Wen 丨 Hoshino Meow 0ww@bigfun community
Although the well-known mobile game "HaraJin" has gained the attention of many Japanese players through exquisite characters, open-world gameplay, and expensive official publicity. However, a mobile game called "Horse Racing Lady" came out, but it surpassed "HaraJin" with a score of 1.6 billion yen in 4 days, becoming a veritable blockbuster work in the island country recently.
The reason for this may be that most of the characters in "Horse Racing Lady" are modeled on the famous horse racing in Japanese history and personify them into cute girls.
Speaking of subcultures, the painting of animals as maidens is an enduring topic. For example, in "Ark of Tomorrow", the "operators" basically have the appearance of beast girls and attract players through cute animal ears or tails.
Although the explosive "Original God" imitates the background view of the "Middle Ages", it still adds many beast girl characters, such as the super popular bartender Diona. In addition to mobile games, Tushan Susu in the comic "Fox Demon Little Red Lady" is estimated to still have many readers to this day.
Therefore, in this article, the author will use these phenomena to talk to you about the beast girls, and the history and culture behind them.
A small history of the development of the beast
One popular view is that ancient humans used specific animals as gods may have been the source of the beast culture. At that time, people's understanding of the whole world was still chaotic, so they often used real or imaginary imaginary animals as gods and messengers, praying that they could fulfill their wishes, bring good wind and rain, and so on.
For example, in Japanese mythology, the god of incumbents in charge of grain and food, its messenger is the fox we often see.
After all, people at that time believed that foxes could prey on rats that had a major impact on agriculture, so they were over time considered guardian gods. This situation is an example of the animals that exist in reality becoming gods, and it is more common for fictional animals to become gods, such as the East Sea Dragon King in China's mythology.
In addition to Asian countries, European countries have similar myths. In French and German folklore, animals mixed with grain are often imagined as elves or gods.
A typical example is the grain wolf that circulated in Mecklenburg (a German administrative state), because it also has a well-known image for Chinese audiences----- Heluo in "The Wolf and the Spice".
Therefore, according to the law of cultural inheritance, people in later generations will naturally think that the inspiration of the beast lady comes from these ancient myths, and then through anthropomorphic creation, the appearance of what everyone sees today is formed. As Scott McCloud, a well-known American cartoonist and cartoon educator, put it, "People often shape things that are unknowable and unimaginable through human images." ”
However, there are still some flaws in this statement.
First, the novels, movies, games, animations and other cultural products of various countries will more or less inherit the characteristics of local myths, so as a universal concept, it is only pointed out in a special tone that the appearance of the beast lady originates from these myths, which is obviously not rigorous enough.
Second, from the perspective of image, the gap between the mythical animal gods and the beast girls we see now is still very large.
Everyone admires the cute and beautiful girl.
But in mythology, it is a "monster" that is simply spliced by the human body and the animal body, which is almost incompatible with the aesthetics of modern people.
(Best, who symbolizes the moon and feminine charm in Egyptian mythology, is the face of a humanoid cat)
The third is the more critical contextual issue. Myths are the products embedded in ancient civilizations, but the beast lady is essentially rooted in the thinking of otaku researchers in today's, the United States and other countries, so there is a big gap in the soil of production.
Therefore, we can only think that the appearance of the beast lady is more or less influenced by ancient mythology, but it does not mean that there is necessarily an inheritance relationship. On the contrary, the concept of the beast lady actually originated relatively late, basically dating back to modern Japan.
In an article circulating on the Internet titled "Soft Cuteness Through Humanity: A Brief History of the Cat Ear Lady", the author mentioned that the fairy tale "The Four Days of the Narcissus Moon" created by Japanese literary scholar Kenji Miyazawa a hundred years ago may be the earliest work that conforms to the modern aesthetic concept of the role of the beast girl.
After all, the Snow Witch in it is a white-haired and cat-eared character, which has a similar feeling to the "vanilla" in "Cat Lady Paradise" a hundred years later.
The concentrated appearance of the Beast Lady is in Japan after the 1970s, such as the manga "Cotton National Star", and later the anime "Moon Song", "Tokyo Cat", "The Stuff of Praise" have similar characters appeared, and then through continuous development and evolution, it has become an important setting popular in various subcultural works today.
It is worth mentioning that the Beast Lady belongs to a very pure personal creation and does not require complex teamwork, so this type of character is mostly hand-drawn and CG illustration, followed by games, comics, animation, and fantasy movies.
In terms of species, in addition to our common cat lady, the beast lady, the fox lady, the rabbit lady, and the bear lady are also common types.
Of course, the Japanese cultural scholar Higashi Hiroki, in his book "Animalized Postmodernity: Japanese Society through the Eyes of Otaku", mentions how the beast girls rooted in subculture are created.
He believes that nowadays everyone likes certain characters, and their charm is not in the role itself, but in the elements that make up the role, such as various animal ears, animal tails, and double ponytails in appearance, maid skirts on the dress, arrogance in personality, sick petite, etc., which constitute a huge "database." ”
The role is the image of the creator "stitched" together by various elements in the "database", if these elements are popular with everyone, they will be retained, and vice versa. So the beast girl we see today is actually the optimal result of the creator's countless "stitching" attempts through the combination of elements.
Although they are all girls, everyone is still different
Many times, the beast girl is often confused with other concepts in a subcultural context.
For example, the Beast Lady and the Beast Ear Lady.
Although the two words seem to be similar, there are subtle differences in specifics.
The concept of the beast lady is actually very wide, and the best in Egyptian mythology, the anthropomorphic horse girls in "Horse Racing Lady", and the maidens with only animal ears can be called beast girls.
In this way, everyone should be able to find that the beast-eared lady is only a branch of the concept of the beast-girl, which refers to the girl who looks like a human but has animal ears. Sometimes, the Beast Ear Lady is also used as a special performance technique to highlight the cuteness of the characters in the animation.
For example, in "Light Voice Girl", Once Azusa Nakano is cute, she will "grow" cat ears (in fact, it is just a prop), the purpose of which is to make the audience realize that she is as cute as a cat through the setting of the cat ear girl. Similarly, in "Miss Hui Ye Wants Me to Confess", the four houses of Hui Ye as the heroine also have a similar setting.
In addition to the beast lady and the beast ear lady, the beast lady and the human foreign mother are often confused.
For the concept of a human mother, all female characters other than non-human can be used. However, it was originally only used to describe monsters with feminine appearances, such as vampires (Sophie next door), slimes (Soros in OVERLORD), and so on. But then the concept was expanded to include robots (Ella in Plastic Memory), toys (little flowers in The Broken Music Box), and game consoles (the patron saint in Hyperdimensional Games: Neptune) who can also be called human brides once personified as girls.
Therefore, from the definition point of view, since not all human characters can be considered human foreign mothers, then the beast women naturally belong to the category of human foreign women. But in fact, as a concept derived from subculture, the beast lady herself has a complete set of creative system, market audience and development process, so it is often listed separately and is not mixed with the human bride.
Attraction between everyday and non-everyday
Japanese ACG works are usually divided into two main categories in terms of subject matter: daily and non-daily. Non-everyday works have been enduring because they can satisfy the audience's desire for imagination. For example, the common other worlds, mecha, and magical girls all belong to this category, that is, a large number of settings that do not conform to the operation rules of the real world are presented in the story.
The daily works are just the opposite, mainly depicting the bits and pieces of normal life, so love works and cute works have become the symbols of this category.
But interestingly, the ACG works that have the role of beast girl do not conform to this division.
Taking "Horse Racing Lady" as an example, the description of the "horse racing" part of the story is very realistic and everyday, which to a large extent reflects the current situation of the "horse racing industry" in Japan. But on the other hand, the cute and hard-working ma niang in the plot is a product of imagination and is not everyday. So we will find that the whole work of "Horse Racing Lady" is in this awkward position between the everyday and the non-daily.
Similarly, in "Cat Lady Paradise", although running a coffee shop abounds in real life, it seems a bit illusory to have cat lady as a waiter.
Therefore, the Japanese critic Chiaki Kami kita called this phenomenon "quasi-daily", that is, when non-daily events descend on daily life, daily life can continue to be maintained.
In this way, the charm of the works represented by the beast lady of course comes from the story structure of "quasi-everyday", in other words, it is used to eliminate the inherent tragedy in the two categories of non-daily and everyday stories.
The English writer and literary theorist Terry Eagleton discussed this. He believes that non-everyday stories often make people feel sad, because any non-everyday setting will always greatly affect and impact the real social order, breaking the original stable ecology, which will inevitably bind the fate of specific characters to the world trend, and finally lead to various uncontrollable tragedies.
For example, rem in the recent hit "RE: Life in Another World from Scratch" and the sister in "Magical Girl Circle" are all like this, these characters often cause life and death due to world mutations, which in turn causes sad atmospheres to be heart-wrenching.
So why do everyday works also have tragedy?
Terry Eagleton believes that everyday works, because they always describe a cookie-cutter life, over time will bring the audience a kind of despair that is never-ending, unchanging, and can see the head at a glance. Therefore, the reason why many friends do not like to watch cute animation is also the same, after all, homogeneous content often makes people feel boring and boring.
In this way, the advantages of the quasi-daily life emerge.
Taking the beast girls as an example, these girls will not overly affect or even impact the normal world view, resulting in the flooding of the plot of life and death and then affecting the audience's emotions. At the same time, because the character itself is non-everyday, through its own sense of curiosity, it can also make the audience feel new and fun.
So with the help of these advantages, the beast lady has indeed attracted more and more attention and love in recent years.
Of course, not only ACG works, but also many waiters in coffee shops today are dressed up through girls cosplaying into beast girls, in other words, breaking the dimensional wall and letting this concept come into reality. But it is worth mentioning that as a cultural phenomenon, its emergence is not to please the public, but to add a different color to the world.