay is a study on the detective and detective fiction. We look at the structural role of the detective, and what elements they provide for the narrative. We look at how the detective functions within a narrative, and what special characteristics they have. And through that, we see the detective is a form of contemporary pop culture trickster.

The Mandalorian lets viewers in on the complicated nature of the survival of Mandalorian culture in the middle of diaspora. In this essay, I explore Anthony D. Smith's theory of nationalism and nations through the Mandalorian, to understand how focus on folk traditions and religion helped to sustain Mandalorian culture when unable to return to their homeland.

Strap in for a slightly longer essay than usual, because this week we're doing a structural analysis of the first season of Stranger Things. Jumping off from the idea of Pop Culture as Mythology, we're going to illustrate that what actually means when we directly study a piece of pop mythology. Stranger Things argues against structures of society that sets the us against them. By reinterpreting the classic cultural structures, it demonstrates ways to defend the vulnerable and fight against government pressures.

In this essay, we're digging into the scandoval that shook the world of reality television. Of particular interest for us is the way the story of the scandal unfolded, and why it was so enticing and so juicy for the audience. We talk about the way the characters developed on our screens over the course of ten years, and how the complicated nature of reality television timeline means an intricate web of dramatic irony.

This month's essay covers an aspect of pop culture and mythology that we don't talk about as often: the way that myths are sometimes used in popular culture in their storytelling. We talk about how mythology is used as a form of exoticisation in some narratives. But we also talk about how some narratives, like the Ancient Magus's Bride, use mythology as a shadow text which provides focus and legitimisation to the story.

In this essay, I'm looking into repetitive game types, particularly rogue-like and rogue-lite games. Using Hades, Cult of the Lamb and Moonlighter as my primary focus, we talk about how these games utilise repetition to tell the story of the game without fatiguing the player with too much of all the same.

Netflix's Wednesday was an immediate success, but received critiques that it was full of clichés. In this essay, I decided to delve into what makes Wednesday successful, nostalgic, and why relying on familiar tropes and clichés is the most important part of Wednesday's backbone.

It's back to basics today! With the sudden growth of this channel, I wanted to take a step back and explain the basics behind both myself and Incidental Mythology. So today, we're exploring what I mean when I say that popular culture is our contemporary mythology. We go into the various definitions of mythology, and how fiction can be meaningful.

Rian Johnson's Knives Out series, of both Knives Out and Glass Onion, helps to recapture the spirit of the whodunnit. It recalls the nostalgia of previous classic mystery narratives while also presenting them in new and and interesting ways to help present their own spin on the format. In this video, I explore the structure of the whodunnit and the innovative alterations to the structure that Knives Out does.

Bee and Puppycat: Lazy in Space on Netflix provides us with a wonderful blurring between categories. It really echoes a main theme of anthropology: making the familiar strange and the strange familiar. In this video, we explore the way Bee and Puppycat complicate subject matter and characters which are extremely familiar to the viewer, while also taking figures and setting incredibly unfamiliar to the viewer and making them incredibly relatable.

Massive Monster's new Cult of the Lamb is a combination rogue-like dungeon crawler and cult management simulator. What makes Cult of the Lamb interesting is in how it treats aspects of death. While death is not as relevant to the lamb itself, it's constantly touching the world around the lamb. In this essay, I want to explore the role death plays in this game. From the way death is managed in the cult management, to the way it's embedded into the flow of the game's narrative, Cult of the Lamb's conversation around death is deeply connected to both the lamb and the One Who Waits.